Quotes About Salvation

It's heaven all the way to heaven. And it's hell all the way to hell. Not later, but now.

Those who are too carefully engineering their own superiority systems will usually not allow it at all. It is much more done to you than anything you do yourself, and sometimes nonreligious people are more open to this change in strategy than are religious folks who have their private salvation project all worked out.

There are no dead ends in the economy of grace.

Until we start reading the Jesus story through the collective notion that the Christ offers us, I honestly think we miss much of the core message, and read it all in terms of individual salvation, and individual reward and punishment. Society will remain untouched.

Everything finally belongs, and you are a part of it. This knowing and this enjoying are a good description of salvation.

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.

We Christians did not take this world seriously, I am afraid, because our notion of God or salvation didn't include or honor the physical universe.

The full Christian story is saying that Jesus died, and Christ "arose"—yes, still as Jesus, but now also as the Corporate Personality who includes and reveals all of creation in its full purpose and goal.

Privatized salvation never accumulates into corporate change because it attracts and legitimates individualists to begin with.

Christ is God, and Jesus is the Christ's historical manifestation in time. Jesus is a Third Someone, not just God and not just man, but God and human together.

Once a person recognizes that Jesus's mission (obvious in all four Gospels) was to heal people, not punish them, the dominant theories of retributive justice begin to lose their appeal and their authority.

unlearning, letting go, surrendering, serving others, and not the language of self-development—which often lurks behind our popular notions of "salvation.

Our faith became a competitive theology with various parochial theories of salvation, instead of a universal cosmology inside of which all can live with an inherent dignity.

salvation is sin turned on its head and used in our favor.

God protects us into and through death, just as the Father did with Jesus.

In this negative frame, the quickest ticket to heaven, enlightenment, or salvation is "unworthiness" itself, or at least a willingness to face our own smallness and incapacity.

What, then, does it mean to follow Jesus? I believe that we are invited to gaze upon the image of the crucified Jesus to soften our hearts toward all suffering, to help us see how we ourselves have been "bitten" by hatred and violence, and to know that God's heart has always been softened toward us.

Resurrection is incarnation coming to its logical conclusion. If God is already in everything, then everything is from glory and unto glory. We're all saved by mercy, without exception. We're all saved by grace, so there's no point in distinguishing degrees of worthiness because God alone is all good and everything else in creation participates, to varying degrees, in that one, universal goodness.

But grace is not a late arrival, an occasional add-on for a handful of humans, and God's grace and life did not just appear a few thousand years ago, when Jesus came and a few lucky humans found him in the Bible. God's grace cannot be a random problem solver doled out to the few and the virtuous - or it is hardly grace at all!

Threats of hell are unfortunately more memorable to people than promises of heaven.

if you believe Jesus's main purpose is to provide a means of personal, individual salvation, it is all too easy to think that he doesn't have anything to do with human history—with war or injustice, or destruction of nature, or anything that contradicts our egos' desires or our cultural biases.

Grace is always a punishment for us.

the state of mind of the "shipwrecked"3 is perhaps a necessary beginning point for any salvation from such drowning.

As Carol Bialock writes in her poem, we cannot stop the drowning waters of our addictive culture from rising, but we must at least see our reality for what it is, seek to properly detach from it, build a coral castle, and learn to breathe under water. The New Testament called this salvation (some might call it enlightenment); the Twelve Step Program calls it recovery.