Job 33:28

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece in the wake of Lance Armstrong's confession to using performance-enhancing drugs called "Behind Lance Armstrong's Decision to Talk." which describes a meeting between Armstrong and Travis Tygart, the head of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, the man who finally caught up with Armstrong's deception. In this meeting, Armstrong pointed to himself and said, "You don't hold the keys to my redemption. There's one person who holds the keys to my redemption, and that's me." The fascinating thing about this quote isn't the brazenness, it's the common nature of the refrain.

Everyone thinks that their redemption is up to them. Except, maybe, for Travis Tygart. Upon hearing Armstrong's claim, Tygart allegedly responded. "That's (expletive)." Tygart is right: the idea that we hold the keys to our own redemption is total (expletive).

That Armstrong might believe that baring his soul (or, at least, the contents of his medicine cabinet) to Oprah would lead to his redemption is, at worst, cynical in the extreme and, at best, evidence of a woefully weak definition of redemption.

When Christians talk about redemption, we don't refer to a return to a prior state of good standing. Some do, actually, but such thinking, as Gerhard Forde points out in his book On Being a Theologian of the Cross, hinges on the unbiblical notion of a "fall." We imagine that we were once at a certain place in our relationship with God, we messed that up, and Jesus gave us the ability to get back. That is, according to Forde, a theology that "uses" Jesus and the cross to "get" us something, rather than one that sees Jesus and the cross as the end of us, and our resurrection. The truth is so much better. In our redemption - in real redemption - we are saved to a state higher than we ever had before: we are regarded as one with Christ, as God's own Son.

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