Thursday, September 13, 2007

Autobasileia is Salvation


Autobasileia
is as Origen describes, the "Kingdom in person". It is Jesus.

Pope Benedict says in his book Jesus of Nazareth (p. 49),

Jesus himself is the Kingdom; the Kingdom is not a thing, it is not a geographical dominion like worldly kingdoms. It is a person; it is he. On this interpretation, the term "Kingdom of God" is itself a veiled Christology. By the way in which he speaks of the Kingdom of God, Jesus leads men to realize the overwhelming fact that in him God himself is present among them, that he is God's presence.

This sense of Christ as the embodiment of infinite realities is crucial in truly understanding reality itself, for Christ is the reality (Col. 2:17). When one attempts to define the Kingdom of God as something less than Christ himself, it will always fall short.

This is true in regards to salvation. Salvation is a mystery and a reality that begs definition. Real spiritual mysteries are infinitely knowable, so we have the study of salvation in Christ known as soteriology. Yet, so many gifted, godly, and great theologians fail to recognize the simplest, yet most profound truth, that salvation is a person. That person is Jesus Christ.

In language as in our thoughts, a noun must be either a person, place, or thing. But the truth of Salvation goes beyond man's attempts to narrow and define. Salvation is a person, place, and thing. That person is Jesus, the place is Jesus, and the event is Jesus. He is the Gospel. Jesus is the Good News.

When my sadly mistaken, Protestant brothers in Christ say the Roman Catholic Church preaches a different Gospel, they are actually revealing the fact that they either don't know what the Catholic Church professes or they have narrowly defined their Gospel to fit their doctrine rather than reality. Many have tried to narrow the definition of Salvation to an event, yet even their understanding of the "event" of Salvation has fallen short. They even go so far as to narrow their definition of salvation to a moment in time.

Even then they sadly make the focus of their truncated view of salvation to be some event in their life not the moment Christ said "it is finished", the moment he shed his blood, the moment he died, the moment he arose, the moment he ascended into heaven, or the moment he returns. The great irony is they accuse the Catholic of salvation by works and then define salvation as some moment THEY do something.

The true Evangelical, Pope Benedict XVI, demonstrates a clear understanding of this in discussing the disciple's mission on p. 173 of his book Jesus of Nazareth:

The first task is preaching: to give people the light of the word, the message of Jesus. The Apostles are first and foremost Evangelists - like Jesus, they preach the Kingdom of God and thereby gather people into God's new family. But the preaching of God's Kingdom is never just words, never just instruction. It is an event, just as Jesus himself is an event. God's Word in person. By announcing him, the Apostles lead their listeners to encounter him.
The emphasis added was mine, because protestant Evangelicals preach a Gospel that says you must get saved, and that moment is the main event. The true Gospel preserved in the Roman Catholic Church says that you must get the Savior. They say that the moment you get saved you get Jesus. We say that every moment is an opportunity to get Jesus, to be more like Him or to draw nearer to Him. He must increase and we must decrease. Salvation can only be understood as a process. As a person, Salvation is a growing relationship with Jesus. As a place, Salvation is drawing closer to Jesus. As an event, Salvation transcends all of time from its beginning to infinity, AND BEYOND!.

When someone describes something it can easily be true even if it falls short of complete. However, if that person then claims to have a complete description or narrow it by saying what it is not then they have raised the bar on whether their claim is true or not. This is my point of contention with those who claim things like "faith alone", "salvation is not a process", or the Catholic Church teaches a "different Gospel" than found in the scripture. Claiming that salvation is a process does not exclude moments, but the "moment only" message excludes the process. I can see moments of salvation described and experienced in scripture but scripture absolutely teaches nowhere "moment only" or "faith alone". It clearly states just the opposite in Paul's command to work out your salvation and in Jame's statement that we are not justified by faith alone.

This pattern of error, which is to truncate the truth, can be clearly seen in regard to the canon of scripture and in regard to Ecclesiastic authority as well. Their Bible is not complete and the concept of "sola scriptura" is incomplete. They fail to recognize the full canon. They also refuse to admit that perfect truth in the scripture must have an interpretation without error to be true. The interpretation can be true even though it may be incomplete, but it must be infallible to be true. The Scripture does little good without accurate preservation, translation, and interpretation.