Salvation

Simple Path To Salvation

"If you would be simple-hearted like the Apostles, would not conceal your human shortcomings, would not pretend to be especially pious, if you would walk free from hypocrisy, then that is the path. While it is easy, not everyone can find it or understand it. This path is the shortest way to salvation and attracts the grace of God. Unpretentiousness, guilelessness, frankness of soul - this is what is pleasing to the Lord, Who is lowly of heart. Except ye become like children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of God (Matt. 18:13)." -- Elder Leonid of Optina

It is Certainly Possible to Find Reconciliation with God

"Not every person is able to achieve the highest state of transcendent soul; but it is certainly possible for everyone to find reconciliation with God, and it is this that will save them." -- St John Klimakos

Work out your own salvation, knowing that God is working within you

So then, my dear friends, just as you have always obeyed, not only in my presence but even more in my absence, continue working out your salvation with awe and reverence, for the one bringing forth in you both the desire and the effort – for the sake of his good pleasure – is God. -- 2 Phillipians 2:12,13

Spiritual Sickness

"The soul is greater than the body: the body becomes sick, and with that it is finished. But a spiritual sickness extends into eternity. Deliver us, O lord, from such illness, and grant us healing." -- St. Macarius Living Without Hypocrisy

Difference between Eastern and Western views of Salvation

"The non-Orthodox churches have as their emphasis the forgiveness of sins in order that one might not go to hell, and go to heaven. Because of this, the understanding of what salvation is has become more of a juridical and a legal issue, where the goal of the Gospel, and the goal of everything is forgiveness of one's sins. In contrast, we Orthodox view the forgiveness of sins only as a first step in the process of salvation. Indeed, we are forgiven, but so that we may be purified and healed, so that we can be transfigured, so that we can become God-like. The goal is not for us to make it to heaven. The goal, really, is God himself. The goal is the mystical union, and communion with Him. This is theosis; divinization; deification; transfigurement; whatever we want to call it. It's a forever process of becoming by grace what God is by nature, without ever becoming God." -- Fr. James Bernstein, The Illumined Heart Podcast, May 22, 2008 (see Theosis)

Salvation by Grace Through Faith is a Trap

Much of what today passes for Protestantism is nothing of the sort. Rather, it is a thinly veiled cloak for the democratic spirit at "prayer." Salvation by grace through faith is a slogan for individualism, a Christianity "by right." There are no works, no requirements, only a "grace-filled" entitlement. For the ultimate form of democracy is the person who needs no one else: no Church, no priest, no sacrament, only the God of my understanding who saves me by grace. -- Fr. Stephen Freeman

Orthodox View of Salvation

The original Orthodox Christian understanding of atonement is incarnational. It has as its basis not the law or the courtroom, but God's unconditional love and grace. We begin with the understanding that forgiveness and atonement ("at-one-ment" or reconciliation with God) are not essentially legal or juridical concepts. They are principally therapeutic, organic, synergistic, transformational, and ultimately ontological in nature. In fact, the Greek word translated as "salvation" is soterias, whose root meaning is "health."

So being saved means more than being saved from something, such as death or hell; it also means being healed or made whole. When Jesus says, "Your faith has saved you" (Luke 7:50), He means, "Your faith has healed you," or "Your faith has made you whole." Forgiveness and atonement pertain to God's participation in His creation in order to renew His image and likeness in us, bringing us to wholeness and fulfillment. To be healed, we don't go to a lawyer or to a judge. To be healed, we go to a physician-and Jesus is the Great Physician...

...In Orthodoxy, we experience God not only as Judge, but as He is referred to in Orthodox services: "the Lover of Mankind." Orthodox incarnational theology, which is at the core of the original Gospel, teaches that God Himself, the second Person of the Trinity, became incarnate, not in order to pay a debt to the devil or to God the Father, nor to be a substitutionary offering to appease a just God, but in order to rescue us from our fallen condition and transform us, enabling us to become godlike. The way God chose to deliver us from our condition-our illness, fallenness, mortality, corruption, and sin-was by taking upon Himself our human nature and participating with us in the limitations that creaturehood encompasses. Forgiving our sins is part and parcel of a much larger whole, as forgiveness in itself is not enough to ensure healing, purification, illumination, wholeness, and transfiguration. Actual organic participation in the life of the Incarnate God is required, in addition to being forgiven.

The original biblical Gospel often speaks of salvation as an organic experience that is preeminently non-juridical. The words and phrases used include: being crucified with, dying with, being buried, resurrected, and living with Christ and in Him, being united with and together with Him, as well as putting on Christ. They also include abiding in Him and He in us, being one with, married to, members of His Body, and of one flesh withChrist.

