A Doctrine of Salvation for the Turning of the Year

A post about Systematic Theology may not be traditional for the last day of 2023.  But it's what's on my mind.  My seminary professors have until January 6 to turn in grades, and while I've wanted the feedback, I haven't been as anxious as some years--perhaps because I have fewer classes for this term.  

Yesterday I was thrilled to find out I got a 58/60 on my Systematic Theology final paper; at first I had a slight panic attack because I thought I got a 58/100, which would have been quite a blow.  Happily, it only took me 16 seconds to realize that I had made an A, not an F.  The paper counts for 60% of my grade, and the midterm paper counts for 40% of my grade; unlike other classes I've taken, there was much that could go wrong with so much riding on so few papers and a topic that was less familiar to me.  I've done a lot of theology writing, but very little that is systematic.

To be honest, I'm not sure I'm doing systematic theology still.  I had to show that I understood what we'd been talking about throughout the semester, and I had to refer to theologians and to passages from the Bible.  On the morning of the day that it was due, I worried that I should have organized it differently, but I also realized that if I had, it wouldn't have been as balanced, and I risked looking like I didn't know what I was supposed to know.  So I left it alone, while at the same time worrying that there were some doctrines that I had completely missed.

When I got my grade yesterday, my first impulse was to go back to read the paper again, for the first time since I turned it in on December 14.  I'm really impressed with the ending, and since my grade is in, let me post it here.  I think it gives a hopeful note as one difficult year comes to a close and another year, likely to be even more difficult, begins:

But here is where soteriology [doctrine of salvation] gives me hope. We have seen God overcome one of history’s huge domination systems, the Roman empire. Christ was killed by the Roman empire, in a brutalizing death designed to humiliate and to keep the population terrified of resisting. In The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions, Moltmann points out that under Roman law, “crucifixion was the punishment designed to deter rebels against the political order of the Roman empire, or the social order of Roman slave-owning society” (p. 163). Crucifixion was a death designed for those who were a threat to the state, which tells us how the empire saw Christ’s message, as a threat to empire. We can argue about how Jesus was raised from the dead (did God the Creator raise him? Did God the Spirit?); the Nicene Creed doesn’t tell us the particulars of the process, but all of our creeds assure us that resurrection happened to the physical body in a physical way.

Throughout human history, we’ve been at a similar crossroad, where it looks like the powers of earthly empire will prevail. But we’ve also seen that when people who believe in resurrection work together, the results can be surprising and empire disrupting.

So I will keep working for both human rights and the preservation of the planet. I believe in the Triune God who is making all things new (Revelation 21: 5). I believe in the Triune God who led people from slavery (Exodus) and who can raise the dead, both the literal dead, like Lazarus and Jesus, and the vast populations who are spiritually dead. In logical terms, it’s hard for me to imagine how God comes to our chaos and cures it all. In spiritual terms, I remember that God is the one who crafted it all from the beginning, and I trust that the Triune God has the blueprints and the plan.