Salvation is A Rescue Mission

Salvation is a comprehensive idea covering the process of God calling a person to a reconciling relationship, leading to repentance, forgiveness, new birth, and a life of following and learning from Jesus. This includes participating in his values and his mission. The culmination of this good life is stepping into the eternal state of an active life with him.
 
Salvation is the plot of history; it is a rescue mission. Salvation is God’s action, his project, and it includes the entire creation. The world’s alternative is to put the world right by good deeds and so to leave God out. To the secular mind, for God to conduct himself in the way he sees fit, even though great human minds cannot fathom it or agree with it, is scandalous. Many think of God as a megalomaniac because he violates their modern sensibilities (Isaiah 55:8-9; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25). But what it takes to turn around the world, save it, and rescue its people is a strong stomach and an absolute commitment. Salvation requires bloodshed. Can we agree then not to trivialize salvation by reducing it to whether a person is safe and secure in the arms of Christ based on a prayer or religious ritual prescribed by the priestly class?
 

 - Bill Hull & Brandon Cook, 

The Cost of Cheap Grace: Reclaiming the Value of Discipleship, 2020.

 

Understanding of 'Salvation by Grace Alone'

Like most clichés, “salvation by grace alone” isn’t wrong. Complicated ideas are often distilled into shorthand phrases to make them easier to access. Over time, however, such shorthand phrases can come to mean something much different from what their authors meant when they crafted them.
 
The following is what we consider the contemporary understanding of “salvation by grace alone.”
 
Salvation. A person is saved from their sins. Their sins are forgiven, and as a result, they gain admission to heaven. Salvation is thus a singular event focused exclusively on forgiveness of sin, partitioned off from any requirement for behavioral change.
 
By grace. Grace is a derivative of God’s mercy, and the greatest portion of it comes to us at our “point of salvation.” This often is called the moment you were “saved” or received new life, forgiveness, new birth—the big moment when you became a child of God. Grace is something you cannot seek or earn; you only receive it. The human’s relationship to grace is a passive one: God is the one who distributes it as he wills.
 
Alone. Alone contrasts grace with human effort. Life in Christ is separate from human action: There is nothing you can do to earn it, there is nothing you can do to lose it, and there is nothing you can do to supplement it. There is something powerful and right about each of these elements. They are profoundly true: All people need to be saved, salvation can only come about by God’s grace, and we are completely unable to achieve salvation on our own.
 

 - Bill Hull & Brandon Cook, 

The Cost of Cheap Grace: Reclaiming the Value of Discipleship, 2020.

 

'Salvation by Grace Alone' is A Cliché

“SALVATION BY GRACE ALONE.” It’s a modern theological cliché—by definition, “a phrase or opinion that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought.” This cliché has become the way you establish your bona fide evangelical credentials. It is meant to bolster a doctrine that emerged from the Reformation, that salvation has nothing to do with behavior. The phrase has provided a secure hiding place for millions, somewhere they could rest from the obvious labor the gospel requires. The divorcing of grace from behavior is responsible for the church relieving itself of the moral burden to live better and be better than the general population. Dietrich Bonhoeffer applied his stinging rebuke of this development in his 1937 manual for ministers, The Cost of Discipleship.

 Cheap grace means justification of sin but not of the sinner. . . . The church that teaches this doctrine of grace thereby confers such grace upon itself. The world finds in this church a cheap cover-up for its sins.

There are actually Christians who proudly proclaim that they are no better behaved than people of other religions or no religions at all. If this is the gospel—that you are saved, you get your sins forgiven, and you gain entrance into heaven but that your morality, behavior, and the collective contribution of the church will not improve life on earth—why would anyone be interested? Any honest person with moral integrity would be repulsed by such an idea. Skeptics would (rightly) say, “Christians go to heaven regardless of life and conduct, but non-Christians go to hell forever, even if they live better and contribute more to society.” Even flawed humans reserve life sentences for only the most heinous crimes.
 
So we can conclude that “salvation by grace alone” is a cliché: It clearly reveals a lack of thought.
 
“Salvation by grace alone” protects the option to live as a partial Christian—to take advantage of religious goods and services, the assurance of heaven, the immediate and unconditional availability of forgiveness. You can come and go as you please, live a selfish life, be critical of the church and its leadership but not help solve the problem—and still get Communion.
 

- Bill Hull & Brandon Cook, 

The Cost of Cheap Grace: Reclaiming the Value of Discipleship, 2020.