We must not settle for a small God and a small salvation:
On, what? OK, a rather odd mouthful of a title. But reading further will explain everything. And let me make one prefatory remark before digging into all this. I have said this before, but there are advantages to having a large library. One advantage which gives me great pleasure is this:
I am reading something and come upon a neat quote. What I especially love is the fact that I do not need to go to a library or a bookstore or online. I can simply walk to the relevant bookcase, pull out the volume, blow off the dust, and read the quote in its surrounding context.
And it just happened again as I was going through one of Doug Wilson’s books. He shared a brief quote from a book penned by Fred Sanders some years ago called The Deep Things of God (Crossway, 2010). The subtitle explains: How the Trinity Changes Everything.
His main thesis is we – especially we evangelicals – have a small view of God and what our salvation and Christian life really entails. And all this greatness comes from our trinitarian God. In Chapter 3 he discusses “So Great Salvation,” based on Hebrews 2:3 (KJV).
He looks at how an appreciation and understanding of our trinitarian God amplifies and extols the wondrous salvation we have in Christ – a salvation too often minimised and deflated by too many evangelicals. We can tend to downsize the gospel, or select just certain aspects of it, instead of embracing its glorious wholeness and beauty.
It is at this point that the Wilson quote of the book about a decadent theological culture comes in. Says Sanders:
[Our] problem is not so much that we’ve distorted the gospel by adding to it or taking away from it. The problem is that we have taken one true element of it and characterized the whole by that part. Our situation is like the legend of the six blind men who encountered the elephant: one leaned against its side and said, “Elephants are like walls.” Another felt its leg and said, “Elephants are like trees,” and so on until each of them had described the elephant as like a snake (the trunk), a spear (the tusk), a fan (the ear), and a rope (the tail). Each of them had grasped something real, but because of their blindness none of them could produce overall descriptions that did justice to the reality. Even combining the six descriptions would not solve the problem, because no matter how you arrange a wall, a tree, a snake, a spear, a fan, and a rope, you will not assemble anything worthy of the name elephant.
All cultures and subcultures move through stages, and evangelicalism is, among other things, a distinct subculture of Christianity. In cultural terms, a classical period is a time when all the parts of a community’s life seem to hang together, mutually reinforce one another, and make intuitive sense. By contrast, a decadent period is marked by dissolution of all the most important unities, a sense that whatever initial force gave impetus and meaningful form to the culture has pretty much spent its power. Decadence is a falling off, a falling apart from a previous unity.
Inhabitants of a decadent culture feel themselves to be living among the scraps and fragments of something that must have made sense to a previous generation but which now seem more like a pile of unrelated items. Those in decadent cultures feel unable to articulate the reasons for connecting things. They spend a lot of time staring at isolated fragments, unable to combine them into meaningful wholes. They start all their important speeches by quoting Yeats’s overused line, “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Decadents either fetishize their tribal and party distinctions or mix absolutely everything together in one sloppy combination. Not everybody in a decadent culture feels a need even to work toward articulating unities, but those who do make the attempt face a baffling challenge. At best, the experience is somewhat like working a jigsaw puzzle without the guidance of the finished image from the box top; at worst, it is like undertaking that task while fighting back the slow horror of realization that what you have in front of you are pieces that come from several different puzzles, none of them complete or related. Evangelicalism in our lifetime seems to be in a decadent period. In some sectors of the evangelical subculture, there is not even a living cultural memory of a classical period or golden age; what we experience is decadence all the way back. (pp. 109-110)
The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything (Second Edition)by Sanders, Fred (Author)
Sanders continues:
The inability to grasp the wholeness of salvation is actually one of the primary manifestations of our decadent theological culture. Is Christian salvation forgiveness, a personal relationship with Jesus, power for moral transformation, or going to heaven? It is all those and more, but a true account of the thing itself will have to start with the living whole if we ever hope to make sense of the parts. Just think how tricky it is to combine free forgiveness and moral transformation in an organic way if what you are starting with is the individual parts. A dreary back-and-forth between cheap grace and works righteousness is one of the bedeviling distractions of evangelical experience under the conditions of decadence. (p. 111)
And he concludes the chapter this way:
We have been led into pretty lofty thoughts by the material we are considering, but the soteriology of God’s self-giving is immediately relevant to our lives with God. There is an evangelical spirituality that corresponds to the deeply personal nature of God’s self-giving. It is a spirituality that focuses relentlessly on God himself and is on constant guard against the temptation to be distracted from God by his blessings, benefits, or gifts. A. B. Simpson’s gospel song “Himself” captures it perfectly:
Once it was the blessing, now it is the Lord; Once it was the feeling, now it is His Word; Once His gift I wanted, now the Giver own; Once I sought for healing, now Himself alone.
Once ’twas painful trying, now ’tis perfect trust; Once a half salvation, now the uttermost! Once ’twas ceaseless holding, now He holds me fast; Once ’twas constant drifting, now my anchor’s cast.
Depending on our taste in poetry, Simpson’s lines may seem like overwrought emotion scanned out as pious doggerel. Depending on our individual tendencies in self-expression, the spirituality it expresses may seem histrionic and melodramatic. But this is the kind of language evangelicals have always used, and if they have often been able to say it with more decorum in a cultured and liturgical setting, they have also frequently said it so directly and emotionally that they made A. B. Simpson sound like a stuffy high-churchman by comparison. The modes of expression are many, but evangelical spirituality will always find a way to declare its adherence to God himself, emphasizing precisely the personal character of it. In view of the way God has thrown open his heart and turned his inner life inside out to be our salvation, how else could the people of the gospel respond? He speaks passionately to us, and we must answer. The gospel is that God is God for us, that he gives himself to be our salvation. In this sense, as John Piper has said in a series of meditations on God’s love as the gift of himself: “God is the gospel.” He does not give us some thing that makes us blessed, but he blesses us by giving us himself. It is a great thing to have said this much: to have thought such grand thoughts about salvation that we have come to view it as God-sized and to confront the fact that God gives nothing less than himself to be our salvation…. (pp. 124-125)
