Christians Need to Re-Think Story of Salvation, Conference Told

Missions specialists gather at CMU for annual meeting of Association of Anabaptist Missiologists

By Dorothea Toews

Christians need to rethink the way they present the story of salvation if the church is to successfully reach people in other cultures.

That was the message Mark Baker presented to participants at the opening session of the conference of the Association of Anabaptist Missiologists (AAM) at Canadian Mennonite University (CMU) on October 12-13.

In his address, titled Two Foundational Stories of the Cross: How They Affect Evangelism, Baker stated that the Bible contains a variety of ways of viewing Christ’s death on the cross, including redemption, justification, sacrifice, triumph, legal transaction, and others.

All of these views are understood on the basis of one underlying story, or foundational narrative, he said, adding that problems arise in cross-cultural mission because the church in the West emphasizes the wrong story.

According to Baker, an Associate Professor of Mission and Theology at Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary in Fresno, CA, the western church typically presents the gospel of Christ using the Penal Substitution Model of the atonement. In this story, God is holy and creates human beings to be in relationship with him, but human sin has severed the relationship.

The penalty for this guilt is understood as death, he went on to say. But since God does not want people to be separated from him forever, He sent Jesus to live a sinless life on earth and then take upon himself the sin of all human beings—dying in our place. This sacrifice satisfies the need for justice, and removes the barrier of sin from between God and people.

Baker stated that while this story makes sense in a Western guilt-based culture, where crime and punishment naturally go hand-in-hand, it doesn’t resonate in cultures based on honour and shame.

Baker suggested that Christians who want to share the Gospel outside of North American culture need a new paradigm for salvation. For him, the best story is the life of Jesus. That story, he said, is about God’s loving and gracious initiative being extended to human beings.

In this story, Baker said, “Jesus accepts and accompanies the victims of oppression, and he confronts the oppressors who are sealed in a system of their own making.” At the same time, Jesus stands in solidarity with people who are shamed and excluded, even to the point of death.

“The cross reveals the extent of human sin and alienation, because we kill God incarnate,” he stated. But, he added, it also reveals the character of God since resurrection both provides us with forgiveness and validates the life of Christ. Instead of responding to violence with violence, Jesus embraces those who have failed him and offers restored relationship.

For Baker, this foundational narrative of the atonement is more universally comprehensible, since it does not depend on a human sense of guilt—it applies to everyone.

Other speakers at the conference, which was sponsored by CMU, Mennonite Church Canada Witness, Providence Seminary and Steinbach Bible College, included Terrance Tiessen, Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology and Ethics at Providence College and Seminary, who made the case for what he called “accessibilism,” or the belief that God has a means of revealing himself to every person, even if they never hear the gospel in their lifetime.

Tiessen argued that despite this, the imperative for mission work remains—both because Jesus commanded his followers to “Go and make disciples of all nations,” and because of the love of neighbours. “We want our neighbour to live in the fullest sense possible already now,” he said, “so we share with them the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection.”

Hun and Sunny Lee, Mennonite pastors from London, Ontario, spoke about Christianity in Korea, which they described as being “passionate but one-sided evangelism.” Hun lamented that the salvation which many Korean Christians so enthusiastically preach is shallow, emphasizing individual belief and a one-time conversion rather than a life of discipleship in community.

Sunny added that salvation should be viewed as liberation, and she urged Christians to pursue a relational rather than an objective faith.

Dorothy Yoder Nyce of Goshen, IN is a writer who has focused on interreligious issues for more than a decade. She spoke about the possibility that God might use other religions as avenues to bring people to himself, reminding conference-goers that “religion always contains mystery” and that to place a Christian monopoly on salvation would be to “strip God of the freedom to save as He wishes.”

Hippolyto Tshimanga, Mission Partnership Facilitator for Europe and Africa, countered by lamenting the current trend for mission workers to only go where they are invited, stating that “every generation needs to be evangelized again and again and again until the kingdom comes!”

The conference ended with a powerful presentation by Jonathan Bonk, Executive Director of the Overseas Ministries Study Center in New Haven, CT. Bonk discussed the fall of the church at the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century, noting that when Christianity aligned itself with political power—a tactic that Jesus consistently rejected, he stated—it lost its central identity and integrity, mutating into the church-state culture blend known as “Christendom.”

The result was that doctrine was divorced from ethics, the teachings of Christ became irrelevant, and doctrine was dictated by councils chosen by the Emperor.

Bonk asserted that many people who would consider Christianity don’t do so because they see only broken families, militarism and economic hegemony in the church. They want to follow the teachings of Jesus, he said, but they cannot convert in good conscience since they see so many Christians not living as Christ taught.

For Bonk, mission and evangelism occurs when Christians live faithfully in their context, rather than adhering to a particular doctrine. “We are called to be disciples, not Christians,” he said.

AAM is a network of missions professors, missiologist scholars and writers, current and former missionaries and church members with an interest in mission studies and practice. The association, which meets annually, has 190 members in the U.S., Canada and other countries.

Dorothea Toews is a student at CMU.

Posted October 20, 2007. Revised October 23, 2007.