SALVATION IS THE FOCAL POINT OF RELIGION. HARNACK HAS REFERRED TO THE TWO ASPECTS OF RELIGION AS die ruhende und die beivegende Elemente. There is the side of rest, of trust and hope and help; there is the side of action or obligation, conceived in a high ethical sense or in terms of prescribed ritual, ceremonial, sacrifice, and offerings. The vital concern of men, present in higher or lower form in every religion, is the side of saving help, or salvation.

The Place of Salvation in Religion

Religion roots in the conviction that there is a world of higher meaning and value and power, and that man may have life through right relation to this world. It is the faith, in the words of William James, that "the believer is continuous with a wider self from which saving experiences flow in." ¹ On its highest level religion is always ethics and salvation in closest union, gift as well as demand, dynamic joined to ideal. It says with Augustine, "Give what thou commandest, and command what thou wilt."

The dominant note of the New Testament is salvation. Jesus proclaimed the gospel, the good news of the saving purpose of God. That name, given to its first four books, might rightly be the title of the New Testament as a whole. Its theme is the good news of God's coming in Christ for the salvation of men, of the kingdom of God upon earth and the kingdom in heaven. The Church saw as its first task the proclamation of this word of salvation.

The idea of salvation has not had adequate attention in the modern Church. (1) The emphasis has been on the ethical in religion: in the individual life the stress on service, in church life on organization and activity. In the past the ethical element in Christianity has often suffered from neglect through one-sided mysticism, a subjective and individualistic pietism, a magical sacramentarianism, or a stress on divine absolutism which reduced man to a passive spectator of the divine deed. It was highly necessary that the ethical element should be recovered and that it should receive a new emphasis, especially in the field of social life. But too often the new emphasis meant a loss of the other aspect. Religion tended to become humanistic and moralistic, to lose the message of man's sin and need, of God's saving purpose and power. (2) The traditional statements of the doctrine of salvation were inadequate and unconvincing and the Church failed to give its message the needed reinterpretation.

Even more important has been the change in the environment of thought and life within which the Church works today. The story of this development begins with the Renaissance and the Reformation and the new freedom which came to man, freedom of thought as against the old authoritarianism and freedom of life as found in the growing democracy of the West. It includes the progress of science, invention, industry, and trade. Our concern here is neither with the advantages which this has brought to man nor with the accompanying social evils of which we are so keenly aware today, but with the way in which the changed atmosphere has affected the appeal of the idea of salvation.

Salvation means help from a higher power, and the first effect of this development was to increase man's confidence in himself and to lessen his sense of need. Once man stood in fear of nature and its incalculable forces, and even more of the world of evil spirits; so he sought supernatural aid. Science revealed to modern man a world of order; invention and engineering put into his hands the means of control. With these instruments he could now conquer disease and want and make nature his servant. Science was the new messiah, and man was his own savior. ² Of course this optimistic humanism recognized problems on the human side: man's ignorance, his mistaken ideas, social customs and institutions which needed change. But these could be cared for by education and reform. Man was a rational being and was essentially good; he himself could work the change. In such a world there was room for the ethical ideals of Christianity and for belief in God, but not much place for the idea of a sinful human nature that needed to be changed and of a God who could work in man both to will and to do.

More serious still was the increasing trend to naturalism and secularism. If humanism had no need of God, naturalism left no place for God. There could be no thought of saving help if there were only natural forces under immutable laws. Even when the naturalism was of the idealistic or humanistic type, there could be at most the thought of a beneficent process or a value-supporting order. There was wholly absent the Christian idea of a personal God, forgiving, reconciling, creating new men, and by his indwelling Spirit of truth and love and righteousness creating a new world.

Secularism is naturalism expressed in a philosophy of life and values. It is ancient, but the modern age, with its opportunities for money getting and its multiplied material means of satisfaction, has given secularism a new impetus. Men look on wealth as the test of success, the highest instrument of power, and as commanding all the means of self-gratification. "Soul, you have ample goods. . . ; eat, drink, be merry" (Luke 12:19). Modern nationalism, with its desire for territory and trade and its reliance upon arms, is another expression of this secularism. Communist and capitalist countries alike show this.

This is the world to which the Church has to present its gospel of the God who saves, with its wholly different view as to the highest goods of life, the needs of man, and the way of help.

