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Commentary
GEN-X RISING: Preach salvation, not self-help Andrew C. Thompson, Mar 5, 2008
Andrew C. Thompson
By Andrew C. Thompson UMR Columnist
Wandering through bookstores last Christmas, a book caught my eye: It promised to help me realize the full potential God wants me to have.
The bestseller’s smiling author, Joel Osteen, looked out at me from the dust jacket next to book’s title, Become a Better You.
I spent time perusing the book because Mr. Osteen is one of the most popular preachers in America.
In some ways, I can relate. I want to become a better me. Who doesn’t?
On the other hand, the title is troubling. Both the book’s title and its content suggested that I’ve basically got all that I need. By following seven simple steps—like “keep pressing forward” and “stay passionate about life”—it promised fulfillment. Or to borrow the title of another one of this pastor’s books, it promised my “best life now.”
This obviously wasn’t about salvation. It was just self-help, dressed up in a very thin spirituality. Whatever happened to “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23)?
Apparently salvation doesn’t play well in our culture today. But does it even play in the church?
I don’t think most Methodist pastors preach the gospel of self-help to the extent of that best-selling book, but we are all guilty of preaching a gospel of getting-along-in-the-world at times. When you have congregations with lots of practical needs, it is often tempting to use the Bible to help them sort out their messy lives.
Bishop William Willimon calls this type of preaching the “problem-solution format.” Preachers will take up a problem of contemporary life—depression, rocky marriages or troubled finances—and then use the Bible as a way to offer helpful solutions. In that way, faith is presented as a way to make life easier.
Bishop Willimon thinks this terribly shortchanges the Scriptures.
“[T]he Bible does not simply want to speak to our world,” Bishop Willimon writes in Proclamation and Theology (Abingdon, 2005). Rather, “the Bible wants to rock, transform, dismantle and recreate our world.”
Preaching that faithfully reflects that message will be about salvation, not self-help: “The Bible wants to redeem us, save us, rescue and liberate us for life in a new world, a world that we would not have known about had not that new world been announced through preaching,” Bishop Willimon writes.
Some people will instinctively react against a call to salvation-oriented preaching. It sounds too old school, too focused on the hereafter instead of the here-and-now.
That’s too bad. Because salvation in a Wesleyan sense is very much about the here-and-now. In “The Scripture Way of Salvation,” his fullest sermon on the subject, John Wesley says that the salvation he preaches is not what is usually understood by that term, or “going to heaven.” Instead, “it is a present thing, a blessing which, through the free mercy of God, ye are now in possession of.”
Wesley emphasizes “the entire work of God,” which begins the moment that grace dawns in a person’s soul. Does this salvation include heaven? Yes, of course it does, but it starts here on earth.
This view of salvation opposes the kind of transactional experience that is most associated with praying the “Sinner’s Prayer.” Growing up, I had Baptist friends who could tell me the very moment that they “got saved.” The story usually took on a familiar pattern: During a youth revival or summer camp, a speaker would hammer away at the deep sinfulness of everyone there, and tell them that if they wanted to go to heaven and be with Jesus after they died, they needed to repent of their sin and ask Jesus to be their personal Lord and Savior. An altar call followed, whereupon a whole group of newly redeemed teenagers received the speaker’s assurance that they were saved.
I don’t mean to denigrate such experiences. The message that we are an inherently sinful people is true, and it is important to realize that. Worship is a tremendous means of grace as well, and teenagers often have authentic experiences of God’s grace in the context of revival services or summer camps. But to equate one experience on your knees at the altar with the fullness of salvation is just off the mark.
God means for salvation to be a lot more than just reserving a post-mortem ticket on the Heavenly Express. And salvation is not a transaction, purchased with the price of a three-line prayer.
In Responsible Grace (Kingswood, 1994), Wesleyan theologian Randy Maddox emphasizes how Wesley held that God’s grace justifies us through faith alone while also insisting that such justification must result in holiness of heart and life. Wesley, Dr. Maddox argues, “insisted on a dynamic interrelationship between our response and God’s grace.”
Instead of a transaction with God, Wesley’s view sees salvation as a way of life that involves the renewal of the image of God in us. A “salvation experience” in those terms is really the new birth spoken about in John 3:3. It is a true experience of justification by faith, but it is also only one step in a lifelong journey of holiness as we become more and more transformed into the image of Christ. And for the grace given to us in faith to continue to be effective in our lives, we must respond to God by embracing holiness.
Our doctrine of salvation holds to justification by faith, but the distinctively Wesleyan aspect of it is the strong place it holds for a grace-empowered sanctification through holiness of heart and life. It may not be as neat and tidy as the typical version you sometimes see, but it will preach.
And it’s a heck of lot more interesting than the self-help, psycho-babble you’re liable to find at your local bookstore.
Ultimately, the gospel doesn’t care about helping us “reach our full potential.” It wants to heal us of our sin and transform us through grace. That’s salvation, not self-help.
Andrew C. Thompson
