Salvation Seminar Week 5. Salvation – is it only a matter of a legal transaction? God merely declaring us “righteous” notwithstanding our sinfulness? Jesus taking on our sin and pronouncing us “justified” and “not guilty” as a legal declaration? We being clothed with Christ’s righteousness which hides our sin?  True, Scripture does indicate that justification, or salvation, does have a legal dimension (e.g., 1 Cor 4:4 ). But it is not the only dimension. Scripture tells us that salvation involves nothing less than actually being made like Christ.  Not a mere cover-up. An actual transformation. That is why grace is so amazing–it is way more than our human nature could ever achieve. There are two serious problems to thinking of salvation as only a legal transaction, a mere declaration of legal standing without corresponding reality. First, for God to declare us “righteous” while we actually remain sinners, then God would be making a declaration contrary to reality. He ...

Salvation Seminar Week 4.       “The bread which we break, is it not a communion in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” ( 1 Cor 10:16-17 .)       In Chapter 4 of Dr. Michael Patrick Barber’s book, Salvation , he tells a story the likes of which many of us Catholics have also experienced. Dr. Barber’s fellow-passenger on an airplane, noticing what Dr. Barber was reading, asked, “Are you a Christian?” He replied, “Even better, I’m a Catholic.” The passenger looked surprised and said, “I didn’t realize Catholic were Christians. Would you say you have a personal relationship with Jesus?”       The Catholic answer to that question is: Of course! Even the Catechism ( CCC 2558 ) says that faith is “a vital and personal relationship with the living and true God.” Of course!       But Christianity is not only about me and Jesus – in...

  Salvation Seminar Week 3.       “You are not your own; you were bought with a price” ( 1 Cor 6:19-20 ).       In today’s thinking, we might expect this sort of language to be speaking of slavery, trafficking in human slavery. But in St. Paul’s expression, he means quite the opposite.       When we sin, we have enslaved ourselves – enslaved ourselves to sin, and to that temptation and the tempter which we succumbed to. We enslave ourselves to evil. It’s soul death. St. Paul is talking about buying us back from that slavery, that spiritual death.       The salvation offered to us in Jesus Christ, as presented in the Scriptures, includes this aspect:  “redemption.” To redeem something or someone is an economic term. If I were a Hebrew living on my ancestral land in Palestine, and came to be deeply in debt, I might sell that land to raise the funds I needed. Or, if that were insufficient, I...

  Salvation Seminar Week 2.       Jesus prays that we who believe in him “may be one; even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us .... that they may be one even as we are one. I in them and you in me that they may become perfectly one ....” ( Jn 17:21, 22-23 .)       This abiding in God point to a reality, a manner of existence, diametrically opposed to hell.       Hell is the state of definitive self-exclusion – we exclude ourselves! – from communion with God and the blessed of Heaven. The sufferings of hell consist in the loss of the vision of God, the loss of the oneness with God which is the only thing our hearts ultimately desire and yearn for.       So is salvation about saving us from hell? Yes, for sure.       But is that all salvation is about? For Heaven’s sake, no! Salvation is not just fire insurance!     ...