Growing up, I heard the standard, Protestant Christianese from pastors, youth workers, Sunday School teachers and church leaders. Repeat it with me:
You need a personal relationship with Jesus Christ... You need to accept him into your heart. Recite this prayer with me...As much as this sounds like Standard Operating Procedure for the lifelong protestant evangelical, an unbiased look at scriptures and the words of Jesus might make us rethink that paradigm.
Still, to me, everything in that formula sounds good. A personal relationship with the Son of God. "Accept" him into my life, surrender to him. Sure, sounds fine, maybe even theologically sound. What's not to like? All that is exactly what must be done to become a "Christian," right?
But where do we find any of that language in the Bible?
In
Matthew 19, when Jesus was done telling the rich young man that he must sell all of his possessions and give to the poor, the disciples asked, "Who then can be saved?"
Jesus' initial answer was cryptic, but in verse 29, he says,
And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.
In
Mark 16:16 (which, incidentally, was not in the earliest and most reliable manuscripts), Jesus tells the disciples after his resurrection:
Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.
Of course, this is also the same passage that he said,
And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.
That could get us into a whole 'nother discussion, but for now, we'll leave it be.
When Peter addressed the crowd
at Pentecost, he said,
... everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
One would be hard pressed to find the entire notion of a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" and "accepting him into my heart" in the scriptures. We could say it's inferred, and that it's just current language for the same basic scriptural concepts that have been there all along.
My guess would be that the "accepting him into our heart" and "personal relationship" language is a fairly recept concept, perhaps even a 19th or 20th century evangelical construct.
Am I wrong?
I have no idea. Someone with more knowledge will correct me anyways, so there's no point in me doing the research.
A lot of this goes back to our evangelical
eschatological focus -- the Only Important Thing is what we must do to escape the fires of hell, after all. Giving people an easy-to-understand formula to get into heaven is the key. People want a personable God. People want
relationships. Matters of the heart are important to people.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not necessarily saying that all of the ideas I've heard my whole life are necessarily
wrong. Even if there isn't specific Biblical language to match, I have no doubt that our God IS a God that desires a relationship with us. It's called love.
But really... What must I do to be saved? And were the original people that asked that question using that language in an entirely different way than we do today? When we say "saved," our minds automatically think of fiery pits of hell.
Were first century Jews really thinking along those same lines?
Let me just shed a tear here on Java Jesus for Emily Sander. I never heard of her before I read the gleeful, smirking stories in the press: "Missing College Student May Have Had a Secret Life as a Porn Star." But, she had a secret life as a human being, too. It didn't matter that much, though, until they found out we could see her boobs on the internet. Still I see a sparkling specimen of humanity, a kid who just yesterday was climbing a tree or riding a bike, or writing on her backpack. In the Image of God.