Redeeming Our Fathers & Mothers

How Salvation Works Backwards

Four Generations, Omaha, NE circa 1924, from Haley Morgan

One recurring question I have come across in my years of ministry and teaching is this:

What about my dying or deceased loved ones who say they don’t have any faith? Is there hope for them?

Another question often comes up along with this, and though it might not seem directly related, I think it is:

What about all the people who lived before Christ came? How does salvation work for them? How can they be saved?

In what follows, I want to address these two questions by means of a very prominent theme in Scripture to which modern eyes are often blind, namely, the deep, bi-directional relationship between ancestors and descendants.

In the Bible’s constant emphasis on names and genealogies, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, we’ve been given a deeper well than we might suppose. The lists and connections between families and tribes throughout Scripture are not arbitrary. They are rather a glimpse into the surprisingly organic, embodied, and participatory means by which God is redeeming the world and perfecting his people. That is, they are a glimpse into God’s “long game.” Full disclosure, they may not be all that helpful in furthering our speculative theories about “what happens when we die,” but that is not typically what the Bible is trying to do. The biblical authors do not tend to give us theories about eternity, but rather show us how eternity touches down in the present moment and how we can participate in it through faith. And that is what I hope to do here.

One major barrier that keeps modern readers from appreciating the centrality of ancestors and descendants in the Bible’s story of salvation is that we tend to interpret things increasingly through a kind of “blank-slate” framework. We are living in a push-button cultural moment, in which everyone is seeking and selling simple, short-term solutions to complex, long-term problems. And this mentality has seeped into our understanding of God. To make things even more confusing, when we bring this blank-slate, push-button lens to the New Testament, we find, at first, that it seems to work quite well. The language of “born again” and “the old is gone; the new has come” appears to offer exactly the quick-fix we’re looking for. In a recent article, I called this tendency a “blank-slate theology.”

In a blank-slate theology, new creation works as a kind of wholesale replacement of the old. Christ came not so much to fulfill Scripture as to override it. […] In this view, the genealogies in the beginning of the Gospels seem out of place except as reminders of the old, crude order of things, which has been rendered obsolete by the work of Christ. Likewise, as believers in a blank-slate gospel, our own family trees exist only as reminders of what must be left behind and overcome. We were people born into a certain family in a certain place and culture, with our own natural talents, desires, weaknesses, and struggles. But now, we have been born again. Our second birth has little or nothing to do with the first.

But things are not quite as they seem. Yes, we must be born again. But, as it turns out, being “born again” has quite a bit of continuity with our first birth. Our new faith does not magically transform us into fully mature adults, completely equipped to receive our new inheritance. Nor does it automatically strip us of all the weaknesses and organic hindrances—even the generational curses—which came with our first birth. No, being “born again” means becoming like a child again, with all the excitement and all the frustration that that entails, yet with a new trajectory. To inherit the kingdom means joining one’s self to a reality that sometimes looks more like a mustard seed than a tree, more like a cross than a crown. The old is gone and the new has come, but the new is a patient, growing thing. The new creation promises new bodies, not a mere escape from our bodies. And that portends a seemingly inconvenient continuity between what was and what shall be, between our earthly fathers and mothers and our heavenly Father. It means, for instance, that our resurrection bodies, like the body of our Savior, may bear the scars of our former lives, and that this will not make them any less new. I call this a “theology of continuity.”

In a theology of continuity, new creation is understood not so much as replacement of the old, but as its redemption and fulfillment. Yes, the old must die. But it dies in order to become all that it was meant to be. Creation waits, groaning with the pains of childbirth, because God actually likes what he made. It was good when he made it, and it shall be good again—even better than it was—yet through death and resurrection. The genealogies at the beginning of the Gospels are there to remind us that we are living in one continuous story in which God has been working all along, and that Christ has entered the picture not merely to overcome the imperfect legacies of his ancestors but to redeem and fulfill them. Likewise, we who are born again in Christ share in his work of redeeming the bodies and lineages we were given.

This “theology of continuity” is what I want to explore further here. How can this framework help us to consider the salvation of people who lived before Jesus came? What can it tell us of the redemption of our own fathers and mothers? This is where a theology of continuity gets a bit…mind-blowing.

Normally, we modern believers conceive of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as a kind of blank-slate event, which transforms our ability to access the Father, for all who believed at the cross and afterwards. And this is true, but there is more to the story. Recall the genealogies at the beginning of Matthew and Luke. Why draw attention to Jesus’s connection to Adam, Abraham, Jacob, and David (to name a few)? Because the gospel is more than a story of Jesus merely overshadowing and replacing his ancestors. Jesus fulfills the legacy of his ancestors, perfecting the work of the people of God from beginning to end. It’s not, “Adam failed. Israel failed. David failed. But now we have a new guy.” No. That may be true, to some extent, but it’s not true enough. The story is rather, “Adam was not perfect and could not fulfill his role, but now we have the perfect Adam. Israel was not perfect, but now we have the perfect Israel. David was not perfect, but now we have the perfect David. The Son of David has redeemed David for us, and therefore all things can be made new.” The power of Christ works backwards as well as forwards. Just as blessings are passed down from father to son, redemption is passed up from son to father.

This is why St. Paul refers to Christ as the second Adam, the new Adam, and the last Adam. Because, for Paul, Christ is not merely a blank-slate solution to an age-old problem, deus ex machina. He is Adam…redeemed. Likewise, he is Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Judah, David, Solomon, etc. They are in him and he has fulfilled and redeemed them. He has perfected their role, their purpose, their faithfulness, their life, once for all. Thus, the writer of Hebrews can celebrate the faith of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the people of God without mourning their obvious shortcomings, because he sees them through the lens of the risen Christ.

