It's In the Code Ep. 64: “You Have to Get ‘Em Lost to Get ‘Em Saved”
“You Have to Get ‘Em Lost to Get ‘Em Saved”
What can it possibly mean when some Christians say that you “have to get people lost before you can get them saved?” What does it mean to be “lost”? What does it mean to be “saved”? And what are some of the effects of this language? Is it just a way of summarizing basic Christian teachings, or does it have further-reaching, possibly significant, negative effects? Dan tackles these issues in this week’s episode.
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Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, and I am your host.
As always, delighted and privileged to be here with you, and as always, I want to begin by thanking those of you who support us in so many ways.
Those of you who email me, danielmillerswaj, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com, with ideas, comments, feedback about this series.
The patrons who support us.
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All of you who help us in so many ways.
We are self-funded.
We put out content three times a week and we can't do it without you.
So thank you all so much for that.
I want to dive in today.
I want to note the last episode that I did was on the language of codes.
This whole notion of it's in the code and what that means.
I got some great feedback on that.
I may need to do another episode to revisit some of that.
A lot of you just great comments, questions, wanting to know more about that.
But I need some time to sort of collect my thoughts on that.
But I wanted to thank everybody for the Today what I want to pick up is another topic that as always comes from all of you and it's one that I hadn't really thought of until I go back through the notes that I take and oftentimes I'll note topics that come up and like maybe who mentioned them or when they sent the email or whatever I'll go back and look and you know sometimes you see these patterns that emerge over time and I hadn't really caught this one.
I was looking at these emails and I was like, oh yeah, I do remember that from my time in the evangelical world.
I do remember this way of speaking.
And one listener captured the idea that we're going to talk about today really effective in a slogan that I think just hadn't been on the front of my mind.
But it's a slogan I heard in sermons.
It's a slogan that I heard in youth group.
It's a slogan that I heard from other pastors and seminarians when I was a pastor in an evangelical church.
And it's a form that I actually used to argue about with others when I was a pastor.
Because even when I lived within the evangelical world and I was a pastor, I came to reject this way of thinking.
But it's the idea, and this is the slogan, that you have to get them lost to get them saved.
Or you have to get them lost before you can get them saved, or something like that.
In the more sophisticated way, in case somebody hears this and is like, what is that supposed to mean?
The more sort of theological way of saying it is that people have to know that they're sinners.
They have to know that they're fallen.
They have to know that they're lost before they will accept or can accept Christian salvation.
That's the theological meaning.
And as I say, I've heard from a lot of people who talked about this.
You know, you have to know you're lost before you can be found.
People have to know that they're lost before they can be saved and so on.
Okay.
And looking at this from the outside, so to speak, it really is a strange kind of phrase.
I was talking about this with a colleague recently, somebody I work with who's interested in the podcast and has listened to some episodes, and I was talking about this topic and that I was thinking about doing this in the upcoming episode, and they were like, what in the world does that mean, right?
And if you didn't grow up with that phrase, you might well have the same reaction, and not all Christians talk this way.
Okay?
Once again, we're primarily talking about a certain kind of Christianity that's going to use this sort of language.
Okay?
So I want to do, like I often do, I want to sort of start with the basics.
What does this mean?
What is it supposed to mean?
What is its sort of basic fundamental surface meaning?
Okay?
And here's how it goes.
This is like a quick, I don't know, almost theology thumbnail sketch.
Within most forms of traditional Christianity, and certainly most forms of contemporary American Christianity, here's the human condition.
Okay, this is what we're confronted with.
The first is that human beings are inherently and without exception Fallen beings.
What does that mean?
In Christian terms, it means we are sinful by nature.
Well, what does that mean?
It means that we depart from God's will, we have violated God's laws, and we are unable to live up to God's standards.
And it is really crucial to know That this is understood to be a universal human condition.
There are no exceptions to this.
And as the Apostle Paul says in the New Testament, within this view the wages of sin are death.
In other words, somebody is condemned to eternal quote-unquote death because they exist outside of God's will, they violated God's will, and so forth.
What does that mean?
It means that they are condemned to eternal damnation, to eternal condemnation.
And again, within traditional Christian thought, there is a place, hell, that people go to to suffer eternal torment because of this human condition.
Okay?
And this is what God's justice demands.
People say, well, this isn't fair.
That's not right.
The logic is that God is completely pure and righteous and holy and so forth and completely just and he can't abide sin.
