Why No One in the Bible Accepted Jesus Christ as their Personal Lord and Savior”
April 7, 2024 Dr. Roger Ray
I grew up in rural Kentucky in a household that was on the lower end of the middle class. My parents had grown up in relative poverty on Kentucky farms. My parents raised their four children eating what poor farmers in early 20th century Kentucky ate, which mostly consisted of foods that could be preserved without refrigeration.
A staple food in my home was fried corn bread. I had to go buy the corn meal and butter milk necessary to make these few pieces. Honestly, I had not made it in years, but my mother made it every day. Coarse stone ground corn meal, with a dash of baking soda, scalded with boiling water and then stirred vigorously while adding butter milk until it made a kind of batter. This kind of corn bread came out looking like a pancake. We had this kind of corn bread at one or two meals a day and there was usually a short stack of cornbread by the stove for anyone who got hungry between meals. You could put butter and sugar on it, crumble it into a glass of buttermilk, or just slather it up with peanut butter, but at most meals, we had it covered in pinto beans.
This was filling and, if you are going to go out and chop firewood for the rest of the day, beans and cornbread will keep you going until it kills you with clogged arteries. In most of Central America, beans and rice is the daily meal of the poor.
During my many work trips to Nicaragua, our hotel staff would make eggs and ham for us in the mornings but there was always a large platter of rice and beans because they couldn’t imagine a meal without it. In fact, I would sometimes bring some of our workers from the villages where we were building houses to town with me to treat them to a meal that would be unique to them. If you took them to a pizza place and asked them what they wanted on their pizza, they would give a strange look and reply, “Gallo Pinto,” beans and rice, because they would never have even heard of peperoni or sausage. Their diets consisted of rice and beans and what might be found in the jungle: plantain, bananas, iguana, and what one of my friends called, “a lost chicken.”
I lived in Asia last winter, and there, a friend will not ask you if you have had dinner, or if you have eaten, they will ask you, “Did you eat rice today?” Rice is such an assumed stand-alone meal among the poor, that to have eaten rice is what it means to have had food that day.
We tend to normalize our personal experience to the point that at the age of 12, I couldn’t imagine that every house across the country did not have fried corn bread every day. My friends in rural Nicaragua couldn’t imagine that anyone didn’t eat beans and rice every day. When you don’t know anything else, you assume that everyone is more or less like you. My family never ate in restaurants, but I assumed that the people who did were going there to eat cornbread and beans, just like my friends in Asia assume that most meals in most homes around the globe consists of a bowl of rice.
We form views of what marriage is based on our parents’ marriage. And we assume that even though our friends all went to different churches, we assumed that they all believed basically the same things we did. The Catholics had more statues than we had stained glass windows, but they had the same Bible and we assumed that we were all just trying to get into heaven.
As I gradually changed from being a Christian who was trying to get into heaven into a spiritual person who didn’t believe in heaven or hell, I increasingly realized that I didn’t have very many peers in the world. People can understand it if they think you are an atheist, but not many people have a place in their brain for a pastor who doesn’t believe in souls, an afterlife, or a supernatural theistic god who answers prayers. For most people, everyone else in the world either believes the way that they do, or they don’t believe anything at all.
We tend to globalize our personal experience. “Everyone is more or less like me, or, at least, they should be.” Let me give you an illustration from the recent news about the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore. Sadly, like almost everything else that happens these days, the collapse of the bridge spawned a sudden outbreak of new conspiracy theories about illegal immigrants or terrorism, but most of us accepted that a very big, heavy ship, had a mechanical failure, hit the bridge and brought it down. A tragic event in both loss of life and loss of a major bridge and harbor for several years.
The bridge will certainly be rebuilt, though it make take a few years to finish, but have you wondered if the new bridge will also be named for Francis Scott Key?
Key was a lawyer and poet in Baltimore and he wrote the Star Spangled Banner during the war of 1812, jubilantly celebrating the American victory in a battle he witnessed. But there were critics of hi poem as soon as it was published because Key was a slave owner. Critics said that the United States was more like “the of the free and the home of the oppressed.”
Like a lot of people of his day, he was critical of the worst cruelties of slavery but he kept several of his own and he thought of himself as being a good slave owner. He was, in fact, a very ardent member of the Episcopal Church. He adamantly opposed the abolition of slavery and in fact, the third verse of the Star Spangled Banner, a verse you never heard sung at baseball games, says:
No refuge could save the hireling and slave,
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.
This verse was a special derision of slaves and indentured servants who were fighting for the British so that they could be freed. Key assures them, in this verse, that they will find their graves before they find freedom. The Star Spangled Banner became our national anthem in the 1930’s in some of the worst of our history of Jim Crow laws, segregation, lynching, and racism. So, his connection to slavery and his opposition to abolition wasn’t much of a problem for white folks in the 1930’s and not enough of an issue to be seriously considered in the 1970’s when the bridge was built, but what about now?
Now Maryland has a black governor. Baltimore has a black mayor. Blacks outnumber whites, 2 to 1 in Baltimore. Shouldn’t we come up with a better name for a bridge in that harbor?
You know, Fredrick Douglas was a contemporary of Key’s, and he is from Baltimore.
So was Billie Holliday, and Justice Thurgood Marshall, for goodness sakes, Ta-Nehisi Coates is from Baltimore!
