This is a question I get asked quite a lot and I understand why people ask it. There is a huge amount to unpack to do it justice, but for the sake of brevity, I thought I’d pick on two important points:
First, many people have been conditioned by the modern evangelical perspective that salvation is a judicial matter that addresses a need for guilty people to be made innocent. In this view, guilty = rejected and innocent = accepted. You start out as rejected (because of original sin – another idea that is usually taught contrary to the scripture) and you need to receive Christ to be accepted. Salvation therefore becomes synonymous with ‘getting into Christ’ from a starting position of ‘being outside of Christ’. If that is the baseline assumption then it is understandable why people react to the claim that ‘all are already in Christ’.
Second is the idea that salvation basically means having a ticket to heaven when you die and not really anything else. When someone asks a question like ‘does that mean everyone is saved?’ they usually mean ‘does that mean everyone will go to heaven when they die?’. To them, if the goal of the enterprise is to get to heaven, and if everyone is automatically going there is no need to do anything else including evangelise. If you can be a grade A ass without consequences then you may as well be as much of an ass as you like since you’re forgiven. Evidently this creates a problem for anyone with an intuition for justice as it suggests there are no consequences for our actions.
The result of these ideas is the construction of an exclusive religion that is preoccupied with getting the magic formula of belief just right. People either belong to the ‘in’ club or the ‘out’ club. When someone from the in club (particularly a leader) does something unconscionable, such as committing abuses like using social media data to fake prophesies, this throws the system into shock because the integrity of the in club is threatened. All the maladaptive commentators who devote their time to criticising the church for not being holy enough suddenly look like the smart team and the oft-repeated cycle of panicked handwringing continues.
Why it is necessary to begin with ‘all being in Christ’ for christian salvation to make sense.
Salvation is not a judicial matter. To suggest otherwise is to make the fundamental truth of God’s nature to be that of a legal judge. Being in right relationship to a judge means being declared innocent of crimes under a legal system. The new testament witness to the essential nature of God is that ‘God is Love’ and therefore other virtues such as justice flow out as an expression of the essential divine nature. To be in right relationship to a lover requires the love to be given independently of the response of the person loved. Transactional love (ie you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours) is unholy and not befitting the kind of love revealed in God, who ’causes the rain to fall on the righteous and the wicked’. Our problem when confronted by love is not guilt but shame. The traumatised orphan can be adopted into a loving family and have a full place in the house, but unless their shame, fear, and other entanglements to past deprivation are healed, they are still lost in themselves even while being accepted in a loving family. This is the diagnosis of the creation story in Genesis, and the central issue of the Christian salvation message.
To say ‘all are in Christ’ is to say that all have been brought to ground zero of the incarnation. Even if there ever was a judicial case to answer, it has been definitively answered in the person of Christ – along with all other questions. Because the essential nature of God is love, all people and things have a pre-existing relationship with God independently of their beliefs or actions, because love is what they were created out of and are sustained by. This creates the immovable foundation upon which everything else is built. This is the only foundation strong enough to provide the circumstances under which shame, fear and all other dysfunctions can be cured. The unadopted orphan understands only transactional conditions for survival. Conditional acceptance has to be taken off the table completely by unconditional acceptance for there to be a hope of restoration. Hence, ‘all are accepted in Christ’ becomes a non-negotiable baseline and necessary condition for the full work of ‘salvation’.
This moves on to the matter of ‘ticket to heaven’ ideas of salvation. Jesus said ‘the kingdom of heaven is within you now’ to both believers and unbelievers alike. It is important to affirm that this is not a potential kingdom but a real one. The kingdom of heaven is a metaphor for the life and essence of God. It is ‘within you now’ because you are created from it, sustained by it, and held within it. But just like the adopted orphan in the house of the loving parent, their own trauma can blind them to the good place they have been brought into. Even the unconditional love and acceptance of the parent is read by the orphan through the suspicious lens of transactional love. The orphan actually needs ‘saving’ at a level much more fundamental than the location where they find themselves. Love has the power to restore but it needs to reach them in the depth of their being for it to be sufficient. The point of the cross is that Christ has gone to the depth of our dysfunction to restore us from the inside out, and he has brought the Father and Spirit with him!
Evangelism, then, is not less important but even more essential when we understand all have been brought into Christ. It is more essential because it is not limited to a ‘one and done’ altar call, but a continual renewal of our inner landscape towards the truth. The ones most in need of evangelising are in fact very often the Christians themselves, especially where the confused message of transactional religion has muddied the water and diluted the wine of the good news.
