As I see it now, there were multiple ways that our ideas about being saved distorted biblical teachings. One is that our form of religion was about escaping from earthly life, whereas Jesus’s message was fundamentally about transforming it. Because we saw the central issue to be life after death, we tended to miss New Testament teachings about what God sought for this world. If we noticed in Jesus’s model prayer the request that God’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven,” we assumed that God’s will being done was primarily a matter of getting people to make a commitment that prepared them for eternity.

A few years ago, I heard a preacher at an evangelical church claim that Jesus was born in order to die. My immediate reaction was that there was something wrongheaded about this way of thinking. Accepting this claim meant that dying was the really important thing Jesus did; the rest of his life was like a preliminary to the main event. I knew where the preacher was coming from. He assumed the same teaching about Jesus’s death that I had received as a child: that through the death of Jesus the penalty for sin had been paid so that God could turn from wrath to forgiveness. But it now seems to me that seeing dying as Jesus’s main accomplishment gets things backwards.

Some people think that all biblical stories fit together into a whole that reveals what God is like. But trying to fit all these stories together in that way leaves us with a God who resembles humans who suffer from multiple personality disorder.