William Willimon describes his book, Who Will Be Saved?, as "an extended sermon on how to use salvation in a manner that is peculiarly Christian" (ix). According to Willimon, we not only need to rethink the question, "Who will be saved?" but also "What is salvation?" The reason: "we live in a conflicted supermarket of salvations that are based on very different ideas of what or who saves" (x).

Three Foundational Truths

Willimon begins by stating three foundational truths concerning salvation.

First we must recognize that salvation is not primarily about us. On the contrary, "salvation is primarily about God" (2). Willimon points out that the pressing question in Scripture is never, "Is there a God?" but rather, "Does the God who is there care about us?" (2). The answer provided by Scripture is undeniable: God abounds in love toward God's creation!

Second, "[s]alvation implies that there is something from which we need to be saved, that we are not doing as well as we presume, that we do not have the whole world in our hands and that the hope for us is not of our devising" (3). Our desperate situation demands more than a "helpful moral nudge" (8). We are not saved by "right principles" or "right techniques." Salvation is more than spiritual improvement (13). We need God's salvation because we cannot possibly save ourselves. In regard to salvation, we are "empty-handed beggars, starving for food that [we] cannot obtain on [our] own" (66).

Third, contrary to what most Christians suppose, salvation is not "related exclusively to the afterlife," that is, about going to heaven when we die (3). Certainly, Scripture teaches of eternal life, but "[w]hat has been obscured is Scripture's stress on salvation as invitation to share in a particular God's life here, now, so that we might do so forever. Salvation isn't just a destination; it is our vocation" (3).

God's Abundant Love

Our familiarity with God should never blind us to the fact that the love of God is greater than we can possibly imagine. Jesus' parables reveal a reckless and extravagant God: "God the searching shepherd, the careless farmer, the undiscerning fisherman, the reckless woman, the extravagant father, the prodigal Samaritan. Jesus thus reveals a God who is no discrete minimalist. Abundance is in the nature of this God" (36).

The Scriptures constantly testify of God's abundant love manifest in God's saving actions. Willimon reminds us of the most important "interpretive principle for reading the Bible: Scripture always and everywhere speaks primarily about God, and only secondarily, and then only derivatively, about us.

God gets the story started, and God sustains the story, intervening from time to time, making a way when there is no way, nudging forward, despite twists and turns, subplots and diversions, holding to the overall intent of the Story, calling in a surprising cast of actors, all the while remaining the author and the chief actor in the story. The name of the story is salvation. (37)

God is not a God of scarcity and insufficiency, a miser who arbitrarily doles out love in small portions. God's love is perfect and extends to all people - the righteous and the wicked alike. God blurs the distinctions we often make between people and sheds grace and love upon all without distinction (cf. Matthew 5:45). Therefore, in the words of Karl Barth, we should not commit the "one great sin" of excluding anyone from "the 'yes' of God's mercy" (39). All the "careful, religious distinctions between Gentile and Jew, male and female," slave and free are "destroyed in the inclusive embrace of Christ" (40).

Building upon the life and teaching of Jesus, the Apostle Paul's great discovery was that God was the God of both the Jews and Gentiles (Romans 3:20). "Paul did not move toward the Gentiles from some mushy theory of pluralism but rather because of what he had personally experienced of God in Jesus Christ" (97). Paul was moved to mission by his doctrine of God's saving work in Christ Jesus. "Paul had an ethical corollary to his soteriology--we ought to welcome others as Christ has welcomed us (Rom 15:7; Gal 3:28)" (97).

Our challenge is to recognize that God has acted uniquely in Christ Jesus, but this does not lead to exclusivism in our understanding of salvation, but to a broad inclusivism. "God has acted uniquely, but not exclusively to save in Jesus Christ. There is something about salvation in the name of Jesus Christ that blurs boundaries and creates capacity, nurturing generosity to those in other religions" (97). Like Jesus, Paul got into trouble because of his inclusive understanding of God's saving work through Christ. "A great part of the tension in the New Testament comes from the church (Jewish and Gentile Christians) awakening to the discovery that God has a considerably larger notion of family" (98).

All without distinction are loved by God - a love that is wider, broader, deeper, and higher than we can possibly fathom. Our temptation will always be to sell it short, to whittle it down, to shrink it down to a size we can manage and control. On the contrary, we must humbly recognize that we cannot possibly comprehend the greatness and goodness of God's love. We dare not worry about being too compassionate or too hopeful. This is not possible in light of Jesus' teaching and saving actions. Jesus reveals to us the kind of God whose compassion and mercy break down - and break through - every human category and limitation.

