SALVATION AS COMMUNION: Partakers of the Divine Nature

Theology Today, Oct 2004 by Heim, S Mark

HAVE WE FORGOTTEN THE DEPTH OF SIN?

How does this view of salvation fit with the traditional view of the sin and evil it overcomes? Christian tradition shows striking unanimity in the claim that salvation refers comprehensively to fulfillment of the entire network of creation. This network has three primary foci: the relations of human beings with God, the relations of humans with each other, and the relations of human creatures with all of God's other creatures, the natural world. Thinking diagnostically of the human situation, theology has named the disorders in these three relations sin, evil, and death. Sin is the estrangement between God and humans instigated by human defiance or abnegation. Evil is the disorder within humans individually and among them collectively. Death and despair are the disorders that enter the human relation to creation when that relation is constricted to a self-enclosed reality. Salvation's fulfillment corresponds to the three dimensions of estrangement: justification (righting human relations with God), sanctification (righting intrahuman relations) and eternal life (restoring human relations with nature). Faith, love, and hope correspond as positive realities to the sin, evil, and death from which we are liberated. As each of these last three represents the degeneration or termination of relation, each of the first three represents fulfilled relations. The unification of these three fulfillments through communion with God in Christ is the religious end that Christians call salvation.

This ecumenical commonality has important implications. Various Christian confessions may use a different dimension of salvation as the primary framework integrating the other two. But they agree that a religious aim that definitively excludes even one of these aspects is not true salvation. Salvation encompasses the dimension of love and justice, right and rich relations among humans. Yet a definitive limitation of salvation simply to "right relation among persons" alone is not what Christians seek. Salvation encompasses relation with the rest of God's creation: harmony with nature and eternal life. But a definitive reduction of salvation simply to "ecological balance and personal resurrection" alone also is not what Christians seek. Christian salvation encompasses personal relation with God: faith and justification. But a definitive reduction of salvation to "spiritual experience of forgiveness and union" with God alone is not what Christians seek in salvation. Each of the three reductions affirms a real aspect of salvation. But each, taken alone, represents a limited, truncated vision of the full scope of Christian salvation.

In many contexts, the need for a definition of salvation is largely moot. Immediate oppression, the death of a loved one, the destructive impact of disease, the internal anguish of alienation from God-in the face of these situations of crisis, humans beings cry out for help directly, in the voice of the psalmist. There is no doubt as to the immediate shape of the salvation they seek. Is speaking of salvation as we have done only a dream of heaven, a vision without earthly relevance that shifts attention away from the ongoing struggles against injustice and suffering in this life? Attempting to revive positive wonder in our religious imaginations, have we undermined the importance of material deliverance from the concrete evils and oppressions of history?