salvation

—salvational, adj.

/sal vay"sheuhn/, n.

1. the act of saving or protecting from harm, risk, loss, destruction, etc.

2. the state of being saved or protected from harm, risk, etc.

3. a source, cause, or means of being saved or protected from harm, risk, etc.

4. Theol. deliverance from the power and penalty of sin; redemption.

[1175-1225; ME salvatio(u)n < LL salvation- (s. of salvatio), equiv. to salvat(us) (ptp. of salvare to SAVE¹; see -ATE¹) + -ion- -ION; r. ME sa(u)vaciun, sauvacion < OF sauvacion < LL, as above]

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In religion, deliverance from fundamentally negative conditions, such as suffering, evil, death, or samsara, or the restoration or elevation of the natural world to a higher, better state.

Eastern religions tend to stress self-help through individual discipline and practice, sometimes over the course of many lifetimes, though in Mahayana Buddhism bodhisattvas and certain buddhas may act as intervening divine agents. In Christianity, Jesus is the source of salvation and faith in his saving power is stressed. Islam emphasizes submission to God. Judaism posits collective salvation for the people of Israel.

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▪ religion

Introduction

also called  redemption 

 in religion, the deliverance of mankind from such fundamentally negative or disabling conditions as suffering, evil, finitude, and death. In some religious beliefs it also entails the restoration or raising up of the natural world to a higher realm or state. The idea of salvation is a characteristic religious notion related to an issue of profound human concern.

Nature and significance

      It could be argued reasonably that the primary purpose of all religions is to provide salvation for their adherents, and the existence of many different religions indicates that there is a great variety of opinion about what constitutes salvation and the means of achieving it. That the term salvation can be meaningfully used in connection with so many religions, however, shows that it distinguishes a notion common to men and women of a wide range of cultural traditions.

      The fundamental idea contained in the English word salvation, and the Latin salvatio and Greek sōtēria from which it derives, is that of saving or delivering from some dire situation. The term soteriology denotes beliefs and doctrines concerning salvation in any specific religion, as well as the study of the subject. The idea of saving or delivering from some dire situation logically implies that mankind, as a whole or in part, is in such a situation. This premise, in turn, involves a series of related assumptions about human nature and destiny.

Objects and goals

      The creation myths (creation myth) of many religions express the beliefs that have been held concerning the original state of mankind in the divine ordering of the universe. Many of these myths envisage a kind of Golden Age (paradise) at the beginning of the world, when the first human beings lived, serene and happy, untouched by disease, aging, or death and in harmony with a divine Creator. Myths of this kind usually involve the shattering of the ideal state by some mischance, with wickedness, disease, and death entering into the world as the result. The Adam and Eve myth is particularly notable for tracing the origin of death, the pain of childbirth, and the hard toil of agriculture, to man's disobedience of his maker. It expresses the belief that sin (original sin) is the cause of evil in the world, and implies that salvation must come through man's repentance and God's forgiveness and restoration.

      In ancient Iran (Iranian religion), a different cosmic situation was contemplated, one in which the world was seen as a battleground of two opposing forces: good and evil, light and darkness, life and death. In this cosmic struggle, mankind was inevitably involved, and the quality of human life was conditioned by this involvement. Zoroaster, the founder of Zoroastrianism, called upon men to align themselves with the good, personified in the god Ahura Mazdā, because their ultimate salvation lay in the triumph of the cosmic principle of good over evil, personified in Ahriman. This salvation involved the restoration of all that had been corrupted or injured by Ahriman at the time of his final defeat (eschatology) and destruction. Thus the Zoroastrian concept of salvation was really a return to a Golden Age of the primordial perfection of all things, including man. Some ancient Christian (Christianity) theologians (e.g., Origen) also conceived of a final “restoration” in which even devils, as well as men, would be saved; this idea, called universalism, was condemned by the church as heresy.

