Quotes about Salvation

God's faithfulness to the covenant with Israel, even granted the large-scale failure of Israel as a whole, will result in the rescue of the whole sinful world.

The risen Jesus is both the model for the Christian's future body and the means by which it comes about. Similarly

The heritage mattered, but the hope was all-important—hope for a new world, for the One God to become king at last.

For Paul and all the other early Christians, what mattered was not "saved souls" being rescued from the world and taken to a distant "heaven," but the coming together of heaven and earth themselves in a great act of cosmic renewal in which human bodies were likewise being renewed to take their place within that new world.

They are being offered a narrative, an historical story whose hope of 'salvation' lies not in a flight from history but in a great convulsive change within history, a transformation in which there will be continuity with the present as well as discontinuity.

Second, the means by which this goal is attained is precisely the "forgiveness of sins." If, as Paul implies in 2:15, the objection of Jews (or Jewish Messiah believers) to the inclusion of Gentiles is that they are "Gentile sinners," then this objection is overturned precisely because the Messiah "gave himself for our sins.

Both these elements, sin and death, need to be dealt with on the cross.

Redemption," as we saw, is an Exodus term.

I received mercy, because in my unbelief I didn't know what I was doing.

Resurrection and forgiveness are not strange things that might perhaps happen in the old creation.

the death of Jesus, reconciling people to God, generates the renewal of their human vocation.

Romans 7:4 then summarizes and reemphasizes the point at the start of the next stage of the argument. When the Messiah died, "you"—anyone who belongs to the Messiah, anyone who is a member of his "body"—died at the same time.