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The Bible offers us a rich semantic and expansive repertoire about salvation, all pointing to God as the Creator (Isa. 40:12–31) and Savior (Isa. 43:14–44:6). Genesis 1 affirms that God created by means of redeeming, so that God made or created (bārā’, appearing forty-seven times in the Old Testament to describe God’s action) as God called or named (speech-act) creation into being by delivering or redeeming them from the primordial chaos.^[4] The Old Testament calls God the Savior (Isa. 45:15, 21) who brings salvation (Isa. 49:6) and who raises up saviors to deliver Israel (Judg. 3:9, 15; 6:36).

Consistent with the Colossians passage that names Jesus as the divine agent of creating and redeeming all things (1:15–20), the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (AD 381) refers to the Son’s creating (“through whom all things were made”) and saving (what Jesus did “for us and for our salvation”) functions. The verb “save” (sōzō) in the Septuagint and New Testament (John 3:17) and the noun “salvation (sōtēria) describe the Lord or God in terms of “my Savior” (Luke 1:47) or the one who gives “salvation from our enemies” (Luke 1:71). The word “Lord” in some biblical texts can refer to either God or Jesus, such as Jude 5, which speaks of “Jesus [a textual variant: the Lord] who once for all saved a people out of the land of Egypt.”^[5] The Lord’s Prayer uses a synonym, ruomai (deliver, rescue), of sōzō: “deliver us from the evil one” (Matt. 6:13). In Matthew 27:42–43, the two words are used in the same sentence, serving as a pleonasm to emphasize the meaning of salvation: “He saved [sōsai] others; he cannot save himself. . . . He trusted in God; let God now deliver [rysasthō] him.” Likewise, in Romans 11:26 the use of a synonym is not redundant but highlights the thought: “All Israel will be saved [sōthēsetai], as is written, ‘out of Zion will come the Deliverer [ryomenos].’” Pointing beyond personal salvation, the sociopolitical contexts of these texts are prominent, as is the wide array of cognate words below. Treier’s chapter seeks to critique the overly personal emphasis of salvation in Western Christianity, and using biblical theology he works hard to retrieve robustly the new creation aspects of salvation, such as its sociopolitical and cosmic dimensions.

“Liberation” (eleutheria) is a cognate of “salvation.” Liberation from what is often the debate. Three New Testament verses seem to indicate liberation is on the personal, sociopolitical, and even cosmic levels: “If the Son has liberated you, you will be liberated indeed” (John 8:36); “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:2); “creation itself will be liberated from the bondage of decay and will enter upon the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). Both Latin American scholars in this volume, Jules Martínez-Olivieri and Milton Acosta, as well as First Nations Canadian scholar Ray Aldred, work with this aspect of salvation in their chapters. But their perspectives on the “materiality of salvation” have particular nuances because their contexts are not the same.

A similar question could be asked about the next cognate, “redemption” (apolytrōsis; Rom. 3:24): redemption from what? Romans 3:24 is silent, but it does mention redemption as God’s gift. Other scriptural verses mention redemption from the wrath of God (Rom. 5:9); the power of sin (Eph. 1:7, 14; Romans 5) and the power of death (Rom. 6:23); the curse of the law (Gal. 3:13); and the devil (Heb. 2:14; 1 John 3:8). It is interesting that in the Old Testament God is called the gō’ēl (Redeemer; Ps. 19:14), but never in the New Testament is God or Jesus called Redeemer (lytrōtēs). The redemption metaphor comes from the context of the slave market (such as Exod. 21:8, Egyptian slavery; Isa. 51:11; 59:20, Babylonian captivity; Rom. 6:13–14, first-century Roman society). But the point is always about the new status of freedom. Thus the Bible speaks of the redeemed people as God’s own possession (Exod. 15:16; 1 Peter 2:9), ransomed with a price (Isa. 35:10; 51:11; 62:12; 1 Cor. 6:20; 7:23; 1 Tim. 2:6). Elaine Goh’s chapter seems to use this category well as she examines how Ecclesiastes can be used to speak to the redemption needed for Chinese who possess the mentality of fearing death, overconfidence, and workaholic tendencies.

