Salvation

Salvation names deliverance from a fundamental predicament into a final good, and the traditions differ less over the mechanism than over the diagnosis. What salvation is depends on what is thought to be wrong: sin and estrangement from God in the Abrahamic religions; ignorance and bondage to rebirth in the Indian ones; disorder and departure from the Way in the Chinese ones. The English word carries specifically Christian freight, and comparative use of it needs care, moksha, nirvana and salvation are not obviously one thing under three names, and a good deal of nineteenth-century comparative religion went wrong by assuming that they were.

In Judaism the dominant language is redemption, geulah, and it is corporate and historical before it is individual and otherworldly: deliverance from Egypt, from exile, and finally in the messianic age. The world to come and the resurrection of the dead are affirmed, but Judaism does not hold that salvation requires membership in Israel; the righteous of the nations have a share in the world to come, and there is accordingly no missionary imperative.

In Islam, najat or falah is deliverance from the Fire and admission to the Garden, turning on tawhid, submission, right action and above all God's mercy, with intercession affirmed by most Sunni and Shia theology. Because there is no inherited guilt, there is nothing requiring redemption in the Christian sense; what is needed is guidance and forgiveness.

In Hinduism the goal is moksha, release from the round of rebirth, and the Bhagavad Gita names the classical paths, knowledge, action and devotion, as genuine alternatives, with the theistic traditions treating divine grace as decisive. In Buddhism it is nirvana, the extinguishing of craving and the ending of dukkha, and the tradition is deliberate in refusing to describe it as the survival of a self. In Jainism it is the liberation of the jiva from the karmic matter that weighs it down, achieved by one's own effort without divine assistance, which makes Jainism the clearest case of a tradition in which salvation is not given by anyone.

Christianity has argued about the mechanism of salvation more intensively than any other tradition, and the sixteenth-century division of Western Christendom turned on it.

The instrument. Whether a person is justified by faith alone, the Reformation's sola fide, resting on Romans and Galatians, or by faith working through love, with grace, the sacraments and human cooperation. The Council of Trent's decree on justification (1547) condemned the doctrine that faith alone justifies while equally condemning the view that anyone is saved without grace, a symmetry often overlooked in polemical accounts of it. The Lutheran-Catholic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (1999) stated a shared understanding sufficient, in its signatories' judgement, to lift the sixteenth-century mutual condemnations on this point; a number of Lutheran theologians disputed that the substance had been resolved rather than the language softened.

The scope. Whether Christ died for all, as Catholic and Arminian theology holds, or for the elect alone, as strict Calvinism's particular redemption holds; and whether grace can be resisted. The Synod of Dort (1618-19) defined the Reformed position against the Remonstrants, producing the five points later summarised by the acronym TULIP.

The mechanism of the atonement has never been dogmatically defined in any communion, and several models coexist. Ransom and Christus Victor dominate the patristic period, presenting the cross as a victory over death and the powers. Anselm's Cur Deus Homo (c. 1098) replaced ransom with satisfaction owed to God's honour. Abelard emphasised the moral effect on the beholder. Penal substitution, articulated in the Reformation and dominant in much modern evangelicalism, holds that Christ bore the punishment due to sin; it is criticised by others as importing a juridical scheme foreign to the texts and, in its harsher popular forms, as morally objectionable. Eastern Christianity has generally been less interested in the question of mechanism, framing salvation as theosis, participation in the divine life, rather than as the settling of a debt.

The extent. Whether those outside the church can be saved. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus was stated severely in the medieval West, at its sharpest in the Council of Florence. The Second Vatican Council's Lumen Gentium and Nostra Aetate affirmed that those who through no fault of their own do not know the gospel, yet seek God and follow conscience, may attain salvation. Karl Rahner pressed the inclusivist logic further with the phrase "anonymous Christianity", which drew objection from exclusivists as emptying the gospel of urgency and from pluralists as annexing other traditions without their consent.