…rather, a Christian is what I am dedicated to becoming.
I was reminded of this important nuance via Peter Rollin’s one-time Christian post where he identifies himself as a “one-time Christian…now committed to the task of becoming Christian.”
Or as the apostle Paul says:
“For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
Another way of phrasing Paul’s argument is to simply say salvation is ongoing.
Unfortunately, this idea seems to be lost on contemporary evangelical culture. I believe this present dilemma is largely due to loud-mouth neo-fundie adherents of substitutionary atonement where salvation becomes reduced to a legal contract and the cross is our get-out-of-jail-free-card into Heaven.
(Not to mention the even-louder-mouthed penal-substitutionary-atonement sadists who think God had to kick Christ’s ass so God could get his required divine satisfaction.)
While substitionary atonement certainly has its place, a closer reading of the Gospels and the Letter’s of Paul show that Christ’s death and resurrection has a much wider purpose. Namely, the cross shows what it means to love, and how we are to live. Or as one of my favorite theologians likes to put it, the cross teaches us “who we are to be.” More on that later.
For a similar take see the following clip where Rich Mullins explains the difficulty of trying to answer when he “became a Christian.”
I love thinking that salvation is ongoing, because it makes me think of healing and the redemption of the world, but I think a comprehensive view of salvation is past, present, and future, i.e., we have been saved from slavery to sin, we are being healed (saved) inwardly and in community right now, and we will be saved from the wrath that is to come.
My controversial claim is that none of us are Christians; the best we can do is to try. Maybe sometime we’ll sit by the ocean and drink pina coladas (or beer!) and talk about that.
Sorry - I should have commented earlier, Scott. I hope things are well with you. We should hang out in February (if you haven’t figured out who this is, just check my IP)