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All Tools The Diptych: CompareTheology · Soteriology
The theological study of salvation: what human beings are saved or liberated from, by whom or by what means, through which events or practices, and toward what final condition. Christian soteriology commonly examines sin, grace, Christ's work, faith, repentance, justification, sanctification, and final renewal.
This section presents the doctrine descriptively: what the traditions teach, with their sources, and no adjudication of theological truth. Soteriology is a discipline studied with the methods of theological discovery, never a method itself. Work a question through the evidence in The Workshop.
The fourteen subjects of the discipline, each with its definition, its Scripture references, its history, its live questions, and the positions stated on it.
The study of what human beings are and of what sin is: human nature as created, the universality and character of sin, and whether sin is a privation, a corruption of nature, a condition, an act, or all of these in different respects.
The doctrine of humanity's primal turning from God in Adam and Eve and of the condition that follows from it for their descendants: what happened in the Fall, how its consequences pass to every human being, and what those consequences are.
The study of how Christ's death reconciles God and humanity: what the cross accomplishes, the models by which the church has understood it, and the extent of its sufficiency and intent, whether for all people or for the elect in particular.
The study of Christ's saving work under its threefold office: as prophet he reveals God and God's will, as priest he offers himself and intercedes, and as king he rules, defends, and finally subjects all enemies, in his humiliation and his exaltation.
The study of how sinners are put right with God: whether justification is God's forensic declaration that the believer is righteous, an effective making righteous, or both; the place of faith, works, and the imputed or infused righteousness of Christ.
The study of the believer's growth in holiness after justification: its agent, its means, its pace across a lifetime or in decisive moments, whether entire sanctification is attainable in this life, and the place of law, discipline, sacrament, and suffering in it.
The study of God's eternal choosing: whether God elects individuals to salvation unconditionally, elects in view of foreseen faith, elects corporately in Christ, or elects Christ and the church in him; and the related questions of reprobation and the order of God's decrees.
The study of how God summons human beings to salvation and how they answer: the outward call of the gospel preached to all, the inward or effectual call of the Spirit, the distinction between resistible and irresistible grace, and the nature of the human response God requires and enables.
The study of the relation between God's grace and the human will: whether the will is bound, freed, assisted, or cooperative in salvation; the distinctions among prevenient, operating, and cooperating grace; and whether grace works by necessity, by moral persuasion, or by concurrence with a will it creates.
The study of the new birth: the Spirit's act by which the dead in sin are made alive, given a new heart and a new nature, antecedent to or coincident with faith; its relation to baptism, to conversion, and to the believer's new identity.
The study of whether true believers can fall away finally, and of the believer's assurance: the promises of God's keeping power, the warnings addressed to professing believers, the means by which God preserves his people, and how a believer may know that he or she stands in grace.
The study of the church's place in salvation: whether anyone is saved outside the church, what the church's sacraments and ministry mediate, whether the church is the mother without whom God is not had as Father, and how membership, visible and invisible, relates to election and to final salvation.
The study of the last things as they bear on salvation: death, the intermediate state, resurrection, the final judgment and its criteria, heaven and hell, eternal punishment and its alternatives, and the renewal of creation as salvation's final horizon.
The study of salvation's reach: whether it finally embraces individuals only, or also communities, nations, and the whole created order; whether those who never hear the gospel can be saved and how; and the relation between personal salvation, social transformation, and the renewal of the cosmos.
The doctrinal traditions and positions, described with their theologians, their origins, their authoritative writings, and their claims. The categories overlap in life; they are never presented here as mutually exclusive.
The position descends from Augustine's anti-Pelagian teaching through the medieval Augustinian tradition to John Calvin's Institutes, whose final edition of 1559 ordered election, atonement, and grace into one system. Theodore Beza's scholastic ordering and the Synod of Dort's canons fixed its classical form against the Arminian challenge.
Jacobus Arminius, a Leiden professor formed in the Reformed tradition, questioned the supralapsarian ordering of the decrees and taught a conditional election. After his death in 1609 his followers set out five articles in the Remonstrance of 1610, presented to the States of Holland under Jan Uytenbogaert's leadership; the Synod of Dort condemned the articles and the classical position was defined in the controversy.
The position begins with Martin Luther's recovery, through his lectures on Romans and the indulgence controversy of 1517, of justification by faith alone, and with his catechisms and the Augsburg Confession's fourth article. Its distinctive temper comes from Luther himself: a theology of the cross, the bondage of the will against Erasmus, and the insistence that the sacraments are God's acts bearing his promise.
The position's roots are the Latin church's own: Augustine's anti-Pelagian grace and sacramental practice, the medieval synthesis, and above all the definitions of the Council of Trent (1545-1563), which remains its normative statement. Its dogmatic core: grace heals and elevates nature rather than covering it from outside, and justification includes the inner renewal of the person.
The position is the Greek patristic tradition carried in the Orthodox Church: Athanasius's sentence that the Word became man that men might become gods, Irenaeus's recapitulation, and the liturgy's own language. Where the Latin West, following Augustine, framed the human problem juridically as guilt, the East framed it chiefly as death and corruption, and salvation as the medicine of immortality administered in the church.
Baptist soteriology descends from the English Separatist movement of the early seventeenth century, when John Smyth's Amsterdam congregation (1609) and Thomas Helwys's return to London joined believers' baptism to a general atonement, while the Particular Baptists of the 1630s and 1640s joined it to a Calvinist account of grace confessed in the Second London Confession of 1689.
The position is John Wesley's synthesis: the Arminian doctrine of universal, prevenient, resistible grace, joined to an experiential order of salvation (conviction, justification and the new birth, growth in holiness, entire sanctification) drawn from his reading of the fathers, the Anglican divines, and the Moravians, and tested in the Methodist societies from 1738. Wesley distinguished himself from the classical Remonstrants chiefly by this doctrine of Christian perfection and by an evangelical insistence on the new birth and assurance.
The position begins at Zurich on 21 January 1525, when Conrad Grebel baptized Georg Blaurock and others on confession of faith, and it was confessed within two years in the Schleitheim Confession (1527) under Michael Sattler. Menno Simons gathered the movement's peaceful mainstream after the Munster catastrophe of 1534-35 discredited its revolutionary fringe, and the Dordrecht Confession (1632) gave the Dutch stream its durable statement.
The position descends from the Holiness movement's expectation of a Spirit baptism of power, through Charles Parham's Topeka revival (1901), where speaking in tongues was identified as the Bible evidence of that baptism, to William J. Seymour's Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles (1906-1909), which carried the experience worldwide. Its soteriology is the Holiness order of salvation with the Pentecostal work of the Spirit set at its head as the empowering gift of the last days.
The position descends from Friedrich Schleiermacher's relocation of religion in the feeling of absolute dependence and of redemption in the God-consciousness communicated by Christ, through Albrecht Ritschl's kingdom ethics and the liberal Protestant mainstream of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a family of positions rather than a confession: its common marks are historical-critical method, suspicion of penal and forensic accounts of the cross, and the relocation of sin and salvation into relational and social registers.
The foundational passages, each carrying the readings the traditions give it, every reading with its argument and its sources. A passage is carried by reference only.
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Positions are compared against the same questions, agreements named beside disagreements, with no scoring and no ranking of denominations. Choose any two positions to set side by side; the worked comparison of Classical Arminianism and Classical Calvinism shows the form in full. The doctrinal comparison stands with the Diptych, where worldviews stand side by side.
