Personal Destiny and Selfishness

I’ve now had approximately three weeks to digest the material from my ‘History of Protestant Spirituality’ course and it’s been interesting to try to understand the different ways in which Protestants have understood themselves in relation to God. From Luther’s ‘theology of the cross’ and its reminder that God is experienced in suffering to Pentecostalism’s triumphalist ’second baptism’; from the snake-handlers of the Appalachians to the common-sense approach of the Anglicans, it was an intriguing survey.

One course reading that has really got me thinking was called “The Social Gospel as Personal Salvation” by Walter Rauschenbusch, a prominent liberal theologian from the early part of last century. His basic argument was that we have misunderstood the fundamental point about ’salvation,’ seeing it as a matter of an individual’s destiny in the afterlife rather than as a total reorientation of life toward God and others.

His starting point is the definition of the word ’sin’ and argues that throughout the Bible the word is associated with something like our word ’selfishness’. Sin is the choice of self over God; it is the choice of self over others. It is the choice to guard my ego, my wealth, my pride, my ideas, my very self from harm by lashing out at others and turning my back on God. So if sin is selfishness, is the gospel of personal spiritual destiny a move away from it?

It’s a provocative question that Rauschenbusch asks. His basic point is that if we think that salvation is about getting into heaven after we die then we are still trapped in our selfishness because we are still fixated on ourselves. “As long as men are wholly intent on their own destiny, they do not necessarily emerge from selfishness. It only changes form.”

I think there is something to this critique. I don’t agree with everything in the article but I think Rauschenbusch is on to something in his argument that salvation must shift the focus off of ourselves and onto God and others (or God through others). This is at the heart of the social gospel. Salvation is not a personal quest for God, it is a deeper engagement with life here and now in the confidence that this is the best possible demonstration of and preparation for the world to come.