And so because we are sinful beings, our just desserts are eternal condemnation.
But The just God that demands this is also a loving God who loves human beings, desires to rescue human beings from this fate.
So, enter Jesus.
And again, within this traditional model, Jesus is divine, second person of the Trinity, the Eternal Son, and so forth.
Who becomes a human being to live a perfect, sinless life.
The only human being to do so, the only human being who doesn't sin, who isn't fallen, who isn't separated from God's love because of violating divine commands and so forth, is Jesus.
And yet, he willfully pays the penalty for human sins and is executed on the cross.
Okay?
And again, in traditional Christian theology, he is executed on the cross.
He's raised from the dead on the Thursday after his crucifixion.
Excuse me, the third day.
It sounded like I said the Thursday after his crucifixion, which is not correct.
The third day after his crucifixion, thereby, again in Christian parlance, conquering death, the consequence of sin.
So in other words, Jesus takes on the debt, the sinfulness, what have you, of the world, bears a penalty that he did not himself deserve to bear, so that we don't have to.
And so now, human beings who accept this gift that is being offered through Jesus' sacrifice, That's the thumbnail sketch.
Certainly, different Christian traditions have, as long as there have been Christians, expressed varying understandings of different parts of that story that I just told, that basic theological account.
This is not a theology podcast.
It's not the place to get into all of that.
I just want you to know that I know that, okay?
And in the contemporary American context that, you know, is really the focus of this show, there are certainly Christian expressions, expressions of Christianity, theological positions that would not advocate elements of this story.
And there are certainly parts of Christianity that might, but sort of wouldn't advertise elements of this story.
There are parts, for example, where, you know, they really do believe that if you're not a Christian, you're going to suffer eternal condemnation and torment, but they might not sort of lead with that, so to speak.
Okay?
So this is this is not a story of what every Christian everywhere all the time has always thought or thinks and would always say, but it is a sketch of I think the core teachings of traditional Christianity and certainly the core teachings that a majority of kind of theologically aware American Christians would articulate.
But For our purposes today, the kinds of Christian communities that are likely to say something like, we have to get them lost to get them saved, they do hold this basic sketch of the traditional Christian model of salvation, right?
And the reason that's important is that within the framework, within this phrase, for them, the biggest obstacle to people accepting the salvation offered through Jesus of Nazareth's death and burial and resurrection, the reason people don't accept that, the reason for them that people aren't sort of leaping at this chance, is their failure to understand that they need that, that they need to be saved.
Within what we call theological anthropology, that is a theological account of the nature of the human person, part of the story of sinfulness is not just that we're sinful and fallen and estranged from God, it's that we're sort of deluded about this fact.
We're in denial about it, we don't see it, we're too prideful, we believe that we can do things on our own, and so forth, and sort of more...what?
I don't know what the word is.
More popular, lower forms of Christianity, less structured forms.
It might be because Satan is working to deceive us, where there's demonic influence hiding from us the fact that we are sinful and fallen and so forth.
But whatever that is, within this framework, The sort of central obstacle to human beings coming to accept this promise and this gift from God is that through our ignorance or our willfulness or our pride, we refuse to acknowledge that we need it.
Okay, so we reject this free offer of salvation.
I keep saying this free offer of salvation, by the way.
I'm going to come back to this notion of salvation being quote-unquote free.
We're going to pick up on that, pick back up on that in a few minutes.
And I know some of you, your ears twitch when you hear that word and you're like, but wait, wait, what about?
I hear the what about, we're going to come to it.
Okay.
But for now, the point is that people have to know that they need salvation.
And this is the basic meaning of the phrase.
What it means is that before people can become Christians, before they can be saved and accept salvation, they have to recognize that they need salvation.
They have to recognize that they're sinful and fallen, that they can't meet God's standard, that they exist under divine condemnation for this reason.
And so forth, okay?
The Christian game, as it were, can't get off the ground unless people realize that they need the salvation offered by God through Jesus of Nazareth.
So, when somebody says you've got to get them lost before you can get them found, what it means is you have to preach the gospel or, you know, tell the Christian truth in such a way that you emphasize that people are in fact lost and sinful and fallen and need salvation.
Before you can meaningfully offer that salvation to them through the message of Jesus, okay?
That's the basic idea.
Fairly straightforward, well-marketed, we might say.
The kinds of Christians that talk this way, again, tend to be the theologically conservative ones, and they're good.