      In those religions that regard man as essentially a psychophysical organism (e.g., Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Islām), salvation involves the restoration of both the body (human body) and soul. Such religions therefore teach doctrines of a resurrection of the dead body and its reunion with the soul, preparatory to ultimate salvation or damnation. In contrast, some religions have taught that the body is a corrupting substance in which the soul is imprisoned (e.g., Orphism, an ancient Greek mystical cult; Hinduism; and Manichaeism, an ancient dualistic religion of Iranian origin). In this dualistic (dualism) view of human nature, salvation has meant essentially the emancipation of the soul from its physical prison or tomb and its return to its ethereal home. Such religions generally explain the incarceration of the soul in the body in terms that imply the intrinsic evil of physical matter. Where such views of human nature were held, salvation therefore meant the eternal beatitude of the disembodied soul.

      Christian soteriology contains a very complex eschatological program (regarding the final end of man and the world), which includes the fate of both individual persons and the existing cosmic order. The return of Christ (Jesus Christ) will be heralded by the destruction of the heaven and earth and the resurrection of the dead. The Last Judgment, which will then take place, will result in the eternal beatitude of the just, whose souls have been purified in purgatory, and the everlasting damnation of the wicked. The saved, reconstituted by the reunion of soul and body, will forever enjoy the Beatific Vision; the damned, similarly reconstituted, will suffer forever in hell, together with the devil and the fallen angels. Some schemes of eschatological imagery, used by both Christians and Jews, envisage the creation of a new heaven and earth, with a New Jerusalem at its centre.

Means

      The hope of salvation has naturally involved ideas about how it might be achieved. These ideas have varied according to the form of salvation envisaged; but the means employed can be divided into three significant categories: (1) the most primitive is based on belief in the efficacy of ritual magic—initiation ceremonies, such as those of the ancient mystery religions, afford notable examples; (2) salvation by self-effort, usually through the acquisition of esoteric knowledge, ascetic discipline, or heroic death, has been variously promised in certain religions—Orphism, Hinduism, Islām, for example; and (3) salvation by divine aid, which has usually entailed the concept of a divine saviour who achieves what man cannot do for himself—as in Christianity, Judaism, Islām.

Basic context

The cosmic situation

time

      Study of the relevant evidence shows the menace of death as the basic cause of soteriological concern and action. Salvation from disease or misfortune, which also figures in religion, is of a comparatively lesser significance, though it is often expressive of more immediate concerns. But the menace of death is of another order, and it affects man more profoundly because of personal awareness of the temporal categories of past, present, and future. This time-consciousness is possessed by no other species with such insistent clarity. It enables man to draw upon past experience in the present and to plan for future contingencies. This faculty, however, has another effect: it causes man to be aware that he is subject to a process that brings change, aging, decay, and ultimately death to all living things. Man, thus, knows what no other animal apparently knows about itself, namely, that he is mortal. He can project himself mentally into the future and anticipate his own decease. Man's burial customs grimly attest to his preoccupation with death (death rite) from the very dawn of human culture in the Paleolithic Period. Significantly, the burial of the dead is practiced by no other species.

      The menace of death is thus inextricably bound up with man's consciousness of time. In seeking salvation from death, man has been led on to a deeper analysis of his situation, in which he has seen in his subjection to time the true cause of the evil that besets him. The quest for salvation from death, accordingly, becomes transformed into one for deliverance from subjugation to the destructive flux of time. How such deliverance might be effected has been conceived in varying ways, corresponding to the terms in which the temporal process is imagined. The earliest known examples occur in ancient Egyptian (Egyptian religion) religious texts. In the so-called Pyramid Texts (c. 2400 BC), the dead pharaoh seeks to fly up to heaven and join the sun-god Re on his unceasing journey across the sky, incorporated, thus, in a mode of existence beyond change and decay. A passage in the later Book of the Dead (1200 BC) represents the deceased, who has been ritually identified with Osiris, declaring that he comprehends the whole range of time in himself, thus asserting his superiority to it.

