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The Breadth of Salvation: Rediscovering the Fullness of God’s Saving Work
Tom Greggs
Baker Academic (2020). 144 pp.
For most of my Christian life I have sought—from my Baptist, moderately Reformed, evangelical perspective—to understand the Bible’s teaching on the relationship between God’s universal and particular saving work, that is, what God has done to save all and what God does in applying salvation to some. I have done this academically (primarily in the areas of the intent and extent of the atonement), but even more as a pastor, as I’m convinced that the way we understand this relationship impacts our understanding of the gospel, the church, and how we should minister and witness the gospel of Jesus Christ to the world. Throughout church history there has been a tendency either to overemphasize God’s universal saving work to the detriment of his particular saving work, or vice-versa, and denominations and believers today continue to do the same thing in both ways. In my church and academic circles, I have found the struggle to be how to appreciate God’s universal saving work without embracing universalism, often with the result that his universal saving work is either misunderstood or deemphasized.
Tom Greggs, the Marischal Chair of Divinity at the University of Aberdeen, recognizes this same struggle, and it has been a major area of his research and writing throughout his career, beginning with his work on Barth, Origen, and universal salvation. The Breadth of Salvation is a brief work seeking to counter and correct views of salvation and God’s grace that are too narrow and limiting, keeping us from grasping all that God is doing in the church and in the world. Its four chapters explore the breadth of the ways that we can model and understand salvation, the breadth of salvation in the church and Christian relationships, the breadth of salvation’s scope and God’s grace for the world, and the breadth of repentance, or how people respond to the saving grace of God. Greggs is an evangelical Methodist and appeals to his church and ministry experience in his writing.
The first chapter illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of the entire book. The focus of the chapter is the breadth of imagery in Scripture describing God’s salvation in Jesus Christ, and the corresponding breadth of theological models of the atonement. Greggs has two concerns: that too narrow a focus on only one image or one model of salvation can cause us to miss what the other images and models could teach us, and that such a narrow focus can cause us to act as if the model itself and not Jesus Christ in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension is the basis of salvation. He makes his case with a brief explanation of what theologies of the atonement are meant to do, which is to point to the one in Scripture who alone saves us, highlighting the work of John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas as examples of theologians who do this. He then surveys several biblical images of salvation and the theological models of the atonement built upon those images, demonstrating how none of them capture all of what God is doing in salvation. He ends the chapter with an explanation of the biblical narrative of Jesus’s passion that actually saves us, the gospel itself, showing how it cannot be reduced to a single model or image.
Greggs’s concerns in this chapter are legitimate. Too narrow a focus on one biblical image of salvation to the exclusion of others can cause us to miss all of God’s purposes in salvation, and perhaps unwittingly even limit his grace. Models of the atonement have been presented as the gospel themselves instead of focusing on the actual events of Jesus’ life, death, burial, and resurrection. However, Greggs never offers concrete examples of how this has happened or comes right out and says exactly who he is critiquing. Greggs’s emphasis on the breadth of the Bible’s imagery describing salvation is helpful and thought-provoking, as are his explanations of the biblical truth present in each atonement model. However, Greggs treats the breadth of the biblical images and the multiplication of theological models as if they are the same thing, generalizing when more nuance would be appropriate. He emphasizes the need to see both images and models as complimentary to one another, highlighting different aspects of salvation. Certainly, the biblical images are all necessary and complementary, but this is not necessarily true with the theological models, no matter how historic or influential they are. He does acknowledge that some models might be more helpful than others but doesn’t demonstrate this. As I read, each section left me wanting more, and my takeaway was that this chapter alone could have been a book (a book I would gladly read!).
Similar strengths and weaknesses persist throughout the remaining chapters. Chapter two’s emphasis, on living out salvation as the church, our Spirit-filled humanity as the body of Christ, is much-needed and deserves a much longer treatment. Chapter three has some excellent reflections on understanding how God’s grace is at work throughout the world, but also veers too close to universalism. Greggs repeatedly clarifies he is not a universalist but does not take the time to adequately respond to concerns of how his positions could lead there. Chapter four offers some helpful thoughts on repentance and the nature of the gospel in the Gospels, but also raises some provocative questions that are not answered. The book doesn’t mean to be polemical, and it is clearly an introduction to these vast topics, but each chapter left me with unanswered questions, wanting more. Nevertheless, it is a thought-provoking, ecclesial work that will help sharpen your thinking about the gospel and God’s grace while helping you to ask the right questions on how the universal and particular saving work of God relate to one another.
Gary L. Shultz, Jr. is the Senior Pastor of First Baptist Church of Tallahassee in Tallahassee, FL. He holds a PhD in Systematic Theology from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and is a member of the St. John Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
