Quotes About Salvation

In Christian theology it is God who deals with evil, and he does this on the cross.

He was a Jew who believed in the goodness of the original creation and the intention of the Creator to renew his world. His gospel of "salvation" was about Israel's Messiah "inheriting the world," as had been promised in the Psalms. What God had done in and through Jesus was, from Paul's perspective, the launching of a heaven-and-earth movement, not the offer of a new "otherworldly" hope.

The minute you think you're good enough for God, God says, 'I'm not interested in people who are good enough for me.' And the minute you think you're too bad for God, God says, 'It's you I've come for.

This might be, after all, a way of smuggling in 'works' by the back door, into Paul's soteriology (something we Paulinists are trained to watch out for, like sniffer dogs at an airport ready to detect the slightest whiff of hard drugs).

many people today assume that Christianity is one or more of these things—a religion, a moral system, a philosophy. In other words, they assume that Christianity is about advice. But it wasn't and isn't. Christianity is, simply, good news. It is the news that something has happened as a result of which the world is a different place.

And all this "works" because Jesus is Israel's Messiah, representing his people, so that what is true of him is true of them.

Those who belong to him are to believe and to live by the belief that they died and rose again with him, so that they are no longer under any slavish obligation to obey the old master.

Romans 5–8 is, from one point of view, all about hope: the solid, sure hope that all those who belong to God through faith in his action in Jesus are assured of final salvation.

Paul's explanation for why the gospel, the unveiling of God's justice and salvation, is urgently required is that the tree is rotten to the core, and might come crashing down at any minute.

To imagine a world without the gospel of Jesus is to imagine a pretty bleak place

Though many Christians in the Western world have imagined that the aim or goal of being a Christian is simply "to go to heaven when you die," the New Testament holds out something much richer and more interesting.

The main thing Paul wants to say in this paragraph is that God has done, in and through Jesus, what he promised and purposed all along.

And all of this can be summed up in the phrase "forgiveness of sins." None of it has to do with redeemed souls leaving the world of space, time, and matter for something better. All of it has to do with the strange, unanticipated fulfillment of the hope of Israel.

And the reason that death can be defeated—and was defeated in principle when Jesus rose again—is that on the cross Jesus dealt with sins.

We have, alas, belittled the cross, imagining it merely as a mechanism for getting us off the hook of our own petty naughtiness or as an example of some general benevolent truth. It is much, much more.

Justification" is the covenant declaration, establishing in a single family all who share the messianic pistis.

Like so many other early Christians and in line with Jesus himself, Paul interprets the cross in relation to Passover: a new Passover, a new Exodus.

The divine rescuing purposes and Israel's vocation come rushing together in the same human being, the same event.

We are saved not as souls but as wholes. (All

They believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter.

What has happened in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, in other words, is by no means limited to its effects on those human beings who believe the gospel and thereby find new life here and hereafter. It resonates out, in ways that we can't fully see or understand, into the vast recesses of the universe.

This is how the cross establishes God's kingdom: by bearing and so removing the weight of sin and death.

The great second-and third-century Christian teachers insisted, against such new teaching, that God's rescue of the created order itself, rather than the rescue of saved souls from the created order, was central. That was part of the essentially Jewish faith, rooted in the Jewish scriptures, that the early Christians firmly maintained.

Jesus was announcing that a whole new world was being born and he was "teaching" people how to live within that whole new world.