Quotes About Salvation

In a world of monotonous horror there could be no salvation in wild dreaming. Horror he had adjusted to. But monotony was the greater obstacle, and he realized it now, understood it at long last. And understanding it seemed to give him a sort of quiet peace, a sense of having spread all the cards on his mental table, examined them, and settled conclusively on the desired hand.

In a world of monotonous horror there could be no salvation in wild dreaming. Horror he had adjusted to. But monotony was the greater obstacle, and he realized it now, understood it at long last.

They spoke, at length, about the realms "above" this one. Levels at which the progressing soul becomes at one with God—formless, independent of time and substance though still aware of personal identity.

I]t's not the world that needs saving, it's us. For us to be saved, as a lot of the very old myths say, we'll have to come home and be born again.

stories free of ideas and steeped in local selves. Her salvation is close, hot, and private. It depends on a person's ability to say nevertheless, to do one small thing that seems beyond them, and, for a moment, break the grip of time.

The great and merciful surprise is that we come to God not by doing it right but by doing it wrong!

Salvation is not a divine transaction that takes place because you are morally perfect, but much more it is an organic unfolding, a becoming who you already are, an inborn sympathy with and capacity for, the very One who created you.

Unless we find the communal meaning and significance of the suffering of all life and ecosystems on our planet, we will continue to retreat into our individual, small worlds in our quest for personal safety and sanity. Privatized salvation never accumulates into corporate change because it attracts and legitimates individualists to begin with. Think about that.

Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity (it did not need changing)! Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.

The New Testament called it salvation or enlightenment, the Twelve Step Program called it recovery. The trouble is that most Christians pushed this great liberation off into the next world, and many Twelve Steppers settled for mere sobriety from a substance instead of a real transformation of the self. We have all been the losers, as a result—waiting around for "enlightenment at gunpoint" (death) instead of enjoying God's banquet much earlier in life.

The Crucified One is God's standing solidarity with the suffering, the tragedy, and the disaster of all time, and God's promise that it will not have the final word. The Risen One is God's final word about the universe and what God plans to do with all suffering.

It really works very well, but the trouble is that it feels so godly that much, if not most, religion is a belonging system more than a search for intimacy with God. Jesus was not into tribal religion, groupthink, and loyalty tests. Much of the institutional church is into them, however, and always has been. It works too well to call it into question. It holds us together and that feels like salvation, even if it is a very deteriorated form.

For five hundred years, Christian teachers defined and redefined salvation almost entirely in individualistic terms, while well-disguised social evils—greed, pride, ambition, deceit, gluttony—moved to the highest levels of power and influence, even in our churches.

Only with a notion of the Preexisting Christ can we recover where this Jesus was "coming from" and where he is leading us—which is precisely into the "bosom of the Trinity" (John 1:18). "I shall return to take you with me, so that where I am you also may be" (John 14:3), the Christ has promised. That might just be the best and most succinct description of salvation there is in the whole New Testament.

No doubt you're aware that many traditional Christians today consider the concept of universal anything—including salvation—heresy. Many do not even like the United Nations. And many Catholics and Orthodox Christians use the lines of ethnicity to determine who's in and who's out. I find these convictions quite strange for a religion that believes that "one God created all things.

Before Jesus, it was all about earning and meriting and performing, and Paul knew that would eat us all alive—as it has.

Salvation is not sin perfectly avoided, as the ego would prefer; but in fact, salvation is sin turned on its head and used in our favor.

You will know salvation through the mystery of forgiveness" (Luke 2:77).

Christians shrunk our image of both Jesus and Christ, and our "Savior" became a mere Johnny-come-lately "answer" to the problem of sin, a problem that we had largely created ourselves.

Step 8 is a marvelous tool and technology for very practical incarnation, which keeps Christianity grounded, honest, and focused on saving others instead of just ourselves. "Anyone who claims to be in the light, but hates his brother or sister, is still in the dark" (1 John 2:9). Until religion becomes flesh, it is merely Platonic idealism instead of Jesus radicalism.

When you get your "Who am I?" question right, all the "What should I do?" questions tend to take care of themselves. The very fact that so many religious people have to so vigorously prove and defend their salvation theories makes one seriously doubt whether they have experienced divine mirroring at any great depth.

Salvation for Paul is an ontological and cosmological message (which is solid) before it ever becomes a moral or psychological one (which is always unstable).

God is the ultimate nonviolent one, so we dare not accept any theory of salvation that is based on violence, exclusion, social pressure, or moral coercion. When we do, these are legitimated as a proper way of life. God saves by loving and including, not by excluding or punishing.

The pressed clay or "dust" of Adam has then become the immortal diamond that is Christ.