Get Saved, Damn You!

It has been a few weeks since I wrote, dear readers (all three of you).  That has to do more with the fact that I wanted to really get my thoughts together for this one, because it started with a letter I received in the mail a few weeks ago.

It was a letter from a nearby Baptist church inviting me to a “dramatic presentation of the Gospel.”  It then went on to give the title of the presentation, “Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames.”

Hmm.  

Sounds less like the gospel and more like a scare tactic along the lines of the infamous ‘judgment houses’ that have taken to replace haunted houses and fall festivals in many conservative churches.  So I read on.

“’Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames’ is very similar to a ‘Judgment House’ presentation that many youth groups attend during the fall season.”

Ahh.  It is a judgment house.  Apparently it isn't because instead of moving from room to room, the visitors sit in once place and the scenes change on stage.  It sounds to me very much like a man who was trying to rook me into a pyramid scheme.  As he drew out the ‘plan’ on a piece of paper, I said, “This sounds like a pyramid scheme to me.”  His response:  “It isn't.  I use circles.”

Anyway, the crux of the letter was this:  “I have seen God use such presentations to make an eternal difference in the lives of many teenagers and adults that would not normally step into a church building to hear a ‘sermon.’  Please consider using this as an outreach opportunity to those in your community, and we welcome you to bring a group on any of the performance nights.  We would love to see as many people as possible come to a relationship with God through salvation and plug them into a local body of believers.”

I found the letter troubling.  Mostly because I loathe scare-tactics from churches.  But I began to reflect on what the letter did and did not say.  To begin with, I’m not completely sure how this is a dramatic presentation of the Gospel.  Second, when the letter says that they would love to ‘plug’ people into a local body of believers, I have a sneaking suspicion that “local body of believers” means “same-thinking.”  I don’t think they would want to plug people into a church that doesn't place the same level of emphasis on hell and damnation as does this particular church and program.

In other words, I doubt this church would be forwarding converts to St. Mary’s Roman Catholic downtown.  Or any Episcopal, United Church of Christ, or United Methodist (well, more or less) for that matter.  It has more to do with getting people plugged in to a similar thinking group.  Otherwise, they might not stay as frightened as they were in the presentation that scared them into the loving arms of Christ.

That also prompted me to think about this popular phrase of churches that love judgment houses: getting saved.

One of the aspects of more conservative, evangelical Christianity is the idea of getting saved.  In fact, it is one of the most pressing ideas.  To that end, churches will put on ‘judgment houses’ to scare the hell out of people so that they will, in fear and trembling, accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior so as to make sure they have ‘eternal insurance’ that someone will be in heaven (Jesus) to pull them out of the fiery depths of hell when they die (and like Johnathan Edwards sermon, most evangelicals believe we are all being dangled over hell in the hands of an angry God).

The idea of “getting saved” is one that has so much baggage with it that many don’t even want to talk about it.  Mostly because those who insist on getting you saved want you to have a great story – a gutter to glory story – where you can talk about how bad you were until you were saved.  A date, time, and moment of conversion is expected as well.  But the idea itself, while certainly a Christian point of view, doesn't have as lengthy a tradition behind it as we might be lead to believe. 

Evangelical altar calls and cries to “get saved” are relatively young in the Christian tradition – only since about the 1800s.  And it had most of its origins in the American West.  But it’s propensity for dramatic, emotional conversions took hold, and soon many Protestant denominations began adopting and adapting evangelical tools (which would now include ‘judgment houses’) to make converts and work to get people “saved” by any and all means.

Yet these tools aren't precisely scriptural.  Take, for example, the oft cited “Romans Road” outline of salvation.  It is a formula devised as an evangelical tool to enable people to quickly and easily find their way to Jesus and a personal relationship with him.

The Romans Road (or one particular version of it that I am aware of) works as follows:

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.  (Romans 3:23)

The punishment for sin is death. (Romans 6:23)

The free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus. (6:23)

People are saved by confessing with their mouths and believing in their heart that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead. (Romans 10:9)

Those who have this faith (step 4) are justified and have peace with God. (Romans 5:1).

What you might notice rather quickly is that the Romans road backtracks there at the end (so for chapter 5:1 to make sense, you have to get through the rest of the steps, more of less).  The other thing on which you might pick up is the fact that while these are points Paul seeks to make in the letter to the Romans, it isn't his major thesis.  Romans is a letter that seeks to set out his theological understanding of Christ, of the status of the Jews in the sight of God, and to present himself to a church community in Rome that he had not yet met.

What the Romans Road becomes is a formulaic tool to push people towards a particular (and often emotional) decision to accept Christ.  It is a series of proof-texts to formulate a pattern that takes Paul’s particular letter with its particular context and setting and universalizes it into a five step program to get people saved.

If that was what Paul sought to do, why not just lay it out that way to begin with?  But it isn’t laid out that way because that wasn't Paul’s agenda.  He did want people to accept Jesus as the Christ, but not in some emotive, trivialization of his larger political and theological points.

The other issue with the Romans Road is that it is all about the individual.  It is all about you.  Paul was far more concerned with communities, cities, even the idea of the world hearing the larger message of Christ, but that involved philosophical and theological debates as well as attempts to re-read Jewish scripture in light of the belief that Jesus was the promised messiah.  Paul’s good news wasn't so much that people could be saved (“From what?” the people would ask), but that God was the power in charge of history and the future.

The other issue with the proponents of the Romans Road is that usually, someone says something like this:

“Surely you realize that you are a sinner.  Right now, whoever you are, all you need to do to be saved is to go to God in prayer and say the following words:  ‘God, I know that I am a sinner.  I am lost and deserve to go to hell.  I believe that Jesus was my substitute when he died on the cross.  I accept him into my heart as my Savior.   Amen.”

Billy Graham used this variation most of the time:

“Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I am a sinner, and I ask for Your forgiveness.  I believe You died for my sins and rose from the dead.  I turn from my sins and invite You to come into my heart and life.  I want to trust and follow You as my Lord and Savior.  In Your Name, Amen.”

The issue that many have with this prayer is that it isn't Biblical, nor does it reflect what Jesus taught in the Gospels about himself or really reflect what Paul was getting at in Romans (or elsewhere in his writings).

Now, should one utilize this prayer to provide an opportunity to overcome doubt, okay, but it isn’t what saves you.  Salvation is a life-long journey.  We are saved and we are also being saved and we have the hope that we will be saved.  Like Paul, we work out our salvation with fear and trembling. (I won’t provide all the scriptures for that – I suppose it is my own proof-texting!)

It also troubles me that the Romans Road (and the subsequent Sinners Prayer) isn't something you could get from reading the Bible on your own.  The irony is that many “Bible believing Christians” who are proponents of this type of evangelism would also be highly critical of the Catholic Church because of its history of the priest being the only person who could ‘officially’ interpret the scriptures to the people.  Yet here is exactly the same idea – only a true believer can lead someone down the Romans Road. 

Another irony is that this sounds pretty close to Gnosticism, or at least the idea that those on the “inside” have a more correct interpretation of scripture.  Evangelists would balk at the idea of being called gnostic, but they seem to be using the same idea of secret understandings that the common reader wouldn't be able to see should they just read the Bible as it is printed.  You have to know the 

path.  You have to know where the road actually is.

So after receiving the letter inviting me to the Gospel revealed in the presentation “Heaven’s Gates 

and Hell’s Flames” I find that I am more in doubt about their message than I am about anything else.