Closer Together and Closer to God

The question at hand is a complex one. Salvation is among the vaguest theological term in use, and one of the most popularly misunderstood, to my mind. This misunderstanding, it seems to me, stems from the fact that folks of different traditions mean very different things by this term "salvation." In my tradition, salvation has typically used to express the idea of justification, which happens by faith alone. In a more catholic vein, salvation expresses the idea of sanctification, which is the process by which a person is made holy. I will not even bring into the discussion the concepts of Glorification and Deification, as they are clearly outside of our reach "on this side of Glory." It seems to me that both of these concepts, justification and sanctification, have bearing on the discussion at hand.

Obviously, justification is at work in an individual's life, quite apart from the church, when the individual comes to faith in Christ. Of course, the individual has most likely inherited that faith from, or at least was introduced to that faith in the context of a church tradition. Justification, however, happens in the individual as a result of their personal (not private) decision to turn to God. However, this raises a few important questions: What has the individual been saved from? and What has the individual been saved for?

What has the individual been saved from? Well, in short, sin. Sin is what separates a person from God, and so by turning to God in faith, one somehow begins to cross the bridge over the chasm of sin and separation, and return to God. Sin also, I believe, separates us from each other. And this leads us to the question of what we are saved for, in economic -that is to say this-worldly- terms.

One can model this disparity caused by sin by invisioning dots (individuals) arrayed around a center point (God). Sin causes those dots to travel extreme distances away from the center point. And you may notice that as those dots travel outward in straight lines, the dots themselves grow farther apart. And since they are doomed to travel on straight tracks, the only way to get back into contact with each other is for them all to travel back inward to God. Likewise, as they draw closer together, they are naturally drawing closer to God.

This process of drawing closer together and closer to God I will call sanctification. This is what we are created for, this closeness to God and this closeness to each other. And so I think my answer is that in order to most fully realize our salvation in this life, on "this side of Glory", we must live in community. We must have church. We must draw closer together and closer to God.