Salvation, that is, a life eternally transformed by relationship with the Holy Trinity, is like the burning of a candle.
Faith is the wick, hope is the wax, love is the flame.
The candle burns by the wick alone. Faith is the faith(fulness) of Jesus Christ, which we join by loyally trusting in him and depending on him. (Faith as both trust and loyalty, and the faith of Jesus Christ in his Father and his faithfulness to us as the ground of our own faith response is a big topic in NT studies right now.) Our relationship with God was reconciled by his death on our behalf, and our access to continuing benefits come through this continuing relationship of trust.
The candle burns by wax alone. Hope is the strength that comes from our identity as the community who are somehow seated at God's right hand in the enthroned Messiah, waiting for him to come reclaim his world and, meanwhile, to bring us daily sustenance by his Spirit.
The candle burns by the flame alone. Love is the transformation of potential energy into heat and light, by doing good for others' benefit because we have received God's love, giving vision to other eyes and lighting other candles, and fulfilling the purpose for which we were made.
Are we saved by faith alone?
Now, if this question is really asking, "Can I know for sure in the moment that I raise my hand in an evangelistic meeting that I am going to heaven?", our answer will be different. Because here we are asking not about the burning but about the lighting of the candle. But the lighting includes the burning, and all three elements (wick, wax, and flame) are involved, even if in nascent form. And if the lighting is done by God, then we don't know for sure if the lighting began when we raised our hand or long before, or even not yet -- but we can know that if we truly turn to him, God promises to save us.
Now, you ask, what about repentance? To be honest, I wasn't thinking of repentance when I thought of this analogy, and would really need another analogy to incorporate it well. But I see repentance in the candle in three ways: a change from coldness to warmth, a change from reliance on other power sources than the wax through the wick, and a change from hiddenness to transparency. (Actually, this last one is more properly termed confession, but it is a part of the change.) And ultimately, there is a change of life direction from self-preservation to empowered self-giving.
This brings me to a point I have been thinking about a lot recently. Every aspect of salvation that we "perfect" or essentialize is in a way a metonymy or synecdoche. What I mean is that we speak of one part when we mean it to stand for the whole.
Baptism saves us, not the removal of filth from the body, but a pledge of a good conscience toward God. So baptism is a concertina word, as Jimmy Dunn puts it, including sometimes the sign only, and sometimes both the sign and the thing it signifies, and sometimes being a shorthand for the whole conversion process.
Repentance is the same. It indicates a change of heart and mind that includes sorrow for sin, a change from unbelief to faith, a change from trusting in other things to trusting in Jesus, and specific actions that we take to repair damage and restore others whom we have wronged. A concertina that expands and contracts from a change of heart to an act to an entire process that includes both.
Faith in a way stands for all the other elements of our response to God when we hear the gospel, and yet is more than just the most prominent part of our response, because it invades and motivates every other action. And because it draws from Christ everything it needs, it truly is like a wick (or like a straw in a milkshake, to change the metaphor).
Now back to the candle. I think I hear someone saying now, "Your definition of salvation as a life eternally transformed by relationship with the Holy Trinity is mixing justification with sanctification." Well, yeah. Because sanctification (or as I prefer to call it, transformation) is not optional. Justification through the cross (another metonymy) reconciled our relationship with God. It's a different metaphor, but let's call this restored relationship the oxygen in the room. Transformation started at the moment of ignition. Our relationship with God was reconciled in a potential way at the cross, and in an actual way when we started to believe, that is, when the wick was ignited and the flame burst forth, burning the wax stored up in the candle through the wick as it combined with the oxygen in the room.
And the burning continues.
No analogy is perfect, and this got more and more complex as we kept talking about it. But I would rather parse out these folds of ambiguity and see more and more of the whole picture.
Inspiring this three-fold analogy is a faint echo in my memory of Deacon Braxton at the end of almost every sermon, repeating the prayer of St. Ionnikios of Olympus (762-846)...
Our hope is the Father
Our refuge is the Son
Our shelter is the Holy Spirit
O Holy Trinity, glory to You.