This places us in an interesting position in regard to our understanding of God's salvation. Though we dare not presume that all will be saved, our knowledge of God's love in Jesus gives us hope that this is possible. We do not believe this in spite of Jesus, but because of Jesus.

Thus we can admit that something like "universal salvation" is a fair implication of what we know of Jesus as well as what he taught. To deny universal salvation as implication and possibility, as hope and desire, is to limit and to restrict the power and grace of God. To assert with absolute certainty universal salvation is to restrict the freedom and grace of God. Still, we may, indeed we ought, to hope and to pray and to work for what we hope. (66)

Willimon succinctly defines the balance we must maintain: "We are not permitted to despair, nor are we permitted to be presumptuous; that which we presume is not a gift, and despair doubts that Christ is able to accomplish his purposes. Humility is required" (77).

Unfortunately, our exclusive tendencies remain. We constantly seek to draw boundaries to God's love, defining - according to our own standards - who is "in" and "out". Willimon argues that we worry too much about the fate of others and not enough about our own responsibility to follow Christ. We are like Peter in John 20. When Peter is given news of his personal fate by the risen Jesus, he immediately asks, "What about John, what is his ultimate fate?" "Christ responds, "What [has that to do with] you? Follow me!" (John 21:22). Rather than to determine who's on the way and who's got the truth, we've got our hands fill just trying to follow Jesus down his wide and narrow way" (102).

The Church's Mission

In view of God's abundant love, the question arises: "Believing that Christ is the salvation of the whole world, how then should we live?" (53). We live as people of God's mission. Why? Because to us, as to St. Paul, "this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ" (Ephesians 3:8).

We are not saved from humanity, but rather, for humanity:

A Christian is not saved in order to be plucked out of the damned rabble of humanity, but rather is saved in order to be truly for humanity. The church is the community that lives ahead of time, the people who say now what may one day be said by all, once God gets what God wants--"Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" (Matt 6:10). (58)

Willimon calls the church to embrace God's mission to be a redemptive community: "The only way for the world to know that it is being redeemed is for the church to point to the Redeemer by being a redeemed people" (126). In the words of Karl Barth, the church exists as "the result of God's cosmic salvage operation" (65). Likewise, the church shares God's mission - God's salvage operation.

Does This Compromise Jesus' Uniqueness?

While embracing a hope that God's salvation is greater than we can fathom, we must continue to maintain a strong view of God's unique saving work in Jesus Christ. We do not want to reduce the story of salvation to the point where we, like the person in the following story, exclaim in frustration, "Why bother?"

After hearing an exponent of so-called progressive Christianity expound breathlessly on his discovery of Jesus as a proto-revolutionary wisdom sage, a young woman next to me asked quietly, "Why bother?"

Why indeed? Our minimalist Christology issues forth a flaccid salvation--a "god" who doesn't really do anything except to encourage basically good, progressive people who don't need anything done for them anyway. Educated, Western, upper-middle-class people don't need much of a savior, so we tend to honor the god who cares about us but never acts for us, who feels a certain vague affection for us but never gets around to doing anything for us, a god certainly not reckless enough to die for us. In this cultural context, salvation is reduced to recovery, or a sense of meaning in life, or a positive self-attitude. Why bother? (43).

In order to be fair to other religious traditions, Willimon rejects the idea that all religions are basically the same, and that - in the words of Marcus Borg, all religious traditions are basically different paths up the same mountain. In the supposed name of tolerance, this view actually dishonors the unique and particular aspects of other religious traditions.

This talk of God as a mountain... seems terrible unfair to the claims of Islam and all the other religions to whom Borg is attempting to be nice. It's a rehash of the now discredited nineteenth-century liberal attempt to deny religious differences, to explain away religious particularities (Borg's "external forms") and merge everything into an overarching, general concept like "faith" or "religion" (or Borg's even more vague, "the sacred") that is said to be more embracing than whatever specific religions claim for themselves. Usually, the person taking this approach accuses religious people of being arrogant in asserting their way as the way, their truth as the truth. The liberal thus refuses to see the arrogance within his own position that says, in effect, "Well, you're Jewish (or Hindu or pagan and so on) but that's not as important as that we're all equally ignorant of God in differing ways so that we are all basically wandering up the same mountain, sort of" (104).

