IB World Religions 3.1.3. Salvation, Grace, Reconciliation and the Kingdom of God Notes

3.1.3. Salvation, Grace, Reconciliation and the Kingdom of God

Salvation and being saved

1. Salvation is the state Christians describe as being rescued from sin and its consequences and brought to live in the presence of God. The Greek soteria also carries the sense of healing.
2. Christians answer two questions with the word: what a person is saved from, meaning sin, death and judgment, and what they are saved for, meaning life with God now and beyond death.
3. Paul uses the verb in three tenses, which is why Christians say they have been saved, are being saved, and will be saved.
4. Western churches divide the process into justification, being put right with God, and sanctification, being made holy over a lifetime.
5. Eastern Orthodox theology prefers theosis (deification), the claim that human beings are drawn into the life of God, and it treats salvation as healing rather than as an acquittal.
6. Churches differ over who is saved. Catholic teaching since the Second Vatican Council holds that people outside the visible Church may be saved through Christ, while some Protestant bodies confine salvation to explicit faith.

Grace as gift

1. Grace is God's love and favour towards humanity given freely, and Christians define it by what it is not: not wages, not a reward, and not anything owed.
2. The Greek charis means gift or favour, and it lies behind the Christian words for thanksgiving, eucharistia, and for a spiritual gift, charisma.
3. Ephesians 2 supplies the classic sentence, that Christians are saved by grace through faith, and that this is not their own doing but the gift of God.
4. Augustine argued against Pelagius that even the first movement towards God is God's work, and the Western churches accepted that position.
5. Catholic theology names several kinds, among them sanctifying grace, held to dwell in a person, and actual grace, which prompts particular acts.
6. John Wesley taught prevenient grace, given to everyone before they seek it, which is why Methodist preaching invites all to respond rather than only the elect.
7. Reformed churches following Calvin teach that grace is irresistible for those God has chosen, while Arminian churches hold that it can be refused.

Faith, works and justification

1. The sharpest division in Western Christianity concerns how a person receives what grace offers, and the sixteenth century split the churches over it.
2. Martin Luther taught sola fide (by faith alone), reading Romans to say that a sinner is declared righteous through trust in Christ and not through anything achieved.
3. The Letter of James says that faith without works is dead, and Luther's opponents pressed that text hard against him.
4. The Council of Trent replied between 1545 and 1563 that justification is a real transformation in which the believer cooperates with grace, so that good works genuinely count.
5. Catholic teaching has never held that a person earns salvation, and Protestant teaching has never held that conduct is irrelevant, so the dispute is narrower than the slogans suggest.
6. In 1999 the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, and Methodist, Anglican and Reformed bodies have since associated themselves with it.

Reconciliation with God and others

1. Reconciliation is the uniting of believers with God through the sacrifice of Jesus, and the Greek katallage describes turning enemies into friends.
2. 2 Corinthians 5 is the key passage: God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and has given his followers the ministry of reconciliation.
3. Christians therefore use the word in two directions, vertical between God and humanity and horizontal between people, and they insist the second follows from the first.
4. Matthew 5 makes that link a rule of worship, telling a worshipper to leave the gift at the altar and be reconciled with a brother first.
5. Churches have applied the word to public conflict. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was chaired by Desmond Tutu, an Anglican archbishop, who framed its work in exactly these terms.
6. The ecumenical movement uses the same vocabulary for the divisions between churches, and the World Council of Churches was founded in 1948 on that hope.

The Kingdom of God

1. The Kingdom of God is God's rule, both closeness to God on earth and the fullness of it in heaven, and it is the theme Jesus preaches most often in the first three Gospels.
2. Mark 1 opens his ministry with the announcement that the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near.
3. Matthew writes kingdom of heaven instead, most likely out of Jewish reverence for the divine name, and the two phrases mean the same thing.
4. Jesus describes it almost entirely in parables: a mustard seed, yeast worked into dough, treasure hidden in a field, a net gathering fish of every kind.
5. Christians describe it as already and not yet, present wherever God's rule is obeyed and still awaited in its fullness.
6. The phrase drives Christian social action. Catholic social teaching, the social gospel in North American Protestantism and liberation theology in Latin America all read it as a claim on present arrangements.

The concepts in worship

1. These four words are met in worship long before they are met in argument, and most Christians learn them from hymns, prayers and the shape of a service.
2. John Newton wrote Amazing Grace after leaving the slave trade, and the hymn has carried the word further than any book, sung at funerals by people with no church connection.
3. Christians pray for the kingdom daily in the Lord's Prayer, asking that God's kingdom come and God's will be done on earth as in heaven.
4. The sign of peace, exchanged before communion in Catholic, Anglican and many Protestant services, enacts reconciliation between the people actually present.
5. Evangelical Christians speak of assurance and often give a testimony, a spoken account of being saved, in which grace is described in the first person.
6. Orthodox worship treats the Divine Liturgy as a foretaste of the kingdom, which is why the interior of the church is decorated to look like heaven.
7. Agencies such as Christian Aid, CAFOD and Tearfund present relief and justice work as kingdom work rather than as charity added on afterwards.