Whom Do We Serve?

Following after Paul and us, she kept crying out, saying, “These men are bond-servants of the Most High God, who are proclaiming to you the way of salvation.” Acts 16:17

Salvation – John Stott wrote, “The hallmark of an authentic evangelicalism is not the uncritical repetition of old traditions but the willingness to submit every tradition, however ancient, to fresh biblical scrutiny and, if necessary, reform.”  Are we really ready to embrace his challenge?  Let’s consider the concept of salvation.  How can we understand what the authors of the New Testament are trying to communicate if we read them without their cultural context?  This question plagues Christian preaching.  In an effort to make the Bible relevant, we often remove the thought patterns and cultural assumptions of Yeshua and the apostles.  We preach the Bible as if it were yesterday’s newspaper.  Even the most central concepts of our faith don’t escape the charge of cultural bias.  Scholars recognize this problem, but few believers grapple with it.  Most of us are comfortable accepting what we have been told rather than asking, “What would this mean to the audience that first heard it?”

There is little doubt that the contemporary understanding of salvation is tied to the idea of a blissful abode, the destruction of this present era and the recreation of heaven and earth.  Few Christians realize that none of these connections are found in Jewish thinking.  To understand the meaning of the Greek word soteria (salvation) we cannot remove its Jewish roots.  N. T. Wright draws an important conclusion concerning the Jewish view of salvation.

“It ought to be clear by now that within the worldview we have described [the Jewish worldview] there can be little thought of the rescue of Israel consisting of the end of the space-time universe, and/or of Israel’s future enjoyment of non-physical, ‘spiritual’ bliss.  That would simply contradict creational monotheism, implying that the created order was residually evil, and to be simply destroyed. . . . Rather, the ‘salvation’ spoken of in the Jewish sources of the period has to do with rescue from the national enemies, restoration of the national symbols, and a state of ‘shalom’ in which every man will sit under his own vine or fig tree.  ‘Salvation’ encapsulates the entire future hope.  If there are Christian redefinitions of the world later on, that is another question.  For the first-century Jews it could only mean the inauguration of the age to come, liberation from Rome, the restoration of the Temple, and the free enjoyment of their own land.”[1]

George Moore adds an important element:  “There is no indication that pious Jews were afflicted with an inordinate preoccupation about their individual hereafter. . . . The ultimate salvation of the individual is inseparably connected with the salvation of the people, . . .”[2]

“The most natural meaning of the phrase ‘the forgiveness of sins’ to a first-century Jew is not in the first instance the remission of individual sins, but the putting away of the whole nation’s sin.”[3]

Wright and Moore shatter our theological misunderstandings about Yeshua as our personal savior.  They remind us that no Jew in the audience of the first century could have imagined salvation as a private, personal experience.  Furthermore, no Jew imagined that salvation meant the creation of a new heaven and earth.  Such thinking was blasphemous.  It denied the supremacy and holiness of God’s original actions.

The implications are enormous.  If Yeshua, Kefa (Peter) and Sha’ul (Paul) think like Jews, then they are not teaching doctrines compatible with the idea of an individual rescue and the destruction of the space/time continuum.  Those doctrines were imported into our theology by others.  In particular, the universalism of Hellenism (e.g., the idea God treats all men as equal) with its commitment to a utopian future meant that Jewish claims of exclusive election had to be rejected and replaced.  The conflict between Judaism and Christianity was the battle between a Jewish understanding of YHWH’s exclusive election of Israel as His people and the Church’s claim that God was the God of all mankind without the need for a national exclusiveness.  The replacement of Jewish rituals such as Sabbath and dietary restrictions was motivated by the Hellenistic paradigm of universalism, a paradigm that appeared idolatrous to any pious Jew.

If Wright and Moore are correct, then we need to rethink our preoccupation about our individual hereafter.  We need to recognize that the playing field for salvation is here and now, not by and by.  We need to realize that salvation is a community concept; that no one is saved without the salvation of the people of God.  We need to understand that Yeshua didn’t die for my sins.  He chose to be God’s redemptive sacrifice for the restoration of the entire cosmos.

If first century Jews, including Yeshua and the apostles, taught that salvation was communal, temporal and physical, then where did our individual, ex-temporal and spiritual reorientation come from?  If Yeshua and the apostles understood salvation from a Jewish perspective, then what is our current relationship to Jews supposed to be?

Apparently, we have some really big questions to answer.

Topical Index:  salvation, soteria, Stott, Wright, Moore, Acts 16:17

[2] G. F. Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era:  The Age of the Tannaim, p. 319

[3] N. T. Wright, p. 273