Salvation

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Salvation

The idea of salvation is rooted in a conception that the world and the human condition are not as they once were or should be; salvation is the radical change or transformation that sets them right. It may mean a total or partial transformation of the individual, in this world or beyond death; it may mean a change of the social order, or a new cosmos.

The term "salvation" originally had only a Christian reference; it is now used to apply also to other religions, especially the so-called Great Religions that originated in the Axial Age (between approximately 600 b.c.e. and 600 c.e.). The cosmic religions that prevailed before this period, and that still do in some places, tend to be this-worldly in their concern. There is resort to Divine figures and/or rituals to meet needs for bodily well-being, for children, for help against impurity, chaos, enemies, death. Although there is interest in a spiritual world to be entered after death, it is not usually the standard by which the present life is judged.

But in the Great Religions, especially Buddhism, Hindu religion, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam, a profound otherworldly theme appears, sometimes coexisting with this-worldly concerns. It promises that by means of Divine help, spiritual discipline, or both, radically defective earthly life can be transcended, gradually or all at once. In the five Great Religions named above, such transcendence, whether in the flesh or in a purely spiritual state, is the primary meaning of the term "salvation," whereas resolution of this-worldly needs and distresses may be considered the term's secondary meaning. In Judaism, Confucianism, and Taoism this-worldly concerns tend to be primary.

The majority of immigrants to North America have been of Christian background, holding to a view of salvation that centered on atonement through Christ's death for sin against God, with forgiveness, renewal of life, and a promise of Heaven for the individual, and, to a varying extent, expectation of renewal for the community or the world. Like other Protestants, seventeenth-century Puritans held that the principal means of salvation lay in the Bible, a light to both the individual and the government. Puritans tended to see themselves as God's instruments to subdue the dark wilderness and build a Promised Land, a new Eden. In contrast, the Quakers who settled in Pennsylvania saw salvation more as an awakening from the spiritual death that manifested in materialism, inequality, violence, and religious intolerance; the principal means of salvation they found in a silent opening of the self to the Divine Spirit within every individual and the religious community. Quakers also held the ideal of building a new Eden in the wilderness.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries occurred a series of major revivals called the Great Awakenings, originally influenced by the Methodist experience of the warmth of God's love in one's heart. By means of Bible-reading, preaching, and prayer, listeners were urged to repent from the sin that doomed them to hell, be born again, and receive Christ and the Holy Spirit. This focus on an emotional, life-transforming experience has come to inform the language of salvation in U.S. religion. Although this conception of salvation was primarily individual, it had a part in Christian efforts to transform society, notably in pressing for abolition of African slavery.

For many enslaved persons themselves, a rebirth experience of a powerful Divine Presence in their souls undermined society's message that they were mere chattels. The enslaved had an intense longing for Heaven, but in the Bible they also found subversive, this-worldly themes of salvation, especially the Exodus, in which God delivers his oppressed people from Egypt. This encouraged resistance and escape. In slave religion the longed-for Promised Land thus had dual meanings. The Exodus tradition was to be revived in the 1950s and 1960s in the birth of the civil rights movement in black churches.

Liberal Protestantism deemphasized transcendent religious experience along with ideas of atonement, Hell, and Heaven. It focused on the healing of souls from addiction, meaninglessness, and despair, and the healing of society from poverty, discrimination, and injustice through social and political action.

Jewish conceptions of salvation include a search for meaning in the wake of the Holocaust and centuries of exile and oppression. Salvation is particularly realized on a community level, and atonement with God must be manifest in reconciliation between and among individuals. Action to improve society is also important.

Although there were Roman Catholics on the North American continent from the early days, not until the nineteenth century did Roman Catholic Christianity became an important force there. Catholic views of salvation share with Protestant views the importance of forgiveness and transformation of life through Christ's atonement, but for Catholics good works are essential to this process. Furthermore, the means differ; it is principally through the sacraments, and the help of the saints, that the faithful are reconciled to God and prepared for the Beatific Vision of God in heaven. Certain religious and lay groups have traditions of charitable work among the underprivileged, but mainstream Catholic salvationism in the United States has stressed transcendence.

One significant exception to this pattern appeared from the 1960s onward in the Liberation Theology movement, which appropriated biblical themes of Exodus and the Kingdom of God to oppose poverty and oppression and attempt to build a new society on earth.

Hindu and Buddhist conceptions of salvation have had a substantial influence in the United States in the twentieth century. Tending toward transcendence, these religions teach that every deed creates a karmic reaction in future incarnations, so that we are bound to a perpetual round of suffering. Hindu Vedanta offers freedom by realization, through meditation, that Brahman, infinite Being-Consciousness-Bliss, is immanent in the universe, one with the soul. Buddhism offers freedom through Enlightenment—that is, the realization, by means of meditation and other altered states, that the individual self is illusory and that all we experience is mind-created.

These Eastern ideas, minor notes in North America until the 1960s, were widely diffused via the counter-culture and influenced the amorphous New Age movement. Here what is wrong with the world is a mechanistic, dualistic outlook, which fosters isolation, exploitation, and militarism. The means to change are spiritual experience and spiritual discipline; the goal is transformation of consciousness for the individual and the healing of social and ecological ills.

The search for salvation arises out of need for the transcendent—for contact with the Divine, ultimate fulfillment—as well as for this-worldly transformation: meaningfulness, healing, and renewal for the person and the world.

See alsoCivil Rights Movement; Liberation Theology; New Age Spirituality; Quakers; Transcendence.