Roman's Road to Salvation Is About King Jesus

Help me think this through.

The type of evangelism I was reared up on as a youthful and on fire evangelical was what has been called the Romans Road to Salvation. The basic idea that needed to be communicated to our hopeless victim was that they could in now way earn their way to heaven. They could not please God if they tried. If they have sinned once in their life, broken one little commandment, then they might as well broken them all. The Roman’s Road traces it like this, “there is no one good, no not one” (Rom 3:10), “because all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23), and the “wages of sin are death…” (by which we meant hell) this is the gloomiest point in the whole tale, the bottom of the bottom, but it’s at this point – when their heart has fallen into their stomach and you have them sweating great big beads of fearful sweat drops – that you offer them hope, “but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 6:23). At this point, and with a little bit of prayerful prodding, the now hopeful friend is ready to exclaim like the crowed in Acts, “What must I do to be saved?” at which point you take them to the last stop in their Romans journey, “If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom 10:9). Then you lead them into the Sinners Prayer, after which you two go off to find a church to split somewhere.

But if Scot McKnight, Trevin Wax, and N.T. Wright are correct, and the apostolic gospel is not justification by faith, not the Romans Road to Salvation, not the Four Spiritual Laws, then what does that mean for our evangelizing. To word it positively, if the gospel is – strictly speaking – the narrative of Jesus Christ particularly as it was documented by the Four Evangelists, then what does that mean for our evangelizing?

It would be difficult to find in the Gospels anything that looks remotely close to the Romans Road to Salvation, and if all we had were the gospels – as some of the earliest communities we can assume did – what would our evangelizing look like? The gospels do speak of repentance – particularly out of the unrelenting mouth of John the Baptists – but interesting enough, this is one element that is included in our evangelizing that is not included in the Romans Road to Salvation. There is no mention of repentance in any of the common passages cited. Then if we ask “why repent?”, the Gospels give a different answer than most people do when they evangelize. The Gospels tell us to repent because the Kingdom of God is near (or in some cases, has arrived). Can you imagine adding that element to your evangelizing? Most people would think that to be a very odd thing to say to someone whom you are trying to convince to pray/ask Jesus into their heart. You don’t repent because of the nearness or arrival of the Kingdom of God, you repent because you are a sinner separated from God, everybody knows that. Besides, in the Roman’s Road Paul says nothing about the Kingdom of God, so neither should we, right? Wrong. First, we’ve slyly moved back into the position of comparing the Gospels to Romans rather than the other way around. Remember that the Gospels tell the gospel. So we should say, if the Gospels don’t gospel the Romans Road to Salvation, then should we. But putting that aside for the moment, whoever said that Paul did not have the Kingdom of God in mind even in our favourite Romans Road to Salvation passages?

Have you ever asked yourself what – in Romans 6:23 – did Paul mean by “in Christ Jesus our Lord”? Of course not. It is usually not apart of our gospelling or evangelizing. Our main point is to tell people that they need to accept Jesus into their hearts to receive eternal life. But that’s just it. Because we don’t pay close enough attention to Paul, what our main point is and what Paul’s main point is are not the same thing. This begs the question as to whether we are even gospelling Paul’s gospel when we evangelize using the Roman’s Road to Salvation.

When Paul says “in Christ” he is saying “in the Jewish Messiah” or, to put it more pointedly, “in the King”. This is Paul’s “Kingdom of God” language. Jesus is the long awaited Israelite king, and standing in the line – as the climax in fact – of the Israelite kings tradition, it means that those who are in his Kingdom are represented by him as the King. This is what Paul means by “in Christ”. Jesus is eternal life. Jesus is ‘the Life’ (John 14:6). If we are “in Him” then we partake in that eternal life. Not only that, when Paul says “in Christ Jesus our Lord” what he is saying is that yes, Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, but because Israel’s God is also the God of creation, to say that Jesus is Israel’s Messiah also means that he is Lord – i.e. King – of the rest of creation as well.

All of a sudden it is not about saying a prayer and asking Jesus into our hearts. Rather it is about making a conscious decision, a declaration of allegiance, that Jesus is Lord and with it a deep conviction that he is the first fruits of the New Creation (“if you confess with your mouth [a declaration of allegiance] that Jesus is Lord [read: King] and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead [i.e. first fruits of the New Creation], you will be saved” (Romans 10:9).

If we approach Paul’s gospelling in this way, it aligns well with the Gospels. Notice, it’s not about getting people to say a Sinners Prayer so that they can feel a conscious relief and breathe a sigh of security that they are going to heaven. This is an important point to make because this type of “gospelling” creates would-be “converts” – nominal Christians (and make no mistake about it, we’ve create an entire community of them and stuffed them into our churches). It has long bothered me that Jesus called the disciples the way he did. No Sinners Prayer. No confessions. No – dare I say – even repentance, at least not the emotional altar style we are used to. Rather, he called individuals – in fact, he called nations – to follow him. He called them to be disciples, not converts. Disciples. The Romans Road to Salvation, if understand and preached as I just suggested, does not create nominal converts. It creates disciples. It summons people to join a Kingdom and to become a new creation. This changes everything about their being. It changes the way they think and move and talk and act and live and play and work and love and fight… it changes everything.

Mondays With Wright

“The disciples wanted a kingdom without a cross. Many would-be “orthodox” or “conservative” Christians in our world have wanted a cross without a kingdom, an abstract “atonement” that would have nothing to do with this world except to provide the means of escaping it.”

