This is the first of a three-part series covering David Rudel’s Who Really Goes To Hell?—The Gospel You’ve Never Heard. Rudel looks at how Scripture (The Bible) and our understanding of GOD’s purpose and of Jesus (The Gospel) intersect and where they diverge. My introduction can be found here.

We often take it as a given that the world understands what is meant by the argument about salvation: faith vs. works. Even our shorthand, building this dichotomy displays a certain divisive, post-Reformation attitude about the fundamental nature of Christian faith and what that means for all those in the Church. I don’t reject this, other than to suggest its oversimplification causes great pain and increases conflict.

This argument about salvation, however, has become increasingly difficult to untangle. How do I get it? What does the word even mean? David Rudel turns the mirror on the discussion by posing a simple line of questioning: Was Jesus’s ministry on earth about getting me into heaven? And if so, why does he spend virtually all of his time trying to get us to behave in certain ways?

These seem like easy questions for Emergents, Mainliners, and Roman Catholics; perhaps leading us to snidely condemn the Evangelicals, Calvinists, and Fundamentalists for theological constructions that are unsupportable. But Rudel, in describing these concepts, exposes our own profound inability to untangle a shared ignorance about salvation writ large.

If we look at salvation as it is depicted in Scripture, we are able to recognize two primary elements: what Rudel refers to as “deliverance” and “regeneration”. In deliverance, he refers to a sense of salvation that is in the future, such as in the afterlife. In regeneration, he refers to salvation that happens in the present, during one’s lifetime. In this way, he argues, we use the same word to describe being saved through baptism (present) and being saved at the judgment (future). What the author interestingly does is help parse these concepts and holds them as strings out from each other. When we take salvation as regeneration (being saved now) and deliverance (being saved at the judgment), it causes a flurry of theological impossibilities and strangeness, such as Hitler going to heaven and Gandhi going to hell. So what happens when we think of them as referring to separate things? What happens to our understanding of being saved when being saved in the present doesn’t predetermine salvation at the judgment?

Not only does this seem to match the theological push of the Gospellers, who are interested in helping people better understand who Jesus is and helping people live in certain ways, it makes for a more consistent and understandable theology. It means that we can be truly affected by the Holy Spirit while also being held responsible for our actions and that we are judged by our actions and who we are, not the orthodoxy of our belief. This is great, but scary news.

Rudel is most effective in this first section of the book in discussing the two most problematic writers (or writing communities) in the New Testament: John and Paul. It would be one thing to describe this theology using only the Synoptics, which would be quite simple. In demonstrating how compatible this really is with Paul, however, the author forces us to rethink the nature of Paul’s faith; not only in “the faith of[/in] Christ” sense as described by the New Perspective scholars, but to see Paul’s cosmic interest as also being local and present.

This is even more true with his interpretation of John, particularly in defining what John really means by the phrase “eternal life”. To put his work into a nutshell doesn’t do it justice, but I’ll explain it this way: when John refers to “eternal life,” he is not referring to immortality in a 21st Century, North American sense, or a 19th Century search for the Fountain of Youth sense, or a True Blood/vampire sense in which one’s existence is perpetual and forever, but as an indwelling thing, personal and experiential, and thoroughly now, not unlike the Holy Spirit coming into you. The most useful tipoffs are these:

1. The Greek translated as “eternal” is actually better defined as “measureless”, “indefinite”, and “so vast the edge is unseen”: which do not mean perpetual, but something more like “the boundary is not perceivable by me,” which is not eternal at all!
2. John actually describes and defines “eternal life” using the exact language with which the Holy Spirit is described and defined, making a comparative relationship natural, and most likely, intentional.

As I was finishing this first part, I couldn’t help but feel woefully unprepared to even talk about judgment. Even though my favorite texts have significant judgment passages in them (Mark, Luke, Revelation), it didn’t seem to prepare me for what to say after throwing out the highly-flawed theology that I didn’t possess—meaning that my own theology of judgment seemed to be underdeveloped. My hope is that others that find themselves in the boat with me will do the hard (and presumably rewarding) work of reflecting on this conjecture: that our present life will have a profound impact on our future and that our future probably won’t be in a cloud playing a harp (or stirring a cauldron over hot coals).

The next section of the book is on Judgment, taking a look at what Scripture actually has to say about judgment, now that we are questioning the relationship between redemption in the present as being necessarily linked with positive judgment later. I’ll cover this (hopefully) in the next couple of days, finishing the book next week.

Stay tuned and please share your thoughts!