What Must I Do To Be Saved?

Once upon a time I believed that the Bible was "given by inspiration of God" and was without error. I came by this opinion by way of a religious group that taught that any apparent errors could be reconciled, harmonized and, in effect, explained away. Before my involvement with this group, I, like most Christians, read the Bible and believed that it proceeded from God, but I was kind of fuzzy about the details. Contradictions between different sections of the Bible didn't bother me because I didn't notice them. When, during my freshman year in college, I became involved with a fundamentalist group I had many of these "apparent" contradictions pointed out to me and was shocked that the church that I grew up in didn't address them. In some instances these contradictions and discrepancies were minor - mere curiosities, but others reflected serious doctrinal issues. The method that my group used to reconcile these problematic sections was to presume that the Bible, in it's original texts, was without error, and that any apparent errors were the results of mistranslations or misunderstandings. Therefore it was incumbent upon us to resolve these apparent contradictions in order to determine what the Bible really said. Some of the solutions used to show that these apparent contradictions were pretty simple and were just a matter of a word or phrase having a different modern meaning than the older one. Some could be resolved by showing that a translation was inaccurate. Often though, the way to make it all fit together involved stretching and twisting word meanings and context to the point of ridiculousness. Two related examples are the number of others crucified with Jesus and the  number of times Peter denied him.

In every place that the number of criminals crucified with Jesus is mentioned the number is always two. Nowhere does that number vary, nor is there any suggestion that the two are part of a larger number. Read any Gospel, or read them all, and the conclusion that you'll come to is that only two men were crucified with Jesus. However, what each gospel says about these two men is different from Gospel to Gospel. In one Gospel they both mouth off to Jesus, while in another, one reviles him while the second reproves the mouthy one. In one Gospel they are crucified at the same time, in another afterward. The contradictions, while insignificant, must be harmonized if we are to maintain inerrant status. One way that this is done is to suggest that there were not two, but four others, assigning the conflicting statements and arrival times to two different sets of two criminals. Any contradictions and inconsistencies explained by assuming that the differing words, arrival times etc. are referring to these different pairs. With Peter's denials, a similar problem arises; in every section where his denials are listed, he does so three times, and three times only. There is no suggestion that we are focusing on three of many more. However, each of the gospels presents a different chronology and different people whom Peter denies Jesus to, different Jewish leaders who Jesus is in front of when the denials take place, different numbers of roosters crowing. List the incidents of denial from each gospel side-by-side and you can come up with six distinct occurrences of denial. The problem with this is that now you have created a fifth gospel, since none of the extant gospels say anything about six denials. There are other examples, including when Judas killed himself and how he did it. There are numerous examples of this, which I am not going to spend the time to document. There are many scholarly sources for this information, and just as many places where various Christians make the case that the contradictions can be reconciled. The fact that contradictions exist isn't arguable, however the manner in which one chooses to deal with the contradictions are the foundations upon which new denominations are born.

If you're not of the opinion that the bible is without error or contradiction, then you're not spending any time trying to jam it all together, you don't have a problem. You might even decide that the contradictions are minor matters that don't really effect the heart of what it means to be a Christian. But what if there are contradictions regarding one of the the core doctrines of Christianity? No, not the Trinity, although that's a big subject; no, I'm talking about salvation and how you get it.

Growing up I never really heard anyone used the word "saved". Mainly we talked about "going to Heaven" upon death and what you had to do to get there. If I remember correctly, this mainly hinged upon "living a good life" and perhaps getting baptized in "the church". Sacraments may have figured into it as well. When I got involved in another religious group when I was about twenty, there was a greater emphasis on salvation. No actions, other than "confessing Jesus as Lord" and believing that God raised him from the dead was required to be "saved". We find this in one of the epistles and in at least one place in the Acts of the Apostles. However Jesus himself seems more action oriented, requiring selling ones goods and abandoning ones parents among other things, in order to achieve salvation: entering the Kingdom. Even among the statements about salvation by faith alone there seems to be some inconsistency about how you get faith. Is it simply believing something? Or is it something God gives you? Where it is defined, the Bible seems to say that faith is something that God gives you, but it also seems to condemn those who do not believe. How can God condemn someone for not having something that only he can give? But the bigger contradiction is whether it is faith that gets you saved or works. The Bible says faith in some places and works in others. Some places it says both. And somewhere in the middle is repentance. Can you do the works but not repent? Can you repent without works or faith? Using the contradiction-resolving method mentioned above, an inerrantist will cut and paste and twist and shout the conflicting verses into some kind of harmony. Most Christians will say that they don't care or pick one version and ignore the rest.

