"given no other name under which we are to be saved&quo

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

The Christian God is supposed to be universal, and to will the salvation of all humanity. However, various branches of the Church have variously taught:

• 1. Only people who are baptized by the official Church can be saved.
  2. Only people who know the words, "Jesus Christ," their application to a particular person at a particular time and place, and the content of certain books written about that time/place, can be saved (because we have to avoid believing in "the wrong Jesus," so we can't believe in Him based on Gnostic or Mormon scriptures, say).

... and such-like things. But if (1) or (2) or the like were true, how might all humanity be saved? For it does not seem as if all people will have had the chance to be baptized and believe on His name. Perhaps during the Millennium, the priesthood will raise all the dead who were unevangelized, to offer them a sort of second chance at salvation, or perhaps God at the moment of unaccountable unbelievers' demise miraculously teaches them about His Son, so that they have a chance, unknown to others, to be saved.

These aren't very satisfactory options, though. They rely on magic, basically, for one, so could more or less never be verified (at least not in our pre-Millennial world). Also, they undermine the value of evangelizing the world, which was the Great Commission, after all.

But two other things, then:

• 1. "Jesus Christ" is not the most true name of the Son. The Holy Spirit Itself is His truest name. That is, it is both an independent person as well as a symbolic power, referring to Christ. So salvation on Christ's name does not mean knowledge of or a "personal relationship with" a specific human man Who dwelt among us thousands of years ago, and Who is not directly visible to us anymore, but rather to faith in the Spirit. And the Spirit, as the most abstract Person of the Trinity, might be seen as implicitly encoded into all sorts of religious systems throughout history and the world. Then salvation does come only from believing on the name of the Son, but without direct reference to the Son. (The Father requires the Son to be the Father, and vice versa, so no religion unaware of the Son is aware of the Father, and vice versa.)
  2. At one point it is said that it is enough to confess, "Jesus is Lord," out loud, to be saved. This seems strange, especially if we consider cases of people dishonestly confessing such a thing. However, in the time of the Apostles, to confess such a thing out loud would have tended to be a political statement as much as a religious one. So it is not so much the sentence itself, as the assertion of the sentence under threat of death, that would be a saving grace.
  2.2. Therefore, though individual people might be saved by abstract faith in just the Spirit, the necessity of salvation in Christ might have to do with the salvation of the world as a social entity over and above all individuals in it. That is to say, personal salvation stands apart from Jesus, but political salvation does not--anyone who wants to make the world morally better, better rely on the fact that Christianity exists as a moral-political force. This doesn't mean believing in doctrines so much as appealing to the character of authentic Christians (those who actually practice virtues like humility and patience) as part of a global political program, designed to undermine evil government and related structures.

... QED...

[Avatar]

We have to save ourselves.

--A

[wayfriend]

It's inevitable that some will want to place themselves on the road to salvation, set up a gate, and begin collecting a toll. They will, of course, claim that the only way is through their gate. But it's more of a business plan than spiritual wisdom.

[Linna Heartbooger]

We have to save ourselves.

--A

must contradict you.
Coz if that's true, I'm dead meat!

On a more serious note, the Bible does say stuff that appears to agree with that partially in Philippians 2:12.
(Once a guy referred to that line, and, struggling to remember who wrote it, said, "memory, don't fail me now!")

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Is it possible for us to save ourselves?

So far as morality is based upon the conception of man as a free agent who, just because he is free, binds himself through his reason to unconditioned laws, it stands in need neither of the idea of another Being over him, for him to apprehend his duty, nor of an incentive other than the law itself, for him to do his duty. At least it is man’s own fault if he is subject to such a need; and if he is, this need can be relieved through nothing outside himself: for whatever does not originate in himself and his own freedom in no way compensates for the deficiency of his morality.

And yet,

But if a man is corrupt in the very ground of his maxims, how can he possibly bring about this revolution by his own powers and of himself become a good man?

(These are both from Kant's infamous treatise on rational religion.) The problem is: we don't make choices "in the moment." That one study by Libet(?) shows this to an extent. People usually gloss the Libet study as proving that we don't have free will. Well, it doesn't prove that. It proves that if we have free will, then it works just like Kant said it does, outside of linear time. So really, when we experience ourselves "in the moment" deciding what to do, what is actually taking place is that our eternal choices are being specified within linear time. A general rule is being applied to a particular case, as it were. Given the unity of apperception, then, all the choices we experience ourselves making in day to day life, are reflections of a single choice we made "in the beginning" of our lives. Now because we make this choice in a generalized mental state, it isn't a choice between a local A or B (or C or D or E or whatever). It is a choice between generalities, to wit we choose

• 1. To put our priorities (whatever they turn out to locally be) in the right order, or
  2. To put our priorities in some other order.

