I have this awful fear that the self-righteous will be smiling all through eternity.
I remember once leading a student seminar at York University in Ontario. I had used an illustration from the life of Gandhi in which I told how, at the moment of his assassination, he had blessed his assassin. A blue-eyed, Clairol sophomore responded, “Do you believe that Gandhi was a Christian? If he never accepted the Lord Jesus Christ, he is in hell right today.”
“How true,” I said. But I only reluctantly agreed with her. I have this awful fear that in heaven, just beyond the throne, outside the circle of beasts and elders, will be the self-righteous, smiling smugly all through eternity. Sometimes I awake at midnight with nightmares. I have finally made it to heaven. And horrors, there, by the right hand of God, I see that coed filing her nails, clutching her discipleship manuals, and smiling over the perishing of a great many souls. All the while she is saying, “Too bad, I told you so.”
To be sure, there is only one kind of knowledge that saves. Outside of Christ, there is no life. The knowledge of the Lord is the essential kind, but Christians are often one-dimensional. We have, through dull attendance, written off other kinds of knowledge.
We must win the world to Christ lest it perish. But our conversionism blindly divides our world into “them” and “us.” It is a division so fired with zeal that all other knowledge seems wasted. We Christians have not been the world’s greatest listeners. We are too mouthy in the face of other kinds of human intellect.
But not only are we Christians too talkative, we are quarrelsome with each other in confronting our world. We are of all types and stripes—we are charismatics, high churchers, infant baptizers, and Latin massers. The pluralism within the body of Christ makes our world wonder why we cannot all be a little more alike, and why we do not get along better. Then, when we begin dividing up our Christian camp by insulting each other, the lost decide it is somehow more Christian to remain unsaved.
Our first act of conversion is to make people Christians. The second act of conversion is to make the converted our kind of Christians. Of course, if they are going to be like Jesus, they will have to be a lot like us. This warped conversionism makes the unsaved wary. The trouble comes in our insinuation that the found are not found enough—or found too much! We live in a great misery all our lives trying to get all our Christian acquaintances at the right level of being saved. Episcopalians seem barely saved, while Pentecostals seem oversaved.
Many of the issues that fragment us into ghettos have little to do with salvation alone. With fervent hang-ups, we wonder why those who love Christ do not take our same stands on politics or home-grown schools or religious liberty or antihumanism or Bill Gothard or Christian skydiving. It is part of our slanted pietism to believe that those truly discovered by Christ will take our exact stands on religious television, Tribulation timing, and a thousand other issues “critical” to the faith. The flag of the arm of Christ comes to half-mast, while the pennants of viewpoint fly at the top of the pole. After all, being saved has its place, but locating Christians with our exact hang-ups is joy unspeakable and full of glory.
Am I suggesting that we open the gates of universalism and welcome in all men to the kingdom of God without reference to the lordship of Christ? Not at all. We, by nature of our Lord’s definition, must preach that all men need Christ and that there is only one way to the Father.
But why make it seem to our unevangelical world that we smile above the damned, amazed that they are too ignorant to be saved? Our redeeming word is a word of universal love. We sin when we tack our groupy requirements on to free grace, sectioning the kingdom in favor of ourselves. Until we escape our petty organizational prisons, we only welcome those from the bondage of sin to the bondage of our own peculiar system.
Only Jesus saves! I know that. But he loves while he does it. He is not an iconoclast Savior who picks the bubbles out of other people’s champagne. And I am so glad he did not say to the crowd on Olivet, “Go ye into all the stubborn, idolatrous world and tell them how lucky they are that you’ve come.”
1 Calvin Miller is pastor of the Westside Baptist Church in Omaha, Nebraska. He is a prolific writer, whose most recent books include The Taste of Joy (IVP, 1983) and If This Be Love (Harper & Row, 1984).