But there is another aspect to the modern situation. When all weight is given to the conditions indicated above, certain other facts remain, and this first: the deep needs of man are still here, needs unsatisfied by the gods of the machine and wealth and power. The hunger for God, the sense of guilt, the need of healing and wholeness within, the need of inner power alike to rule ourselves and to meet the world, the desire for oneness with our fellows and for mutual understanding and help, the search for meaning and purpose in the world's life and our own, a faith that will give us confidence as we face the world's future and hope as we think of our own—these eternal needs still cry for satisfaction. Indeed, there is good reason for saying that they are being felt more keenly today than for many years. Men have turned to the most diverse agencies. There is the remarkable growth of psychiatry and its use by social agencies. There is a strong and continued development of cults which have, with very wide differences, this thing in common: they offer a message of salvation, or satisfaction of need, through higher powers. Some are healing cults. Some emphasize the work of the Holy Spirit, often conceived as an ecstatic experience. There are movements on the religious border line like spiritualism, astrology, and numerology, and bizarre religious movements like those of Father Divine and "The Great I Am." They offer variously peace of mind, health of body, material prosperity. But all this points to the same conclusion: men are conscious of personal need and are seeking help.

The social scene points the same way. There is the fear of war in all its forms: economic warfare, the cold war between nations, the threat of danger from what will soon be the common possession of incalculably powerful instruments of destruction, the possibility, to some the certainty, that another war will destroy all that the race has achieved through the centuries. Here, too, the comfortable optimism of a generation ago is gone and men are asking as to a way of salvation. For some it is the way of nationalism, resting on wealth and military might. Others look to a form of international organization. Still other lands show a blind trust in armed autocracies and total devotion to their leaders.

For the Christian Church the conclusion of all this should be plain. Mankind is still in need of help, though its searchings are often blind and vain. The first task of the Christian Church is still to proclaim a gospel. The most pressing task of Christian theology is to make clear the meaning and scope of the Christian doctrine of salvation as it bears on man's total life.

The Meaning of Salvation

The basic questions as to the meaning of salvation may be put in three simple phrases: from what, to what, by what.

1. Historically speaking, man's first concern in salvation was with the perils from which he sought to be saved. Life was full of dangers: want and disease, foes and wild beasts, evil spirits, the gods whom he had angered by dereliction or transgression, often unwittingly. The word "salvation" itself suggests deliverance. This aspect remains in the higher religions. The form of fear has altered; the ground for fear is still present. Man is dependent and limited. Natural evils remain, social evils have not decreased, and a spiritual religion serves to make plain to man the greatest evil, that within himself. Old Testament and New alike emphasize salvation as deliverance.

2. The dominant aspect of salvation in Christian thought is the positive one; it stresses not simply deliverance but that to which and for which man is saved. It is not an afterthought to remedy an unforeseen disaster which came with the entrance of sin and death into the world. It is rather the good purpose of God which is present in all his action in his world: in creation, revelation, providence, redemption. It all flows from the Christian conception of God, from our faith in a God of goodness and wisdom and power, whose love is seen in his sharing of life with his creatures and especially in that higher life of fellowship with himself which he gives to men.

Life is the key word for our understanding of salvation. Just as sin means death, so salvation means life. Christianity is the religion of life. It believes in the living God, not in an inscrutable power, not in a mere cosmic order, whether hard or beneficent, but in a God of purpose and action who brings his good will to pass. And life is the word which characterizes rightly the Christian way. It is life that God asks of man, no mere gift on the altar, or ritual of worship, or keeping of rules, but the whole life: thought and deed, deepest faith and highest affection, the whole field of man's desiring and doing. In turn it is life that God gives to man. What he asks, he bestows. This is salvation, God's gift of life: life at its fullest and highest, life of body and spirit, life individual and inner, life in its social aspects, the corporate life of man developing in history, life consummated in another world. Salvation is life. It cannot be less than this, and there is nothing greater. Men want deliverance from evil, but that of itself is not salvation. Men look for an eternal abode safe from change and decay and death, but salvation is more than a place.

'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant,

Oh life, not death, for which we pant,

More life, and fuller, that I want.

