The ministry of salt requires folding ourselves into the lives or the institutions we want to see changed. Like Daniel, Nehemiah, or Esther, we redeem from the inside by in a sense “belonging” to the world. We maintain relationships with friends and family members; we participate in our neighborhoods, work culture, and social institutions. And just as a block of salt must be diminished to fulfill its purpose, we too will have to spend ourselves to be present to others and work for their good. 

There Israel encamped before the mountain, 3 while Moses went up to God. The Lord called to him out of the mountain, saying, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: 4 ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. 5 Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; 6 and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ (Exodus 19:3-6)
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Seeing the crowds, [Jesus] went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him. 2 And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying: … 13 “You are the salt of the earth … 14 “You are the light of the world. (Matthew 5:1-2, 13-14)
Matthew frames the Sermon on the Mount as Jesus’ “Sinai moment” – where God’s new people meet the divine presence on a mountain to hear the terms of their new relationship with him.
Notice how Jesus describes the identity of his new people. Instead of the old covenant terms “kingdom of priests” and “holy nation,” Jesus uses the everyday metaphors of salt and light to define the identity of his new people.
I’d bet serious money that “light” appears in church and ministry names at least 10 times more frequently than “salt.” Light is easier to “see,” as it were. It sounds more glorious. Public proclamation, public demonstration of God’s grace and holiness, truth and beauty shining on a hill for all to see … we love the “ministry of light.” Let it shine.
But what is the “ministry of salt?” What is this other calling Jesus has for us?
The Mission: Preserve and Seal
We mainly use salt for flavoring now; but in antiquity, its chief use was to preserve against decay. In the ancient near east, salt was mined like coal and cut into small blocks for household use. The blocks contained a mixture of actual salt (halite, which we still use to de-ice our sidewalks but don’t eat) and other minerals. A block of salt would be rubbed into meat, grinding the halite inside, to stop the growth of bacteria. In a world without refrigeration, the preserving power of salt was miraculous.
The “ministry of salt,” then, is a world-preserving ministry. Ministers of salt work themselves into families, institutions, and communities, and fight back the corrupting effects of sin. That means fostering peace and reconciliation; it means training husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers to love their families well; it means giving ourselves to improve the lives of our neighbors and communities. As Matthew Loftus, who lives and writes about the ministry of salt (even if he doesn’t use the term), says:
Every community needs a phalanx of people who take minor leadership roles and simply care for their neighbours. They stand between the established leaders and help mediate what is good and worthwhile to the vulnerable while keeping predators from within and without in check. Without these folks to stand in the middle, though, more people can become vulnerable or predatory.
The ministry of salt has some huge public victories, like the end of gladiatorial slavery in Rome, the abolition of slavery in Britain, and the Civil Rights movement in the US. (The fact that there were many Christians opposing the last two items is its own sad story).
But, as Jesus said of a cup of cold water, the ministry of salt happens on smaller scales too. Just in my church, I’ve seen people help friends fight to keep their marriages alive; people give familial care for widows; people spend hours to tutor, mentor, and even take in children in critical home circumstances. Some of these feel like small victories, and some feel like fighting Galadriel’s “long defeat” against decay. They are all part of the ministry of salt.
Salt also has a sealing effect, which we can see in the Old Testament. It binds relationships.
You shall season all your grain offerings with salt. You shall not let the salt of the covenant with your God be missing from your grain offering; with all your offerings you shall offer salt. (Leviticus 2:13)
God’s covenant to provide food for the Aaronic priests (Numbers 18:19) and his covenant to keep the Davidic line (2 Chronicles 13:5) are both described as “covenants of salt.” In Ezra, those opposed to the rebuilding of the temple told Artaxerxes they were bound to him because “we eat the salt of the palace.” Perhaps because of salt’s preserving nature, and definitely due to its being precious in the day, sharing salt was a way of sealing oneself to another.
If Jesus’ followers are the salt, then, part of our mission is to “seal” our little corners of the world to God: not just to fight decay, but to consecrate.
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Why do the Gospels emphasize faith in so many of Christ’s miracles?  If all of His miracles were to prove His divinity and usher in His Kingdom, it naturally follows that the prominence of faith surrounding these miracles demonstrates its centrality in His Kingdom.  In this new Kingdom of God, faith would be the primary distinguishing factor of its citizens—not heredity, gender, social status, upbringing, good works, or any other human factor.  Faith is so important that it is impossible to please God without it (Hebrews 11:6) and any thought, motive, word, or deed that is not rooted in faith is actually sinful, no matter how good it may appear (Romans 14:23).