Then there's the question of what are we being saved from? There are a small number of verses that appear to support the position that all will be saved, but most indicate that some will be saved and some will not. Some sections of the bible suggest that upon death a person goes to either Heaven or Hell, other reject that in favor of a sleep-like state that will end upon a resurrection when all will be judged and either go to heaven (or live on Earth in paradise) or to Hell (or just cease existing). So I guess the simplest answer to "from what" is saved from either eternal torment (Hell) or eternal death - annihilation. Wow! What would you choose?

One big disconnect in determining the how of salvation is the role that the death of Jesus played in salvation. In the Gospel of Mark, for instance, Jesus' death is an atonement for sins. This fits into the Jewish sacrificial system. In the Old Testament there was a vast system of rituals, including sacrifices, that were meant to atone for sins, individually and as a people. Jesus' death as atonement and its connection with the tearing of the veil of the temple, indicate that the Old Testament sacrifices are no longer valid and that everyone has access to God. Luke, on the other hand does not portray Jesus' death as an atonement for sin, but as typical of the Jewish treatment of the prophets; therefore Jesus' death was proof that he was the prophet of God. The Acts of the Apostles (written by the author of the Gospel of Luke) never mentions the death of Jesus as an atonement, but that his death drives people to repentance as they realize that, due to the subsequent resurrection, he was the Son of God. Repentance then becomes an occasion for forgiveness. The difference between the two views is that with an atonement ones debts (accumulated by sinning) are taken away without any action by the sinner, while forgiveness in this context requires repentance, a declaration that one is sorry for previous sins and intends to cease sinning. One could find many differences of detail among the Gospel writers, but the fundamental difference in what Jesus' death actually accomplished is a big one.

We can find other differences between the Gospel writers in general and Paul. There is no question that Paul's writings are different in style than the Gospels. The Gospels are narratives, they tell a story; the doctrinal views of Jesus and his mission are embedded in the narrative. In Paul's writing he is either writing to address deviations from what he has previously taught (I & II Corinthians) or setting forth a Doctrinal treatise (Romans). In the Gospels, whatever the meaning of Jesus' death for the individual evangelist, it's the message that Jesus teaches that is paramount. He can be referred to as an apocalyptic prophet, preparing people for the end of the age when the Kingdom of God will be ushered in. His moral and ethical pronouncements are intended to get people ready for the change so that they will be found worthy to enter into this new kingdom. For Paul, it the sacrificial death and subsequent resurrection that is important. There is a sharp difference between what Paul teaches and what Jesus taught (or what his biographers say he taught).

Like anything else there are a variety of ways that people use to reconcile this. The most common way is to ignore it all. Another way is to pick one view and ignore the rest, that's probably the most common. Then there's theological justification for it - the most common one of these is dispensationalism. This is a school of theology where all of history is divided into various (usually seven) "dispensations" or "administrations". In this theological system, God has different rules for how he runs things in the world, the consequences for breaking the rules, and just about anything you can think of. Not only does this eliminate the need to reconcile the vast differences between how God acts in the Old Testament and how Jesus and Paul say he acts in the New, but we can oh-so-conveniently put Jesus and the Gospels in a different dispensation and stop worrying about Jesus and Paul disagreeing with one another.

Recently I got in an argument with a guy who insisted that he could determine who was a "true" Christian and who wasn't, not because he was judging or setting up standards, but because God had done so. My point that there are many differing opinions regarding what makes a Christian a Christian. His position was that opinions didn't matter, that the Bible had a standard and that those who didn't adhere to the standard weren't Christians. Period. What he wasn't seeing was that the Bible didn't have a standard; it had several conflicting standards and that different Christians focused on different parts of the bible, ignoring some and elevating others, or mashing them together to support their ideas.

That is one of the reasons that I am no longer a Christian. Rather than being a "rule book" that contains a "plan for salvation" it is rather a collection of sometimes competing visions of who Jesus was, what his teachings meant, why he died and what the meaning of it all is. I'm not trying to convince Christians to be non-Christians or to argue to Christians why they should stop believing the Bible or in God, but to explain why I am no longer a Bible-believer, no longer a Christian and why I've already considered the arguments, in fact once made those arguments myself, and found them, for me, to be wanting.