If we have chosen (2), then we are fundamentally corrupted. But then how can any local choice express a reversal of this corruption? For all our local choices are merely parts of the universal fractal error we made in prioritizing things. To choose to redeem ourselves would be to wipe out the whole fractal, by using the fractal itself. That seems impossible. Hence, the question of the need for divine, i.e. eternal, grace. And yet then:

Against this expectation of self-improvement, reason, which is by nature averse to the labor of moral reconstruction, now summons, under the pretext of natural incapacity, all sorts of ignoble religious ideas (among which belongs the false ascription to God Himself of the principle of happiness as the chief condition of His commandments). All religions, however, can be divided into those which are endeavors to win favor (mere worship) and moral religions, i.e., religions of good life-conduct. In the first, man flatters himself by believing either that God can make him eternally happy (through remission of his sins) without his having to become a better man, or else, if this seems to him impossible, that God can certainly make him a better man without his having to do anything more than to ask for it. Yet since, in the eyes of a Being who sees all, to ask is no more than to wish, this would really involve doing nothing at all; for were improvement to be achieved simply by a wish, every man would be good. But in the moral religion (and of all the public religions which have ever existed, the Christian alone is moral) it is a basic principle that each must do as much as lies in his power to become a better man, and that only when he has not buried his inborn talent (Luke XIX, 12-16) but has made use of his original predisposition to good in order to become a better man, can he hope that what is not within his power will be supplied through cooperation from above. Nor is it absolutely necessary for a man to know wherein this cooperation consists; indeed, it is perhaps inevitable that, were the way it occurs revealed at a given time, different people would at some other time form different conceptions of it, and that with entire sincerity. Even here the principle is valid: “It is not essential, and hence not necessary, for every one to know what God does or has done for his salvation;” but it is essential to know what man himself must do in order to become worthy of this assistance.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

While I'm on the topic of linear time, two pieces of evidence for the image of time overall as non-linear:

1. Emotions. Think for a second of musical notation. To the function-graph geometer's eye, sheets of music look like graphs of points in an X-Y grid. And for some reason, music, even without lyrics, naturally evokes all kinds of emotions. (When lyrics are given with a song, that the song can touch our hearts is obvious, per the content of those lyrics: an angry rap or death-metal ballad will refer to painful, infuriating things, and memory of those things will call forth memories of feelings about those things.) The most intuitive explanation for this is that emotions, as they play out, can be graphed on some kind of X-Y grid. This grid is not that of external physical space, however. Now since philosophers and physicists and Doctor Who fans among others know that we can at least imagine what time would be like, if it were not one-dimensional, it appears as if the coordinate grid for our emotions is... a second dimension of time. That is to say, emotional perception is similar to kinaesthetic perception, yet in relation to our "change of location" in time, not space. So we can, in feelings, directly perceive that time is not just a straight line from past to present to future. Eternal perception is supposed to be the ability to perceive "all past, present, and future as one," and the rule for dimensional perception in general is, "You can see all units per a given geometrical facet, for facets that are one dimension below the one you're on." So because we exist in three dimensions of space, we can see all the points that form given lines, and all the lines that form given two-dimensional spatial figures. (If we were tesseracted off into hyperspace, we could see all the sides of e.g. a chair in front of us, at once. See Flatland for more.) God, then, as eternal, is just (at least) higher-dimensionally perceiving of things in time, so that He sees all the points on a given timeline at once.

2. Where do imaginings/dreams take place? We can cut into the brain, but we'll never see the images flickering inside it. So, oneiromorphic reality is not limited to physical space. Yet, it's three-dimensional, like physical space. So... not only do we live, on the one hand, in three-dimensional (or more) physical space, but we also live, on the other, in a third dimension of time. And this, as a subjective world, is under our subjective control; hence imagination and (lucid) dreaming.

[Avatar]

I'm an atheist. I don't think anybody else is going to do it.