      The recognition that mankind is subject to the inexorable law of decay and death has produced other later attempts to explain its domination by time and to offer release from it. Such attempts are generally based on the idea that the temporal process is cyclical, not linear, in its movement. Into this concept, a belief in metempsychosis (reincarnation) (transmigration of souls) can be conveniently fitted. For the idea that souls pass through a series of incarnations becomes more intelligible if the process is seen as being cyclical and in accordance with the pattern of time that apparently governs all the forms of being in this world. The conception has been elaborated in various ways in both Eastern and Western religions. In Hinduism and Buddhism, elegantly imaginative chronological systems have been worked out, comprising mahāyugas, or periods of 12,000 years, each year of which represented 360 human years. In turn, 1,000 mahāyugas made up one kalpa, or one day in the life of Brahmā, and spanned the duration of a world from its creation to its destruction. After a period of quiescence, the world would be re-created by Brahmā for another kalpa. The purpose of this immense chronological scheme was to emphasize how the unenlightened soul was doomed to suffer an infinite series of incarnations, with all of their attendant pain of successive births and deaths. In the Orphic (Orphic religion) texts of ancient Greece, man's destiny to endure successive incarnations is significantly described as “the sorrowful weary Wheel,” from which the Orphic initiate hoped to escape through the secret knowledge imparted to him.

Nature (nature, philosophy of)

      As an alternative interpretation to this view of man's fatal involvement with time, the tragedy of the human situation has also been explained in terms of the soul's involvement with the physical universe. In some systems of thought (e.g., Hinduism and Buddhism), the two interpretations are synthesized; and in such systems it is taught that, by accepting the physical world as reality, the soul becomes subject to the process of time.

      Concentration on the soul's involvement with matter as being the cause of the misery of human life has generally stemmed from a dualistic view of human nature. The drawing of a sharp distinction between spirit and matter has been invariably motivated by a value judgment: namely, that spirit (or soul) is intrinsically good and of transcendent origin, whereas matter is essentially evil and corrupting. Through his body, man is seen to be part of the world of nature, sharing in its processes of generation, growth, decay, and death. How his soul came to be incarcerated in his corruptible body has been a problem that many myths seek to explain. Such explanations usually involve some idea of the descent of the soul or its divine progenitor from the highest heaven and their fatal infatuation with the physical world. The phenomenon of sexual intercourse has often supplied the imagery used to account for the involvement of the soul in matter and the origin of its corruption. Salvation has thus been conceived in this context as emancipation from both the body and the natural world. In Gnosticism and Hermeticism—esoteric theosophical and mystical movements in the Greco-Roman world—and the teaching of St. Paul (Paul, the Apostle, Saint) deliverance was sought primarily from the planetary powers that were believed to control human destiny in the sublunar world.

Man's responsibility

      The idea that man is in some dire situation, from which he seeks to be saved, necessarily involves explaining the cause of his predicament. The explanations provided in the various religions divide into two kinds: those that attribute the cause to some primordial mischance and those that hold man to be himself responsible. Some explanations that make man directly responsible represent him also as the victim of the deceit of a malevolent deity or demon.

      Because death has been universally feared but rarely accepted as a natural necessity, the mythologies of many peoples represent the primeval ancestors of mankind as having accidentally lost, in some way, their original immortality. One Sumerian myth, however, accounts for disease and old age as resulting from the sport of the gods when they created mankind. In contrast, the Hebrew story of Adam and Eve finds the origin of death in their act of disobedience in eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, forbidden to them by their maker. This causal connection between sin and death was elaborated by St. Paul in his soteriology, outlined in his letter to the Romans, and formed the basis of the Christian doctrine of original sin. According to this doctrine, through seminal identity with Adam, every human being must partake of the guilt of Adam's sin, and even at birth, a child is already deserving of God's wrath for its share in the original sin of mankind and before it acquires the guilt of its own actual sin. Moreover, because each individual inherits the nature of fallen humanity, he has an innate predisposition to sin. This doctrine of man means that no person can, by his volition and effort, save himself but depends absolutely upon the saving grace of Christ.

      Wherever a dualistic view of human nature has been held, it has been necessary to explain how ethereal souls first became imprisoned in physical bodies. Generally, the cause has been found in the supposition of some primordial ignorance or error rather than in a sinful act of disobedience or revolt—i.e., in an intellectual rather than a moral defect. According to the Hindu philosophical system known as Advaita Vedānta, a primordial ignorance (avidyā) originally caused souls to mistake the empirical world for reality and so become incarnated in it. By continuing in this illusion, they are subjected to an unceasing process of death and rebirth (saṃsāra (samsara)) and all of its consequent suffering and degradation. Similarly, in Buddhism, a primordial ignorance (avijjā) also started the “chain of causation” (paṭiccasamuppāda) that produces the infinite misery of unending rebirth in the empirical world.

