Quotes about Salvation

The main thing Paul wants to say in this paragraph is that God has done, in and through Jesus, what he promised and purposed all along.

Conservatives have said that Jesus was bodily raised, while liberals have denied it, but neither group has seen the bodily resurrection as the launching of God's new creation within the present world order.

And the reason that death can be defeated—and was defeated in principle when Jesus rose again—is that on the cross Jesus dealt with sins.

not for a rescue operation that would snatch Israel (or humans or the faithful) from the world, but for a rescue operation that would be for the world, an operation through which redeemed humans would play once more the role for which they were designed.

We have, alas, belittled the cross, imagining it merely as a mechanism for getting us off the hook of our own petty naughtiness or as an example of some general benevolent truth. It is much, much more.

The divine rescuing purposes and Israel's vocation come rushing together in the same human being, the same event.

We are saved not as souls but as wholes. (All

They believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter.

What has happened in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, in other words, is by no means limited to its effects on those human beings who believe the gospel and thereby find new life here and hereafter. It resonates out, in ways that we can't fully see or understand, into the vast recesses of the universe.

This is how the cross establishes God's kingdom: by bearing and so removing the weight of sin and death.

The great second-and third-century Christian teachers insisted, against such new teaching, that God's rescue of the created order itself, rather than the rescue of saved souls from the created order, was central. That was part of the essentially Jewish faith, rooted in the Jewish scriptures, that the early Christians firmly maintained.

work of salvation, in its full sense, is (1) about whole human beings, not merely souls; (2) about the present, not simply the future; and (3) about what God does through us, not merely what God does in and for us.