A Ramble About Salvation

I am Orthodox Old Catholic, but I wasn't always. There was a time when I came from a non-denominational bible church in California, and attended a non-denominational missionary bible school in Wisconsin. The bible school, like the church I attended, was one which taught that, if you accepted Christ as your savior and truly believed in Him, you were saved, and nothing could take that away from you.

One day, the question was raised, as a part of the class, “how much does someone have to know and believe in order to be saved?” As an answer, and a tool for evangelizing, we were given a system called the “Three Crucial Issues.” The first crucial issue is that everyone has sinned and can do nothing to earn their way into heaven. The second is that Jesus Christ died for our sins and paid the price for us so that we don't have to. The third is that it's our responsibility to believe this and act on it. This was considered the bare minimum standard of faith and understanding necessary for salvation.

As I was thinking about this lately, I also thought about the Catholic/Orthodox faith, and how it is perceived by Evangelicals, and even by many Catholics and Orthodox, who see it as somehow requiring us to work to earn our salvation or somehow do enough penance to become “worthy” of our salvation. What a load of rubbish. The writings of the Saints are replete with the understanding that there is no way for us to make ourselves worthy of Him, but that He is also capable of saving even us, unworthy as we are. Time and time again, the Saints write about how unworthy they are of Him, and the closer they draw to Him, the more intense this sentiment becomes and the more vocal they become as to their inability to save themselves. They did not presume on their final salvation, but they did entrust it to God as they grew in their understanding and knowledge of Him.

The truth is that if, as was taught in my old school, these three crucial issues represent the bare minimum of understanding for salvation, then according to this, all professing Catholics and Orthodox who understand their faith are saved. Furthermore, so are all Mormons (at least insofar as the Book of Mormon itself teaches). For that matter, any professing, devout Christian, of any stripe or denomination, Orthodox or not, falls under this category because these “crucial issues” are the most basic understanding of Christianity there is. They are understood as true by everyone who understands what their Faith actually teaches, and this is the key point.

The error in what I was taught in that bible school lies with the misunderstanding of how to evangelize and not proselytize. Evangelizing is spreading the Gospel. Proselytizing is trying to convert people to believe what you believe. There is a wide gulf between them, but they are too often confused. Evangelizing seeks to give Jesus Christ to people. Proselytizing seeks to grow local churches and denominations (and, need I add, increase revenue from tithes).

If such Evangelicals truly wish to Evangelize other Christians of different traditions, then the best thing they can do, according to their own belief system, is to teach these other Christians about their own faith traditions, and not try and force them to leave the Churches they know. If you teach a Roman Catholic about his own faith from the official Catechism of the Catholic Church, you will certainly inform him enough about the Gospel to ensure his salvation according to the Three Crucial Issues. If you teach an Orthodox Christian about his own faith from any of a number of good Catechisms (I like “The Orthodox Way” by Kallistos Ware) you will most certainly fulfill these Crucial Issues. Even if you teach a Mormon from the Book of Mormon itself, once again you will run directly into these Crucial Issues again and again within its pages. If a sincere belief in these three tenets alone ensure one's salvation, and not a belief in other doctrines, or actions or practices associated with the faith tradition in question, then it is better to make the foundation of their salvation more secure by working within their faith tradition and not against it. If you work against it, you run the risk of ruining their faith and pulling up the wheat with the weeds, so to speak.

I am no longer a Protestant Evangelical, but I still understand the theology underpinning it. There is no logic, in this theology, in the attempt to draw Christians of other faith traditions out of their own churches in order to save them when it can already be demonstrated that the tradition in question already meets the bare minimum understanding for this purpose. The only purpose to trying to convince them to leave is to grow one's own church for either that church's financial gain, or personal glory. This is the root of heresy, and what the Apostles and their successors were trying to combat relentlessly. The question which an Evangelist must ask himself is this, “am I trying to truly give Jesus to this person, or am I trying to get him to join my church and leave his?” The person who does the first is a true Evangelist. The person who does the second is a true Heretic.