WHAT IS SALVATION?

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I grew up in Central Florida, never more than a stone’s throw away from evangelical Christianity. This reality meant that when you met another person and they learned you were Christian, about seven in ten times they would ask you, “So when did you get saved?” This question arises from a form of Christianity with origins in the 1700s that places a lot of emphasis on the emotional effects of Christian faith. It came to focus on being “born again,” of knowingly recognizing that one needed to be saved from being sent to Hell when you died, and accepting God’s offer to save us.  This point in time, the moment of acknowledging that one need to be saved and then accepting God’s free offer, was “getting saved.” 

Often the question came from a position of innocent curiosity. But sometimes the question asker was trying to suss out whether you were the “right kind” of Christian or whether, whatever your understanding of yourself, you were a Christian at all. See, many Christians don’t understand what it means to be saved in exactly the same way as evangelicals. Groups like Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, and many Methodists, Anglicans, Lutherans, and Presbyterians, emphasize the Christian faith more as a life of growth in relationship with God and less as a single moment of transition from being unsaved to being saved. 

I grew up as a United Methodist and thus was part of this other tradition. Knowing that kids from traditions like mine would be in environments where their Christianity would be questioned if their faith story didn’t conform to the born-again pattern, I once heard that some Methodist leaders were attempting to develop resources to translate our experiences into terms that could be understood by born-again traditions. I knew of several people, within both Methodism and other non-evangelical traditions, who took to answering inquiries about when they got saved with the day they were baptized as babies.

Christians Believe We Need Saving

I’m hoping that introductory reflection is going to be helpful for framing and introducing what exactly Christians mean when we talk about salvation. But before taking that deeper dive, it’s probably a good idea to pull the camera back and look at two foundational points that may seem to many Christians so obvious that they don’t need an explanation—because they may not in fact be obvious to people not immersed in Christianity. 

First, let me provide a little clarity on terms. You may have noticed in the opening reflection that I repeatedly talked about getting or being saved but didn’t use the term salvation—that’s because “salvation” is more or less a Latin word that English just picked up and started using. Salvation comes from the Latin word salvatio (sal-VAT-see-oh) which turned the Latin adjective meaning “safe” or “saved” into a noun meaning, more or less, the “action or state of saving or making safe.” So, talk about getting or being saved is talk about salvation. 

Second, Christianity teaches that human beings need saving. Specifically, Christians hold that God created human beings for the purpose of having a relationship with God, but that human beings have broken that relationship. This broken relationship somehow affects all people who ever have lived and ever will live, except for Jesus Christ. Importantly, human beings are unable to restore the relationship with God through their own actions. Without God’s intervention that is somehow accomplished through Jesus Christ, we would continue to languish in suffering, evil, and death. Because God loves humanity so much, God thus sends to Jesus to make it possible for some or all human beings (exactly how many people will be saved, or can even respond to God’s offer, remains a hotly debated question in Christian thought) to have the relationship with God that God created human beings to have. Christianity thus shares with many other religions and philosophies a notion that something about the world is significantly distorted and needs to be set right; it shares with a smaller number of them the notion that humans cannot do this without assistance from outside our world; and it is particularly set apart by its belief that this assistance comes specifically through the life, death, and new life of the man Jesus Christ. 

Images of Salvation: A Harmonious Multitude 

Looking at the reflection that started this piece, I would bet that most Christians think salvation is something like being saved from punishment (Hell) after you die and being allowed to experience paradise. And I’d guess this vision is basically what many non-Christians think Christians think salvation is. Certainly the meme that went around online a few months ago in which Jesus asks to be let into your heart in order to save you “from what [he’s] going to do to you if you don’t let [him] in” strongly suggests some familiarity with the popular conception of salvation—even if it misses the idea that the punishment may in some way be deserved (as most Christians who hold this popular view would likely say). Interestingly, I think this understanding of salvation actually informs both the “when did you get saved” folks as well as the people who respond, “When I was baptized.” In both instances, the focus is on when God’s forgiveness of sins gets applied to the individual Christian. 

However, if we actually turn to the New Testament, the second part of the Christian Bible that deals with Jesus Christ and the early Church, we find a great variety of understandings of what exactly it is that humanity needs saving from as well as what human beings are saved for.  

The Dutch theologian (Christian thinker) Edward Schillebeeckx (skil-uh-BEX), in his lengthy and meticulously researched book Christ, identifies an extensive range of images for what God does for us through the life, death, and new life of Jesus Christ. These include being freed from different kinds of servitude or slavery; having a ransom paid to free us specifically from debt bondage; having a relationship patched up after a dispute; being brought from a condition of war or conflict to a state of peace; an offering of the animal sacrifice necessary for removing sin as understood in the Old Testament; having sins forgiven or forgotten; being made able to come into the community of holy people; being given a sort of defense attorney to argue our case before God; being offered a new form of community; being freed to offer and receive mutual love with other believers; being freed for true, full, and real freedom; a renewal and restoration of humanity and the whole universe to a better state than they exist in now; a fully meaningful life; protection and freedom from demonic or evil spirits; and finally eternal, undying life in the presence of God (summarized from Christ, trans. Jean Cunningham [New York: Seabury Press, 1980], section 3, ch. 2 §2-3). 

