Just Believe to be Saved: Against the Accretions that Sully the Gospel

Tradition. All Christians, indeed, all people in the main operate via traditions. For the Christian, as Jesus teaches, good tradition doesn’t nullify the Word of God but magnifies it. I’m afraid too many Christians have gotten away from the simplicity of the Gospel through the accretions of various traditions. The Apostle Paul warned the Corinthians against becoming entangled in doctrines, and accretions that nullify the simplicity of a pure devotion to the risen Christ. Too many Christians have allowed a spirit of sectarianism, which itself is an absolutization of traditions, to sully the way they view the Gospel and justification before God. The Bible is quite clear on what it takes to be justified before God, it is to be ‘in Christ,’ in union with Christ (unio cum Christo). The Bible says, against many traditions accreted through various liturgies, catechisms and confessions (taken in sectarian ways), that whosoever believes on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ will be saved [full stop]. If someone operates with a tradition that nullifies this simple kerygmatic proclamation, and declaration, then they are operating with and from a bad tradition. If someone heaps a bunch of dotted “i’s” and crossed “t’s” on top of the simple Gospel message, that is ‘believe on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved,’ then we can know that this person has been taken into a mechanism of deceit wherein they are saying more than the Word of God does.

The Way of God pro nobis (for us) doesn’t leave justification/salvation before God up to us getting the right details of worship correct. Indeed, to conceive of salvation as if a cluster of details is to betray an actual and biblical understanding of the Gospel. The Gospel isn’t a basket of propositions strung together in some sort of right and/or magic stringing together of things; that only this or that “tradition” in the Church gets right; or more, who gets management over. The Gospel by definition is not something we possess; indeed, it is not a thing at all. The Gospel is in fact God’s being in becoming for us in the incarnation of His life for us in Jesus Christ; and if He be for us who can be against us? The Gospel is the triune perichoretic life of God in action and actualism for us. It is His life in-breaking into this world, personally, through the Son enfleshed, and by this in-breaking His assumption of our flesh, that we might come, by the grace of His life, to assume His resurrected flesh for us; indeed, as He is the firstborn/first-fruits from the dead for us. My basic premise is that: salvation is indeed the event of God’s personal and relational and eternal life for us. It is His unilateral Self-predestined Self-givenness for us. It is of the type of self-givenness that we have no say over, it is simply a gift given. He offers it to all, and makes the way simple for all who will. His life is perspicacious, inherently so, so far that there is no convolution when it comes to what He is gifting us in Himself for us; which is indeed, the Gospel. The details of the Gospel are profound, and indeed eternal; but it isn’t the implications and soundings of the depths of the Gospel—which indeed run for eternity—that are required to apprehend in order to be saved. No, it remains simple: believe on and in the person, Jesus Christ, and you will be saved. And this isn’t a belief that is self-generated by some type of capacity that lies latent within us; as if we could habituate in a certain pattern of ‘faith’ in order to arrive at a saving faith. No, the Gospel says we are dead in trespasses and sins, and that our only hope is the vicarious faith and repentance of Christ for us. He has done for us, in our assumed humanity, what we could never, nor would never do for ourselves, left to ourselves.

I wanted to write this post, off the top, to simply underscore the simplicity of the Gospel message. It isn’t tied sectarianly to this tradition, or that denomination, on the continuum of the Church catholic. The Church is possessed by her head, her Lord, Jesus Christ. We don’t possess the Church, just as we do not possess salvation. Salvation possesses us, just as salvation possesses His Church. We are not our own, we have been bought with a price, the precious blood of Jesus Christ. When you feel that nagging Pelagian urge to imagine that you have come to some type of understanding of the Gospel wherein you and your tradition alone possess the Gospel, just know you have a false Gospel that nullifies the simplicity found in the Word of God for the world, in Jesus Christ.