Now, in a mysterious way that cannot be fully pinned down, what is true of Christ is also true of us, if we are in him. Here’s what I mean…

By the powers of both nature and nurture, your parents are in you. Through the lens of a more ancient perspective, it might be said that you are their body in the world. Even from a modern scientific perspective, we are discovering more and more how true this is. In a very real way, your parents live on in you.

Now, let’s imagine that your father has died, and that your relationship with him before he died was, well, problematic. He wasn’t a very good father. In fact, he wasn’t a very good man. It’s a complicated story. Perhaps he had faith of some kind, but overall he left a pretty poor legacy, one that did not honor God or his neighbors well. And now he is gone. How can such a father ever be redeemed? There was little hope of having a meaningful conversation with him while he was living. There is no hope now. Except that, whether or not you’d like to admit it, your father still lives in you.

Grown children will jump through all kinds of hoops to escape being the child of their parents. They will change their names. Reshape their memories. Remake themselves and their future families without a semblance of a hint of the spirit of the ones that raised them. And yet, they are still there, in your subtlest facial expressions, in your unconscious turns-of-phrase, in every fibre of your DNA. There is no more hope of escaping the fact that your father and mother were Jim and Sally than in escaping the fact that your oldest ancestors were Adam and Eve. You are living with the inexorable inheritance of all of them, Jim and Sally, Adam and Eve, and everyone in between. You can bear them as a curse. You can perhaps leverage them for some kind of blessing. But you cannot not carry them. They are in you. You cannot escape them, but you can redeem them. In fact, if you have put your faith in Christ, that is exactly what you must and shall do.

Imagine, again, that deceased father, that painful legacy. “Good riddance,” your heart might be tempted to say. “I can finally move on.” But you cannot move on. “Whatever he was, I will be the opposite,” you declare. But you cannot do this either. Because, in some deep sense, you are him. Or at least, he lives in you. If your friends and neighbors and family members stop to notice, they will see him in your smile, hear him in your humor, sense him in your very being…and all this despite yourself, since you want nothing to do with his legacy.

But in the midst of this existential struggle with your deceased father, let us imagine that you surrender yourself to Christ. Right away, you find in Christ the thing you had always longed for: a good Father. In light of this, you are more than happy to obey his more radical commands: “Let the dead bury the dead…If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, he cannot be my disciple.” Such commands, far from intimidating you, draw you closer in. A new Father, a new family, a new beginning…is all you ever wanted. And now you have it.

But also, an unexpected thing begins to happen in you and around you. With this new-found life and freedom, you slowly become a new source of love and life to others. That same community which had previously endured the sins of your father now enjoys you as a blessing. Your neighbors, without ceasing to see your father’s expressions in your face, slowly come to see those expressions in a new light. And, over time, because your father is still so present in you, they actually come to remember your father differently. Memory is a strange thing. The past itself is often transformed by the way we remember it. Old things die, and new things appear. Because of this, your neighbors actually become grateful for your late father, remembering the most worthy parts of him, which now shine so brightly in you, though in his own life they remained dim. And you too, over time, find reasons to be grateful for him, which you could not have seen in your prior life. But now he is being made new in your eyes. Your father truly had some great qualities, you begin to think. You thank God for him, not because you have forgotten the past entirely, but because now you see more than you did then. Before, you were like Noah’s youngest son Ham, who was cursed for uncovering the nakedness of his father in the cave. Now, you are like his other sons Shem and Japheth, who are blessed for coming in afterward and covering his shame. You are simultaneously receiving the blessings of your father and redeeming your father in you.

Whether or not this is possible for us—and I believe it is¹—we can be certain that it was not only possible for Christ, but precisely what he was doing. The earthly ministry of Christ not only offers redemption to his faithful followers, then and afterward, but also constitutes a kind of lived redemption for those who came before him. Adam will not live in eternal disgrace, because the new Adam has redeemed his role. By faith, we now see even Adam—the original bringer of the curse—in a new light. And by faith (for it surely requires his own faith too), Adam can also live in that light, the light of Christ, which is his salvation no less than ours. Perhaps this is precisely the good news Jesus preached when he descended to the dead (1 Peter 3:18-22). But that is only speculation.

To be clear, this is not meant as some sort of argument for “universal salvation” in the past, nor certainly in the present. No one comes to the Father except through Christ. How exactly that works, from person to person, no one knows but God. My purpose here is merely to point out that the pattern of redemption in Scripture is thicker than we might have assumed. The Bible’s continual insistence on the deep connectedness of ancestors to descendants and vice versa—with Christ as the centerpiece—reminds us that God has indeed been playing a long game; and that the cords which bind us to him are not only made of heavenly threads but earthly ones, not only of new threads but old ones; and that Christ is all, and in all (Colossians 3:11).

In conclusion, the New Testament seems to present Christ’s life, death, and resurrection as a kind of “salvation bomb” in the middle of history which explodes backwards as well as forwards—up and down the family tree—redeeming those in his lineage, as well as opening a way for the adoption of those outside. Because of this, we (mostly adopted) sons and daughters of the King can participate with him in the redemption of the world by means of our own more immediate family lines—both backwards and forwards—by redeeming our parents in us.

---

If you enjoyed this post, please hit the LIKE button. It helps more than you might think in making this post visible to others. Also, subscribe to receive future posts. Thanks!

1. though I make no metaphysical speculation with regard to how this affects the eternal souls of our loved ones after death!