The Christian Understanding of Salvation-Liberation

Abstract

The organizing committee assigned me the following task: first, to articulate the Christian theological understanding of salvation; second, to include some Roman Catholic perspectives on that common Christian task; third, to reflect on the political-ethical dimensions of the Christian understanding of salvation. I shall attempt to fulfill that assignment in the following way: First, I shall locate the question of salvation within the fuller system of symbols in Christian theology. Next, I shall give my own theological understanding of the basic characteristics of Christian salvation. Thirdly, I shall reflect further on the question of salvation by paying special attention to the political-ethical implications of salvation as the latter is interpreted, especially but not exclusively, by some contemporary Roman Catholic political and liberal theologians. Because of the confines of space, I shall simply state my own systematic theological interpretation on each of these issues. Those confines do not, of course, excuse any failures of interpretation on my part of either the great Christian tradition's understanding of salvation or the character of the fundamental questions which the Christian symbol of salvation addresses. Here too, the peculiarity of all properly theological interpretation must hold: however personal any individual theologian's interpretation must necessarily prove, that interpretation can never be merely personal. In sum, this interpretation, like that of all the other Christian partners in the Christian-Buddhist dialogue, must be held accountable to the following Christian theological criteria for the adequate interpretation of any doctrine or symbol: first, that the proposed interpretation be hermeneutically faithful to the Christian tradition; second, that the proposed interpretation be intelligible to any intelligent, rational, and responsible human being who asks the fundamental existential questions which the particular symbol addresses. The latter is based on the principle that any human being should be able to ask and critically reflect upon such familiar existential questions as mortality, transience, anxiety, a search for a properly human way to exist, and freedom from all bondage-personal, social, and political-which the Christian symbol of salvation both provokes and responds to.