Hi Martin,
Thanks for this--we *must* make sure that we keep meaning business. One of the ways I like to focus on this is to return to the language of Colossians: just what does it mean to be hid in God with Christ? What does that look like and feel like on a daily basis--and am I inviting others to live into the life of God with me?

There is one other factor that I think is significant, though. Modern society excels at aiding us in our attempts to alienate ourselves from reality, and that alienation becomes most profound when we doubt the existence of such a thing as "evil". But evil is quite real and flourishes in a multitude of forms--from the impersonal and systemic to the deeply personal and interior. While I greatly prefer to speak of salvation and my on-going relationship with God in positive terms (as above), I wonder if we are colluding in our own deluding if we do not acknowledge the reality of evil and sin and our need to be saved from it and from perpetuating it in our relationships and world.

We lost this battle when we let others define salvation too narrowly.

I don't see us ever committing to re-engage the topic, because that would require the greatest shift of resource allocation in our history. We hold lesser things too dear to attempt now to communicate Good News on the macro level. We've become a niche denomination for the comfortable and well-educated, even though that means we're no longer a church at all. We've painted ourselves into the loveliest corner, and now we don't know how to break out of it.

It's a media world, and the best we can do is Matthew Moretz on YouTube.

No, Josh, we only lose this one when we give up on it...

I don't see the problem because one can only doubt where it is possible to check things out and verify empirically, as Wittgenstein taught. Where there is no solution there is no problem. "I believe in God," for example, is not falsifiable and does not depend on finding any objective meaning in the world. It is quite different from an assertion such as, "I believe Smith is in London," which can be falsified. Evidence may be found which makes me withdraw my claim that Smith is indeed in London. "I believe in God" expresses an attitude to life rather than asserting a state of affairs.

"I believe in God" is closer to the language of ethics, which makes no knowledge claims but rather prescribes behavior.

The way to "save" the religion game is not to bring back outdated notions such as salvation but rather to move on to ethics.

Religion as bad science has no future but religion as ethics can easily serve a purpose.

Gary Paul Gilbert
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"We've become a niche denomination for the comfortable and well-educated, even though that means we're no longer a church at all. We've painted ourselves into the loveliest corner, and now we don't know how to break out of it."

Well-said. And I think the answer is: we get out of it. Time to stop thinking in "comfortable and well-educated" ways, and start thinking differently.

(And thanks, Martin L. Smith, for this post. It really cuts to the heart of things; I think you've hit the nail squarely on the head here.)

Martin,

Thank you for asking this so clearly. Recently I've been thinking about two of the images for salvation in the New Testament - redemption and reconciliation. I find myself wondering whether redemption made a different sense in a culture and society where slavery was a commonplace experience. Do people in American culture feel enslaved and in need of redemption? I think at at the level of a first hearing, most Americans struggle with how many choices they have to make and actually feel burdened and isolated by this superficial, almost symptomatic freedom. Reconciliation on the other hand touches people's experience of loneliness and isolation and the frustration that most of the many choices we can make don't touch either our loneliness of isolation. To find the courage to address our society and culture, we need to recover a clarity of our own experience of Gospel and what it is people want and need to be saved or delivered from.

Donald Schell

Smith redefines salvation as in "Perhaps it’s because they equate being saved with the idea of God reprieving (some of) us from the sentence of eternal damnation in hellfire." The question is whether the word "salvation" is a good term to use nowadays when Hell, eternal punishment, and even the notion of an afterlife have been quietly withdrawn from use.

One life is good enough for most people, including those who are religious.

Even if one wanted to continue to use the word "salvation," Smith's redefinition of salvation as being about a quest for meaning I find too narrow.

Gary Paul Gilbert

"I wonder if we are colluding in our own deluding if we do not acknowledge the reality of evil and sin and our need to be saved from it and from perpetuating it in our relationships and world."

Wanted to add that I think this is a very important point. Human beings are specialists at deluding ourselves about ourselves - and for me, this is where "salvation" occurs and must occur.

In any case, I'm delighted that this posts asks the question about "whether or not we mean business." For me, it's pointless to belong to the church if it doesn't offer salvation of the soul; as I continue to ask, why would anybody belong to such a bizarre organization if there weren't something offered that can't be found anyplace else?

So I think we need to continue to ask exactly what the church is for, if it's not salvation?