Committed Critic

Since no one raised any disagreements with last week’s post, I’ll suggest one myself.

I think I beat up on a bit of a straw man. Many of the web sites that discuss the Roman Road do, in fact, acknowledge that a new believer is called to live a new life after conversion, and many of them cite other passages of Scripture that fill in some of the gaps I was bemoaning.

However, I maintain that some problems remain with the Roman Road method in general. So here I’ll try to tease out a few main points and raise a question for everyone to respond to.

(1) I am convinced that for a person becoming a Christian, the new life is not just something that happens after salvation, but rather is salvation (or at least a part of it). Perhaps this is my Church of Christ upbringing talking, but I am persuaded that repentance is an action word –– not just a decision –– and that it must take place before salvation.

(2) I think two key reasons Scripture emphasizes baptism are that (1) it’s a public act so that we have people to hold us accountable, and (2) it reminds us that we can’t just make a little change here and there, but instead we need to be completely transformed by putting to death our old self and being raised to a new life. So it’s not just the act of baptism missing from the Roman Road, but also what it signifies.

(3) I am convinced that the way we use Scripture to prove points will teach our listeners how to read Scripture. Reading one verse at a time is, frankly, the worst way to read Scripture; it means that if we understand the verse correctly, it’s due to little more than dumb luck. (I’d prefer to say it’s the work of the Spirit that determines things, but have you seen how people interpret some verses?) So when we quote a verse at a time for the Roman Road, we suggest to people that that’s the way truth is found in Scripture.

On the other hand, obviously some parts of Scripture are more important than others, and it’s rarely helpful just to tell people to read the whole Bible and figure it out for themselves. The balance we need, then, is to find passages of Scripture (ideally larger than a verse or two) that work, in context, at explaining key points so that people can understand them and simultaneously learn how to read Scripture in an appropriate way.

(4) I think Christians need to consider carefully just how simple God intends for the Gospel to be. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul outlines what things that are of “first importance,” yet we cannot take that passage as sufficient, because it says nothing about how the story of Jesus relates to our lives or something called “salvation.” So we don’t want to be overly simplistic. And yet, clearly not everything is essential to know from the start.

So for this post, I’d like to throw open the discussion, and ask what is essential to teach someone (immediately) who may become a Christian, and what can be put off till later? In other words, if we want to develop a presentation of the Gospel to communicate to a non-believer, what should we make sure not to leave out?

So as not to stifle discussion, I won’t suggest any (further) examples.

Last year in a class I took on Romans, we were asked in our final exam to critique the “Roman Road to Salvation,” a series of verses from Paul’s most famous letter which are often used by evangelicals to walk someone through the process of becoming a Christian, often before they leave the web page that describes the process. I want to offer here a modified version of my answer.

The Roman Road exists in numerous forms (just google it to see what I mean), but it consists essentially of 5 points:

1. Everyone has sinned (Rom 3:23).
2. Sin’s consequence is death (Rom 6:23).
3. While we were sinners, Christ died for us (Rom 5:8).
4. Because of Christ’s death, we can be saved (Rom 10:9).
5. We are saved when we confess Jesus and believe in his resurrection (Rom 10:9, 13).

I am a firm believer that taking verses out of context is an exceedingly troubling practice. In addition to the oft-lamented risk that we will simply make these passages mean whatever we want, we also miss out on the richness of the complex argument Paul does make.

However.

I also cannot help but believe that God intended for the Gospel to be understood clearly without a full-blown seminary degree, and to follow the argument of the book of Romans just about requires one. I’m exaggerating a bit, of course, but Paul’s argument is indeed complex and confusing. It could take a lifetime to master.

Perhaps we should look elsewhere in Scripture for something simpler to use with beginners. But in the meantime, I want to point out 5 specific points (from Romans) that we miss if we rely on the Roman Road for our understanding of salvation:

1. God’s election and calling. From the start of the book (1:5f), Paul emphasizes the role of divine calling in Christian identity. In 8:29 he insists that “those God foreknew he also predestined . . . those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.” So for Paul it is election and calling (along with faith) that lead to justification, whereas the Roman Road suggests that God’s saving work was limited to sending Christ, leaving the rest up to the decision of the individual.