Methods and techniques

Ritual

      The means by which salvation might be achieved has been closely related to the manner in which salvation has been conceived and to what has been deemed to be the cause of man's need of it. Thus in ancient Egypt, where salvation was from the physical consequences of death, a technique of ritual embalmment (embalming) was employed. Ritual magic has also been used in those religions that require their devotees to be initiated by ceremonies of rebirth (e.g., Baptism in water in Christianity, in bull's blood in rites of Cybele) and by symbolic communion with a deity through a ritual meal in the Eleusinian Mysteries, Mithraism, and Christianity (communion).

Knowledge

      Religions that trace the ills of man's present condition to some form of primordial error, or ignorance, offer knowledge that will ensure salvation. Such knowledge is of an esoteric kind and is usually presented as divine revelation and imparted secretly to specially prepared candidates. In some instances (e.g., Buddhism and Yoga), the knowledge imparted includes instruction in mystical techniques designed to achieve spiritual deliverance.

Devotion and service

 Whenever mankind has been deemed to need divine aid for salvation, there has been an emphasis on a personal relationship with the saviour-god concerned. Such relationship usually connotes faith in and loving devotion and service toward the deity, and such service may involve moral and social obligations. Judaism, Christianity, Islām, and the bhakti cults of India afford notable examples. Christianity adds a further requirement in this context: because human nature is basically corrupted by sin, God's prevenient (antecedent, activating) grace is needed before man's will can be disposed even to desire salvation.

Varieties of salvation in world religions

Ancient Egypt (Egyptian religion)

      The Pyramid Texts of ancient Egypt provide the earliest evidence of man's quest for salvation. They reveal that by about 2400 BC a complex soteriology connected with the divine kingship of the pharaohs had been established in Egypt. This soteriology was gradually developed in concept and ritual practice and was popularized; i.e., the original royal privilege was gradually extended to all of the classes of society, until by about 1400 BC it had become an elaborate mortuary cult through which all who could afford its cost could hope to partake of the salvation it offered. This salvation concerned three aspects of postmortem existence, as imagined by the ancient Egyptians, and, in the concept of Osiris, it involved the earliest instance of a saviour-god. An elaborate ritual of embalmment was designed to save the corpse from decomposition and restore its faculties so that it could live in a well-equipped tomb. This ritual imitated the acts that were believed to have been performed by the gods to preserve the body of Osiris, with whom the deceased was ritually assimilated. The next concern was to resurrect the embalmed body of the dead person, as Osiris had been resurrected to a new life after death. Having thus been saved from the consequences of death, the revivified dead had to undergo a judgment (presided over by Osiris) on the moral quality of his life on earth. In this ordeal, the deceased could be saved from an awful second death only by personal integrity. If he safely passed the test, he was declared maa kheru (“true of voice”) and was admitted to the beatitude of the realm over which Osiris reigned.

      This Osirian mortuary cult, with its promise of postmortem salvation, was practiced from about 2400 BC until its suppression in the Christian Era. In some respects, it constitutes a prototype of Christianity as a salvation religion.

Hinduism

      Running through the great complex of beliefs and ritual practices that constitute Hinduism is the conviction that the soul or self (ātman (atman)) is subject to saṃsāra—i.e., the transmigration through many forms of incarnation. Held together with this belief is another, karman (karma)—i.e., that the soul carries with it the burden of its past actions—which conditions the forms of its future incarnations. As long as the soul mistakes this phenomenal world for reality and clings to existence in it, it is doomed to suffer endless births and deaths. The various Indian cults and philosophical systems offer ways in which to attain mokṣa (moksha) or mukti (“release”; “liberation”) from the misery of subjection to the inexorable process of cosmic time. Basically, this liberation consists in the soul's effective apprehension of its essential unity with Brahman, the supreme Ātman or essence of reality, and its merging with it. Most of the ways by which this goal may be attained require self-effort in mastering meditation techniques and living an ascetic life. But, in the devotional ( bhakti) cults associated with Viṣṇu (Vishnu) and Śiva (Shiva), an intense personal devotion to the deity concerned is believed to earn divine aid to salvation.