The desire for life has always been a driving force with man. At first it meant simply the demand for the satisfaction of physical wants, the need of fellowship, of safety. Christianity does not bid men give up the desire for life and for the satisfaction of its wants. Its word is not renounce, not Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren. Rather it says: "Why will you die?" (Ezek. 18:31). "Ho, every one who thirsts, come. . . . Hear, that your soul may live" (Isa. 55:1, 3). "I came that they may have life" (John 10:10). The task of religion is to show what life is, where its true needs lie, and how these may be satisfied.

The New Testament recognizes life as the good and goal of man and as God's great gift in Christ. Jesus assumes and approves the desire of men for life; his concern is to point out the real meaning of life and the way of attainment (Luke 12:15-23; Matt. 7: 14; 16:25). Paul and John, the great New Testament interpreters of salvation, make repeated use of the term "life"; and both of them refer to the life that is given here as well as in the world beyond. "The free gift of God is eternal life" (Rom. 6:23), says Paul. "You be made alive, when you were dead" (Eph. 2:1). They are to "walk in newness of life" (Rom. 6:4), that is, to live out the life which has been given them. He speaks of "Christ who is our life" (Col. 3:4). This thought of salvation as life is even more pronounced in John. God gave his Son that those who believed in him should not perish but have eternal life. "In him was life" (John 1:4). Christ is "the bread of life" (John 6:35). And that life begins now; he who believes has "eternal life" (John 3:16), "has passed from death to life" (John 5:24). "He who has the Son has life" (I John 5:12).

3. The third question is that of the way: By what is man saved? The heart of the Christian answer is simple: God's deed in mercy, man's response in trust and devotion. "By grace you have been saved through faith" (Eph. 2:8). All life is from God; man receives life through fellowship with God. But as we explore this simple answer, we find how profound and how inclusive it is, how it enters into all the relations of life, transforming them and using them. The doctrine of salvation should make clear how God works in individual life, in the fellowships of life (especially the Church), in the movement of history, what his goal is in all these aspects of life, and what the means are which he employs.

Ways of Salvation

The world had not lacked in proffered ways of salvation before Christianity. Man has always had ways by which he has sought deliverance from evil and the goods of life. Chief among these have been (1) sacrifices and offerings by which to appease the anger of the gods or win their help; (2) on a lower level, the arts of magic by which man thought to control spiritual powers and make them serve his ends; (3) the moralistic way, where man seeks to commend himself to God's favor by uprightness and good deeds in obedience to the divine will; (4) the way of gnosis, or knowledge of the truth, gained by philosophic insight, special illumination, or induction into secret mysteries once revealed (ignorance being here the great evil); (5) asceticism, winning salvation by fleeing the world and the flesh; (6) mysticism, seeking life by direct union with God, often through ecstatic experience.

Clearly, except for magic, which is, strictly speaking, not a religion, there are elements of truth in all these ways in which man has sought for help in a world higher than his own. The systems of offering and sacrifice symbolize the need of surrender and devotion. Gnosis indicates the place of insight. Asceticism suggests the need of self-discipline and the mastery of the spiritual over the physical. Legalism rests back on ideas of moral demand from a righteous God. Mysticism points the need of the union of man with God. But in the forms commonly taken each of these ways misses the larger truth and in so doing fails adequately to state its own.

When Paul and other Christians proclaimed the gospel, they found four rivals. Two of these played little part. One was the faith in the old national deities, whose names remained but whom the "acids of modernity," first century modernity, had already destroyed. The second was the philosophic cult, stemming from Greece, having its most active and significant form in stoicism. But though there was much that was noble in this, and though stoic missionaries carried it abroad, it belonged to the few, to great spirits like Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. It was an ethic, not a gospel; it had no promise of help for the common man. Neoplatonism was another philosophic faith. It combined the speculative, the religious, and the ethical. It influenced Judaism through Philo and had its effect later on in Christian theology. But it, too, was for the few; and it was not strictly a message of salvation.

It was different with the mystery cults. They were distinctly religions of salvation. Here religion was at once individualized and social. The individual man was initiated into the mysteries and joined a group. There was an outward resemblance to the Christian movement in these societies, as also in their belief in a hero god who had died and entered into immortal life, with whom they sought a mystical union through sacrament and ecstatic experience so that they too might overcome death and have life immortal. But the differences were fundamental. Their gods were mythical; Jesus was a historical person. They had no message as to God; their hero god was a finite being. The Christian gospel proclaimed the eternal God who had come to men in Christ. The ethical was incidental, a qualification which candidates had to meet in order to gain admission, at least in some of the cults; for Christianity the ethical was basic alike in the salvation which it brought and in the demand which it made.

