Matthew 5:16

"In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven"

The others are presumably those who are not disciples. What interests me is that here we don't have, a many church leaders nowadays would like it to say, '.. so that they may see your good works and become Christians'. No; it's giving glory to the Father that is important [shades of the first line of the Lord's Prayer. I'm intrigued at how making disciples doesn't really make it on to the agenda of Jesus' teaching until the end of Matthew. Now you could argue that giving glory to God implies a right relation to God and that sort of implies becoming Christians, or whatever. I'm not so convinced, though, that that is not eisegetical: reading far too much into the text. The way the world, time and time again, comes over to me through Jesus' teaching is that there are a group of called people who are disciples, some of whom are apostles, and there are a load of people who respond positiviley to Christ and the disciples who nevertheless don't become disciples but seem to be rightly related to God and might be called 'saved' [all those people that Jesus says things like 'your faith has made you well/saved' to]. Maybe it's because they are Jews and are presumed, at least at this point, to be part of God's covenant of salvation ... ?



For me the intriguing possibility it opens up is that we too should expect that there may be people of good will who are not part of the church in formal terms, who nevertheless are within the household of salvation because they are responding within their own lives to that which is of God, to the promptings of the Holy Spirit. These are the ones who will recognise God's work as good and give glory to God when they see the evidence of the Spirit at work in people's lives.



I don't know: I'm still thinking about that and I am trying to negotiate a path between the kind of fideism that sees only a very few saved [even only 144,000!] and a universalism that sees all being saved [which seems to contradict the way that warnings of hell are given]. I'm also trying to preserve the insight that salvation is of God, not our own efforts, and God takes the initiative by the Holy Spirit in individual lives, we can only respond and 'faith' is the only response that makes sense of the overture. So I find myself drawn towards a kind of Rahnerian anonymous Christian position. I guess I'm also aware that Jesus' seems to make a strong critique of religion as a mechanism for welf-justification that nullifies or excludes a faith response to God. A critique that even applies to Christian religious forms; a critique that warns us of our propensity to seek 'salvation' in things that seem more securely rooted in the more tangible realities of this world that we can control.



In other words I'm seeking a way of thinking about such things that keeps faith with the Christian heritage of salvation /exclusion yet does justice by the generosity of love and the sometimes /often rather profligate way that Jesus seems to deal with people. In his teaching its the religious people, along with the rich who seem to be in the greatest peril of losing their souls and it is people who simply accept God's overtures with gladness who seem to be, tacitly, assumed to be okay, to be people of goodwill [?]



As I say, still thinking about this but not fully satisfied with a lot of the answers given traditionally; from limited atonement to universalism.

Crosswalk.com - Matthew 5:16: