What is ‘salvation’?

The concept ‘salvation’ contains within itself two distinct, though connected, ideas. The first is the idea of being delivered from something. The second is the good situation that results from such a deliverance.

What is it that humanity is saved from?

The normal answer to this question is: ‘from sin’. Such an answer is not wrong. But it is imprecise. To be more precise we should say that salvation, as envisaged by Christian theology, delivers people, indeed the entire world, from the effects of sin. As we saw, Christian tradition believes that sin has affected all aspects of human life and not simply the individual's relationship to God. It therefore affects not only people's unity with God but also unity with their neighbours, their inner harmony and unity with their environment. What salvation seeks to achieve, therefore, is to overcome the fractures between God and humanity caused by sin and, having done that, to overcome the divisions caused by sin between human beings, within individual human beings and between human beings and their environment.

What is it that humanity is saved for?

Unity with God

If the first effect of sin is to divide God and humanity, then salvation is before all else the overcoming of that division. Salvation reconciles us to God (see, for example Romans 5:10, 11; 2 Corinthans 5:18–20), sets aside fear of God and enables us to experience God's presence in our midst (Romans 8:14–16). Salvation makes us God's children, God’s people (1 Peter 2:9–10), Christ's body (1 Corinthians 12:27). Salvation will only be fully realised in an individual when he or she is one with the Father as Jesus is (John 17:21). And that will demand a transformation so total that the person escapes from the limitations of space and time as we experience them. Salvation therefore will only be fully realised in an individual when he or she experiences the sort of resurrection that Jesus experienced after his death.

Unity with one another

If sin divides humanity itself, then salvation restores genuine community and overcomes the divisions existing between people (Ephesians 2:14, Colossians 3:11, Galatians 3:27– 28, Romans 10:12, 1 Corinthans 12:12–26, Matthew 28:19).