Spiritual Salvation
From D. Elton Trueblood, The
Essence of Spiritual Religion, Harper & Row, 1936.
The poem, Lord
Your Purpose is to Kindle.
Elton
Trueblood, the Quaker divine of blessed memory, describes spiritual salvation
in this excerpt from his first book. Biography here.
"Elton
was one of this century's most remarkable interpreters of the Christian
faith," said Earlham President Richard Wood. "He was a Quaker
with a genuine ecumenical vision of the Church and its mission in the world.
Fundamental to this vision was his conviction that deep faith and
rigorous intellect require each other, a conviction that he lived."
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The need for salvation rests upon a surprising and apparently enduring fact, the fact of contradiction in the inner life. We all tend to begin, as Socrates did, with the assumption that wickedness is a matter of ignorance, and we often hold that, if a man really knows what is good, he is sure to do it. If a man were completely convinced that friendship was more valuable than personal gain, would he ever sacrifice friendship to gain? Perhaps if he were logical he would not, but the fact is that all men have in them an illogical strain, the supreme illogicality of flat contradiction. It has been the experience of countless men that they have turned deliberately against the best they have known. The experience of St. Paul as recorded in the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans is the classic example.
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The supreme demand in all conduct is the
demand for trustworthiness. As Bosanquet well said, "Bona fides (good
faith) is the ultimate need in all matters of conduct, and religion is the
supreme bona fides: In spiritual religion we assert that the fact of primary
importance is the fact of our relationship to God, who is completely good, but
we then act as though this were not the primary fact. This is the fundamental
contradiction of life and is what we mean by sin. Sin, then, is far deeper than
a matter of individual acts, and refers to a radical failure in veracity.
The religious man, believing as he does in
the spiritual nature of God and in the spiritual nature of man, soon discovers
that he has two selves. One is the present actual self, narrow, confused, and
self-contradictory; the other is the real self which a man may see but dimly,
but which he soon realizes is his greatest possession. I am not really what I now appear to be, I am
bona fide other, and my sin consists in the continual rejection and disownment
of the bona fide other. Salvation consists in that change by means of which a
man faithfully embraces his real self, overcomes the fundamental contradiction,
and comes to the place where his heart is really given to the best he can
conceive.
There has been a marked tendency among
religious leaders to feel that the word "saved" needs other words
after it to make a complete sentence. They would answer the old question,
"What must I do to be saved?" by adding another question, "Saved
from what?" But when we try to answer this further question it is very
hard to know what to say. We say from fear, from greed, from malice, from
selfishness, but are these all? We may say from hell, but about hell we know
very little. Perhaps it is better to follow the general practice of our race
and use the word in the old absolute sense. We are saved, and that is all. This
is the positive word, and other states may be defined in relation to salvation
rather than vice versa. If you are saved you are in a condition in which your
heart is really given to the best you can conceive, and that is a great
positive experience. What, then, are you saved from? You are saved from
everything else but that.
The condition most nearly the opposite of
salvation is one of waste. Waste is the real tragedy in any avenue of life, and
any thoughtful person is moved when he sees great powers which are either
undeveloped or badly used. It is more than a truism that the saddest words are
"it might have been." If every
divine propensity were to be used, if no essential part should atrophy, that
would be salvation.
Salvation so conceived is something far
deeper and more radical than moral change in the narrow sense of the word. Moral results follow, but the experience
behind the moral change is fundamentally religious; it is akin to the supreme
act of reverence and trust. There must
be an inner spring behind and beneath the new conduct and this si another way
of saying we must be born again. The
change must be internal before it is external.
A second birth is not something for the emotionally unstable, but is a
healthy, wholesome, and normal human experience.
But how is a man saved? How can we be born
anew? The message of Jesus, as well as of countless others, is that we can be
saved only if we give ourselves away. This paradox is absolutely central to the
spiritual life and may be illustrated without end. The person who is
continually concerned about the state of his soul, and the moral progress he is
making, is an enterprise which is naturally self-defeating. The enterprise is self-defeating because the
religious man, as he watches his progress, feels that he has, for the time at
least, succeeded; he supposes that he has achieved something of himself apart
from the object of his trust. His very concern for the state of his soul is a
species of selfishness, and selfishness is sin because it involves the act of
giving ourselves to the partial rather than to the perfectly and completely
good.
We are saved by giving ourselves away and the
very act of trust will work wonders in a man's inner life that no amount of
individual striving would accomplish. The central act of religion has reminded
many of the experience of learning to swim in which a man, by trusting himself
to the water, learns more than has been learned by all his previous hectic
splashing.
We have many words for the experience which
makes salvation possible, and it makes little difference which word we use. We
are saved by loyalty, we are saved by trust, we are saved by love, we are saved
by caring. All of these words refer to the same experience, the experience in
which we hold something supreme and give ourselves unconditionally to it. The
fact of unconditionality is crucial. I am not really loyal to my nation, if I
am loyal to it under certain conditions; I do not really trust God unless I can
say with Job, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust him"; I do not
really love my son if I say I shall love him as long as he loves me. Those of us who are pacifists have often
criticized unintelligently the patriot's toast, "My country, right or
wrong." The patriot is at liberty to distinguish between his country and
his government, to criticize national policies, to refuse to obey immoral
commands, but if he is really a patriot he will be steadfastly loyal in every
situation, most loyal of all, perhaps, when his country seems to be going in
the wrong direction and thus needing him most. Much of the wonder and glory of
the start of a new home lies in the very completeness of the transaction; it is
unconditional, it is not temporary. The word "if" does not appear in
the marriage ceremony, and neither does it appear in the creed of the man who
embraces spiritual religion. The act of giving ourselves is absolute or it is
nothing.
