Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.2007, Side 41

Salvation Versus Human Effort
I have stated what is meant to be a distinction as something of a contradiction,
but overstatement often has a point. Humans, particularly in the political
sphere, are prone to claim salvific significance for their efforts at social and\or
political transformation. The twentieth century has been crammed with those
blood-stained attempts. When the God-man Jesus Christ is refused as savior,
the man-god in many different guises is given full sway.
The good news of the Gospel is that God saves us through his gift of grace
in Christ. He has chosen to reconcile us to him by sending his son, by breaking
through to us from his side, as it were, and not insisting that we climb some lad-
der of achievement through our own efforts. We trust God to save us in Christ;
we do not earn our salvation nor even add something to what he has offered. It
is sheer gift. We need do nothing but accept the gift with repentant heart.
This insistence on a strong doctrine of grace puts all human efforts in
proper perspective. They deal with penultimate improvements in the hu-
man condition, with relative goods and bads, not with salvation. This means
that politics is desacralized and relativized. Salvation is through Christ, not
through human political schemes, nor through psychological or religious ef-
forts, for that matter. Following from this, we might appropriately speak of
liberation ethics, but never of liberation theology, if that is taken to mean that
revolutionary praxis is the same thing as salvation. Such a judgment provides
a critical shield against the constant attempts in American Christianity to give
redemptive significance to ecological, psychological, spiritualist (New Age)
feminist, educational, and now multi-cultural movements.
One would think that the world has had enough experience of revolution-
ary change to obviate any claims that political and social “transformation”
lead to anything remotely resembling human fulfillment. Ordinary human
observation and experience arrives at such a negative verdict. But for religious
people to make such claims is even more baffling.
traditions, especially the Reformed. My main sources are: Gustaf Wingren, Luther on Vocation (Philadelphia:
Muhlenberg, 1957), and Creation andLaw (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1961); Einar Billing, Our Calling (Rock
Island, Augustana Book Concern, 1951); Gustaf Aulen, Church, Law and Society (New York: Scribners, 1948;
George Forell, FaithActive in Love (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1954); and William Lazareth, Lutherand the Chris-
tian Home: An Application of the Social Ethics of the Reformation (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1960), and his
recent Christians in Society: Luther, the Bible, and SocialEthics (Minneapolis: Fortress,2001.