Judaism was the fourth way. It has shown at times a distinct missionary spirit. Its high ethic and lofty monotheism appealed to serious seekers in the Roman world. These proselytes, found in the synagogues of the Diaspora, were among the first to respond to Paul's preaching. What Christianity owed to it and where Christianity went beyond it must be considered later. In the end Judaism remained the religion of a particular people and predominantly a religion of law and ritual. It developed no clear message of personal salvation. Salvation remained for it a future and a national deliverance. It had no adequate gospel for that needy world.

Looking back with the perspective of the years, we can see what the world needed and what Christianity brought.

Its gospel was a message from God, God's word to men, not man's ideals and ideas. Its object of faith was not the hero gods of the mystery cults nor the deities of the old Greek and Roman pantheons, finite and fallible creatures of man's imagining. Its promise was that of the help of the infinite and eternal One, exalted above men yet drawing near in mercy. He was the living God, a God of action and not a mere cosmic order. He was a personal God with whom man might have fellowship and not a mere abstract principle or idea.

It brought Jesus Christ: not myth but history, not an imagined ideal but a concrete living personality, revealing in life and deed at once the true life of man and the spirit and purpose of God.

It came with a right understanding of man. It knew the disease for which it offered the remedy. It was equally removed from cynical pessimism and uncritical idealism. It saw man as a sinner in God's sight, but a sinner who might become a son of God.

Its message of salvation was inclusive. It was for all men, not for an elite of intellect or character but for the least and neediest and most sinful. It was for the whole man: it brought forgiveness and healing of spirit, high ideals and strength to obey, and personal fellowship with God. It included the associated life as well as the individual, the future as well as the present; it offered men a present fellowship of faith and love and service, the promise of a coming kingdom of God on earth, and the hope of the life beyond.

Education and Salvation

Education and salvation have often been set up in contrast with each other or even in opposition. Man needs regeneration, say some, not education. It is not enough to train man; he must be transformed. And that cannot be done by mere development of the capacities of man, for man is finite and evil, but only by a Power above man. On the other side we have not only the naturalistic humanist, who has no place at all for God or salvation, but the widespread tendency to view education, with social reform, as the complete answer to human problems, and to think of education, of its aims and its resources, purely on the human or even secular plane.

Part of our trouble, particularly in the Western world, arises from the fact that formal education is mainly in the hands of the state, with the strict exclusion of religion and little attention to the ethical In this way the most significant dimension of man's life and of his education is omitted. On the other hand the Church has not adequately conceived or performed its task of education. What is needed first is a truer understanding of the meaning alike of education and salvation.

Present-day leaders are moving toward a deeper appreciation of the meaning of education. It is more than acquiring knowledge; a man may have "loads of learned lumber in his head" and not be educated. It is more than the acquirement of skills, favorite concern of a machine age; it should teach a man to live, not simply how to make a living. Briefly put, education is the process by which a man achieves the largest possibilities of personal development and the most fruitful life in relation to his world. It involves free growth from within; it is a life process, not something added from without. True, it demands aid from without; it is a process of social directing and giving and aiding, and not of mere individual resource and effort. Its aim is maturity but at the same time unceasing growth, for he is no longer truly alive who has ceased to see and seek and grow. Its goal is a life of unity and self-mastery and freedom within, of a harmonious and helpful relation to the world of men through which we are enriched by the wealth of the past as by the associations of the present, while in turn making our gift to this associated life. Here individual and social, freedom and dependence, are united.

Modern educational thought would commonly go thus far, but there are other elements which are not commonly included. Moral ideals, a spiritual dynamic, and a vital faith are basic to human life. We associate these with religion; they belong equally to education; indeed they are here of crucial importance. (1) The educated man is one who has learned the values of life which should direct his efforts and the moral ideals which have the right to command him. Without the recognition of an authority which is more than prudence or self-interest, there can be no abiding social order or assured social welfare, and equally no high individual achievement. (2) Education demands a dynamic, a source of inspiration and strength which is more than prudential considerations or promptings of ambition. (3) These call for a living faith, or, if you wish, a world view. It is not enough to learn from science how things behave, or to acquire the skills by which we can get what we want. We need to ask what it all means, this world which we are studying, this life for which we are preparing, what we ourselves are, and the true goal of our life. It is through this third element that the first two are realized. God is the answer to the problem of moral ideals, of ultimate authority for individual and society, of spiritual dynamic, and of the meaning of life.

