Quotes about Salvation

unlearning, letting go, surrendering, serving others, and not the language of self-development—which often lurks behind our popular notions of "salvation.

Our faith became a competitive theology with various parochial theories of salvation, instead of a universal cosmology inside of which all can live with an inherent dignity.

salvation is sin turned on its head and used in our favor.

God protects us into and through death, just as the Father did with Jesus.

In this negative frame, the quickest ticket to heaven, enlightenment, or salvation is "unworthiness" itself, or at least a willingness to face our own smallness and incapacity.

Resurrection is incarnation coming to its logical conclusion. If God is already in everything, then everything is from glory and unto glory. We're all saved by mercy, without exception. We're all saved by grace, so there's no point in distinguishing degrees of worthiness because God alone is all good and everything else in creation participates, to varying degrees, in that one, universal goodness.

But grace is not a late arrival, an occasional add-on for a handful of humans, and God's grace and life did not just appear a few thousand years ago, when Jesus came and a few lucky humans found him in the Bible. God's grace cannot be a random problem solver doled out to the few and the virtuous - or it is hardly grace at all!

if you believe Jesus's main purpose is to provide a means of personal, individual salvation, it is all too easy to think that he doesn't have anything to do with human history—with war or injustice, or destruction of nature, or anything that contradicts our egos' desires or our cultural biases.

Grace is always a punishment for us.

the state of mind of the "shipwrecked"3 is perhaps a necessary beginning point for any salvation from such drowning.

As Carol Bialock writes in her poem, we cannot stop the drowning waters of our addictive culture from rising, but we must at least see our reality for what it is, seek to properly detach from it, build a coral castle, and learn to breathe under water. The New Testament called this salvation (some might call it enlightenment); the Twelve Step Program calls it recovery.

Jesus is precisely giving us his full bodily humanity more than his spiritualized divinity!