Placing the Fall, sin, and death into a legal framework leads to viewing the Person and work of Christ as part of that same framework. Accepting our inheritance of Adam's guilt leads to viewing judicial guilt for sin as our main problem, which results in the belief that once divine justice is satisfied on the Cross, redemption is complete. That is why many expressions of Christianity seem shallow and simplistic: sanctification, virtue, holiness, life in Christ, transfiguration, union and communion with God were held to be added onto redemption and salvation, not integral to their very essence.

The original Gospel emphasizes that Jesus takes upon Himself our humanity in order to purify, heal, illumine, and transfigure it. We are saved from something (namely, death, sin, and the devil) in order to be saved for something else (union and communion with God). Union and communion with God is a journey of ever-deepening love that begins in this life, and-because God is infinite-continues forever. -- Fr. James Bernstein, from a talk given by him in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on June 19, 2009.

God's Will is Our Salvation

"God wills our liberation, our exodus from Egypt. God wills our reconciliation, our return from exile. God wills our enlightenment, our seeing. God wills our forgiveness, our release from sin and guilt. God wills that we see ourselves as God's beloved. God wills our resurrection, our passage from death to life. God wills for us food and drink that satisfy our hunger and thirst. God wills, comprehensively, our well-being—not just my well-being as an individual but the well-being of all of us and of the whole of creation. In short, God wills our salvation, our healing, here on earth. The Christian life is about participating in the salvation of God." ―- Marcus J. Borg, The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion To A More Authenthic Contemporary Faith

Who is saved?

"It is our teaching that the only way to be in the Kingdom is to die and rise with Christ. But as St. Gregory the Theologian said in the fourth century, 'what is meant by baptism?' Because it is certainly a dogma of our Church, that you can be dunked in I don't know how many pails of water -- even the Pacific Ocean; you can have pounds of chrism on you; you can receive the body and blood of Christ every Sunday in the Liturgy; and go right to Hell. And the more you do it, the worse you get. St. Theophan the recluse, who was just canonized by the Russian Church said, 'Why is it that people who go to church alot, are very Christian, belong to churches, get worse instead of better?' The answer is because they go through all the rites, all the motions, read the Bible, do everything; but they don't really love God or their neighbor." -- Fr. Thomas Hopko, On The Apocolypse, Great Tapes Series

Non Orthodox Can Be Saved

"St. Gregory the Theologian said, 'There are many who die for what is good, what is true, what is right, who never heard of Jesus Christ, but when he comes in glory they will recognize him, as the end of their longing, and will bow down and worship him.'" -- Fr. Thomas Hopko, On The Apocalypse, Great Tapes Series

"It is a dogma of our Church that anyone, anywhere who dies for righteousness and truth sake, if it is objectively right and true -- not what they think is right and true -- those people are automatically saved by the blood of Christ on the cross. Christ died for those people. Christ died on the cross so that no act of righteousness or justice done by anyone, anywhere, would be lost." -- Fr. Thomas Hopko, On The Apocalypse, Great Tapes Series

"St. Gregory the Theologian, on his homily on baptism said, 'There is a baptism of fire, and a baptism of desire'. The baptism of fire means people who actually die at the hands of the beast; who say 'no' to the beast. They might not self-consciously be Christians, for whatever reason, but factually they are if they do not say 'yes' to the beast. Then there is the baptism of desire. Those who really would want it, hunger and thirst for it, but humanly speaking, just don't have the possibility to have it. And I think we could even dare to say by our own observation that there are probably millions of such people. People who never heard the gospel. All the people who belong to the nations. All the people shut in places where the gospel hasn't been heard, or they heard the most stupid version of the gospel that it is to their credit that they did not believe it. So who is really there and who is not there, we cannot judge." -- Fr. Thomas Hopko, On The Apocalypse, Great Tapes Series

Salvation must be pursued continually

"We have to be very firm and to say [when asked] 'are you saved?' Yes, I am saved. In fact every idiot on earth is saved because Christ died for them. But whether I actualize and appropriate that salvation, that's another question. And that's why I pray every day, God be merciful to me, a sinner. I want to be saved, I pray to be saved, I struggle to be saved, and not by my own power, but by the spirit of God in me." -- Fr. Thomas Hopko, On The Apocalypse, Great Tapes Series

When St Sisoes lay upon his deathbed, the disciples surrounding the Elder saw that his face shone like the sun. They asked the dying man what he saw. Abba Sisoes replied that he saw St Anthony, the prophets, and the apostles. His face increased in brightness, and he spoke with someone. The monks asked, "With whom are you speaking, Father?" He said that angels had come for his soul, and he was entreating them to give him a little more time for repentance. The monks said, "You have no need for repentance, Father." St Sisoes said with great humility, "I do not think that I have even begun to repent." -- Wisdom of the Desert Fathers

See Also

• Atonement
• Justification