But see, even knowing that Francis Scott Key was a slave owner who fought against abolition, and advocated for freed slaves to be immediately shipped out of the United States and sent back to Africa, even if you didn’t know it before just this moment, do you, if you are white, still struggle with not naming the new bridge after Francis Scott Key? And while I am at it, why couldn’t “This Land is Your Land” become our national anthem. Just because white people were insensitive jerks in the 1930’s doesn’t mean that we have to be in 2024, or does it? Are we able to change our views in light of new information?
It makes us uncomfortable to learn that Christopher Columbus funded his new world exploration by capturing Indians and taking them back to Europe as slaves. And illustrations like this one don’t even touch the fact that many were young women and boys who were taken to be sex slaves which is why many of you proudly announce that your “23 and me” results show that you are 2% native American… it isn’t a good story and some of your ancestors were horrible people. When we didn’t know the truth about Columbus, we could feel one way about his holiday, and now that we know, not many of us are willing to honor such a person.
It is different when you didn’t know, it is something else when you know, and you don’t care. The famous psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, defines “evil” as being “militant ignorance.” And this is especially true in my field, which, if you have forgotten, is religion.
It is one thing to globalize your belief that everyone else eats what you eat, or to believe that Francis Scott Key was a noble patriot who wrote the song we sing at baseball games, though I hope that you can move past that; but when it comes to religion, most of us were raised to reject any new or different ideas. We were taught that it is a virtue to believe, by blind faith, things that just are not true.
Look, I live alone, as I have for many years, and so, social media becomes the place where I go for conversation about things that I am excited about, or what I am mad about, or what fills me with wonder. A couple of weeks ago, in a fit of some personal disappointment with public religion, I wrote this post:
Two times in the past week, very educated, professional, people here in Florida have summed up the goal of religion as being coming to "know Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior." They say this in order to dismiss any religious differences, at least among Christian denominations and sects.
I pointed out to both of them that the word "personal" does not appear anywhere in the Bible, not in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament and the concept of "accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior" was a creation of late 19th century revivalism in the 2nd Great Awakening based on a poor reading of John Calvin. They both just blinked and pretended that I had not said anything.
I pressed the point, saying, "No one in the Bible was described as having accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior." Again, these two very self-confident "scientists" made it clear that they still believed that the essence of the faith journey is just what they had heard in these echoes of 19th century revival preachers.
In both instances, I tried to stress that the message of Jesus was about a kind of radical compassion and that to be "followers of the Way," as early Christians seem to have referenced themselves, was to embody that message of radical compassion (See Matthew 25:31-46). Again, this statement of the obvious had no effect.
When it comes to religion, people's critical thinking skills often just go on vacation. They will believe something that is clearly not true because, as existentialists sometimes say, "it pleases me to do so," but in a matter as important as one's faith, why would anyone reject reason and especially reject contrary evidence????
This was just a Friday night rant for me but it turned out to be new information for a whole lot of people who had no idea that the word “personal” is not in the Bible and that no one in the Bible got saved by accepting Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior. But what really toasts my noodle is when people are made aware of this bit of theological insight, they insist upon holding onto a form of Christianity that was invented by nearly illiterate revivalist preachers in the American west in the late 1800’s. Why call it Christianity if you know that it is a formulaic religion that Jesus, Peter, Paul, James, and John wouldn’t recognize and surely wouldn’t approve of?
It has been a long time since I have claimed to specifically be a Christian, but if I did, I think that I would want the real thing and not some snake oil salesman version of a once laudable faith!
I thought my career had long ago moved away from the Biblical word studies that I talked about in the 1980’s, but if you’ll allow me one further point: the word “salvation” in the Bible never meant your one-way ticket on the soul train to heaven. The word is σωτηρία (sotiria), which means, “to be made whole.”
Even scholarly translations of the New Testament often get this wrong. In Mark, chapter 10, when Jesus heals blind Bartimaeus, the text reads, “Go, your faith as made you well.” But in Greek, it isn’t “made you well,” it is “sotiria.” But in the passage about the sinful woman in the house of the pharisee in Luke, chapter 7, when he forgives her of her sins, he is quoted as saying, “Go, your faith has saved you,” but the word in Greek is the same. It is the prejudice of the translators who think that illicit sex is a sin that needs to be forgiven and blindness is a medical condition that needs to be fixed. In the language of the New Testament, they are the same. Salvation has to do with healing your brokenness, it has nothing to do with going to heaven. I could get excited about talking about salvation if people knew what the world meant. Americans have turned Christianity and Judaism and I suspect that the same has infected Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, with a notion of personal life enhancement and after-life fire insurance. Forgive me for being so blunt, but that is embarrassingly stupid. We Unitarians are fond of saying that “love is our religion” but that is not a baptized form of narcissism. The point is that we love other people. Remember the song, “red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight”? Honestly, didn’t you catch the meaning of this in kindergarten? We’ve covered a lot of ground today: Everyone doesn’t eat friend cornbread or rice every day. Neither Francis Scott Key nor Christopher Columbus were noble historical figures. And Jesus never asked anyone to accept him as their personal lord and savior. He did, evidently, ask you to love your enemies and forgive those who have wronged you. His message was self-evidently a message about showing radical compassion in how you live your life which should be obvious from everything he is reported to have said! And not that you asked, but if there was a hell, for me that would be having to spend eternity with the people who think they deserve to be in heaven.
But maybe that’s just me.