N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus - p. 173

Obedience and Belief

“Only the believing obey, only the obedient believe”.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer -

Christian Minimalists

Evangelicals have become experts in finding a thousand new ways to ask the same question, “What is the least one has to do to become a Christian.“ That’s our defining question. We’ve become masters at theological and soteriological minimalism. We are the ones who have boiled the entire glorious Gospel down to a single phrase, a simple emotive transaction, or some silly slogan. It is time for a new generation of Christians, committed to apostolic faith, to declare this minimalistic, reductionistic Christianity a failed project! It is wrong to try to get as many people as possible, to acknowledge as superficially as allowable, a Gospel which is theologically unsustainable. We need to be reminded of the words of Søren Kierkegaard, in his Attack Upon Christendom, where he declared, “Christianity is the profoundest wound that can be inflicted upon us, calculated on the most dreadful scale to collide with everything.”1 We, on the other hand, have made entrance into the Christian faith painless and almost seamless. In the process, we have managed to produce as many nominal Christians as Christendom ever did. If the liberal project taught us that denying Apostolic Christianity renders the Gospel inert and non-reproducible (note rapid decline of mainline churches), evangelical, minimalistic Christianity has taught us that the Gospel cannot be reduced to a bite sized piece for mass consumption.

The Gospel is about the in-breaking kingdom and the New Creation that claims the whole sphere. Christians can’t simply choose to play in one small corner of the chessboard – you have to play the whole board, or you will lose. The Gospel must be embodied in a redeemed community and touch the whole of life. That is why the Wesley brothers set up class meetings, fed the poor, wrote books on physics, gave preachers a series of canonical sermons, catechized the young, preached at the brick yards, promoted prison reform, rode 250,000 miles on horseback, preached 40,000 sermons, superintended orphanages, were avid abolitionists, and wrote theologically laden hymns for the church, etc. You see, they were capturing every sphere with the Gospel. The New Creation does not simply break into one little square on the chess-board – it crashes into the whole of life! If Wesley teaches us anything, it is that salvation is not something which is merely announced to us, it is something which God works in us – the forceful intrusion of his holiness into our history.

Brothers and sisters, it is time for us to capture a fresh vision of the great meta-narrative of the Christian Gospel for our times! The bumper sticker “God is my co-pilot” will not get us there. We have, in effect, been criss-crossing the world telling people to make God a player, even a major player in our drama. But the Gospel is about being swept up into His great drama. It is about our dying to self, taking up the cross, and being swept up into the great theo-drama of the universe! Christ has come as the Second Adam to inaugurate the restoration of the whole of creation by redeeming a people who are saved in their full humanity and called together into a new redeemed community known as the church, the outpost of the New Creation in Adam’s world. Discipleship, worship of the Triune God, covenant faithfulness, suffering for the sake of the Gospel, abiding loyalty to Christ’s holy church, theological depth, and a renewed mission to serve the poor and disenfranchised – these must become the great impulses of our lives.

Timothy Tennant, Bumper Sticker Christianity

COMMUNITY

Community is the place where the person you least want to live with is always there.

- Henri Nouwen -

Believing is Doing

Protestantism has created some odd heresies. One of these is an elaboration of justification as by “faith alone” that renders the works, i.e., the everyday life of a Christian, inconsequential. For the Pauline letters in the NT, nothing could be further from the case. Paul’s missionary goal is to bring about, not faith alone, nor even faith in Christ per se, but “the obedience of faith” (Rom 1). Paul celebrates the Thessalonians’ work of faith (1 Thess 1).

The reality into which Christians enter is not merely a different set of heart thoughts (I now believe in Jesus) but a whole new sphere of life.

The paragraph ends with Paul’s affirmation that God has freed us–we are now in the kingdom of the beloved son. Not merely freed from condemnation, we are now freed to learn, to grown in the knowledge of God. Not merely free to learn, we are free to act in accordance with what we know.

To be one who exists in Christ is to have a life defined by a certain kind of actions. This is not merely the repetition of “belief” in Christ, but a whole life lived so as to please our God and Father.

J.R. Daniel Kirk

Living in God's Story

As we enter into God's Story as narrative, a whole new world is opened to us. One of the most significant things that happen when we enter into God's Story is that we begin to get a sense of God's entire interconnected narrative, and we see how it intersects with our own stories. The narrative, in turn, clarifies our place in God's Story and helps us take the focus off of ourselves and aim it toward God and his desires for the World.

This is in direct contrast to what much of Protestant Christianity in America has focused on for the last several decades. Churches have highlighted an individual and personal faith, pointing toward personal devotions, personal evangelism, and personal growth as benchmarks. This way of thinking contributes to the idea that "God is part of my story." Thus, the goal becomes motivating people to make room for God in their own stories and let God play a bigger part. In other words, make God more central.

This seems like a noble focus in some ways - and it's one that I had for a long time. But now I can see that it's backward. Not only does this way of thinking place my own story as the centerpiece of my life, but it also leads me to a never-ending struggle to put God first. Spiritual formation becomes individual process, focused on spiritual disciplines, solitude, and surrender. And while disciplines, solitude and surrender have their place and importance, viewing them so centrally creates a limited perspective.

We need to stop trying to fit God into our lives and stories and realize that God desires us to play a role in his Story instead. As subtle a difference as it may seem, the shift in perspective changes everything. When we see ourselves as a part of God's Story -- as opposed to God being part of our story --it awakens us to live in a broader reality, to live for and contribute to something bigger than ourselves.

Michael Novelli, Shaped by the Story