When the real question is: ‘Are you saved?’

(Ed: Even more weird. First Peter Selby. Now I find myself agreeing with Giles Fraser! Or is the world coming round to my point of view? ;-) )

[...] St Paul runs sin and death together. We are saved from sin/ death, because sin is a form of death. Real sin — rather than the watered-down, overly sexualised version we too often employ as a substitute — is cold, and hollow, and meaningless. Hence it is death. Furthermore, real sin is not a terribly religious thing. One does not have to be a believer to feel threatened by the deathly chill of human self-absorption.

So the question of salvation, the first question of theology, is something like this: have I found a way to be released from the sin/death composite, or am I trapped by it? It begins with a sense of one’s own captivity, and how incredibly difficult it is to free oneself when one is for ever being sucked back into sin, like being sucked into quicksand. It was no surprise to me that the question of salvation jump-started our ailing conversation around the kitchen table. Suddenly, we seemed to be talking about something that really counted.

Although my background is in philosophy, I am at one with Luther when he wrote: “I believe I owe it to the Lord to bark against philosophy, and speak words of encouragement to holy scripture.” If we turn the question of God into a philosophical question concerning God’s existence, we have chosen the wrong terrain for the whole debate. In doing that, we ensure that God will never be found. Read more
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