This kind of "pluralism isn't all that pluralistic. It tends to silence and trivialize the very faiths that it is attempting to be nice to by demanding that all of them suppress their assertions about reality and merge into the liberal, intellectually totalitarian 'faith' of the modern nation state" (104). For Christians to proclaim that "in Christ God was reconciling the world" (2 Cor 5:19) is "to make the most inclusive of statements. Christians are able to love and to respect Buddhists as uniquely Buddhist, precisely because we are followers of the unique mediator of salvation, Jesus Christ. The internal logic of Christian theology gives us our best hope for fruitful relationships with other faiths" (105). He continues,

The Buddhist who says that there is no way to enlightenment except through the Eightfold Path is excluding Christians from that particular salvation, but I take no offense because the Buddhist is speaking of salvation in a sense that I in no way mean by my use of the word salvation. The Buddhist, as best I can understand him or her, hopes for an ultimate destiny in which his or her self with its restless strivings will be graciously extinguished. I, on the other hand, on the basis of the stories I've been told by Scripture, hope for a destiny in which my true self will be most filly realized, my strivings will be graciously redirected and fulfilled in a way I could not. My self will be developed and discovered in the complete embrace of the Savior who has so relentlessly reached toward me throughout this life and who, I believe, will continue to embrace me in whatever life there is in the future. (105)

True interfaith dialogue begins with the recognition that we are not basically "saying the same thing." "If there were no genuine difference, no truly other, why talk in the first place? The demand that one relinquish any claim to significant, genuine difference is the height of intolerance" (106).

What About Hell?

What then do we do with hell? Jesus certainly spoke of hell. "Hell is the opposite of heaven. Hell is that eternal separation that is contrary to what God wants: eternal reconciliation" (69). In order to understand Jesus' teaching about hell, we must abandon medieval views that present God as delighting in the torment of the wicked. Hell does not exist because God doesn't want us. Hell exists because we don't want God.

Thus hell remains a real, but nevertheless inexplicable, possibility, a failure not of the resourceful love of God, but rather of our own disordered desire. Hell is getting what you think you really want. In Dante's Inferno those whose main pleasure was lust are allowed to bum forever and gluttons are doomed to unending engorgement. The heaven we craved is the hell we got. (70)

We must be very careful - and very humble - in regard to our pronouncements concerning who is and who isn't in hell. It is not our place to decide what God can and can't do. This is true for the religious fundamentalist who is certain they know who is going to hell. This is also true for the liberal who adamantly denies that hell exists at all.

The sweet-spirited person who crooned, "The God whom I love would never harshly judge someone, condemning him forever to punishment," is the person who, under the cover of self-ascribed compassion is awfully arrogant in demanding just what God should or shouldn't do in order to be loved. The God whom I'm trying to love is capable of doing a host of things--including judging, condemning, refining, and punishing me-- things that I wouldn't do to me if I were God. Our ways are not God's ways, our thoughts not as high as God's (Isa 55:8). (73)

Conclusion

A proper humility is necessary in speaking of realities beyond our comprehension. Because of our human limitations - and our constant temptation to reduce God's love to human dimensions - we must refrain from final pronouncements concerning the eternal destiny of other people. We have enough on our plate in regard to our own responsibility to follow Christ and reflect Christ's love to others - believer and unbeliever alike.

Undoubtedly, some of my more liberal readers will find the possibility of hell to be intolerable to their sensitivities and guilty of an unnecessary "literalism" in my reading of Scripture. I also realize that some of my more conservative readers will find the possibility of universal salvation to be a denial of clear passages of Scripture.

But I have done neither in this summary of Willimon's book. I am not so presumptuous to assume that I possess the authority to give the final verdict on anyone's eternal fate. I merely hold to the hope that God's love is greater than I can fathom and God's salvation is more amazing than I can comprehend. I also refuse to presume that my limited perception of what is just and true should be the final standard by which I judge God's judgment. God is the final judge. I am not. And I trust that God will do what is best, for God is good.

I do know one thing with certainty: My compassion is surely not greater than God's. And I can easily - with little hesitation - imagine that God's compassion and justice are both greater than I can fathom. Thus, I do not presume, but I do hold out hope, that, as Julian of Norwich said, "In the end, all will be well - and all manner of things will be well." And in this, I draw comfort and strength. Even more, I draw on God's resources to love all people as God does - and hope for the best.

Quotes excerpted from Who Will Be Saved? by William H. Willimon
© Richard J. Vincent, 2008