Week #1: Salvation by Bonnie Beadles-Bohling

Is Jesus Christ your personal Lord and Savior? 

In the Small Catechism, Luther unpacks the core teachings of the church via the question: what does this mean?  If you happened to undergo Lutheran confirmation in your youth or an adult catechism class upon coming to the faith, this phrase may ring familiar. I find this question to often be my first response as I ponder where and how God is at work in our lives and in our world. It is the lens through which I examine questions such as the one above.  Have you heard this question?  Have you been asked this question?  Does this question have meaning for you?  What associations, concerns or responses does it bring up in your gut? Your soul? Your mind?

In my experience, it is a modern evangelical question with a distinctly self-reliant flavor.  The question isn’t, “Does Jesus save?” or “How does Jesus save?” or “What is salvation?”.  The question is, “Has Jesus saved YOU?”.  Or, as it sits in my ear, “Have you chosen Christ?”.  I am left asking, “what does this mean?”.

In my youth, I was a junior counselor at a Midwestern Bible Camp.  I have many great memories of that experience.  I also have a few regrets.  There was a “game” we played with the kids called angels and demons.  It was a bit like spiritual battle-ball.  The campers were blindfolded and set loose in a dimly lit gym.  Counselors, some in the role of demons and some as angels, would target kids, trying to persuade them to follow.  The point of the games was to have kids, under confusion and emotional distress, declare Jesus as Lord and Savior to save themselves and stop the competing entities hounding them.  Oh, the fear involved in believing that we are responsible for our own salvation! The stuff of nightmares…

Is the question of salvation a question of what you have done or a question of what Jesus has done? Luther found relief from his own fear in the scripture: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God”. (Ephesians 2:8). And so, what to make of the urge to believe that our salvation comes from choosing Christ?  Does our salvation really hinge on anything we can do?  Luther says no and points to grace (God’s free gift) alone, through faith alone and even goes so far as to claim that faith itself is also a gift from God, generated by the Holy Spirit.  In this way, we do not in any way effect our own salvation. For you, what does this mean? 

Bonnie Beadles-Bohling, Lay Leader, South East Community Organizing