I really appreciated your reflection and its challenge to our American need for control and our cultural aversion to mystery.

As a pastor who works really hard to read what is really in the books of the Bible, though, I ask you to consider your use of the term “eternal salvation” which I find to be also a mostly modern and liturgically developed theological error not so different from the one you challenge today. It seems to me that the first thing we need to remember about Jesus is that he was a Jew and for Jews salvation does not and has not ever really meant the sort of pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die happily, ever after idea that post-Nicene doctrine has both encouraged and eventually insisted upon. Anabaptists have long died challenging such ideas. What if we were to challenge this one today? What if embraced the sort of salvation that Jesus the Jew probably understood as the same sort of liberation that God has brought to Israel when he received his name after wrestling that angel? What if we taught and sought a salvation of the oppressed and downtrodden like the freedom that the Hebrews knew in the Exodus?

Just a thought, and one you stirred up, so thank you.

And peace to you – always – my brother.

John Wierwille
Pastoral Elder
Berea Mennonite Church
Atlanta, GA