Another favorite biblical word for salvation is “reconciliation” (katallagē; Rom. 5:10–11; 2 Cor. 5:18–20), translated by William Tyndale as “atonement” and thus focusing on overcoming the enmity between God and humanity (at-one-ment) rather than the broken relationships among people. Paul here is probably not using the Old Testament or Hebraic idea of atonement sacrifice (Leviticus 16), but the Greco-Roman background of transforming hostility into friendship or love. Such a relational and interpersonal connotation appeals to Majority World Christians, such as Sung Wook Chung, who examines the painful tension between North Korea and South Korea.

The last two terms are controversial, depending on the interpretive frame one uses to understand the concepts. “Being set right” (dikaioumenoi; Rom. 3:24) is often used to mean “vindicating” in the context of justice where God stands with the weak or the oppressed, thus justifying them (Ps. 82:1–3). But the second meaning is also used in the Bible: reversing the lowly from shame to honor (Ps. 31:1–2);^[6] thus the shameful cross in the New Testament sets right the distorted value system of glory (aesthetic) and obscenity (shame). Unfortunately, the second meaning has often been ignored, especially in legal Western societies, and is picked up by Elaine Goh, Ray Aldred, and Emily Choge Kerama in the Asian, Native North American, and African chapters, respectively, in this volume.

The most controversial cognate word for salvation is hilastērion, translated as either “propitiation” or “expiation.” “Propitiation” refers to the salvific work of Christ in placating divine justice or appeasing the wrath of God (Rom. 3:25; Heb. 9:5; cf. hilasmos, 1 John 2:2; 4:10).^[7] My preferred translation, “expiation,” traces its theological roots to the Hebrew word kappōret, that is, “mercy seat” on the ark of covenant in the Holy of Holies,^[8] thus indicating that “God loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation [hilasmos] of our sins” (1 John 4:10). Jesus Christ is “the expiation [hilasmos] not only for our sins but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2). Gerald O’Collins writes of hilastērion in this regard as “wiping away”:

The LXX never introduces this verb or related words (e.g. exilaskomai) to speak of sinners appeasing or rendering favorable an offended God [propitiation]. It is rather God who expiates, purifies, and deals with sin (e.g., Ezek. 16:13). Likewise in the NT it is God who is the agent or subject of expiator activity, lovingly providing the “hilastērion,” his only Son, who is the means and the place for wiping away the stain of sin.^[9]

Soteriology is not simply about atoning sacrifice but also about offering love. Salvation is not simply “saved from,” but also “saved to”; not simply delivery from sin and death, but also restoration to fullness of life; not simply suffering servant but also reigning king; not simply death and crucifixion, but also resurrection and consummation; not simply forgiveness, but also regeneration; not simply wrong and sin overcome, but also love and life abundant.^[10] In short, salvation in the biblical understanding means God’s creative deliverance of people in their situation of need from that which threatens wholeness of life, impedes the order of creation, and disrupts God’s redemption in the world.

God so loves the Majority World. God’s expansive love is expressed indigenously in global contexts through the back-roads and alleys of African villages, the new trails of Latin American valleys, and the highways of Asian cities. From the perspective of “saved from” to “saved to,” here the language of the contributors to this volume varies, reflecting the myriad soteriological expressions in the New Testament: from sin to God (Acts 3:19), from death to life (1 John 3:14), from bondage to freedom (Philemon), from brokenness to wholeness (2 Cor. 12:9), from enmity to reconciliation (Eph. 2:16), from evil to goodness (Rom. 12:21), from despair to hope (1 Thessalonians). Just as these metaphors are multiple throughout Scripture, then, so also are the interpretations of soteriology in church history and even today: from guilt to judicial justification (John Calvin), from chaos to order (Gregory of Nazianzus), and from obscenity to beauty (Hans Urs von Balthasar).