The logic of the word ‘salvation’ involves the idea of a person or situation from which the subject of salvation is saved. There are a variety of models used in the Bible for describing such a situation or person; I choose to use that of slavery. Apart from other considerations, this model is useful in that it connects the idea of situation to that of person: slavery is always slavery to. Salvation is thus the setting-free of someone from slavery to someone else. In the Bible the paradigm case of salvation is the setting-free of the Israelites from their slavery to Pharaoh. Ultimately, however, in the Gospel, salvation becomes the setting-free of man from his slavery to the devil.

So much by way of defining how I intend to use the word ‘salvation’. I wish now to question our contemporary experience as to how far it contains anything which this model of salvation can help us to interpret. Do we experience a need which could be called the need for salvation? And if so, how does it show itself? What are the characteristic forms of the need for salvation today? Where, in our multi-storeyed modern society, does it show itself most clearly? To indicate at the outset the way in which I intend to deal with this question, let me say that it is in the sphere of language, or more generally that of communications, that I discern the clearest evidence of this need.

Consider the following. They are passages quoted in an article by W. A. de Klerk (a well-known Afrikaner novelist and playwright) in the recently published ‘Beweging Uitwaarts’ (‘The Movement Outward’), a collection of critical essays by de Klerk, Johan Degenaar and Martin Versfeld, that is at present causing quite a stir in Afrikaner cultural circles.