When we read of the various miracles in Scripture, the faith of the people involved is at the forefront of the narrative in many cases, which can lead us to think that not only miracles but all of the blessings of God are somehow dependent on the faith of the recipient.  This has led to some gross misapplications of these miracles to say that if we exhibit enough faith, God is somehow compelled to bless us.  The obvious counterpart to this would be to say that if God does not bless us, it can only be because we lack the appropriate level of faith.  This distortion is most clearly seen in the prosperity gospel that exhorts people to display their faith by “planting seeds” in the form of monetary donations, thus compelling God to bless them with health, wealth, and happiness.  However, it is not only the false teachers of the prosperity gospel that hold this view.  In a more subtle form, it dwells in many American Christians, particularly in how they approach suffering.  This view is so prevalent in large part because the miracles of Jesus seem to support it.  However, as we examine a few of His miracles, we will see folly of this view.
Faith as the Key (But Not Magical) Ingredient
Jesus healed many people, drove out many demons, and even raised three people from the dead.  These people were both male and female of various ages and from various ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds.  But a common trait is seen in many of them: faith.  When He healed a woman while enroute to raise the daughter of Jairus, He told her that her faith had healed her (Matthew 9:22).  He said the same to blind Bartimaeus as He restored his sight (Mark 10:52) and to ten lepers as He healed them (Luke 17:19).  At other times, faith seemed to move Jesus to heal people, such as when the paralytic was lowered into the room through a hole in the roof that his faithful friends had made (Luke 5:20).  Similarly, Paul observed that the crippled man in Lystra “had the faith to be made well” before healing him (Acts 14:9).  These incidents seem to suggest that the faith of these people caused them to be healed, especially since Jesus told His disciples that if they prayed in faith, they would receive what they asked for (Matthew 21:22).  But is faith really the stimulus to which Jesus responded by healing these people?  Is it our faith that causes God to answer our prayers and work on our behalf?
To answer this, let’s look at a couple of Christ’s more spectacular healings.  Of all of the people Jesus healed, only three were healed without interacting with Him at all.  Interestingly, two of these three involved Gentiles.  A centurion’s slave, a Gentile woman’s daughter, and a Capernaum official’s son were all healed by Jesus without ever meeting Him.  We will look at the first two in some detail and contrast the third with the first to see the role faith played in these incidents.
The Centurion’s Faith
The first of these involved the Roman centurion in Capernaum.  Not long after the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus entered Capernaum and had a remarkable encounter with the centurion there that resulted in Jesus healing the centurion’s slave, recorded in Matthew 8:5-13 and Luke 7:1-10.  A centurion was an officer in charge of one hundred Roman soldiers.  At one point, I was an officer in charge of about one hundred enlisted personnel, so I can relate.  This particular centurion also has the distinction of causing Jesus to marvel at him.  When we consider that Jesus, being fully divine, was omniscient, it is remarkable that anything or anyone could cause Him to marvel, but one thing did: faith (both its abundance and its lack).  Jesus was astonished at the incredible faith of this centurion, but was equally astonished by the lack of faith in His own hometown of Nazareth (Mark 6:6).  In contrast to Christ’s friends and relatives who should have known who He really was, this centurion had remarkable insight into His true identity that no one else had at the time.   But he was also remarkable in his character and reputation.  Despite being a Gentile in general and a Roman occupier in particular, he was highly regarded by the Jews in Capernaum.  Local Jewish leaders described him to Jesus as one who loved their nation and who had built their synagogue.  Therefore, when his slave was seriously ill, he did not hesitate to ask the local Jewish leaders to go to Jesus on his behalf and ask him to heal his slave, and those leaders emphatically and wholeheartedly fulfilled that request. They even went as far as to say that this centurion deserved Jesus to heal his slave because of his righteousness in their eyes.  You would he hard pressed to find a Roman official in all of Judea or Galilee at the time with such a reputation among the Jews.