They're good at, like, these nice rhetorical phrases and, like, single sentences that can capture a lot of nuance and meaning in a way that's sort of easy to package and pitch to somebody, okay?
That's the basic meaning.
Got to get them lost before you can get them saved.
Cool.
But as always, it's also more than just the basic meaning.
It's more than something that just encapsulates basic Christian thought.
It's also, it's a code.
It's a code that does more than that.
Okay?
If you're listening to this, you've heard me say before that bad theology hurts people, and this is one of the many examples, in my view, of bad theology that hurts people.
And the view articulated here and the arguments I used to have about it are, you know, one of the reasons why, again, I ultimately left this form of Christianity.
I had nothing to do with it anymore.
So let's talk about that.
That's what I want to pick up on for the last few minutes we got here.
I used the language a few minutes ago of God's free, quote-unquote, gift of salvation.
And the idea when Christians say that it's free, and the Christian word for this is that it's grace.
And you can think of like, you know, if you go somewhere and you get a gratis copy of a book, or you receive something gratis, it means by grace, it means free.
You get it sort of on the house, you don't have to pay for it.
And the idea in the Christian tradition is that human beings don't deserve God's salvation, they can't earn it on their own, so the fact that God offers it at all means that it's grace, it's a free gift.
Okay?
I grew up with this language, hearing about the free gift and the unconditional love of God and so forth, And this is what I think people don't often recognize about that, people within that community, though I talk to lots of people, you know, who have been there before who do, which is that I don't think in most of those Christian articulations that accept that traditional story, I don't think that it's really free or unconditional at all.
Instead, it's highly conditioned and it comes with tremendous strings attached.
The mere notion that it's not enough that God loves us and would forgive us and do all this stuff to reconcile us.
No, we have to acknowledge it and come to God in humility and so forth.
And you may say, well, that doesn't sound so bad.
Cool.
All right.
Whether it's bad or not, it's, it's not unconditional.
It's on the condition that you respond in the right way, that you have the right attitude and so forth.
Okay.
But the reason that matters to me is not just that it's disingenuous to say that it's unconditional free gift and so forth.
It's that it's so wrapped up in authority.
The issue of authority is always right there with this.
God doesn't love human beings enough to simply forgive and accept them no matter what.
And I hear the theologians now saying, well of course he can't, he's just and demands justice.
If you can find this giant loophole of becoming human and paying the sin, the debt for humans, if he can like bypass his own justice through his own actions in that way, I see no reason why God couldn't just say, you know what?
I love everybody, and no matter how deluded they are, no matter how self-centered, whatever, I accept them.
They don't even have to know that I've done it.
They don't have to come to me and say thank you.
It's a true gift, which means I want nothing in return.
No, God demands that we accept Him.
God demands that we love God.
God demands that we serve God.
In most versions of this theology, God demands that we recognize divine authority.
One must acknowledge the authority of God and explicitly bow to it.
Okay.
Now within Christian thought, they might say, well, you know, that's not so bad.
I get it.
Like that makes God kind of the ultimate cosmic or divine desperate, but God's all loving, God's benevolent and so forth.
And so God is sort of the ideal desperate.
So, you know, yes, it's wrapped up in divine authority, but God is pure love and so on and so forth.
So how bad an authority can that be?
Okay.
All right, I think that's a problematic view of God for lots of reasons.
I think the whole thing of defining God in terms of power and authority is bad theology, and I think it leads in a bad direction.
That's not what we're here to talk about.
But what concerns me is, let's say, okay, fine, yeah, that's true of God, but here's the deal.
When it comes to actually accepting salvation and becoming a Christian, we're not really dealing directly with God.
No matter what the Protestants say, who says that, you know, we have this unmediated access to God, we're dealing with people around us.
We're dealing with the church.
We're dealing with those who claim to speak in God's name, whether that's, you know, a friend or a relative who quote-unquote shares the gospel with us, gives us this message, whether it is a pastor of a church, whether it is, you know, the teachings of a denomination or whatever, we're dealing with human institutions.
And to submit to God is shown by submitting to them, to their authority.
And you've heard me say this before, because this is kind of a standard thing for me, is that we don't ever get to God, we get to these kinds of institutions, which means that all of this claim to submit to authority ultimately comes down to submitting to the authority of other human beings and all to human institutions.
And to say that the very human church has historically abused that authority, to say that the church continues to do so, would be a colossal understatement.
Right?