2. New life with Christ through baptism. The Roman Road leaves out most of chapter 6, where Paul describes how salvation actually takes place. In baptism, the believer is crucified and buried with Christ, then raised with Christ to a new life. We only have the eternal life of 6:23 because of the resurrection we experienced in 6:8-9. Thus the eternal life which the Roman Road promises only makes sense in light of our baptism.

3. Freedom from bondage to Sin and Death. For Paul, we used to be enslaved to personified Sin, which paid us wages of death (6:23). The crucifixion of the old self sets the believer free from this force in a transformation that, for Paul, amounts to salvation. The Roman Road assumes that we owe God a death because of our sin, and thus it lacks any reference to sin and death as Powers which bind us in slavery.

4. Obedience and new behavior. The Roman Road, because its adherents often wish to avoid any suggestion of justification by works (in line with, e.g., 9:32), makes no reference to a new kind of behavior by the believer, just as it made no reference to a new life or freedom from sin. Indeed, many hold that in Paul’s view, new behavior comes after salvation, not as a part of it. However, I would hold that salvation must be a change to something, and for Paul a person’s changed behavior is a part of what she becomes at salvation. Paul’s emphasis on a changed life can be seen, for example, in 6:12, 7:4, and 8:13.

5. The work of the Holy Spirit. Paul insists that only those who have the Spirit of Christ belong to Christ (8:9), and that it is by the (Holy) Spirit that misdeeds are put to death so that we might live (8:13). Furthermore, the resurrection of our bodies will take place because of God’s Spirit within us (8:12). These parts of present and future salvation are dependent on the Holy Spirit, which is not mentioned in the Roman Road.

The glossing over of these crucial points of Christian theology/spirituality leads to an important logical gap in the road. The Roman Road tries, as far as I can tell, to find the quickest logical path from “sinner” to “saved.” However, it ends up taking a different logical route than the one Paul actually takes in Romans. This should bother us.

The Roman Road interprets Christ’s death (by its 3rd point) as a means of substitutionary atonement, assuming that Christ died the death we were supposed to die. The logic goes something like this: when we sin, we deserve death; but Christ died instead, so if we believe in him we don’t have to.

According to Paul, however, Christ died as a sacrifice of atonement (3:25), which is a means of forgiveness, not a transfer of punishment. This is important because Paul is describing God as a just ruler willing to give up something to atone for our sin, not as an angry diety needing vengeance to appease his wrath. Subsitutionary atonement may indeed be suggested in the NT (e.g., 1 Peter 2:24), but I do not think it is Paul’s concern in Romans (or perhaps anywhere, though perhaps I’m overlooking something).

Furthermore, when Paul talks about the “wages of sin,” I think he means something very different than what the Roman Road supposes. Paul argues that in baptism we are crucified and raised with Christ, setting us free from our slavery to (personified) Sin (6:6-7), so that we no longer earn death, but become slaves to God and receive God’s free gift of eternal life. So Sin, in Romans 6:23, is not an action that demands a wage, but a master who pays a wage.

This changes the logic of the entire Road. Our problem is not some punishment that we deserve, but a Power who has control over us. Substitutionary atonement can only remove punishment, but Paul describes us as having a bigger problem. We are slaves to a cruel taskmaster, who pays us only death, and from whom we can only be set free (ironically) by dying (with Christ) and being raised again. This demands that becoming a Christian requires an entirely new life, and that simply believing that Jesus took away our punishment is insufficient.

Essentially, the Roman Road substitutes the idea of salvation and one benefit of salvation for what salvation actually is. In other words, it changes salvation from a powerful transformation via death and resurrection into an unobservable, internal alteration of our ultimate destination, which should be followed by an actual process of transformation but does not include such a change as part of its essence. I think such a suggestion would make Paul either laugh or cry. Well, more likely he’d write an angry letter.

This is a key reason, I believe, that salvation is meant to take place in a community (rather than in reading a web page), because understanding and enacting the process of salvation are necessary parts of undergoing it. Word, as they say, must put on flesh. (I owe that line to Rich Mullins.)

If we take Scripture as a revelation of God, then we must acknowledge that God revealed to us the book of Romans, not 5 scattered verses from Romans which we were meant to piece together as best we could. A simple presentation of the Gospel from Romans, if it is not true to the book’s own logic, is not likely to be God’s intent. So I would argue that it remains for Christians who want a simple, clear presentation of the Gospel to keep looking.