Save us from Being Saved
I spent Saturday at a conference on the work of Rene Girard. A friend of mine, Mike Kirwan, has just published a book about him, and the conference was to celebrate this. (Check out Mike's article for The Tablet.) You can order the book here.
I gave a paper called 'Save us from being Saved', talking about different offers of salvation and the need to take a critical approach in order to unmask false salvation. So, for instance, language of salvation is used around the war on terror or structural adjustment programmes, and these need some critical attention. We also look for salvation in different ways in our own lives. These can be just as destructive.
I would be interested to hear from any who have examples of 'salvations' from which we need to be saved.
During the afternoon, I sloped off to the pub with Giles Frazer and he told me about a meeting sponsored by the Evangelical Alliance that he had been to that week. This had been called to debate Steve Chalke's new book, The Lost Message of Jesus, in which he is critical of Penal Substitution as an account of the salvation offered by Christ. Giles suggested that this was the nearest thing to a heresy trial he had come across. Differing accounts of the meeting can be found on the Ekklesia website, the Anabaptist Network site, and on the EA's own site.
It seems that being saved from salvation is a live topic!
I gave a paper called 'Save us from being Saved', talking about different offers of salvation and the need to take a critical approach in order to unmask false salvation. So, for instance, language of salvation is used around the war on terror or structural adjustment programmes, and these need some critical attention. We also look for salvation in different ways in our own lives. These can be just as destructive.
I would be interested to hear from any who have examples of 'salvations' from which we need to be saved.
During the afternoon, I sloped off to the pub with Giles Frazer and he told me about a meeting sponsored by the Evangelical Alliance that he had been to that week. This had been called to debate Steve Chalke's new book, The Lost Message of Jesus, in which he is critical of Penal Substitution as an account of the salvation offered by Christ. Giles suggested that this was the nearest thing to a heresy trial he had come across. Differing accounts of the meeting can be found on the Ekklesia website, the Anabaptist Network site, and on the EA's own site.
It seems that being saved from salvation is a live topic!
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