What if Christian soteriology, in its concern with how to get God’s grace and be saved, has been little more than an unwitting attempt to resist that grace?
What if our strategy, unbeknownst to ourselves, has been to keep salvation somewhere beyond planet Earth and eternally in the future? If we take the position that universal salvation is the truth, then soteriology might be, on the psychological level at least, a grandiose and perverse attempt to keep that inevitable salvation at arm’s length for as long as possible.
Reading Eckhart Tolle, one encounters repeatedly the idea that the ego, which is a false self, constantly tries to create various situations and narratives which sustain its existence. This leads to a great deal of unnecessary drama and pain. We are accustomed, in the religious or spiritual world, to look at ego moralistically. But this is something Tolle does not do. He seems to see the ego as a persistent force that causes us problems constantly, sucking the life out of us, but he views this more as a problem than a sin.
For Tolle, the ego lives on time, thrives on time, and needs some kind of narrative (and not even necessarily a self-praising one. It can even be the opposite) to keep itself alive. To be fully present in the now is the death of the ego, and something it militates against constantly. The reason we spend most of our lives in the past or the future, and in ways that are not necessary or beneficial, is because the ego cannot live in the present, and must keep us distracted from it.
What would a deep-seated conviction of God’s eternal, unconditional, and irrevocable love for us mean to the ego? It would mean the ego’s death.
Where would one find such a deep-seated conviction? Where would one experience God’s love? In the present, and the present only. But to avoid this conviction of divine love (such avoidance being what the ego wants) we must limit our soteriology to the level of eschatology: the last things, some future events. Salvation must be of the future (an uncertain future at that) and of the future only.
We look to the second coming of Christ in the future because we don’t know how to find him in the present.
We become lawyers of the Bible because we see the Bible as a book of the past and we do not know how to live now.
Take none of this to mean that the Bible is “outdated” or needs to be “made relevant”; please also note that I do assert a literal second coming of Christ, entailing a radical rebirth of the world and eventually of all people. But if Christians spend much of their time trying to parse the book of Revelation to know exactly how and when he is coming, or if they ignore and despise the world around them because it is not ancient scripture, it may well be because they deny the Christ of the present, of the here and now.
Christ yesterday, Christ tomorrow, never Christ today. The Christ of the Now is too frightening. “Seek and ye shall find,” he said, but we only think we are seeking.
If only we do such-and-such then Christ, truly, will love us (in the future). Conversely: oh look at the dear Bible and see how Christ loved us (in the past). No Christian would deny that Christ loves us now of course, but it is one thing to assert this as a doctrine and quite another to embrace it in one’s attitudes or spiritual practice. Alas! Jesus loves us, but Jesus is elsewhere, waiting to come back. We fold our hands piously and sit with woebegone faces staring at the heavens, waiting for the love to come. Christ is always elsewhere, be it time or space.
Theologians, who have egos as much as the rest of us, must find some clever way around universalism if God’s love is to be rendered an uncertain thing and the ego left with a good toehold, at the very least, in our lives. Hence, the torment of soteriology: is he saved? Is she saved? Am I saved? How do we know? What do we do? Have we done it enough yet? For if universalism is not true, or if it is only a pious “hope” that some patronizing doctrine allows us (condemning us for “dogmatism” or “presumption” if we insist that universalism is true) the ego can thrive: especially on its plans, constructions, narratives on how it will get into heaven and even how, perhaps, others will not.
It is my contention that if there is something we must do to be saved, we shall do it, somehow, sooner or later, both freely and inevitably.
The good news of our inevitable salvation in Christ is bad news for the ego. The dramatic narrative is ruined if there is an inevitable happy ending for everyone. How does the ego feed off the prospect of eternal bliss if everyone gets it?
It can’t.