Soteriology is the study of salvation. This has been one of the hot debate points of 500 years of theology: predestination or free will. Are we saved because Jesus chose us and basically dragged us to salvation, or are we saved because we heard the Gospel and we chose to respond to it? I am not going to answer that here. I am only going to say that wherever you stand, you need two things: you need God being sovereign over all things, and you need man being responsible for his choices. You must have both. I personally see these two as parallel pillars in the same way that we have God’s government (His law, wrath, and justice) and God’s grace (His mercy, grace, and patience) operating at the same time without ever contradicting.
There is one thing I despise in the salvation debate and that is ultimately the “minimalist approach.” It comes in the form of “Do I need to believe that to be saved?” When it comes to topics like origins, baptism, end times, angels, etc., does belief in a certain position on this topic merit or lose salvation? I again question what people understand salvation is when they do this. They will say, “All you need to do is believe in Jesus.” However, what does that mean and what does that entail? It’s especially seen in Reformed circles, in the academics, where “salvation” and “doctrine” are ultimately a pure academic study. My own church has come out of a season of over-emphasis on doctrine and missing genuine salvation, and I am so grateful to my pastor for his approach on this because it’s pulled me back from going so far against one ditch that I get trapped in the other on the other side of the road.
Salvation does require belief in certain doctrines, but it’s more than that. It’s really believing Jesus. Not merely believing “in” Jesus, but actually believing Him. I have heard one person tell me when debating origins, “If God said it, I believe it.” I immediate asked him about whether God said “six days” or not and he never gave a clear answer. He professes belief in Jesus, and if he had never said anything about origins, I’d think he was a generally solid Christian because he checks off the doctrine boxes. Yet, a red flag keeps warning me about this issue. It’s not that he is an “old earther” because there are old earthers that I can tell are simply wrong on Genesis but genuinely love their Savior, but really how he has justified his position. The ones who genuinely love Jesus and show it also show very little knowledge about old earth ideas and also put very little weight to such ideas. I will say this: if the earth truly is billions of years old, then NO ONE is saved because there is nothing to be saved from.
People talk about salvation as being “saved from my sins” and “saved from Hell,” but that is as far as it goes. While those statements are true, that can easily become a weak knowledge of salvation if there is a weak view of sin. If you get your doctrines of sin wrong, you get the doctrines of salvation wrong, and with that, you will also have Jesus wrong. These are all intertwined; messing around in one area is going to greatly impact the others. If Jesus died for your sins but your view of sin is that it’s just imperfections within you that are no big deal, then what really was the point of his dying? The Progressive Christians have an extremely erroneous view of sin because they think they are “part God” or are “little gods” and thus are inherently good. And to their credit, they are consistent with this because they then ask, “Why did Jesus have to die?” They have to argue Jesus’ death from something other than being required to satisfy the wrath and justice of God, so their view of salvation is purely academic and rather Gnostic in their approach. It’s salvation via knowledge and the salvation is from ignorance. The Christian view, however, is that salvation is salvation from sin, salvation from ourselves, salvation from God’s wrath, and even more than that.
But salvation is not just salvation from something but salvation to something. God did not rescue Israel from slavery just to free them, but so that they would be a people to serve Him. Salvation for the Christian is not to get out from sin alone, but also so that we would be the Bride of Christ, a people who would serve, worship, and enjoy God forever. Under the Biblical view of Adam’s sin, the paradise was lost. Adam was in paradise. He was not only in a perfect world but in an ideal relationship with God. He’d talk with Him, walk with Him, and enjoy Him. But then he decided to eat from that tree, disobeying God. Adam chose to live another life and do his own thing, and it was a deadly decision. Yet, despite that, God still offered hope and salvation. Upon confronting Adam about his sin, God showed how He would bring salvation. He killed an animal to use its skins as clothing, shedding innocent blood as a substitute for sin. Why didn’t Adam die that very day? Because an animal died in his place. And thus, the first mention of the Gospel message was established.
Salvation is shown in many images throughout the Bible. I mentioned this earlier in the series, but Paul directly connects the regeneration process, the process of being born again, to creation. As God spoke light into existence, so He gives man light to see the truth. While I believe man is responsible to how he responds to the light given to him, it is God who illuminates man to begin with and gives him the chance to see his need for salvation. If man does not see his need for salvation, he won’t seek an answer for that need. That is why the Progressive Christians are so opposed to the Gospel; they don’t see their need to be saved, because they don’t see their sin to be an actual problem.
When it comes to origins, the wrong view of origins will drastically affect one’s view on the need for salvation. If the earth is millions of years old, salvation is not possible. Again, salvation is from sin and its effects. According to old earth beliefs, when taken to their logical conclusion, there is no need to be saved because sin never did anything. If Adam and Eve existed, they were just among a population that lived and operated as we do today – short life spans of no more than 80 years, got sick, hurt, died, etc. for hundreds of thousands of years. What did sin do in such a scenario? The Old Earthers who are better at theology would say it separates man from God, but what was the relationship between man and God prior to Adam if they weren’t the first and ONLY humans? What you will find is that they actually take the YEC theology on such issues and claim it as their own. But their entire theology that remotely sounds good doesn’t come from OEC ideas carried out. And as God is in the business of restoration, what does the old earther have to look forward to? We’ll cover this more on the study of end times, but if salvation is being saved to something, and that something is a restoration of what was originally planned, then what does salvation to an old earther actually look like? They actually don’t have answer because their models don’t have sin doing anything, and thus salvation truly doesn’t do anything either. Again, there are many OEC out there who have sound doctrine otherwise, but there are many more OEC out there who have much less.
Before we argue about how salvation is done, we need to have a clear picture of what salvation is. To do that, we need to know what things were like prior to sin, what sin is, what sin does, and why there is a need for salvation to begin with. We need to stop throwing out our Christianese vocabulary around and treat it as we have been. We need to get back to taking it seriously.
Next week, we’ll look at ecclesiology: the study of the church.
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