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First, the proclamation that the Gospel is about a personal and life-changing relationship with Jesus Christ is at the heart of Evangelicalism. Nevertheless, legal and moral paradigms cloud this vision of salvation. Consider the typical evangelical evangelism narrative. It begins with a legal predicament cast in terms of a heavenly arraignment. Sinful humans stand guilty before a holy God and divine law and cannot make recompense for their infractions. They are without hope and doomed to eternal punishment until Jesus Christ fulfills the precepts of God’s law and suffers punishment in the place of the sinful humans, thereby assuaging the wrathful deity. According to this image, the essence of salvation is a legal exchange in which the sinner receives a pardon of sin and the conferral of Christ’s righteousness before the divine tribunal. The second part of the narrative is a personal relationship with Jesus that quickly reduces to a set of spiritual protocols and social-lifestyle expectations. The story line of evangelical redemption, then, is to trust that Jesus’s suffering on the cross mollified God’s wrath and then to conform one’s moral and spiritual life to his. The classic doctrines that express the legal and moral plot lines of redemption are justification and sanctification. In place of the legal and moral archetypes, chapter 5 reorients evangelical theology on a relational and transformational paradigm by outlining a vision of redemption as a transformative relationship with the trinitarian God.
Second, with roots in Fundamentalism and charged with an appropriate missionary zeal, Evangelicals traditionally have held neither much hope for the fate of the unevangelized nor positive attitudes toward non-Christian religions. In 1992, John Sanders remarked that “even though the belief that no unevangelized person can be saved is not in the doctrinal statements of many evangelical institutions, it can be safely said that it is for many an unwritten article of faith.”10 Though the work of Sanders and other scholars such as Clark Pinnock has opened up discussions of this issue in evangelical quarters, it remains a theological minefield for evangelical scholars.11 For instance, the well-known and respected New Testament scholar D. A. Carson hardly engendered respectful dialogue when he suggested that the question of whether some people participate in Christ’s salvation without explicit faith is “perverse” and