Over in IMHO (though it started life here in GD), Idle Thoughts started a thread asking the question, in essence, “Do you consider yourself ‘saved’?” in the Christian context.
My beloved sister in spirit Siege made the following comment there:
Now, most people hear the term used in the typical conservative Evangelical (“fundy”) usage – God’s going to send everybody to Hell unless you do something that He expects of you, at which point He will “save” you from having to go there. “Getting saved” becomes the “Get out of Hell free” card in a cosmic Monopoly game, with your soul as the stakes.
To say that I find that approach to a relationship with God obnoxious is a vast understatement.
The Latin words salvus (“saved”) and salvatio (“salvation”), in non-Christian classic Latin, refer not to a spiritual or theological state, but rather to a matter of health. Salvus means “healed, whole, well, cured of illness” and salvatio probably most closely translates as the very modern concept “wellness.” My understanding of what “saved” means in a religious context is founded very much in this idea – that a life lived in relationship with God and one’s fellow man is one in which healing has occurred and is occurring, a more whole and fulfilling life, one that is curing one’s spiritual malaise.
So what I want to see discussed in this thread is what this whole idea of “being saved” might mean.
For purposes of this discussion, assume the existence of the Christian God, and Jesus as some sort of Spokesman for Him with a handle on what He desires and expects. IOW, Jews, pagans, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists, etc., will put to one side their personal non-Christian metaphysical concepts and discuss the issue as if Christianity (though not necessarily the fundie conceptualizing regarding it) were true, much as if a thread said “Suppose that Mars were inhabited by little green men” or “Suppose the Central Powers had won World War I” – you reason working from an assumption that may be contrary to what you believe to be fact to see where it takes you.
IOW, you may be firmly convinced that the whole thing is a bunch of legends without historical referent, used by church leaders to assert power over people by preying on their fears; or that the whole thing is utter malarkey. Don’t bother saying that (unless you need to in order to get to your main point) – we’re working this as a “what if” thread to see if we can make any sense out of what is supposed to have happened.
So: what you’re working with is: Jesus of Nazareth did exist and said and did most of the things said of Him in the Gospels, with the potential that figurative and symbolic language may have entered into it. (I.e., if you have a real problem with the “dead men rising from their graves” in Matthew, consider it as metaphorical as Ezekiel’s hallucination of the Valley of Dry Bones that came back to life – but assume that while Jesus may have been talking metaphorically, what He said had real meaning and reference to something real and true, that He had “a hot line to God” about the stuff He said.) Do not assume as a given that the fundie interpretation that God’s planning on sending everyone to Hell for their sins unless they formally “take Jesus as their Savior” is the sole possible way to read this whole “salvation” issue.
Given all that, then, the question of what Jesus meant by stuff like “Your faith has saved you” and similar lines about “being saved” might mean, working only from what He said, and not necessarily from any given set of teachings evolved by people from it, is the issue to be discussed.
I think the discussion might prove interesting – I’ve never known the collective Doper mind to fail to come to some intriguing new concepts when we work together on an issue, and this one in particular has some potential for new insights.
