Historical Background
The biblical story itself widens from one man's family to a nation, to the nations streaming to Zion, to a new heaven and new earth. The older theology asked the scope question chiefly about persons: the fate of the unevangelized drew answers from strict exclusivism through the hope of Limbus and invincible ignorance to Karl Rahner's account of the anonymous Christian, which Vatican II's affirmations about those who seek God prepared and which its critics, Protestant and Catholic alike, resisted. Liberation theology from Gustavo Gutierrez (1971) insisted salvation includes liberation from unjust structures in history, not only beyond it. The creation-wide reading, grounded in Romans 8 and Colossians 1, gained ground as ecological theology developed; the individualist reading answers that communities and cosmos are saved in and through saved persons.
Scripture References
- Genesis 12:1-3
- Isaiah 2:2-4
- Romans 8:18-25
- Colossians 1:15-20
- 1 Timothy 2:3-6
The Questions
- Is salvation finally of persons, of peoples, of the cosmos, or of all in an ordered relation? Work on this question in the Workshop
- Can those who never hear the gospel be saved, and if so, on what basis? Work on this question in the Workshop
- Does salvation include the healing of social structures now, or is that a fruit distinct from salvation itself? Work on this question in the Workshop
- What happens to creation: replacement, renewal, or liberation from decay? Work on this question in the Workshop
The Positions on This Subject
Charismatic and Pentecostal
The Spirit is poured out on all flesh: salvation's gifts cross every line of race, sex, age, and station, and the last-days community of the Spirit is God's sign that the scope of salvation is the whole human family.
Progressive
Salvation includes liberation from the structures that oppress: sin is personal and systemic together, and God's saving action in history sides with the poor and the crushed against the powers that crush them.
Methods Brought to This Subject
The methods of theological discovery demonstrably worked on this subject, each with the reason it belongs here and the evidence of its use.
Liberation Hermeneutics
Whether salvation reaches social structures and history itself, or souls only, is this subject's sharpest open question, and the liberation reading exists to press it: it reads the Exodus and the prophets as God's saving acts within history and measures every account of salvation against them.
Evidence of use: Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation (1971), argues from those texts that salvation is one integral process embracing the personal and the structural, and the work is the named source of the position this reading takes on the subject.
Feminist Hermeneutics
The feminist reading asks this subject's question in its most pointed form: whether the salvation the tradition describes reaches women as it reaches men, and what in the tradition's language has obscured that reach. The question is a scope question, and this method is the one that posed it.
Evidence of use: Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk (1983), poses the question in its canonical form, whether a male savior can save women, and works it through the tradition's sources.
Objections
Inclusivist accounts are objected to for emptying mission of urgency and for patronizing other faiths by claiming their adherents anonymously. Strict exclusivism is objected to as making salvation turn on the accidents of geography and birth, against God's universal salvific will. Liberation readings are objected to for collapsing salvation into politics; purely individual readings are objected to for shrinking the Bible's own cosmic horizon to private rescue.
Sources
Primary: Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, para. 16 (1964); Karl Rahner, 'Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions,' Theological Investigations V (German essays 1960s; English 1966); Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation (Spanish original 1971; English 1973).
Secondary: John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, 2nd ed. (Yale University Press, 2004); Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God (IVP Academic, 2006).