Buddhism

      Buddhism accepts the principles of saṃsāra and karman (Pāli: kamma), but it differs in one important respect from the Hindu conception of man. Instead of believing that an ātman, or soul, passes through endless series of incarnations, Buddhism teaches that there is no such preexistent immortal soul that migrates from body to body. Each individual consists of a number of physical and psychic elements (khandha (skandha)s) that combine to create the sense of personal individuality. But this combination is only temporary and is irreparably shattered by death, leaving no element that can be identified as the soul or self. By a subtle metaphysical argument, however, it is maintained that the craving for personal existence generated by the khandhas causes the birth of another such personalized combination, which inherits the karma of a sequence of previous combinations of khandhas.

      The Enlightenment won by Gautama Buddha was essentially about the cause of existence in the phenomenal world, from which suffering inevitably stemmed. Buddhist teaching and practice have, accordingly, been designed to acquaint men with their true nature and situation and enable them to free themselves from craving for existence in the space-time world and so achieve Nirvāṇa (nirvana). Traditionally, this goal has been presented in negative terms—as the extinction of desire, attachment, ignorance, or suffering—creating the impression that Buddhist salvation means the complete obliteration of individual consciousness. In one sense, this is so; but, in terms of Buddhist metaphysics, ultimate reality transcends all the terms of reference relevant to existence in this world.

      Theoretically, the Buddhist initiate should, by his own effort in seeking to eradicate desire for continued existence in the empirical world, achieve his own salvation. But, as Buddhism developed into a popular religion in its Mahāyāna (Mahayana) (“Greater Vehicle”) form, provision was made for the natural human desire for assurance of divine aid. Consequently, belief in many saviours, known as bodhisattvas (“Buddhas-to-be”), developed, together with elaborate eschatologies concerning human destiny. According to these, before the ultimate achievement of Nirvāṇa, the faithful could expect to pass through series of heavens or hells, according to their merits or demerits and the intensity of their devotion to a bodhisattva.

Judaism

      Because Judaism is by origin and nature an ethnic religion, salvation has been primarily conceived in terms of the destiny of Israel as the elect people (chosen people) of Yahweh, the God of Israel. It was not until the 2nd century BC that there arose a belief in an afterlife, for which the dead would be resurrected and undergo divine judgment. Before that time, the individual had to be content that his posterity continued within the holy nation. But, even after the emergence of belief in the resurrection of the dead, the essentially ethnic character of Judaism still decisively influenced soteriological thinking. The apocalyptic faith, which became so fervent as Israel moved toward its fateful overthrow by the Romans in AD 70, conceived of salvation as the miraculous intervention of Yahweh or his Messiah in world affairs. This saving act would culminate in the Last Judgment delivered on the nations that oppressed Israel and Israel's glorious vindication as the people of God. From the end of the national state in the Holy Land in AD 70, Jewish religion, despite the increasing recognition of personal significance, has remained characterized by its essential ethnic concern. Thus, the Exodus from Egypt has ever provided the typal imagery in terms of which divine salvation has been conceived, its memory being impressively perpetuated each year by the ritual of the Passover. The restoration of the holy nation, moreover, always has been linked with its Holy Land; and Hebrew literature, both in biblical and later forms, has lovingly described the establishment of a New Jerusalem and a new Temple of Yahweh (“the Lord”), whether it be in this world or in some new cosmic order. Into this new order, the rest of mankind, repentant and purified, will be incorporated; for the original promise made to the patriarch Abraham included all men within the divine blessing. In the Book of Zechariah (Zechariah, Book of), the ultimate salvation of mankind is graphically envisaged: the Gentiles, in company with the Jews, will return to serve God in an ideal Jerusalem.

Christianity

      Christianity has been described as the salvation religion par excellence. Its primary premise is that the incarnation and sacrificial death of its founder, Jesus Christ, formed the climax of a divine plan for mankind's salvation. This plan was conceived by God consequent on the Fall of Adam, the progenitor of the human race, and it would be completed at the Last Judgment, when the Second Coming of Christ would mark the catastrophic end of the world. This soteriological evaluation of history finds expression in the Christian division of time into two periods: before Christ (BC) and Anno Domini (AD)—i.e., the years of the Lord. This classification of time has been increasingly superseded since the late 20th century by the periods before the Common Era (BCE) and Common Era (CE), respectively.

