Introduction

      So Great a Salvation: Soteriology in the Majority World

      K. K. Yeo

      As a young Chinese born and raised in Malaysia, I encountered the living Christ through reading the Bible for salvation in the middle of the flux and vicissitudes of life. In the nihilistic and secular worldview of my youth, I yearned for meaning in life amid despair and dissonance. I hoped for racial reconciliation and peaceful coexistence among all people in a multi-religious and racial country. I lamented that my relatives went through the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and prayed often for the national salvation of China.^[1] Although I knew the need of salvation for all, I was not clear about the meaning of “salvation” and how the biblical God had anything to do with actualizing salvation in our world. I was puzzled by sermons I heard that declared salvation was mainly about “saving one’s soul from the eternal torment of hell.”

      The Traditional Landscape and Biblical Repertoire

      Traditional Theories of Salvation

      What is salvation? Is salvation the same as redemption, liberation, enlightenment, awakening, forgiveness, attaining nirvana, or going to heaven? Theories of salvation abound in world religions and Christian theologies. Traditionally, and primarily in the North Atlantic West, soteriology (the doctrine of salvation) is construed as:

      1. mystical theory, the orthodox understanding of salvation as divinization of the human being via communicability of the divine-human nature and, later in Christian history, Friedrich Schleiermacher’s understanding of God-consciousness

      2. ransom theory (Athanasius, Origen, Irenaeus, Martin Luther, and Karl Barth), which views salvation based on the vicarious atonement of Jesus (Isa. 53:10, “an offering for sin”; Rom. 3:22–25; Heb. 10:12, 14; Mark 10:45) and thus understands Jesus as the Victor (Johann Christoph Blumhardt; as in Gustaf Aulén’s Christus Victor) over enemies such as chaos, darkness, the devil, or sin and death

      3. satisfaction theory, or the juridical view (Cyprian, Gregory the Great, Ambrose, Augustine; then Anselm of Canterbury, Cur Deus Homo? [Why the God Man?]), which argues that the salvation of humanity can be attained only by Jesus Christ the God-human, who alone can make satisfactory reparation for the wounded honor of God (against the previous view that the debt is paid to the devil)

      4. penal substitutionary theory of the Reformers (John Calvin, J. I. Packer, Donald G. Bloesch),^[2] which interprets salvation as Christ’s bearing human sins in their place, thus taking the punishment on the behalf of sinners because sinners violated the demands of God’s law, which requires God’s holiness and justice from humanity (against the view of satisfying God’s honor)

      5. moral example theory (Peter Abelard, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Horace Bushnell), which holds that salvation is the work of Jesus Christ, whose death on the cross sets an example for people to imitate Christ morally, so that they will become fully human

      6. participatory soteriology (James F. McGrath, Mark M. Mattison, Marcus J. Borg, and John Dominic Crossan), which sees the ones “in Christ” as those who participate in Christ’s atonement work as they follow the path of dying and rising so that they themselves may be internally transformed.^[3]

      Daniel Treier, in his lead chapter in this volume, has given us a more detailed exposition of the Western understandings of salvation, from the Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, Anabaptist, Arminian, Wesleyan, to the Pentecostal. I agree with Treier, who observes that the chief lacunae in traditional dogmatic soteriology are the sociopolitical and cosmic dimensions of salvation. However, I attribute the cause of such lacunae to the Western tendency to read Scripture and construct theology without paying much attention to Scripture’s contexts and that of the readers. Thus, by reading abstractly and turning inward on themselves, Western soteriologies, according to Treier, focus too exclusively on the personal blessings of participation in the new covenant.

      The Biblical Semantic of “God Saves” (“Jesus” in Hebrew)

      The Bible offers us a rich semantic and expansive repertoire about salvation, all pointing to God as the Creator (Isa. 40:12–31) and Savior (Isa. 43:14–44:6). Genesis 1 affirms that God created by means of redeeming, so that God made or created (bārā’, appearing forty-seven times in the Old Testament to describe God’s action) as God called or named (speech-act) creation into being by delivering or redeeming them from the primordial chaos.^[4] The Old Testament calls God the Savior (Isa. 45:15, 21) who brings salvation (Isa. 49:6) and who raises up saviors to deliver Israel (Judg. 3:9, 15; 6:36).

      Consistent with the Colossians passage that names Jesus as the divine agent of creating and redeeming all things (1:15–20), the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (AD 381) refers to the Son’s creating (“through whom all things were made”) and saving (what Jesus did “for us and for our salvation”) functions. The verb “save” (sōzō) in the Septuagint and New Testament (John 3:17) and the noun “salvation (sōtēria) describe the Lord or God in terms of “my Savior” (Luke 1:47) or the one who gives “salvation from our enemies” (Luke 1:71). The word “Lord” in some biblical texts can refer to either God or Jesus, such as Jude 5, which speaks of “Jesus [a textual variant: the Lord] who once for all saved a people out of the land of Egypt.”^[5] The Lord’s Prayer uses a synonym, ruomai (deliver, rescue), of sōzō: “deliver us from the evil one” (Matt. 6:13). In Matthew 27:42–43, the two words are used in the same sentence, serving as a pleonasm to emphasize the meaning of salvation: “He saved [sōsai] others; he cannot save himself. . . . He trusted in God; let God now deliver [rysasthō] him.” Likewise, in Romans 11:26 the use of a synonym is not redundant but highlights the thought: “All Israel will be saved [sōthēsetai], as is written, ‘out of Zion will come the Deliverer [ryomenos].’” Pointing beyond personal salvation, the sociopolitical contexts of these texts are prominent, as is the wide array of cognate words below. Treier’s chapter seeks to critique the overly personal emphasis of salvation in Western Christianity, and using biblical theology he works hard to retrieve robustly the new creation aspects of salvation, such as its sociopolitical and cosmic dimensions.

      “Liberation” (eleutheria) is a cognate of “salvation.” Liberation from what is often the debate. Three New Testament verses seem to indicate liberation is on the personal, sociopolitical, and even cosmic levels: “If the Son has liberated you, you will be liberated indeed” (John 8:36); “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:2); “creation itself will be liberated from the bondage of decay and will enter upon the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). Both Latin American scholars in this volume, Jules Martínez-Olivieri and Milton Acosta, as well as First Nations Canadian scholar Ray Aldred, work with this aspect of salvation in their chapters. But their perspectives on the “materiality