Pure Protestants and "Bare Salvation"

A serious problem that besets (what might be called) Pure Protestants, is the minimalist desire for Salvation-only - a life dedicated to Bare Salvation, and (ultimately) nothing-else-matters. 

This is a consequence of that strand of Reformation theology that focuses (almost exclusively) on Salvation by Faith - by the Grace of God. 

The Pure Protestant inference is that salvation is the only thing that matters, and salvation is achieved by faith in God during this mortal life - indeed specifically faith at the end of this mortal life. 

For a Pure Protestant: "As the tree falls, so shall it lie" - eternally. In other words, by the state of our soul at the moment of death, so shall our eternal destiny be decided.  

This has some appalling consequences in practice; because the whole of our mortal lives up to the moment of death is hazardous and futile at best.

The optimal thing in a mortal life would be to die at the instant of conversion; to eliminate the risk that subsequent experiences would cause us to backslide and lose faith*. 

Presumably; it is only the prohibition on suicide that prevents this being a normal post-conversion sequela - but anyway, a PP would be very likely to pray for the deliverance from the threat of damnation by wanting Death ASAP, for as long as he has faith.

 

What then should a Pure Protestant do with his life? 

Just about the only valid activities would seem to be - 1. to guard one's faith, and 2. to seek the conversion of others: evangelism. 

And this is, indeed, the tendency of Pure Protestants: faith is guarded by repeatedly re-visiting, re-living, re-experiencing the conversion experience; and by engaging in whatever evangelical activities are deemed (by current theological theories) to be likely to succeed at inducing the maximum number of conversions. 

That is the theory, or aspiration - yet (looking around at PP-tending churches as of 2025) it clearly does not work, and has not worked for some decades. 

The reasons is that with PP there is no such thing as legitimate positive, constructive, creative spiritual activity. 

And a faith-defending life spent under continuous, increasing, inescapable siege from the extreme and pervasive evil of modern Western societies can only lead to defeat - sooner or later. 

By denying the value of any this-worldly spiritual activity; Pure Protestantism creates a values-vacuum which is almost inevitably occupied by the hegemonic, secular, materialistic (and nowadays leftist) socio-political morality - which perhaps explains why self-identified Christians of this type are often strikingly successful in terms of status, money, and power. 

And this brings with it the besetting modern-Western sins such as untruthfulness, resentment and despair - and many (if not all) of the the characteristic value-inversions of totalitarianism. 

Holding-out against some of the inversions of the sexual revolution is one positive thing; but when Pure Protestantism eagerly embraces socialism, antiracism, climate-environmentalism, birdemic-healthism etc etc - then there is no cause whatsoever for self-congratulation.

Such churches have-been and are decisively assimilated into supporting the strategic demonic agenda.

   

The answer lies in examining the false assumptions at the root of Bare Salvationism. 

If God sustains us alive, then there is work he wants us to do; and that work must surely be spiritual in its nature and individual in its focus. 

It's up to each Pure Protestant to discover what that spiritual work must be for himself, personally, here-and-now. 

* That wonderful story in Acts of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, really ought to end (if Bare Salvationism was true, and if it were to have a genuinely joyful ending) with the eunuch slipping underwater and drowning, the instant after he was baptized... Rather than, as reported, going on his way "rejoicing". (And then, according to Ethiopian Orthodoxy - as I understand it - returning home to found the church in that country.)