Are You Saved (from certainty)?
Do you remember the movie Saved!? It was a satire about evangelical teen culture that came to us in the simpler days of 2004. I was thoroughly evangelical at the time of its release, which meant I had a rather complicated reaction to it.
On the one hand, it was my first time seeing Macaulay Culkin on the big screen for the first time since Home Alone 2. On the other hand, he played an embittered young man who was virtually the only non-Christian in the movie. His character offered a steady stream of sarcastic criticisms of my then-beloved faith tradition.
On the one hand, we were treated to Mandy Moore in the villain role as a controlling, conniving queen bee in a Christian high school. On the other hand, her moral unraveling is one of the many tools the film uses to undermine evangelical views on sexuality and purity culture. At the time, I was not a fan of the undermining.
I have not gone back to watch Saved! since my deconstruction journey began. I would probably love it now. I only brought this up to give you some nostalgia… but also to introduce the topic of “being saved,” a phrase and idea so ubiquitous that when someone wants to create a movie to make fun of evangelicalism, they call it “Saved!”
Saved… from what?
If you’re reading this blog, I’m sure you’re familiar with the typical evangelical rhetoric about salvation. The particular version of the “gospel of salvation” that I learned most strongly came from Cru’s pamphlets about “the four spiritual laws,” their hallmark way of explaining the gospel message (I’m paraphrasing):
God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.
Your sin separates you from God, both now and into eternity.
Jesus is the unique solution, the only way you can be saved from sin and death, allowing you to spend eternity in heaven with God.
But the only way for this salvation to occur is for you to make a decision that Jesus is your Lord and Savior.
In this rendering of the gospel, our act of belief ushers us into a state of being saved, and the main thing we’re saved from is hell, or a bit more palatably, “separation from God.”
Now, people have poked plenty of holes in the logic of this account. For instance, the thing we’re being saved from is God’s punishment of our sins—the “just” punishment of God’s wrath being meted out in hell. So this version of the gospel does seem to indicate that God sent God to save us from God. Even if you try to say we’re saved “from sin and death,” or even, “from ourselves,” the actual factual thing we’re saved from in this gospel is God’s punishment.
Setting those debates aside, the concept of salvation is still wonderful. We know there’s a lot of stuff wrong in our world and in ourselves—this past week alone, Russia invaded Ukraine while several US states voted on horrible anti-LGTBQ legislation. On top of that, our own daily lives are marked by strife, envy, loneliness, disappointment… who will save us?
Somebody save me
One way we might think of salvation is in terms of our relationship with fear. Certain key fears, in particular, seem to weigh heavily on nearly all of us, like the fears of death, failure, and the unknown.
What effects do these fears have on our lives?
Maybe this is just me, but fear can ensnare me. I become captive to fear, and will either refuse to act or will accept bad ideas, bad words, or bad theologies that promise me security against the thing I fear, the thing that has entrapped me.
So when an easy 4-step plan presents itself to me, one that will remove my fear of death (by guaranteeing me a spot in heaven), I accept it gratefully. Even as I begin to see that so many of the aspects of the religious movement that brought me that plan are toxic and harmful, I cling to it—because it is alleviating my fear of death.
Are we supposed to live trapped by fear? Trapped in toxic theologies, or harmful political tribes, or silent passivity?
No!
The remedy—the thing that will bring us salvation from our captivity—is love. “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not yet completed in love. We love because God first loved us.”
We can be saved. We are saved by truly, deeply, completely feeling Love. By knowing in our soul and in our bones that we are loved. And this is true not because of our own loveliness (though you are a wonderful delight, reader); it’s true because “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.”
Most of these fears calcify into a need for certainty. If I can only know what happens to me after I die, I’ll be okay. If I can know that God has a wonderful plan for my life, everything will turn out all right.
But we can’t really know any of this. And so fear, like “sin,” is ever crouching at our door. But closer still is our salvation: not certainty, but the love that casts out fear. The love that cries out “Forgive them” from a cross.
