Matthew's Journal

Interesting lunchtime discussion at Selwyn (they always are, although the timetabling means they often end up feeling unreasonably short. The topic was salvation, and how Christ's death and resurrection achieved this.

We dashed through a few models, starting with the patristic idea of Christ's defeat of devils, and covering Anselm's rather feudal idea of us owing God a great debt that Christ pays for us, as well as Calvin's idea that we have broken the law, and that Christ somehow is able to take our punishment for us.

In each case, we discussed the model a little, and found that although there is scriptural backing for each idea, they all have some flaws (the last, Calvinist one perhaps the most serious flaws). Some other theories will have to wait until next week now.

Afterwards, Annie, Joe and I didn't quite manage to leave. Joe was saying that each of these ideas about salvation gives us an image of how salvation works, and that you shouldn't get too hung up on the fact they all have flaws; they're approximations of a mystery and as long as you don't get too caught up in one and try to insist you have the only answer it's OK.

My counter-concern was that if all the available images of salvation have serious flaws, then where are we left? My analogy is the apple falling from the tree - in a scientific world, this is quite an important thing to explain, and if you imagine a situation where gravity was proven to have serious holes in it, you'd be a bit stuck. Annie's idea "what's wrong with saying God made it fall?" was an interesting one. We talked a bit about how science assumes there's a simple "right" answer to things, that can be reasoned from evidence with logic, and how this approach doesn't necessarily apply to theological questions: the eucharistic prayer has within it "Great is the mystery of faith".

As a scientist, this sort of argument is quite difficult to accept; the idea that one should have faith that because God has said (through Scripture) that salvation is effected through Christs death and resurrection, it is, and that it may be too difficult to be expressed in a clearly reasoned simple idea. I'll wave away the Invisible Pink Unicorn argument with "experience of God" at this point, because having that debate right now isn't what I'm interested in. I gather arts types are rather happier with there not being one "right" answer to things...

Clearly it's a problem for apologetics, which is why CICCU's hard-line Calvinist stance makes a certain amount of sense - if you can try and claim that this is the simple answer, it makes it much easier to sell to people than a "trust in God" approach to how salvation might or might not work.

I'm still not sure I'm happy with the idea, but I wanted to write down my meanderings on the subject, and doubtless we'll talk about it more next week.