What About the Flat Tire?

Chapter one of “Love Wins” raises a number of questions. Essentially what Rob Bell is doing is challenging some assumptions that have been held by Christians and then asks if those assumptions can be found in the story of scripture. I will offer two of them here.

Assumption 1 – The story of Christianity is about getting your ticket punched so that you can go somewhere (heaven) after you die. If it is all about getting your ticket punched, then people are going to ask what they have to do to get it punched. That question will be answered in different ways by different groups. In Evangelical circles it usually means saying a prayer and inviting Jesus into your heart. In churches of Christ the final step to get your ticket punched is baptism.

If a relationship with God is all about getting your ticket punched for the hereafter, then it could be (and often is) concluded that the here is not that important. Bell asks “Is that what life is all about? Going somewhere else? If that’s the gospel, the good news – if what Jesus does is get people somewhere else – then the central message of the Christian faith has very little to do with this life other than getting you what you need for the next one”.

But what if the gospel message is not about going somewhere else? What if salvation means something in the here and now as well as the hereafter? It is helpful to notice two things in this regard. (1) Not once does the Bible ever suggest that the goal of the Christian is to go to heaven when we die. What the Bible does say is that the goal of a Christian is to be a certain kind of person. Specifically, a person like Jesus (Rom. 8:29; Gal. 4:19).

(2) Salvation is never restricted to what happens to us after we die. The Greek word for salvation is sozo. It is sometimes used for people being healed of physical ailments, and therefore it is often translated as “Healed” (Matt. 9:21; Mk. 6:56; Lk. 8:36). In other words, salvation is about making people whole. Sin has disrupted God’s good creation and God is in the business of redeeming it (we’ll get to this later). This means (in the words of Isaiah the prophet applied to Jesus by the Gospel writers) what Jesus does is level out the ground and straighten out the roads (Lk. 3:4-6).

This is social justice language. The good news is not simply that there is pie in the sky in the sweet by and by, but that God is in the business of making people whole right now. Granted, it is an incomplete wholeness that will only find its completeness in God’s final consummation, but that is what Jesus is doing when he heals people in the Gospel stories – he is bringing good news. He is bringing wholeness.

Assumption 2 – You don’t have to do anything to get into heaven – just believe. This is standard rhetoric in Protestant churches which are still (over)reacting to Medieval Catholicism or to legalism in their own fellowship (e.g. churches of Christ). To this Bell lists a number of episodes that suggest that maybe salvation involves something more than faith (aka doing nothing).

For instance, Nicodemus is told that he must be born again. On one occassion Jesus says that you can’t be forgiven unless you forgive others and in still another place he say that those who stand firm to the end are the ones who will be saved. Then there is Zacchaeus who gives half his possessions to the poor and promises to give back that which he may have gained through cheating. In response Jesus says that “salvation has come to his house”. So Bell asks “Is it what we say, or what we are, or who we forgive, or whether we do the will of God, or if we ‘stand firm’ or not” that causes us to be saved?

What he is doing is challenging the whole “Grace versus works” debate. That debate is rooted in the notion that salvation is about getting your ticket punched. So then the debate rages on about whether you can do anything to get it punched or whether God does it for you. Bell simply points out that there are passages that suggest that it is about faith and passages that suggest that it is about something that you do.

But the second assumption is directly tied to the first. That is, if we assume that the goal is to get our ticket punched, then we would also assume that something is needed to punch it (Either by God or by us). In an attempt to avoid a “Salvation by works” theology, many Protestants have argued that you don’t do anything to get it punched, you just believe (although Bell rightly points out that believing is actually doing something). But this obviously doesn’t square with the stories we noticed above.

However, if we see salvation more as becoming something (specifically becoming like Jesus), then there is no ticket to be punched. In that case there is no discussion about what we have to do to get it punched. The whole “works versus grace” argument is dead in the water. Zaccaheus was becoming something. He was becoming what he was intended to be and therefore was experiencing salvation.

So what if salvation is about being, not about a place? What if we can begin to experience salvation right now? What if heaven has entered the real world already? These are question we will get to when we look at chapter two of “Love Wins”.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what a flat tire has to do with this chapter, you’ll have to read Bell’s book.