You may be able to gather that these different images present different diagnoses of the predicament humans find themselves in—and therefore of its corresponding fix. Some emphasize what humans are saved from and some emphasize what is opened up to them. While they are different, they are far from incompatible. They are united by the sense that human beings suffer from some predicament that prevents them from living as they were created by God to live and that the solution to that predicament was offered by God through the life, death, and new life of Jesus Christ. This diversity of images is in part because the problem and the solution have multiple aspects: Sin may cut us off from God such that we need to have the relationship repaired, and being cut off may also have led to a breakdown in our relationships with other people, for instance. It is important to note that what we see in the New Testament is also the result of different cultural and religious backgrounds. The early church was made up of Jewish Christians as well as people who came from outside of Judaism, of people from Roman, Greek, and North African religions and cultures. These different religious and cultural backgrounds meant that what people saw as broken or dangerous in the world differed. For instance, Jewish Christians were likely more likely to see the problems of the world in terms of sin and separation from God while non-Jewish Christians were likely to understand the problems in terms of slavery to and dangers from evil and harmful spirits. 

So, the range of images presented in the New Testament certainly include those of the popular contemporary understanding of salvation. The popular account emphasizes the need for forgiveness and the ideas of bondage and debt, as well as the ways in which Jesus’ death allows humans to be forgiven. However, the image of salvation presented in the New Testament is much more expansive than this popular story. Answering the question of “what is salvation” means opening oneself to a fuller vision than the popular contemporary understanding offers. 

Toward a Fuller Understanding of Salvation 

As the Christian tradition developed and thinkers reflected more on these various images of salvation in the New Testament, a more expansive vision both of the human predicament and of how God rescued us from that predicament began to take shape. This vision understood that human beings had been created to fully love and rely on God. In doing this, humans would live harmoniously with other human beings and with the rest of the universe. However, humans treated themselves or some other thing in the universe as though they were God. In doing this, humans turned away from God who was the source of their very existence. This broken relationship with God is what is called Sin, and the result of this is Death. Ultimately, Death (when terms like Death or Sin are capitalized in Christian thought, that often means something like the underlying condition or the overriding problem, not individual instances of the thing) results in the end as the extinguishing of human life, but it also means all those forces in the world like violence and hate that cut human beings off from each other and from the rest of the universe. 

Because Sin is our own fault, God would be justified in just letting us drift away into nonexistence or even punishing us (at least on some Christian accounts). However, because God loves the world, especially human beings, God freely works to mend the wound. To do this, God becomes a human being, Jesus of Nazareth. Through Jesus’ life and teaching, he offers a teaching and model for the kind of life God created human beings to live. By dying he shows us God’s love and also somehow allows humans to mend their broken relationship with God and be forgiven. By being raised to new life, Jesus inaugurates a new form of humanity that is not subject to the ravages of disease, decay, suffering, and death. This new form of life means that humans can see our physical deaths not as the great enemy of life leading to Death, but as the gateway to new, transformed, and better life where we can be in perfect relationship with each other and with God forever. 

This outline of salvation exists in some form across all forms of Christianity. However, there’s still quite a bit of variety in how it pays out for specific groups. For instance, some emphasize what Christ’s death does for us and focus on the need to be forgiven. Others focus on Christ’s overcoming death and offering us (and the creation) new life. Some Christians focus on very specific ways that Christ’s death brought about forgiveness, looking at this, as I said above, as a removal of a debt or the taking on of a punishment we deserve, while others see how God forgives us and mends the relationship (a process called atonement or being made “at one” with God) as mysteries that we need not probe too deeply. However, despite these and many other differences in emphasis, careful thinkers emphasize that humans cannot extricate themselves from the forces of Sin and Death, that Jesus makes this possible, that humans must be forgiven by God, and that after this initial forgiveness we need further transformation before being able to exist as God created us to be to experience the joy of being in God’s presence forever. 

Salvation is not an event—even an event as important as accepting forgiveness for your sins. Salvation is instead an ongoing process during this life and beyond it that begins with receiving God’s forgiveness, continues with transformation more and more into the model of human existence that Jesus offered, and concludes after death when our bodies are transformed into ones that are free of the effects of suffering and death and we can bask fully in the joy of God’s presence. The right response to the question of “when did you get saved” is neither “When I accepted Jesus into my heart” or “When I was baptized”; the right answer is “I was saved by Jesus on the cross; I am being saved by God helping me to becoming more like Jesus every day; and I will be saved when my I am transformed after death and can enter into the joy of God’s presence that goes on forever.”