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When thoughts of a book on salvation were percolating in me, a friend of some years approached me with a question that had become his obsession. He told me that he grew up in a small-town Baptist church. As a youth he "accepted Jesus as [his] personal savior and [he] knew that [he] was saved." He was active in church until his late teenaged years when other interests drew him away. As a young man, when he married, he returned to the church, partly because of his wife's piety.

Now, in midlife he had become obsessed with the question, "Am I really saved?" He had begun to doubt that he had ever had a true conversion experience. He had engaged in a study of the Bible, but that had filled him with more questions. He had tried to discuss his plight with a number of pastors and friends, but they all seemed to have different points of view that confused him all the more. He used to pray, but had stopped because it felt like he was just "talking to [him]self."

"What if I died tomorrow?" he asked. "I'm not sure that I would be saved and go to heaven."

I told my friend that God had sent him to me to reassure me that we needed another book on salvation!

My heart went out to this brother who was in real torment and consternation. I could make a number of observations about his struggle with salvation, but for now I'll just note the absence of one key player: God. My friend characterized his struggle as his lonely battle to understand, his solitary attempt to decide, his need to feel, and his heroic efforts to be certain. I asked my friend to consider the possibility that his turmoil might be God induced, that God might be using this turbulence to move him to some new plane in their relationship. Perhaps his struggle was validation that God was indeed real and that God was working to draw him closer. Perhaps.

The modern world teaches us to narrate our lives without reference to God. It's all our decisions, our actions, our feelings, and our desires. So the first thing we must say is that salvation is primarily about God.

How does it stand between us and God? In Scripture the question is never, "Is there a God?" but rather, "Does the God who is there care about us?" W. H. Auden depicts the modern task of learning to live in a universe now emptied of concern for humanity:

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well

That, for all they care, I can go to hell.¹

Auden goes on to assure us that the universe's failure to take notice need cause us little concern. If anything, we should be concerned about the attention we draw to ourselves here on earth, be it admiration or admonishment. But no matter who observes us on earth or from heaven, Auden suggests that we can get used to anything. Given opportunity, we could decide even a sky emptied of its stars is a beautiful and fitting thing.

With time we adjust to cosmic indifference. A favorite means of coping with the absence of a savior is to deny that we need saving. One of my cherished viewpoints of the National Cathedral in Washington DC is the sculptured tympanum over the front door. Medieval interpreters spoke of the tympanum as a component of the "doorway of heaven," the "gateway to God," because it was here that one entered the cathedral and also the glories of the Christian faith.

In almost every medieval cathedral that space is occupied by a depiction of the Last Judgment. One thinks of Notre Dame de Paris where a judging angel holds scales, weighing the merits of the good and the bad. Over Notre Dame's scene of judgment, blessedness, and damnation presides the enthroned Christ, surrounded by his faithful apostles. In some churches Mary, mother of Jesus, is on the tympanum, and sometimes Christ is on the cross.

At the National Cathedral the contemporary sculptor Frederick Hart has rendered a peculiarly twentieth-century biblical subject—the creation of humanity. It's a Rodin-like, sensuous Adam and Eve emerging from the hand of a creative God. Gone is any sense of the judging, saving God. God's greatest work is no longer the cross or our redemption; the greatest divine work is our creation. Neither atonement nor reconciliation but rather creation of humanity has become the message that the church celebrates before the world.

This suggests humanity overly impressed with itself, getting along just fine, thank you. Our great desire is to be successful in achieving the human project, as we define it, immune from the judgments of God, rather than to be redeemed through the judgments of God. To paraphrase dear Flannery O'Connor, anybody with reasonable success in being successful, or even a good car, "don't need redemption."

No enthroned or even crucified cosmic Christ to be seen because, well, if you are as knowledgeable, as grand and glorious as contemporary North Americans, there is not much left for God to do for us. God gave us a grand start in fashioning us from the dirt at Creation, then retired, leaving us to fend for our gifted selves.

(By the way, at Duke Chapel, where I preached for twenty years, the tympanum is occupied by none other than John Wesley! So who am I to criticize the National Cathedral's tympanum?)

Although celebration of humanity is the dominant, governmentally sanctioned story, it is not the story to which Christians are accountable. It is the conventional North American story that, at every turn, is counter to the gospel. Thus we begin by noting that there are few more challenging words to be said by the church than salvation. Salvation implies that there is something from which we need to be saved, that we are not doing as well as we presume, that we do not have the whole world in our hands and that the hope for us is not of our devising.

Most Christians think of salvation as related exclusively to the afterlife. Salvation is when we die and get to go to heaven. To be sure, Scripture is concerned with our eternal fate. What has been obscured is Scripture's stress on salvation as invitation to share in a particular God's life here, now, so that we might do so forever. Salvation isn't just a destination; it is our vocation. Salvation isn't just a question of who is saved and who is damned, who will get to heaven and how, but also how we are swept up into participation in the mystery of God who is Jesus Christ. Get a biblical concordance and check the references to heaven and you will find that almost none of them are related to "death." Heaven is when or where one is fully with God—salvation.

Look up salvation in the concordance and you will find a wide array of images. Luke-Acts uses the word salvation rather frequently, Matthew and Mark almost never, though we ought not to make too much of that. All of the Gospels may be fairly read as stores about the rich, peculiar nature of salvation in Jesus Christ. Salvation is a claim about God. God's selfassigned task is "working salvation in the earth" (Ps 74:12). God is addressed as "God of our salvation" (Ps 65:5). For some, salvation is rescue, deliverance, and victory. For others, it is healing, wholeness, completion, and rest. Isaiah speaks of salvation as a great economic reversal in which God gives a free banquet for the poor (Isaiah 55). Whatever salvation means, its meaning must be too rich for any single definition.²