But it was not this centurion’s upstanding reputation that amazed Jesus.  Instead it was his faith, both understanding who Jesus is and who he was.  This began with a proper understanding of who Jesus is.  While Jesus was on His way, the centurion sent friends to tell Jesus that he was unworthy of Jesus even coming into his house.  This stands in stark contrast to the Jews telling Jesus that he was worthy of not only a visit from Jesus but also a miracle.  He knew that regardless of how righteous and upstanding he was, he did not deserve for Jesus to do anything for him, especially not for Jesus to make Himself ceremonially unclean by entering a Gentile’s house.  So the centurion asks Jesus to heal his slave without entering the house but merely speaking the words.  This reveals his unparalleled understanding of who Jesus was.  The Jews debated over who Jesus was, with many seeing Him as some form of prophet.  As such, they would have had certain expectations as to what Jesus could and could not do as a prophet.  There were various stories of prophets healing people in the Old Testament, but in all of them the prophet was present with the person either before or during the healing.  Instead, this centurion realized that such proximity was not required because Jesus had authority, which is something he as a military officer understood well regardless of his knowledge of Israel’s past prophets.  To him, it was incredibly simple for Jesus to heal his slave.  He was used to both giving and receiving orders, knowing that the power of any order comes from the authority behind it rather than in the manner in which it is given.  He therefore heard about the previous miracles of Jesus and deduced that Jesus had authority to command nature just as he had authority to command his soldiers.  Therefore, Jesus didn’t need to by physically present to heal his slave but merely had to give the order and nature would obey just as his soldiers obeyed him.  When I was in charge of a hundred personnel, they obeyed my orders because I had the appropriate authority from my rank and position, just as I obeyed my commander I because he had been appointed over me and thus had the appropriate authority.  He could be on the other side of the country or the world, but if he gave me an order, it was just as valid as if he gave it to me personally.  That is how this centurion understood the authority of Jesus over nature. So to him, healing his slave was as simple as Jesus giving the order, regardless of His location.
Contrast this with the account of Jesus healing the official’s son in John 4:46-54, in which the official asked for Jesus to travel with him from Cana to Capernaum and heal his son there, leading Jesus to lament the general lack of faith of the Jews who required signs in order to believe.  Conversely, this centurion believed before witnessing a miracle, realizing that Jesus had authority over nature and was therefore divine.  Not even His disciples understood this yet, as evidenced by their bewilderment when He calmed the storm later in His ministry (Matthew 8:27, Luke 8:25).  That was something no prophet was able to do.  The closest was Elijah who prayed for a drought and then prayed for it to cease.
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Written by Jeffrey T. Riddle |
Saturday, November 12, 2022
At one point he makes reference to the inherent binary convictions of traditional Christianity when he writes, “Christianity make a clear distinction between those who follow Christ and those who fail to believe” (134). Key to his argument is the idea that even those who reject traditional borders, paradoxically invent new ones to replace them. This recalls Paul’s insight that even pagan Gentiles “which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law…

Frank Furedi, Why Borders Matter: Why Humanity Must Relearn the Art of Drawing Boundaries (London and New York: Routledge 2021): 193 pp.
The mere title of this book might lead one to think it is about immigration, a topic much in the news these days. In fact, however, though applicable to immigration, this book is about much more than that. It is about borders or boundaries as a salubrious sociological phenomenon meant to establish order and promote flourishing in human individuals and societies. Borders are important not only in distinguishing one nation from another, but in demarcating boundaries in numerous other crucial areas of life, including the differences between the public and private spheres, adults and children, males and females, and even humans and animals. The author, an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent in the UK, brings the requisite expertise required to examine this topic with authority. This work challenges the contemporary promotion of a “borderless spirit” as ideal.
Review of Content
We begin with a summary of the book’s content. In the opening chapter (Introduction) the author suggests there is a contemporary “paradox of borders,” epitomized in those who reject border walls, on one hand, while decrying “cultural appropriation,” on the other. Contrary to the spirit of the age, Furedi suggests that the creation of boundaries is vital. He notes, “The marking out of space and the tendency to draw lines constitutes humanity’s need for signposts and guidance” (5). This is true not just of physical but also of symbolic boundaries, including moral ones. “When symbolic borders lose their meaning, a cultural crisis ensues” (7). According to Furedi, “Western society’s estrangement from borders is not an enlightened step forward—rather it expresses a self-destructive sensibility of estrangement from the conventional sign posts that guide everyday life” (12).
Chapter two addresses challenges represented by the modern value of “non-judgementalism,” presented “as an enlightened and liberal attitude towards the world” (19). Furedi defends “the act of judgement,” however, as “a deed through which people can establish connections and develop a shared understanding of one another’s outlook” (20). The condemnation of moral judgment has led to moral indifference.
