FORGIVEN

The bar-code illustration from Dallas Willard is a classic. Read it carefully and be challenged.

Think of the bar codes now used on goods in most stores. The scanner responds only to the bar code. It makes no difference what is in the bottle or package that bears it or whether the sticker is on the “right” one or not. The calculator responds through its electronic eye to the bar code and totally disregards everything else. If the ice cream sticker is on the dog food, the dog food is ice cream, so far as the scanner knows or cares. 

On a recent radio program a prominent minister spent fifteen minutes enforcing the point that “justification,” the forgiveness of sins, involves no change at all in the heart or personality of the one forgiven. It is, he insisted, something entirely external to you, located wholly in God himself. His intent was to emphasize the familiar Protestant point that salvation is by God’s grace only and is totally independent of what we may do. But what he in fact said was that being a Christian has nothing to do with the kind of person you are. The implications of this teaching are stunning.

The theology of Christian trinkets says there is something about the Christian that works like the bar code. Some ritual, some belief, or some association with a group affects God the way the bar code affects the scanner. Perhaps there has occurred a moment of mental assent to a creed, or an association entered into with a church. God “scans” it. And forgiveness floods forth. An appropriate amount of righteousness is shifted from Christ’s account to our account in the bank of heaven, and all our debts are paid. We are, accordingly, “saved”. Our guilt is erased. How could we not be Christians?

For some Christian groups the “account” has to be appropriately serviced to keep the debts paid up, because we really are not perfect. For others—some strongly Calvinist groups— every debt past, present and future is paid for at the initial scan. But the essential thing in either case is the forgiveness of sins. And the payoff for having faith and being “scanned” comes at death and after. Life now being lived has no necessary connection with being a Christian as long as the “bar code” does its job.

We do hear a lot of discussion concerning what good Christians do and do not do. But of course it is not necessary to be a good Christian in order to be forgiven. That’s the main point of the bar code, and it is correct.