Christians are Saved, Not Switched

“But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself” (Philippians 3:20 NRSV).

Several Biblical scholars have been trumpeting in recent years that the idea of “salvation” in the Bible is not about going to heaven when you die (see, for example, N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope, or J. Richard Middleton’s A New Heaven and A New Earth). Rather, it is about God setting right the world, doing away with sin and death once and for all, and restoring human beings’ proper role within creation (see especially here Genesis 1:26–28 and Romans 8:18–25). This will happen, according to the New Testament, when Jesus returns from heaven to fully establish God’s kingdom on earth, as the Lord’s prayer anticipates (Matthew 6:10). At this time Christians will experience a bodily resurrection to a new order of life, just like Jesus did (see 1 Corinthians 15). The book of Revelation summarizes well the salvation of Christians when it says, “for you [Jesus] were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation; you have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God, and they will reign on earth” (5:9–10 NRSV).

Taking my cue from the Revelation passage, I wish to press here the implications of this salvation, and ask: does becoming a Christian mean that a person altogether ceases to be who s/he was before; if not exactly now, then when Jesus returns? Indeed, if my Christian identity were to be ultimately realized in a disembodied spiritual bliss, in a heavenly realm wholly distinct from life on earth, then it probably wouldn’t matter in the long run whether, say, I am also an Italian-American, husband, step-father, teacher, etc. And it likewise probably wouldn’t matter in the end if you are a person of any ethnicity, performing any vocation, and possessing any other social role or identity beyond that of a Christian. If salvation were to finally indicate a complete disconnectedness from our lives as we now understand them, then I think we would have to judge all these other aspects of ourselves as merely fleeting and thus of quite limited importance.

However, given the Bible’s emphasis on the restoration of the world that God has made (see, for example, Acts 3:19–21)—a world in which God ordained the development of various people groups and cultures (i.e., “tribes and languages,” “peoples and nations”—see Genesis 10), and accompanying human institutions and vocations (e.g., marriage, music, metallurgy, livestock herding—see Genesis 2–4), then we might conclude that salvation really means being saved—that is, being renewed in terms of who we are rather than being switched into something else. In other words, I suggest that God doesn’t simply throw away all that makes us human—our differences as individuals and groups, our vocational pursuits that contribute to the goodness and proper functioning of the world, and, of course, the various relationships we form throughout our lives. These may experience (radical) transformation. Remember, sin and death will be no more. But on a fundamental level it seems that all these things are necessarily eternal and therefore of much importance, both now and forever!

As a wise professor once told me, “God makes no junk and he doesn’t junk what he has made.” As the Bible tells me, “God so loved the world [in all its wonderful variety] that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who is faithful to him may not die but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:16–17 translation mine).