At morning prayer yesterday
morning, the breviary offered this petition: “May we seek those things which
are beneficial to our brothers and sisters without counting the costs, to help
them on the way to salvation.”
The word “salvation” hit me. How
long has it been since I considered it important to help someone on the way to
salvation? What is salvation?
Last fall I met once a week with a
Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor to help him spruce up his Latin. He was preparing
for an exam for a doctorate. After we finished he gave me a Christmas gift: a
book by a Catholic scholar named Daniel Olivier writing about Martin Luther,
first published in French in 1978.
Olivier’s thesis is that Luther’s
challenge to the Roman Church made an essential correction to the world that
scholastic theology (think Thomas Aquinas) solidified, a world where salvation
was achievable if only you got with the program. Read “Law.” I recall once
describing the spirituality of my childhood: being saved in the Catholic Church
was mechanical, just like fixing the furnace. The Church at Luther’s time added
a productive coda: you could save your friends and relatives by purchasing
indulgences for them to get them out of purgatory. (Nobody could get with the
program perfectly, so everybody was bound to be in purgatory.)
Luther rejected that kind of world.
Luther’s world was centered on the person of Jesus Christ. His insight was that
a personal relationship with Jesus Christ made all the rest of the program superfluous,
if not downright counter-productive. That’s what he meant by “faith,” as
opposed to “works.” Granted that his insight got captured by all kinds of
religious and secular politics and was tragically run off the rails, but the
Protestant movement he inspired has greatly enriched Christianity. It has taken
the Roman Church centuries to realize that, a realization finally acknowledged
in the Second Vatican Council.
I add some reflections from John
Joe Lakers. Scholastic theology, along with much Church thinking before and
after Aquinas and continuing today, is based on a Greek philosophical paradigm,
that of a structured world that can be described perfectly once and for all in
some sort of synthesis, for example, Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. Lakers
contrasts this paradigm with a Hebrew paradigm based on narrative, on stories,
where an incomprehensible God interacts with humans in unpredictable ways. The
stories never end. They are continually in progress, right up to the present.
“Salvation” is a static concept.
You have it or you don’t have it. You get it by sticking with the program. You
get baptized, and then you obey the rules. Grace comes from a vending machine.
A narrative is unending, always
unfinished, unpredictable.
One more Lakers’ contribution: love
is involvement, involvement with four characteristics: it is passionate,
respectful, vulnerable, and faithful. That is the way God is involved with us.
That is the shape of the story that God would like each human person to live.
Salvation is to live a story of
love, with God and with other people. We love the Lord with our whole heart and
soul and mind and strength, and our neighbors as ourselves, or, as Lakers often
observed, as Jesus loved us.
We have moved away from a spirituality
where the physical act of baptism would save a person. The Church recognizes
that God surely is not condemning the four-fifths of the human race who are not
baptized. Our calling is not to rush around the world baptizing people, as many
religious did when they accompanied the colonizers of Africa and Asia and Latin
America. Our calling is to live a story of respectful, vulnerable, faithful
involvement with the people around us and with God, and humbly acknowledge that
God may be helping people outside the “Faith” to live lives of love without
hierarchical control. We are not called to rule the world, or even to fix the
world. We are called to live a story shaped by the story of Jesus, a story of
love, in the midst of all the ways that we unfinished human beings live our
stories.
