The Meaning of
Salvation in Christ
by John Kalomiros
The experience of salvation in Christ presupposes knowledge of the mystery of the Church. The meaning of ecclesial life cannot be exhausted by attending a service at some parish church. Certainly participation in worship is the cornerstone of Christian experience and the life of the parish. On the other hand, ecclesial life should spring forth from inside a man in such a way that it will spread to other aspects of his life as well and embrace his daily existence as a whole. Otherwise, one may think his participation in the Church is something limited to a specific day and time or that it is a compartment of his life detached from everything else. But if he remains with this thought only, he will always wonder about a big question: In the end, what does it all meaning?
This should be the starting point of inquiries on these matters. If we limit ecclesial life to a perfunctory participation in worship, then we will have only a very small part of the picture, and it is doubtful that meaning could spring from such particularity. As people who care about spiritual life, we need to understand well that what we call meaning can only arise from a catholicity, a wholeness, that embraces everything in our lives. It is impossible for meaning to spring from the particular. The particular by itself never produces a meaning but rather only a fragmentary picture. The particular has always to do with the element of individuality, that is, with what a man does as an individual in his life. For example, whether he goes or does not go to Church on Sunday morning is a private decision--a matter of his own private life. And meaning is not contained within individuality. If that part of life springs forth from a more catholic and broader human spiritual perspective and experience which guides him to live every moment of his life in a certain manner, only then can a man distinguish meaning behind all those isolated actions.
If we want our works to bear fruit, we have to avoid an attitude that simply recycles standard practices without ever questioning the actual meaning that lies beneath them. We will not be judged for the fulfillment of the law or for our obedience to certain rules of Christian life but rather for the ethos of our life, which springs from within us in a living way as testimony to Christ and the Gospel.
What do we Christians mean when we say “salvation?” What can salvation possibly mean for certain creatures, such as men, who are born, grow old, and die?
In order to have a meaningful discussion about salvation, we have to be fully conscious that the objective has to do with something beyond nature. Otherwise, if we lower the level of our discussion about the meaning of salvation to things which are purely of a natural or biological order and perceive man simply in some natural terms, we will gain only a psychological and moral understanding of our objective, an understanding that one can meet in any other human religion. The objective of religions in general is to offer to man as a biological being the moral supports he needs in order to go forth psychologically equipped for the difficulties in life.
We must pursue the meaning of the Church and salvation beyond that. To begin with, man must see himself as a being who is not self-sufficient in his physical subsistence. In other words, we must get away from this biological perception of what man is. The pursuit of salvation presupposes a theological and anthropological approach. Without it, any discussion about the Church breaks down in very secular way.
According to the Christian understanding, there is only one Christian mystery that is embodied by the Church and forms the basis for any discussion about salvation. And that mystery is the fact that God became man. It is an understanding, which one may find only in Christianity, and it elevates the discussion about salvation and the meaning of life to a level quite different from any other religion. If we’d prefer to say that the Church and Christianity are not a religion but something different, it is precisely because the Christian tradition and Christian spirituality have as their foundation the mystery that God became man.
This is a fact that inevitably results in a series of things. It
means that man is not only a being that is born, grows old and dies according
to a biological order, but rather that man is the being with whom God Himself
was united. This is also the premise of any understanding of man’s creation. We
often witness tensions and disagreements about the creation of man that have no
spiritual basis. For whether one supports the idea that man descended from an
animal that developed with time and became Homo Sapiens, or that man was created
as a clay statue which came to life, in the end, there is no essential
difference. Obviously, in both cases the composition of this creature came from
the elements of the universe, that is, from the scattered dust of the universe,
which, in some way, resulted in organized forms of life. Both of these views
come down to that simple truth. The true Christian perspective in this
discussion is in the knowledge that man is the being with whom God united
Himself. It is a truth that often escapes us, even as Christians, and we try
anthropological approaches to the subject of creation without
taking this theological dogma into consideration. As a result, our theological
discussions sometimes are marked by the same stupidity that marks worldly
philosophy, if not worse. The world thinks that it can explore the existence,
conscience, reasoning, and moral and social values of man by viewing him as an
objective biological, natural phenomenon. As Christians, however, we must make
the clear distinction that, because man’s flesh is united with God Himself in
the Person of Christ, the totality of man is not exhausted by his biological
nature even though his natural energies give that appearance. It is impossible
to talk about man and the basis of his salvation apart from the self-evident fact
that he is man not because of biological coincidences but because God became man.
