Theology Thursday: God can save whomever he wants?

Welcome to Theology Thursday! Theology is the study of God, his relation to the world, and our relation to him. I hope these newsletters help enhance your faith and deepen your love for God and his people, the church.

Today's question:
Here's the full question: "I have heard you say “God can save whomever he wants.” If God’s word (Bible) is truth and God cannot lie (Titus 1:1-3 and Hebrews 6:18), how can we say anything that deviates from our understanding of scripture?"

Pastor Brady's thoughts:
I received this question in response to my sermon on baptism, where I stated that I believe the New Testament to teach that believer’s immersion is a necessary and required part of the salvation process, but I also stated that it is not the purview of pastors or any Christian to determine if someone else is saved or not - that God alone will be the ultimate judge, and that he can save whomever he wants.

Let’s premise my response this way: our primary, foundational belief related to epistemology - what we can “know” - is that God in his immense grace and wisdom has chosen to reveal his truth through the scriptural writings that comprise our Bible. And, that our scripture is authoritative, meaning that those who desire to be in obedience to God’s will must adhere to its instructions and live out its commandments and expectations.

Alongside that foundation, we also believe that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and capable of action beyond what he has chosen to reveal to us, but that his actions will always be in line with his perfect, immutable (unchanging) character.

In one of the few places in scripture where God himself speaks directly and audibly to a human, God reveals that his very name means love, mercy, and justice. In a monumental scene in biblical history, Moses is on Mt. Sinai receiving the law from God. Here’s Exodus 34:5-8:  

Then the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the Lord. And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”

God has communicated to us through the Holy Spirit-inspired writers of scripture, and our job is to trust and obey to the best of our ability to understand and apply what he has communicated.

And that’s the rub: when it comes to a doctrine of salvation (or any other question of scripture), we only know what we know from God’s recorded will - the testament of scripture. Our knowledge is limited by what God has chosen to tell us through the Bible, and our knowledge is limited still more by our fallible human ability to comprehend the divine.

Furthermore, we disagree on what we know; meaning, even for those who accept the foundational truths of God’s goodness and the authority of his word, we come to different conclusions about what it means to do what he tells us to do.  

Towards the end of his second letter, Peter is writing about the Apostle Paul and says: …His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction (2nd Peter 3:16).

The Apostle Peter says the Apostle Paul's theology can be confusing. This ought to encourage some humility in our hearts and our minds when we draw doctrinal lines. It doesn't mean we shouldn't draw those lines, but it does mean these topics require much study, contemplation, and prayer, and that we should arrive at our conclusions firmly but with graciousness for those who share our heart for the Lord but think differently on these matters.

(However, I am personally most gracious with those who arrive at different conclusions based on what I perceive to indeed be much study, contemplation, and prayer on their part...not necessarily as much with those who lean mostly on denominational church tradition. Church tradition can be a beautiful and valuable thing when it's aligned with solid scriptural exegesis (critical examination and explanation of the biblical text), but it often is not.)

Pretty much every reputable Bible scholar I'm aware of believes in a particular interpretation of scripture, but leaves open the possibility that that interpretation is flawed or incomplete. God through his human writers did not give us a passage of scripture that says "Here's the Full and Orderly Requirements for Salvation," followed by a bulleted list. That might have been nice! But then we’d have less reason to fully trust in him, and would be tempted to “lean on our own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5-6).  

Instead, we piece together our doctrine of salvation - belief, repentance, confession, baptism, persistent faithfulness - from various writers across several New Testament books.

This reality mandates some humility and a distinction between what we can claim to know as a metaphysical law of incontrovertible fact, and what we believe in good faith is the full and whole witness of scriptural truth.

This is why I maintain, for example, that the Bible's teaching on baptism is that it's a necessary and required part of the salvation process, but I would not claim that Restoration Movement Christians and others who believe the same about baptism are the only recipients of God's saving grace. This would require believing that the vast majority of professing Christians across history were not saved. That is possible, but I think it's unlikely. One of the tenets of our movement is that "We are Christians only, but not the only Christians."

We believe and teach what we understand to be the normative and expected - and most accurate, complete -  expression of saving faith, but maintain the possibility that we could be wrong. Or that even if we're right, God can (and perhaps does) reward earnest faith that falls short due to sincere misunderstanding.

In his book on doctrine titled The Faith Once for All, Jack Cottrell writes in his chapter on baptism that "In view of the clear teaching of Scripture on the subject, we must say that only those who have consciously received immersion as a saving work of God can be confident of their present status as Christians and as members of the body of Christ. It is, of course, possible that in some cases God has made exceptions and has acted outside his stated plan of bestowing salvation upon believers in immersion, but we have no right to presume upon God in this respect...while granting that God may have made an exception, we must insist that no one can know this for sure."

Because God is God, he can extend his grace (provide salvation) to those he chooses to outside the expectations presented in his recorded will because he is the author of creation and salvation. But we cannot assume that he does, and we should not see the salvation process defined in scripture as merely suggestions.

Cottrell goes on: "In the final judgement we can expect God to judge all persons who have received baptism improperly in the same way that he will judge everyone else, namely, in accordance with their conscientious response to available light. No one will be condemned for failing to meet some particular requirement as long as he is conscientiously responding to whatever light is available to him (see Romans 4:15). It is obvious that human traditions have seriously distorted and limited the light of Scripture concerning baptism, and many sincere people have responded in good conscience to what light they have. For this reason we may hope to see such people in heaven."

If Cottrell is right, this has implications for believers who believe differently than we do, and it has implications for the people groups across history who never had the opportunity to hear and respond to the gospel. That's a somewhat different question, but it is related.  

I'm also unsure how else we could handle the death bed conversion/car crash questions that inevitably pop up in these conversations (the question of children and the mentally disabled is separate, I think, because we believe repentance requires guilt and the acknowledgment of accountability, which neither children nor the disabled have). The scenario is always presented the same: an unbeliever is brought to faith through a conversation with a friend; she believes, repents of her sin, and heads to the church to be baptized! Only to die in a car crash on the way...

...Does God save that person? I don't know, but I suspect so (and hope so!), and I surely believe he can, even though doing so would be outside what we understand the design of salvation to be as laid out in the New Testament.

Thus, it remains appropriate in my view to say things like "Here's what we believe the Bible teaches about salvation, and therefore we should follow its instructions, but God in his grace has the power to do what he wants. He is a perfect and just God."

Pastor Jim puts it this way: "If I follow God's Word I have the promise of salvation, if I don't I just have the hope."

Our eternal hope is secure and certain when we are faithful to the full witness of scripture, especially regarding salvation. God deserves our everything, our total obedience; let us not attempt to give him less.

To know God and make Him known!
- Pastor Brady

Have a question for Theology Thursday? Send an email to office@minierchristian.org and we'll respond, or we'll include in a future Theology Thursday Buffet.