2 Timothy 1:8-12 – 5/28/2026
[God] saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to his own purpose and grace, and this grace was given to us in Christ Jesus before [historic time].
2 Timothy 1:9 (NRSVue with my re-translation)
When I left the life of the visible church almost 25 years ago, one of the primary things that pushed me away from the church community I was a part of was its view on salvation. In that particular church’s theology, the most important thing in a person’s life was what they called one’s relationship with God. Each person, depending on the nature of their “relationship with God,” was either saved or not saved. The difference between being saved and not saved depended on whether someone had accepted for themselves faith in Jesus Christ for salvation. Without a conscious, willful decision to claim faith in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins, one was still condemned by their sin. After such a decision, God would declare that person righteous through Jesus’s Christ redemptive offering on the cross. Only when conscious faith is in place and God has declared one forgiven through Jesus is one saved. No longer is one in danger of eternal punishment for sin. Instead, one can joyfully await an eternity with God and the others who have been saved by their faith in Jesus.
The exact words used to describe this picture of salvation differ from tradition to tradition and telling to telling, but the basic idea remains the same. We begin our lives lost in sin. If we accept faith in Jesus, God declares us not guilty of sin on behalf of Jesus’s redeeming death. From that time onward we are saved and no longer need to fear death or punishment. This is a neat and tidy picture, but on closer inspection it ceases to make sense of Scripture.
According to Protestant theology, human beings are not saved by anything an individual does. There is nothing a person can do to earn God’s favor or forgiveness. It is only the faith of Jesus, his life, teachings, death, resurrection that makes human beings in right relationship with their creator. It is not an action of ours that initiates the change from death to life. A decision to believe something or to adopt a particular faith are not what produces change in a human being in need of salvation.
In today’s reading, the author writes that God’s grace that saves us was “given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages.” Before time began, before the aeons, God called us. Outside of time, before time, we were called. There never was a time before we were saved. The passage from death to life was written into the nature of things. It is not our decision to believe that matters but the choice of God outside of time. It cannot be the content of the things we believe that save us; it can only be God’s “own purpose and grace.”
It is clear we must expand our idea of what it is to be called and saved by God if these happened before time began. What does this mean? We have always already been saved. There was never a time when God’s grace was not given to us. The neat division of people into the saved and the unsaved is inconsistent with this idea of grace for all time. Salvation depending on the content of our beliefs also cannot be sustained. What then does salvation mean? If it is an already accomplished eternal fact, what matters the specific direction of our lives in the here and now? Does salvation eternal diminish the facts of our lives, the fallenness and the blessedness of our actual lived experience? Is salvation then a generic truth about the relationship between God and humanity?
Here the difficulty is in translating χρόνων αἰωνίων (chronōn aiōniōn), which literally means “time of the ages.” This time is when, according to 2 Timothy, grace was given to us in Christ. The “ages” or aion are the epochs of history, and the “time” or chronos is the measurable time of the progression of clocks and calendars, so I have chosen to translate the phrase in 2 Timothy as “before historic time.” Before history we were already in God’s grace.
What sense are we to make of salvation in light of this? Salvation implies a negative situation that one needs saving from and a state that is better than the initial situation that one enters into after one has been saved. Salvation has a temporal structure, a before and after. How then are we to make sense of salvation’s temporal structure (we are in need and then have that need met) when God’s grace was given before historic time according to 2 Timothy?
To make sense of this tension and seeming paradox we have recourse to a second sense of time in Greek, Kairos as opposed to the Chronos of measurable, countable historic time. God’s grace may have been given before historic time began, but the moment of salvation happens in a time that interrupts historic time but is itself not a part of that history. Kairos then is the opportune moment for salvation to appear. God’s grace appears in our need, a need which is a part of history but a salvation that is outside it and interrupts it. Based on these reflections, I will provisionally define salvation as God’s grace given before/outside of time interrupting history at the opportune moment.
More needs to be said here, and with this reflection and this provisional definition of salvation, I have left for myself more questions than I have answered. Does salvation leave history unaffected or does it change history? Salvation must change history because our need happens within the embodied material passage of chronological time. To be saved in our need within historic time is to have the state situated in historic time changed. If then salvation is indeed a timeless grace affecting a historic need, how does this action occur? How can the unchanging nature of grace given before time interact with material history in the flux of change? What is the mode of causation?
However one might answer these difficult philosophical questions, it is clear that I have moved quite far from the conception of salvation of my Evangelical Fundamentalist days. One of the greatest joys of returning to the life of the church has been the openness of this church body to diverse ways of understanding Scripture and theology. Questioning with conceptual boldness and trying on provisional theses is encouraged It’s OK to not have all the answers. It’s not necessary to be right about everything. My introduction to the particular church and historical institution that is the ELCA was a Kairos interruption of timeless grace into the chronos of my life.
Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary.
Dionysus on a Bike 
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