One of the things that I think the story of Christian history tells overall is that while this message of universal human sinfulness should have inculcated a strong sense of humility, Among those who are sort of tasked with spreading this Christian message, I think the dominant story has all too often been the opposite.
It created a social world where those who were given divine authority could wield it as they willed, And anybody who didn't submit to that could be punished on the grounds that what?
That they're sinful, fallen, and so forth.
It becomes the ideal mix for a kind of authoritarian human regime.
And this is why I think it's a theology that hurts people.
And I think to go back to our discussion about what it means in the code, this is in the source code.
This is sort of written in.
I don't think that you can actually fundamentally call that into question Unless you call into question the whole notion of authority, which means the notion of what God might be at the heart of it.
Again, that's a game we could play.
It's not the point of this podcast.
Okay?
I also think that this message, not only is it not free, not only does it have lots of strings attached, But it also hurts people, I think, needlessly.
And I mentioned earlier that I used to argue with people about this, that I rejected this way of speaking, even when I was within the evangelical world.
That was the pastor of a church.
And I remember conversations where I have with people and they would say something like this, you know, people have to know that they're lost before.
And I would say, you know what?
Like when I talk to people, this is me once upon a time talking as a Christian minister.
I lived in a city that was mostly full of non-Christians.
I spent a lot of my time with people who weren't Christian.
And you know, I said, I In my experience, most people don't think that they're all right.
The problems people have is that they know that they're not all right.
They know that they say things that hurt other people's feelings.
They know that they lack self-esteem because of bad things that have happened to them.
They know that, I don't know, maybe they had parents who were mean to them or yelled at them or were verbally abusive and they hated that and yet they find themselves saying things to their kids or their partner that they wish they didn't.
Or people do things that they think are unethical, and it keeps them up at night that they did it, and yet they feel trapped in these patterns.
In my experience, people knew, in Christian terms, they knew that they weren't morally upright or whatever.
They knew that they were quote-unquote sinful.
They wouldn't use those words, but they knew that.
What they needed was precisely the message of radical acceptance And a message of real hope that their lives could be different, that their lives could be better, that they were missing.
And in my view, that was something that I thought a kind of Christianity could provide, but not the kind that I had sort of grown up in and the kind that I was frankly participating in.
So what happened, I think, oftentimes is that this theology, whether well-intentioned or not, it became a message that sort of breaks people down further.
You take somebody who's already broken, who already has their own doubts about their moral goodness or their status, or they feel bad about the way they treat people that they love and so forth, and they don't understand why they do these things, and instead of helping, it sort of beats them down further, beats them down further, beats them down further, until they submit to an external authority that then will tell them, What they should do and how they should act.
It doesn't really fix them or help them figure themselves out.
It sort of tells them what to do.
It holds them in thrall.
So it just sort of breaks people and then controls them.
And this is one of the legacies that I encounter with my coaching clients.
A practitioner with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
And this is the sort of very interpersonal side of this that I see.
This legacy of this kind of message That I wrestle with with my clients.
So I got to wrap this up, but these are the issues why to me, you know, you have the, yes, here's the basic theological meaning, but I'm, as always, I'm interested in, you know, what does this actually do?
It comes down to authority.
And I think it also raises some really basic psychological and mental health issues, right?
If you continually tell people they're terrible, it will have a negative effect on them.
It will hurt them.
And to me there is something pernicious about inflicting additional pain on people all in the name of then somehow telling them what they need or how you can take that pain away.
It's an effect that I think is written into, as I say, the source code of this kind of Christian thought.
I feel obligated to say again, there are other articulations of Christianity that do not accept this.
They take on board many of the same insights that I'm articulating.
Many of them grew out of traditions that had the same kind of disillusionment I'm describing and they took a different shape.
But that's where I'm at with this notion.
So, the idea of you've got to get them saved, or excuse me, you've got to get them lost to get them saved.
People have to know they're sinful and fallen or they won't become Christians.
It's the basic meaning.
The issues I have is that I think it's also a code that operates on people in such a way as to render them subject to external authority.
I think it inherently becomes a license for the misuse of that authority.
And I think it's just morally and psychologically damaging in a way that cuts against the grain of the Christian claim to offer people hope and salvation.
Got a sign off here episodes running longer than most but again, thank you to everybody who listens Please keep the ideas coming Daniel Miller swag Daniel Miller SW AJ at gmail.com Love the ideas insights Interesting pushback from folks, whatever you've got.
Let me have it.
I love to hear it.
Thank you for listening And as always be well until we meet again