Chapter three examines “openness” as a predominate modern value: “In popular culture, openness supposedly rejects preconceived notions, refuses to possess durable commitments and ideas, and does not abide by fixed points and permanent boundaries” (31). The convergence of openness with non-judgementalism has resulted in “a mood of moral malaise” (33). Oddly enough, advocates of these values often express “bitter hostility” that is “visceral and characteristically militant” to any who see value in “closed communities” based on “ties of kinship, family, friendship, religion, and community membership” (36-37).
Chapter four further addresses how these values have challenged notions of national sovereignty, democracy, and citizenship. It questions “the project of delegitimizing territorial borders” (49). According to Furedi, belonging to a particular people inhabiting a bounded place constitutes “an important source of solidarity” and provides “moral significance for members of a national community” (53).  There can be no democracy without a demos. Advocates for the new values, however, promote “global citizenship” preferring “a heterogeneous space to a homogeneous one” (65).
Chapter five addresses the erosion of boundaries between the public and private spheres. “Personal and emotional openness are regarded as cultural ideals and promoted through media and popular culture” (73). The “classical virtue of stoicism” has been replaced by public and unrestrained “emotionalism” (74). He cites as an example “the relentless drive to ‘normalize,’ routinise, and demystify the domain of sex” (76). “Pornography,” for example, “has become a culturally, even socially, validated fetish” (76). The old value of reticence is dismissed as prudishness. In contrast, Furedi suggests, “The protection of the private realm is essential for the conduct of a healthy public life” (85). He concludes:
Once the space for secrecy is lost, the individual’s capacity to question, doubt, and act in accordance with their inclinations is undermined. In this area as in others, the        flourishing of freedom is inseparable from the maintenance of limits and boundaries (88).
Chapter six addresses how the erosion of the public and private distinction has had unsettling effects in public life. This has included the development of “identity politics” and charges of “micro-agression” (100).
Chapter seven addresses how the “boundaryless spirit of our time” has created confusion for “intergenerational relations” (112). In the post-traditional world, the self is made rather than “passively inherited” (113). One result has been “a diminished sense of adult responsibility” and the “phenomenon of infantilization” (115), leading to the erosion of parental authority, the tendency to treat children as adults, and of adults to act like children. A side effect has been failure to socialize children and confusion as to what values to transmit to them.
Chapter eight addresses current hostility against the practice of binary thinking, and its dismissal as “morally wrong” (130). “Binary thinking is sometimes presented as a psychological deficit—a symptom of anxiety, and a marker for intolerance of ambiguity and complexity” (132). According to Furedi, however, binary thinking is not simply a “cultural tool” but a fundamental feature of the practice of human conceptualization” (136). He notes, in particular, how “anti-binary activists” have attacked the basic human distinction between men and women. They have attempted “de-authorising not just gender but also the difference of biological sex” with “the character of a religious duty” (142).
Chapter nine suggests that the rejection of conventional boundaries has, in fact, ironically resulted in “new ways of drawing lines in everyday life” (151). This includes emphasis on “personal boundaries,” the “Me too” movement, and the desire for “safe spaces.”
The book ends with a conclusion noting again that, “Hostility towards conventional boundaries and borders coexist with the demands for new borders” (165). Furedi notes that some are even challenging the boundaries between humans and animals. Human morality is dismissed by some as “an anthropocentric conceit” (165). He concludes that “the decisive influence” is the West’s unwillingness to affirm clear borders in all areas, resulting in “a lack of clarity about the moral values that underpin the self” (173).
Final Analysis
This is a work of sociology and not theology, and yet it contains many helpful insights for the church today. Furedi offers a compelling description and analysis of the contemporary Zeitgeist and its rebellion against traditional boundaries or borders, with respect not only to nations (cf. Acts 17:26) but also with respect to the fundamental differences between men and women, adults and children. At one point he makes reference to the inherent binary convictions of traditional Christianity when he writes, “Christianity make a clear distinction between those who follow Christ and those who fail to believe” (134). Key to his argument is the idea that even those who reject traditional borders, paradoxically invent new ones to replace them. This recalls Paul’s insight that even pagan Gentiles “which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law… Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts….” (Rom 2:14-15). This book challenges the Christian reader to consider not only how to understand and resist the spirit of the age as it works upon us, but also how to extend a winsome alternative in Biblical Christianity to a confused world.
Jeffrey T. Riddle is Pastor of Christ Reformed Baptist Church in Louisa, Virginia.
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