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Unendangered Savior

Thank God for Holy Week.

To hear the common rhetoric of apostasy accusers, Jesus’ life is as endangered in today’s Presbyterian Church as it was two millennia ago in Roman occupied Judea.

Jesus’ unique status as Savior did seem threatened 14 years ago when a speaker at the peacemaking conference asked rhetorically, “What’s the big deal about Jesus?” The subsequent General Assembly was offered a bumper sticker answer, “The singular saving Lord,” but many protested that that sounded too trite to be worthy of the only begotten of God. They punted the question to the PC(USA)’s Office of Theology and Worship. The OTW developed an eight-page response that outlined the “big deal” with clarity in its summary paragraph:

“Jesus Christ is the only Savior and Lord, and all people everywhere are called to place their faith, hope, and love in him. No one is saved by vir- tue of inherent goodness or admirable living, for ‘by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God’ [Ephesians 2:8]. No one is saved apart from God’s gracious redemption in Jesus Christ. Yet we do not presume to limit the sovereign freedom of ‘God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowl- edge of the truth’ [1 Timothy 2:4]. Thus, we neither restrict the grace of God to those who profess explicit faith in Christ nor assume that all people are saved regardless of faith. Grace, love, and communion belong to God, and are not ours to determine.”

The 2002 General Assembly approved the document by 98 percent, and the 2003 GA reaffirmed it with a 99 percent vote.

No, not an endangered Savior.

Even the Presbyterian Layman, which has dubbed a past GA or two as apostate, applauded the vote (July 2003, p. 16).

Yet the rhetoric of the apostasy accusers continues to warn that Jesus is under threat among us. They cite a 2012 Presbyterian Panel report that sup- posedly states that 41 percent of our pastors do not believe that Jesus is the only way of salvation. They quote or, rather, misquote the fact that two-fifths of us pastors disagree with the statement, “Only followers of Jesus Christ can be saved.” As one of those asked that question when the Panel first raised it in 1996 (I was a participant in that year’s surveys), I thought about the children whose funerals I’d performed; I thought about Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, Ruth and Boaz — each born too soon to follow Jesus — and recorded my disagreement with that statement. Oh, I’m no universalist. And I reject the pluralist notion that all religions are equally valid; Jesus has no competitors, nobody even claiming to have given his or her life to save sinners. Yes, I believe that salvation comes only through Jesus, and I believe that he can and does save at least some who never had the chance to believe.

Now to be honest, Jesus’ followers have long asked tough questions of the

Savior. “Did you die to ‘satisfy the wrath of God’ as if our heavenly Father needed to vent some pent-
up rage toward us sinners, and you sacrificed life and limb to take the heat for the rest of us so that we, your adopted siblings, would be let off of the hook?” Too often the “satisfaction theory” of the atonement comes across that way — and in an era sensitized to the horrors of child abuse, that’s a question worth asking.

Theologian Cindy Rigby raises similar questions in a study of the parable of the Prodigal Father. Reading her makes clear the fact that one can affirm Jesus’ aton- ing work as the crux of the Good News (crux is Latin for “cross,” after all) while never being satisfied that you’ve grasped all of its meaning.

We in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) will be worshiping, contemplating and reconsidering Jesus through the climactic remembrances of Holy Week. It will be quite obvious that here and now, Jesus is not an endangered Savior. Thank God.

Jack long sleeved—JHH

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