by Ben Richmond

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review by Ron Woodward

BEN RICHMOND tells us that the seeds for this book were sown many years ago in a Winchell's Donut Shop in Portland, Oregon, when a stranger sat down beside him and begin to share the Four Spiritual Laws. Somehow, Richmond began to think, there must be more to the biblical idea of salvation than Four Spiritual Laws. This prompted many years of serious study. He summarizes his ideas on the back cover of his book:

Salvation is not private “fire insurance.”

Salvation is a new kind of life.

In the Bible, God acts to save people—in this world—from all sorts of dangers and evil.

• God saves us from loneliness—into communities of grace and truth.
• God saves us from enemies—so we can live free from fear and at peace.
• God saves us from economic oppression—so we can afford to be generous.
• God forgives our sins, heals our wounds, and speaks intimately in our hearts.

There is no salvation without “signs of salvation” because salvation is for this world and the next.

Richmond begins the book by helpfully telling us where he's coming from. Growing up as the only child of divorced parents, Richmond himself experienced a divorce, brought on, he says, by “my clinging neediness that psychologists might trace back to my childhood.” Considering himself at the time to be “vaguely Christian,” he testifies to more than one remarkable mystical experience that led him to surrender his life to Jesus Christ and actually feel a call “to preach Christ.”

In an early chapter, “Salvation in This World and the Next,” Richmond reviews, in considerable detail, the various covenants God established with Israel in the Old Testament. He points out that of the 753 verses in the Old Testament containing Hebrew equivalents of the word salvation, the vast majority refer to the sovereign activity of God in bringing deliverance from danger or from enemies in time of war. Then, in reviewing the Gospels, he notes that 44 percent of Jesus' references to salvation have something to do with physical healing. In regard to Pauline theology, Richmond makes it clear that being saved is both a present reality as well as a promise of a future state of blessedness.

In his chapter “The Sign of the Listening Community,” Richmond says that “it [is] impossible to be saved in isolation because our salvation is into the community of God's chosen,” but also because “it is impossible to evangelize without the living evidence provided by the community of faith” (p. 97). In “the expectant silence of the community, Jesus is present as living Teacher and Lord (John 13:13)” (p. 112).

In the next chapter, “The Sign of the Bountiful Community,” Richmond deals with God's concern for the poor, with the Old Testament law of Jubilee, with biblical prophecies of material bounty, and with parables of Jesus that warn against the god of mammon. In summary,

The marriage supper of the Lamb is the abundance, creative work and joyful celebration of love that God intended for humanity from the beginning of creation, lived in simplicity of heart and marked by lavish generosity and sharing. The bounty of the community of God's people is a sign of salvation.

“The Sign of the Peaceable Community” reveals Ben Richmond's Quaker conviction that biblical pacifism is the way of the cross. At the beginning of the chapter he refers to what reformers have periodically called “the Babylonian captivity of the church.”

The first sign that the church has fallen captive is that the people of God see security and well-being in riches instead of God's miraculous provision of daily bread. The second sign…is that the people of God employ political and military violence, instead of relying upon the miraculous power of God to deliver them from their enemies. (p. 155)

Much in this chapter deals with the theme of God as Warrior and with the War of the Lamb. “The war of the Lamb, then, is a symbolic way of speaking about the spiritual process by which the word of God goes out into the world bringing salvation. It is, in a sense, what this whole study is about” (p. 185). I personally found Richmond to be most convincing when he insisted that “the followers of Immanuel take up the cross rather than the sword, because the goal is the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven, and that kingdom can only be established when the warfare is God's alone” (p. 179).

The book has two practical appendices: Appendix #1: Discussion Questions (for each chapter) and Appendix #2: Questions Concerning the Saved Life. The latter is a collation of Quaker queries drawn not only from various yearly meetings in the United States, but also from London Yearly Meeting.

In summary, I found the book stimulating and helpful. The format, however, makes it tedious reading in places where lengthy Scripture passages are quoted right in the text. In fact, one of the amazing things about Signs of Salvation is the vast number of biblical passages the author cites. From the index of scriptural citations at the end of the book, I counted 706 different verses from almost every book in the Old and New Testaments (no verses from Ruth, 1 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, four of the Minor Prophets, Jude, 2 and 3 John). With so many Scripture passages incorporated into the text, and with extensive footnotes at the end of several chapters, I often felt like I was reading a term paper or a doctoral dissertation. Having said this, I do want to commend Ben Richmond's extensive scholarship. In fact, I wondered at times if he was writing partially for a liberal Quaker audience in a scholarly attempt to show how so many core values of Friends are deeply rooted in the biblical vision of salvation.

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