We will continue this thread under the heading N.T. Wrights and Wrongs even though we are officially off the trail and thrashing around in the bracken. I appreciated all the questions and comments.
We are so naturally oriented to “works” that when we discover that an embryo can be saved apart from any works of the law, including notional works of the law, this makes us wonder about grown pagans and so on, who also don’t know that Jesus is the God/man, that He died on the cross for our sins, and so on. Isn’t this view of mine just liberalism, that old porch climber, trying to jimmy another window?
No, I really don’t think so. People are lost because of presence of sin, not because of the absence of Jesus. If someone has terminal cancer and he refuses efficacious treatment, he still dies of the cancer. He does not die of “not taking medicine.” Now in a sense, the refusal to take medicine clearly has something to do with it, but it is not the direct cause.
High views of grace and high views of sin are interrelated. The old liberalism, that wanted to do the “many paths to God” thing, could only extend grace to everyone by minimizing the sin. But in unbelieving societies, where the works of the flesh are manifest, we assert in the strongest possible way that they need to have the gospel of Jesus Christ preached to them. Why? Their lives are characterized by discord, enmity, hatred, murder, fornication, lust, etc. Why do we say they still need the cancer medicine? Because they still have cancer.
To say that someone can be saved apart without contributing anything of his own (the child who dies three days after his conception) is not to say that someone can be saved from paganism without being saved from paganism. I don’t believe that we can be saved from drowning and remain on the bottom of the pool.
Another reason why we affirm that salvation is in the hands of the Lord (and I agree with the Westminster Confession when it says that outside the church is no ordinary means of salvation) is because high views of grace and high views of sin and law understand the complexity involved in all such questions. They are so complex that only God can be the Savior. Salvation by grace alone is the truth of God, and it really messes our religious hair up. Part of the reason we are attracted to “salvation by affirming salvation by grace” is that this is an intellectual work, and something manipulable and controllable by us. But grace itself, the real thing, is a lion out of the cage. We don’t like that to happen too much, because it scares the theologians.
There will be wretched people in Heaven who sinned far more grievously than other socially decent people who are in Hell. There will be people who worked for the last hour of the day and are paid the same as those who worked all day. There will be hookers and coke addicts in Heaven, and members of the Evangelical Theological Society who aren’t. There will be people up there like Rahab who was justified by lying, saying that the spies went one direction when she knew damn well they went another. And God said, “Well done, woman. I’ll have the apostle James use you for an example of how faith without works is dead.” So there’s a doctrine for you. Justification by lying. And there will be people in heaven even though they occasionally use words like damn to make a point. As though I was not in enough trouble. In the realm of God’s work, there are kings praised for eating the shewbread that they were not supposed to eat, and kings struck with leprosy for going into the temple where they were not supposed to go. There will be priests praised for profaning the sabbath by offering sacrifices on that day, even though they were guiltless in their sinning. There will be rabbis praised for breaking the sabbath through perfoming circumcisions on that day, and Presbyterian ministers praised for violating the Lord’s Day by administering baptisms then. There will be thousands of “pagans” from the Old Testament saved, people who were under no obligation whatever to become Jews. Who will be saved outside the covenant nation of Israel? Well, Melchizedek, Jethro, Namaan the Syrian, Job the Edomite, the inhabitants of Ninevah who repented at the preaching of Jonah, and however many antediluvians who had a change of heart after the door closed and the rain started. Make no mistake — saving a planet full of sinners like us is a messy task, and not one for the tidy-minded.
But we still get worried with the notion that the Spirit is a mighty, rushing wind who is rampaging all over the place, saving people. We want grace in a can. We want to put grace into little spritzer bottles, and then we can mist each other at approved meetings. But the grace of God is a tornado, not a zephyr.
The postmillennial hope teaches us that God is serious about filling heaven up. Make no mistake — I believe in the doctrine of Hell, and I affirm the eternal, conscious torment of the lost. Jesus taught that and so should we. But the Bible also teaches that the number of the saved is going to far surpass the number of the lost. Since God is serious about filling heaven up, it is long past time for conservative Christians to start believing that perhaps He is the kind of God who might want to. The apostle John heard the number of the elect, which was 144,000. But then he turned and looked at them, and what did he see? A multitude that no one can number. Grains of sand on the beach. Stars in the sky. Stars in the sky after the invention of the Hubble telescope.
How many will be saved? I don’t know. We can’t count that high.