      The evolution of the Christian doctrine of salvation was a complicated process essentially linked with the gradual definition of belief in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth. In Christian theology, therefore, soteriology is an integral part of what is termed Christology. Whereas the divinity of Jesus Christ has been the subject of careful metaphysical definition in the creeds, the exact nature and mode of salvation through Christ has not been so precisely defined. The church has been content to state, in its creeds, that Christ was incarnated, crucified, died, and rose again “for us men, and for our salvation.”

      The basic tenets of Christian soteriology may be summarized as follows: man is deserving of damnation by God for the original sin, which he inherits by descent from Adam, and for his own actual sin. But, because sin is regarded as also putting man in the power of the devil, Christ's work of salvation has been interpreted along two different lines. Thus, his crucifixion may be evaluated as a vicarious sacrifice offered to God as propitiation or atonement for human sin. Alternatively, it may be seen as the price paid to redeem man from the devil. These two ways of interpreting the death of Christ have provided the major themes of soteriological theory and speculation in Christian theology. Despite this fluidity of interpretation, belief in the saving power of Christ is fundamental to Christianity and finds expression in every aspect of its faith and practice.

Islām

      Muḥammad (Muhammad) regarded himself as “a warner clear” and as the last and greatest of a line of prophets whom Allāh had sent to warn his people of impending doom. Although the word najāt (Arabic: “salvation”) is used only once in the Qurʾān, the basic aim of Islām is salvation in the sense of escaping future punishment, which will be pronounced on sinners at the Last Judgment. Muḥammad did teach that Allāh had predestined (predestination) some men to heaven and others to hell; but the whole logic of his message is that submission to Allāh is the means to salvation, for Allāh is merciful. Indeed, faithful submission is the quintessence of Islām, the word Islām itself meaning submission. Although in his own estimation Muḥammad was the prophet of Allāh, in later Muslim devotion he came to be venerated as the mediator between God and man, whose intercession was decisive.

Zoroastrianism and Parsiism

      According to Zoroaster, a good and evil force struggled for mastery in the universe. Man had to decide on which side to align himself in this fateful contest. This dualism was greatly elaborated in later Zoroastrianism and Parsiism, which derived from it. Good, personified as the god Ormazd (Ahura Mazdā), and evil, as the demonic Ahriman, would contend for 12,000 years with varying fortune. At last Ormazd would triumph, and Saoshyans, his agent, would resurrect the dead for judgment. The righteous would pass to their reward in heaven, and the wicked be cast into hell. But this situation was of temporary duration. A meteor would later strike the earth, causing a flood of molten metal. Through this flood all would have to pass as an ordeal of purgation. The sensitivity of each to the anguish would be determined by the degree of his guilt. After the ordeal, all men would become immortal, and all that Ahriman had harmed or corrupted would be renewed. Salvation thus took the form of deliverance from postmortem suffering; for ultimate restoration was assured to all after suffering the degree of purgation that the nature of their earthly lives entailed.

The Rev. Samuel G.F. Brandon

Additional Reading

For recent and comprehensive studies of the subject, S.G.F. Brandon, Man and His Destiny in the Great Religions (1962), provides extensive documentation and bibliographies; important aspects of salvation are specially dealt with in his History, Time and Deity (1965) and The Judgment of the Dead (1967). S.G.F. Brandon (ed.), The Saviour God (1963), comprises 15 essays by specialists in the major religions. A valuable and well-documented study of the subject in Hebrew, Greco-Roman religions, and early Christianity may be found in T. Klauser (ed.), Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, vol. 5, col. 54–219 (1964). Adolf von Harnack's monumental Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 3rd ed., 3 vol. (1893; Eng. trans., History of Dogma, 7 vol., 1900, reprinted 1961), traces the development of Christian soteriology. L.W. Grensted, A Short History of the Doctrine of the Atonement (1920, reprinted 1962), is a reliable concise guide. Aspects of salvation in the religions concerned are treated in the following books: R.C. Zaehner, Hinduism, 2nd ed. (1966) and The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism (1961); E.J. Thomas, The History of Buddhist Thought, 2nd ed. (1951); and A.J. Wensinck, The Muslim Creed (1932).

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