What is soteriology?

Question 07011.

Soteriology is the theological name for the doctrine of salvation, and it is the part of Christian teaching that answers the question every one of us eventually has to face: how can a guilty person be made right with a holy God? The word comes from the Greek soteria, meaning rescue or deliverance, joined to logos, meaning word or study.

I know that theological labels put some people off, and I have sympathy with that. But labels are simply filing systems, and this particular file happens to contain the best news anybody has ever heard.

What the Doctrine of Salvation Covers

The doctrine of salvation asks what we are saved from, what we are saved by, what we are saved for, and how it is all applied to an individual. Under that heading sit the great New Testament words: redemption, justification, regeneration, adoption, reconciliation, propitiation, sanctification and glorification. Each one describes the same rescue from a different angle.

That is the first thing to grasp. Salvation is not a single idea with one metaphor attached. Scripture piles up pictures because no one picture is big enough. The slave market gives us redemption. The law court gives us justification. The family gives us adoption. The battlefield gives us victory. The temple gives us propitiation.

So a good doctrine of salvation is not a narrow thing. It is a gallery, and you walk round it slowly.

What We Are Saved From

Any doctrine of salvation stands or falls on how seriously it takes the problem. If sin is a minor inconvenience, then a minor remedy will do. Scripture will not allow that. Romans 3:23 says that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and Romans 6:23 puts the wage of that sin at death.

We are saved from the guilt of sin, which incurs real condemnation. We are saved from the power of sin, which enslaves. And we will be saved from the very presence of sin, when we see him as he is. The rescue is as wide as the ruin.

There is also a Person from whom we are rescued, and I do not think we should be shy about saying it. 1 Thessalonians 1:10 speaks of Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come. God’s settled opposition to evil is real, and the doctrine of salvation is meaningless without it.

What We Are Saved By

The answer is grace, through faith, on the basis of the cross. Ephesians 2:8-9 puts it as plainly as language allows: by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

At the centre of the doctrine of salvation stands penal substitution. Jesus took the penalty that our sin deserved, in our place, and God’s just anger against sin fell on him. Other pictures of the cross are true and valuable, but they hang on this one rather than replacing it. Take away substitution and you have a moving example with no mechanism.

I hold that the provision is genuinely unlimited. Jesus died sufficiently for every human being without exception, which is what 1 John 2:2 says when it calls him the propitiation not for our sins only but also for the sins of the whole world. The provision is universal; the application is to those who trust him.

The Three Tenses

One of the most useful things I ever learned about the doctrine of salvation is that it has three tenses. I have been saved from the penalty of sin, which is justification and is finished. I am being saved from the power of sin, which is sanctification and is ongoing. I will be saved from the presence of sin, which is glorification and is certain.

Confusing these three causes endless trouble. People read a verse about the second tense and panic about the first. They read a verse about the third and try to live it now. Sorting the tenses sorts a surprising number of pastoral problems.

You can follow each of them separately in justification, sanctification and glorification.

How Salvation Is Applied to a Person

Theologians speak of an order of salvation, and while the phrase sounds forbidding the idea behind it is simple enough. When a person is converted, a number of things happen, and it is worth asking which depends on which. Does God give new life so that a person can believe, or does a person believe and God then gives new life? Whole systems hang on the answer.

I take the second view. The gospel is preached, the Spirit convicts, the hearer trusts Jesus, and in that same instant God regenerates, justifies, adopts, indwells and seals. Logically the trusting comes first; temporally it is all one moment. I hold that because the apostolic preaching in Acts consistently commands people to believe and assumes that they can, and because Ephesians 1:13 puts hearing, believing and sealing in that order.

What follows conversion is a lifetime of being changed, and what follows that is a body like his. None of it is earned at any stage. The doctrine of salvation is grace from the first movement to the last, which is why the New Testament keeps breaking into praise in the middle of explaining it.

There is one more note worth adding. Salvation in Scripture is not only about individuals. God is assembling a people, and the doctrine of salvation reaches its end not in a crowd of rescued individuals but in a bride, a body, a city and a kingdom. We are saved one by one, and we are saved into something.

Where I Stand and Why

Every doctrine of salvation is worked out within some framework, and honesty requires me to name mine. I am a Biblicist evangelical Baptist. I am not a Calvinist and I am not an Arminian, and I am not trying to be clever by refusing both labels. I simply do not find either system’s distinctive machinery in the text when I read it plainly.

So I hold that Jesus died for all, that God genuinely desires all to be saved, that faith precedes the new birth rather than following it, and that the believer is eternally secure because God is faithful rather than because the believer is. Those four convictions shape everything I write on this subject.

I also avoid certain vocabulary that has become freighted with system rather than Scripture. Where the Bible gives me a word, such as propitiation or redemption or adoption, I use it gladly. Where a theological tradition has coined one, I am more cautious.

Who Does the Saving

All three Persons of the Trinity are at work in the doctrine of salvation, and it is a shame that popular teaching often reduces it to one. The Father planned it and gave the Son. The Son accomplished it at the cross and the empty tomb. The Spirit applies it, convicting, regenerating, indwelling, sealing and finally raising.

Ephesians 1 sets it out in exactly that order, and the paragraph ends each movement with a note of praise. Salvation is not a mechanism that God operates from a distance. It is the outworking of the character of a God who is, by nature, a rescuer.

If you want the Spirit’s part in this laid out, see the Spirit’s role in regeneration.

Why the Doctrine of Salvation Is Not Academic

I have never met anyone whose Christian life was helped by vagueness here. A muddled doctrine of salvation produces either anxiety or presumption, and often both in the same person on different days.

Get it clear and a great deal settles. You know why you are accepted, so you stop trying to earn what you already have. You know what God is doing in you, so you stop being surprised by the fight. You know where it ends, so present suffering has a horizon.

That is why I keep teaching this material, and why the questions in this section of the site keep multiplying. It is not theory. It is the ground you stand on, and ground is the one thing you never think about until it moves. I have watched believers come apart under pressure because nobody had ever taught them clearly what God had done for them and what he had promised to keep doing, and I have watched others hold steady through appalling circumstances for exactly the opposite reason. The difference was rarely temperament. It was usually teaching.

So, now what?

So if soteriology has sounded to you like something for the seminary rather than the pew, I hope this has changed your mind. The doctrine of salvation is the account of how God came after people who were not looking for him, and paid a price they could never have raised.

Where would you like to start? If you have never settled the first tense, begin there, and read how a person is saved next.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

Ephesians 2:8-9 (ESV)