Everywhere you look in the 21st Century, someone is trying to sell you a short-term solution to a long-term problem. It is no wonder, then, that our churches should sometimes be tempted to do likewise. In my last piece for Mere Orthodoxy, Be Perfect, I suggested that the biblical notion of “perfection” means not so much “flawlessness” as “finished-ness,” that salvation means more than a blank-slate transformation brought on by a conversion experience, and that believers are not merely magically transferred to heaven when they die. Rather, they mature into perfected citizens of the New Jerusalem as a mustard seed becomes a tree. “I am aware that this defies modern imagination,” I wrote.
Our push-button culture has tricked us into believing in a push-button salvation. But as the story of the Bible (and the story of our lives!) slowly and painfully reveal, no such salvation is available to us. If, by the sudden flip of a switch or wave of a wand, all creation were made magically flawless, that might seem wonderful at first. But it would be a fragile salvation, prone to another fall (and then another and another).
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