Being Born At The Wrong Time

A central conviction of evangelical Christians is that an experience of Jesus Christ as one's personal Savior and Lord, definable both in content and time of occurrence, is essential for salvation. A major assumption behind the conviction is that in the experience, the saved know who their experience is of, because they have already heard about, and therefore know, who Jesus Christ is. I have less of a problem with the conviction than I do with the assumption.

Although evangelicals tip their helmets of salvation conspicuously when they lay on the importance of encountering Jesus personally, their idea itself actually has merit. Salvation is not merely something conferred from a cross a long time ago on the basis of a transaction involving only Jesus and his Father. Unless in some way one experiences the work of the cross through the changes it makes possible in one's own life, there is little worth celebrating about it. As Isaac Watts once put it, we need to see for ourselves the mingled sorrow and love flowing down.

About the evangelical conviction, then: so far so good. But now what has to be faced is the evangelical assumption, and on this terrain the going is not as easy. The assumption is that salvation is for those who know Jesus. Not just his background, or his teachings, or his followers, with their own teachings and doctrines. And not just good people in all times and places who have struggled to lead good lives to the best of their own knowledge of things. Only Jesus, and knowledgeable experience of him, finally counts.

One difficulty with this assumption is that it makes salvation impossible for people who were born after Jesus died, but who failed and fail to get the word about their divinely imposed obligations to him. Many evangelicals overcome this difficulty by insisting that the "word" was out there for the hearing and the taking, and therefore that people who did not avail themselves of it are without excuse. Perhaps.

But surely this reasoning cannot apply to that other segment of humanity whose members were born before the coming of Christ. These folks comprise quite a multitude, whether they range back only six thousand years or so, per Archbishop Ussher and not a whole lot of remaining followers, or seven million years or so, per Jared Diamond and more followers than we can count. The problem for people born too early is not that they failed to pay attention to what they should readily have known, in some form, about what the later-arriving Jesus would stand for. Rather, it is that they hadn't been born when anybody else knew anything about it either. Denying them salvation on the grounds of untimely birth is something no God I know anything about would even consider doing.

To this problem, evangelical Christians offer three basic solutions. The first is an humble acknowledgement of the problem as a problem, accompanied by a winsome expression of trust that, somehow, God will make things right with the people who happened to have been born at the wrong time. This version of evangelical Christianity is a keeper.

Two other versions are not. One espouses a kind of Malthusian spirituality that seems to relish the efforts of the Powers-That-Be to keep the population behind the pearly gates down. "No chance to hear about Jesus? Well, life is tough all over, but that's just the way it is. What do you expect any of the rest of us to do about it anyway?" From this perspective, the Father's house must have more empty rooms than anybody ought to feel comfortable with.

Another, equally frightening response to the issue of being born too soon to be saved typically gets expressed not in words but in a blank stare. The look on the faces of some evangelical Christians when I raise this issue with them makes plain that it simply has not occurred to them, ghettoized as they are in cults of their own making, that the reconciling ministry in God's name had to be going on in some form in all the worlds that preceded Jesus Christ on earth, precisely because all of those worlds represent just as much God's world as Jesus' world and our own do.

A transforming experience of Jesus Christ as your personal Savior and Lord? Go for it. On the far side of your salvation, however, particularly in the Kingdom that is not of this world, there may be more than just a few surprises awaiting you, when you discover who is, and is not, there already.

Getting Off The Family Merry-Go-Round

A number of readers like to tease me about my June-time preoccupation with marriage and family issues. I plead guilty. It comes from doing a lot of June weddings back in the days when churches had a lot of them, and when more of them lasted. So, ready or not, here we go again:

One frequently used image for life today is the image of a merry-go-round that never stops. The rides look like so much fun at the beginning, but quickly prove tedious and tiring, opening out on a frightening vista of frustration, repetitiveness, and hopelessness. Better that your life should be a cabaret, old chum.

The feeling that life is just a big merry-go-round can be like the feeling of getting somewhere and then discovering that you have only been moving relentlessly back to your initial starting point. Many people who feel like this want desperately to break out of the habits and routines that make all of their experiences déjà vu all over again, but lack both the hope and the confidence to bring it off. They keep getting attached to something that seems attractive initially but that turns out leaving them stuck in the “same old, same old.” A bad career choice, or a destructive relationship, or alcohol and drugs, or unaffordable vacations, not to mention the frantic pursuit of wealth and fame, will do it almost every time.

The merry-go-round is an especially powerful image of what many family relationships and family systems are like: a disparate bunch of people, holding on to their precarious sense of self-identity for dear life, bringing old ways of doing things to new challenges, while blaming each other that nothing ever seems to get better for them. At the center of this unhealthy process is the failure of family members to acknowledge and cherish the uniqueness of their respective personalities, values, and interests as sources of power, renewal, and excitement for each other. Instead, they become increasingly inflexible and defensive about the necessity of everyone else’s being more like they are and doing things more like they do.These family members work harder and harder to accomplish less and less, and wind up back at the same place faster and faster.

There are many contributors to dysfunctional relationships --- whether among family members, in the work force, or between friends and acquaintances in general --- than just the failure to respect peoples’ individual differences. Insecurity, self-centeredness, skill deficits, poor role models, and just plain stubbornness represent only a few. But one of the biggest contributors still is allowing differences of style, functioning, and values to work against rather than for the quality of all relationships. To illustrate:

Liz, a future-oriented, highly imaginative “dreamer”settles down with Arnie, a no-nonsense, practical, just-the-facts, here-and-now kind of guy. Both wonder why their relationship, when it is going anywhere at all, only seems to be heading “south.”

Brad seems never to know what he thinks and feels about something unless he talks it out in the company of others. By contrast, Brenda thinks everything out in her head before she offers even a first word to anyone else on the subject at hand. When they are thrown together on company business, Brad criticizes Brenda mercilessly for her coldness and aloofness, and Brenda retaliates by humiliating Brad for his invasiveness and boorishness.

Jack, a conflict avoider, becomes joined at the hip emotionally with Joan, a conflict confronter. Joan eventually bails out of the relationship with Jack, only to go on to forge a new one with Jerry, whose approach to dealing with conflict is neither that of avoidance nor confrontation, but of mediation and negotiation. Jack, Joan, and Jerry continue to insist that his and her own respective approach is the only right one, and wonder why they have so much difficulty getting anything settled for very long.

The basic form that all collisions like these take is --- you guessed it --- going around and around and not getting anywhere. The primary reason that the collisions keep turning out this way is that each party to them is convinced that when the other party becomes more like he or she is, all the problems will go away. The marriage relationship is an especially apt illustration: many people marry their opposites, personality-wise, and then put untold time and energy into re-making their spouses in their own own image. How God images each is never factored into the equation at all. And that’s a pity, because finding out is the single best way to stop family merry-go-rounds long enough for everybody to get off, and discover together a ride that everyone can really enjoy.