The intimate relation of education and salvation is seen if we revert to the conception of salvation here set forth as life through right relations and for right relations. For this is also the method and meaning of education. It seeks individual integration (wholeness, harmony) as well as a life in harmony with the world of nature and men and work secured through right understanding and attitudes. But the supreme relation of life, that of man to God, should not be excluded. Here is life's highest good, here is the clearest light on its meaning, here the deepest source of help. The increased interest of education in psychology points the same way. More is needed than growth conceived simply as development of the given life. Life is made up of discontinuities as well as continuity. Educators recognize how the problems of maturity root in childhood or infancy. They see the need of readjustment, reorientation, and change of basic attitudes, problems which directly concern us in the study of salvation.

But if education has need of the perspective and resources of religion, salvation has need of the element of education. Obviously that includes instruction. A man should have a clear grasp of his faith, a knowledge of its sacred writings and history, of its ideals and demands, as well as of the world in which he lives and which the Church serves. Religious education must give these.

And we need to see how God uses the way of education in giving men life. The Old Testament tells the story of the training of Israel. "When Israel was a child, I loved him. ... I taught Ephraim to walk" (Hos. 11:1, 3). Again and again the idea of growth in life is emphasized in the New Testament. We are to be no longer children; we are to grow up in him who is our head. And here, as always, demand and gift, ethics and salvation, go together. That follows from the basic conception of salvation as life. There is a beginning, the initial deed by which man is brought into fellowship with God. But there is needed a continued giving and continual growing. In our later discussion of ways of help, or means of grace, we shall consider the ways which God uses, not simply to maintain us in this life, but to enrich and increase it. This is salvation as education, God's training of men that they may grow up into a larger life of wisdom and love, of faith and freedom and righteousness.

In the light of this concept we see the educational task of the Church. It is more than the traditional idea of instruction and certainly more than the modern idea of self-expression and self-development. It means bringing men—children and adults—to a living knowledge of God, furthering a life in fellowship with God, so that with God's help they may live and grow. As Archbishop Temple says: "The main function of the Church is religious education, that is to say, the building up of thought and character in the knowledge of the love of God, so that the soul is always open to the operation of the Holy Spirit." ³ A hopeful sign is the increasing importance assigned to the Christian home as a vital part of the Christian communion and to its work of nurture.

In beginning the discussion of the doctrine of salvation it is well to note again that Christian truth is an organic whole. Salvation is not a doctrine which can be separately defined. That appears when we consider the work of God in salvation. Creation, revelation, and salvation are aspects of a single continuing work of the living God. The meaning of creation is seen in redemption. Redemption, in turn, is a part of the creative work of God; it is his continuing spiritual creativity. Further, revelation and redemption belong together; it is in his ongoing redemptive work, in history, in Christ, in Christian experience, that God is known.

It is equally important that we see things whole as we study salvation on the human side. Thus it is necessary that we see how the "religious" and the ethical, the gift and the demand, the divine word and the human response, form at every stage a living whole. The saving gift of God demands the response (repentance, faith, the devotion of love). The response is made possible by the gift (mercy, forgiveness, grace). So time as the fateful moment of opportunity and decision (kairos, krisis) has its meaning in and through history. So individual and social form a whole, each requiring the other.

1) A Pluralistic Universe, p. 307.

2) In a passage in The Golden Day Lewis Mumford refers to Mark Twain's naive worship of the "paleotechnic age," and quotes from a letter of his written to Walt Whitman in connection with the celebration of the latter's seventieth birthday. "You have lived just the seventy years which are greatest in the world's history. . . . What great births you have witnessed I The steam press, the steamship, the steel ship, the railroad. . . . But tarry for a while, for the greatest is yet to come. Wait thirty years and then look out over the earth! You shall see marvels upon marvels: . . . and their formidable result—man at almost his full stature at last." That was in 1889. Thirty years later the first world war had just closed and the victors had learned so little that they were even then shaping the events which led to the even more terrible second world war.

3) Mens Creatrix, p. 43.