"Have you been saved?" Those were the first words used to greet a member of my former church when he went to visit a Presbyterian church closer to his home. He drove quite a distance to get to our church and when a new congregation planted itself closer to his home, he decided to try it out. As he walked through the front doors of the new church, the first person to meet him asked if he had been saved. The question so unnerved my friend that he had no idea what to say…so he mumbled something excused himself and headed for the sanctuary. The next week when he was back with us, he wanted to know how he should have answered. Though we might not have encountered quite the same situation, chances are many of us might have wondered as well how to answer the question…so we will take a look at what this being saved thing is all about.
In its most basic sense, the word "saved" implies that one is saved from something and to something. One is saved from an onrushing train (your car moves off of the tracks) to safety (to the roadway clear of the train). Within Judaism and Christianity there are several traditional ways in which this "saved from" and "saved to" language has been used.
Within Judaism saved has most often referred to being physically saved from illness or death. In early Judaism (before the exile to Babylon) there was no sense of eternal life and so to be saved was a very real saving of one's life here and now. As a belief in eternal life began to take hold, being saved meant being saved from an eternity in the shadowy netherworld of Sheol (the place of the dead) to a resurrected life back on earth following God's redemption of the righteous (those who obeyed the Law of Moses).
Within Christianity the earliest way in which this language was used was that people are saved from sin into new life. The understanding here is that sin leads us away from the life-giving ways of God and into the death dealing ways of "the world." By following Jesus (usually expressed in terms of believing in Jesus) our path is altered and we leave behind the ways of death, which harm us and others, and we enter a new path which leads to a way of life which positively impacts the world on God's behalf. The end result, very much like with Judaism, was that the saved were resurrected into God's renewed world.
The most frequent use of "saved" in the American religious tradition was and is that people are saved from hell and to heaven. This is the theme of every evangelical crusade that has set up a tent or filled an auditorium. The underlying belief is that if someone makes a profession of faith in Jesus, one is saved from eternal punishment in hell and into eternal bliss in heaven. Chances are this is what the person meant when he asked my friend if he was saved. My favorite example of this view of salvation comes from the Crystal Cathedral which once had a TV promotion where a person could call in, tell the operator that they had professed faith in Jesus and the caller would be sent a ticket to heaven.
A summary of the biblical sense of salvation then is that humanity, including the Jews as God's chosen children, had abandoned God's plan for the world (to love God and neighbor) and had chosen instead a destructive self-centered manner of life. Somehow this self-destructive path needed to be altered so that as humanity awaited the coming Kingdom of God, they would more and more demonstrate God's love to the world. This is why Jesus, as would any good Jew, spent so much time talking about life here on earth, rather than about heaven. Salvation for Jesus was connected with how one lived one's life in the present moment, not as a way to earn salvation, but as a way of demonstrating that one was in fact being saved (changed more and more into a God-centered individual). At the same time salvation did contain an after-death component which impacted how one might spend eternity. Next week we will spend some time with this eternal component.
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