Certainly this is a theoretical base, but it can turn from theoretical to living and empirical through a life in the Holy Spirit. It is then that the mystery of the Church starts to play a critical role for man. For it is shown that it is impossible for man to be an independent and self-perfecting being without God. Without his relations with God, he ceases to be a true man. If there is a difference between man and the rest of the creation, it springs from precisely that single, unprecedented theological dogma about "the only new thing under the sun" that the Fathers of the Church uttered. Responding to the saying of the ancient philosophers that there was "nothing new under the sun," the Fathers said that there is only one thing that is not repeated, that is incomprehensible to every human brain, that is entirely outside all natural order: that God became man. This reality signals an event in human history that counteracts the idea of perishable time.
Ancient paganism had ingeniously conceived of the nature of perishable time as something compressed into an endless cycle of repetition. Let us remember the fable of Sisyphus who recapitulates in himself the image of vain human endeavor as well as the cycle of time in perpetual, eternal repetition. The only thing that truly breaks this recycling of the same things in human history is the Nativity of Christ, the event that signifies the beginning of history in human consciousness. The truth is that historical time, as a breaking of cyclical repetition, is born of Christian thought, for the only new thing that man’s mind is able to grasp is the event that God Himself, the reason in everything, became part of creation, taking it upon Himself and uniting Himself with us.
Church life, then, is but the image of the dogma of the Incarnation. And it is a dogma not because it may not be doubted but precisely because it can become experiential ultimately and give meaning to man’s life, delivering him from the meaninglessness that exists when he tries to ponder his life and being apart from that event. This is why the Fathers of the Church saw the human idea that erroneously takes the Church for a worldly organization as a critical blow to the theological understanding of the nature of the Church. The Church is always dual in nature precisely because it is founded on the Incarnation of Christ: it is the image of the Holy Spirit in the world, that is, the image of the creation that co-exists together with the energy and grace of God, the Holy Spirit’s embrace of the world.
Having all this in mind, one can begin to understand why the life of the Church is indispensable to salvation. What else can salvation mean to man if we define him as the being with whom God united Himself? It is nothing other than his seeing this reality that relates to him behind the nature of his biological creation and life, and succeeding in acquiring the experience of this reality because the root of his existence lies in it. For this reason it is salvation for him. It is not salvation because God decided, for some legalistic reason, that this is how He wants man must act in order to be saved. We must free ourselves from the legalistic view of ecclesial and theological matters, which is a result of western influence and especially of corruptible man’s tendency to see and interpret everything in a tangible, rationalistic manner. The simplicity of such an interpretation can draw us at first, but it gradually declines and proves fruitless.
Spiritual effort must start from a basis
that has meaning. The only such basis, as we have been taught by Tradition,
says that man needs the life of the Church because the life of the Church preserves
man’s existence whole. Since man is the being with whom God united Himself, the
true life of man cannot be other than a life with God. This is the deeper
spiritual nature of the Church: the body of the faithful which becomes the Body
of Christ, that
is to say, the union of the creature with the Uncreated. In the Church’s life,
the Saints embrace the mode of God’s life, and they draw strength from the
comforting Energy of the Holy Spirit. They partake of the life of the Divine by
communing with the incorrupt nature. They are preserved whole and genuine by
returning to the life-giving Energy that is the well and the rational
orientation of their existence. This continuous rational orientation of their
lives is the wellspring of all virtue and sanctity, and it finishes the soul
according to the ethos of the perfect man, who is Christ.