--A

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Depending on one's definition or sense of things like morality, sin, redemption, etc. the "problem of making amends" will or will not arise in a way relevant to the question of whether a divine being exists or contributes to the solution to the problem. As Kant defines the problem's parameters, it is possible to derive the existence of divine grace as a solution to the problem; but a different derivation would follow from different parameters. I think in my pre-transtheism days, I simply thought that my own private free will contained an infinite/eternal power in and of itself, and that this infinity was sufficient to nullify the (finitude of the) sin in my heart and mind. Indeed there is another remark by Kant, about how strange it is that we are born essentially good (not morally good as such, but with a set of motives none of which are essentially evil), and yet are able to divest ourselves of this essence. If this inexplicable transition took place without God's help (it seems), why not the other inexplicable transition towards virtue and human-originated grace?

Now there is something else (pun intended, Avatar ), though. Normally theists think of God as morally perfect. And often, various lay or even academic critics of theism suspect that theism is a sort of mental/emotional crutch in the face of suffering and the like. Unfortunately or not, part of my conversion to transtheism was based on the judgment that God somehow did something wrong "in the beginning," and that the work of the Son was not (just) about redeeming humanity, but about redeeming Himself (if in the form of the Son redeeming the Father, through the Spirit). However, perhaps there was also some spillover, if you will, from the evil in the divine beginning, into the souls of the people God created (supposing that there is a God Who creates souls/people). Then for God to be involved in helping us become better, reflects God's obligation to be so involved, inasmuch as to Him would be to some degree imputed the strange transition from our original goodness to radical evil.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

An option that I don't think I've considered, but which also might not really make sense:

From the Kantian POV, the problem is of having one will, based on a single ultimate maxim (a maxim of maxims), which maxim, if corrupt, determines all other willing under it, so that no willing under it can express a reversal of the original maxim (unless we assume that the maxim was something like, "I will sin, but then I will atone for that sin"). However, what if we have multiple wills? Not in time, since then we would choose things day to day, contra Libet or whatever. But if we have, say, an infinite number of eternal wills...

[Orlion]

We have to save ourselves.

--A

I would say, "from what?" From sin? From discomfort? From the tediousness of modern life without purpose? If we do not identify what we "need" saving from, the whole concept of salvation is meaningless. Maybe some of us do not need saving, maybe some of us do. It's likely the concept of "sin" is just as worthless without framing in terms of the individual. Just because one person is an alcoholic does not mean all people are alcoholic and must, therefore, abstain from alcohol, for example.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

I would say, "from what?" From sin? From discomfort? From the tediousness of modern life without purpose? If we do not identify what we "need" saving from, the whole concept of salvation is meaningless.

I appreciate you asking these questions because they reminded me of the purpose of the OP. I don't think I was asking about salvation absolutely in general, but within the framework of the traditional Christian theory of divine justice. To wit: if God makes salvation (in this theory) depend on the grace of knowing His Son, how can this salvation be fairly distributed? (Of course, that would lead into all sorts of thorny problems about grace and the like.)

[Avatar]

There's no justice. There's just us.

(Goodness, I'm just full of aphorisms recently, aren't I? )

--A

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

However, Plato said something interesting about this once (am I rhyming with you? No!!!!!!!!!!!). He said that we could figure out whether doing good was good for us, by comparing the emotional mind to a stable vs. an unstable city. If our emotions are guided by virtue, we say, they are in harmony, in the sense that we can define virtue as this harmony. If we are mentally stable, and moreover mentally fit, well, that is good for us, isn't it? So anyway, justice-as-a-virtue then was defined from the city image in its totality, that is external justice could be explained, recursively as it were, as the output of a society of people whose minds were in harmony according to the parable of justice in the inner city.

EDIT: Accordingly, the Form of the Good is the Form of the City, as it were. But for some reason, despite the obviousness of this from even the idea of the title of The Republic, Plato remained somewhat uncertain even of himself about how to explain the "Form of the Good" concept. He says it is greater in dignity and might than all other Forms. When we think of his image of the other, higher world from the parable of the cave, Plato has us think of the Form of the Good like the sun there. But this is a living sun, i.e. the Form of the Sun is a living city that its own glory dwells within (it is a star as a city, a star as alive, and therefore the star as a citizen of itself as a city-state). For the sublimity of a city horizon bears down with dignity and might even here upon the phenomenal Earth.

EDIT 2: The Holy Spirit in Christian imagery ends up being a city then, too, though. So the New Testament speaks of the heavenly city and the New Jerusalem, the Bride of the Lamb (the Friend of the Son, viz. the Spirit as It accompanied Him as a friend on the Earth). The Lord is the City of Friendship, I guess you would say then.