The truth which is embodied in the religious
use of such words as love, loyalty, and caring has long been summed up in the
phrase "salvation by faith." It is an admirable phrase and indicates,
on the part of religious thinkers, a sound psychology. Human nature, they have
intimated, is peculiar in that it can be changed only by the principle of
indirection. You cannot give a soul unity by finding a center within itself;
you can give a soul unity only by directing all its powers to a center outside
itself. If the person really cares for something other than himself in such a
way that he will give himself to it unconditionally, he already has, without
striving for it, a saved condition in his own spirit. Luther succeeded in part
because of his sound psychology; he knew the secrets of the human heart. But
has anyone ever stated this essential point in the religious life better than
did Professor Bosanquet?
We cannot be "saved" as we are; we
cannot cease to be what we are; we can only be saved by giving ourselves to
something in which we remain what we are, and yet enter into something new. The
peculiar attitude in which this is effected is religious faith. And this is, as
I see the matter, just what we mean by religion -- this, and no more, but
nothing less.
It is easy to see how men impressed in a
lively way with the psychological fact of man's inability to save himself, with
the fact that his salvation comes from the outside, should come to think of it
as an arbitrarily imposed gift. This is the essential Calvinistic approach to
the question and is at least as true as the opposite error which supposes that
man saves himself, but there is a truth which is far more precious than such
half-truths.
The precious truth is that there is a
"double search," that the fundamental experience of religion is that
in which both God and man are needed. Salvation does come from outside us, but
it is not arbitrarily imposed; it comes only when we give ourselves. We are
made new by the grace of God and by our own efforts, but the grace of God must
not be looked upon as arbitrary. If the grace of God is arbitrary, He is not
worthy of our reverence. When we are trying to learn to swim it is the water,
to be sure, that holds us up, but the peaceful result occurs only when we first
trust. We are saved by giving ourselves unconditionally, but it is within our
power to give our-selves or not to give.
What is the place of Jesus Christ in the
salvation on which any genuinely spiritual religion rests? Thousands have
asserted that they have been saved "by his blood" or "in his
Name." Sometimes these phrases have represented at-tempts to do justice to
the fact that salvation comes from outside us, but they run the risk of seeming
to say that we are saved by some external transaction, and this any spiritual
religion is bound to reject. Our salvation is meaningless if it takes place
anywhere except in our own spirits, for it is our spirits that need to be
saved. A merely heavenly transaction will not suffice.
Often our words about salvation through
Christ mean that the Person whom we meet in the Gospels is one who stirs us to
the act of trust and loyalty on which salvation rests. We know that our wills
need to be affected, that information will not suffice, and how are our wills
affected if not by the magic of personality? If our relationship to Jesus is
something deeper than a theory about His divinity, if it is relationship of
personal discipleship that stirs us to the depths of our lives, we have there
the kind of setting in which genuine salvation might well be expected. When we
talk about salvation through Christ, therefore,
we are
referring not merely to a theory, but to an historical fact.
Leading exponents of spiritual religion have
made much of the inner, or living, Christ. By this they have referred to the birth
in each loving heart of the very same reality that was manifested in Jesus.
Perhaps the best evidence that each man has in him something of what was
perfectly in Jesus is that we respond so amazingly to what we find in Him.
Christ really means something to us when he becomes more than an historical
figure and is born today in our frail hearts.
The experience of Christ within helps us to
see how it is that, though men are normally saved through Christ, there have
been saved persons in all generations who have had no knowledge of the
Carpenter of Nazareth. No human heart has been without an inner witness, no
human heart has been without the living Christ, and the presence of this
witness has made possible the culmination of the double search at all times.
But why should we call this inner witness the "living Christ"? Why
not call it the "inner light"? For centuries men have called it the
"living Christ," because they found in a dim and confused way in
themselves the same thing that they saw so beautifully portrayed in the Jesus
of history. Men call things by the same name when it is obvious that they
belong together.
Are men ever completely saved? The question
is particularly difficult to answer because we all know ourselves best and we
should hesitate to say that we are completely saved, for we are still conscious
of elements of contradiction within us, and yet if we say complete salvation is
not possible we seem to lack faith either in the power of God or in the
capacities of men. In practice we have to say that there are degrees of
salvation; though all men sin, some are more nearly loyal to their bona fide
selves than others are. But if we assert the necessity of sin, we seem
to be condoning it, and accepting defeat before the battle is fought. The
position of spiritually-minded men on this subject, as on so many others in
religion, is fundamentally paradoxical. The religious man in all generations
says, “I am not fully saved, but by the grace of God I can be.”
Lord Your Purpose is to
Kindle
by Elton Trueblood
Lord, your purpose is to
kindle,
Now ignite us with your fire;
While the earth awaits your
burning,
With your passion us inspire.
Overcome our sinful calmness,
Rouse us with redemptive shame;
Baptize us with your fiery
Spirit,
Crown our lives with tongues of
flame.
Lord, in your holy gospel
You will that man should truly
live:
Make us sense our shame of
failure,
Our tranquillity forgive.
Teach us courage as we struggle
In all liberating strife;
Lift the smallness of our
vision
By your own abundant life.
Lord, you still a sword deliver
Rather than a placid peace:
With your sharpened word
disturb us,
From complacency release!
Save us from our satisfaction
When we privately are free,
Yet are undisturbed in spirit
By our brother's misery.