When the Bible Says "Salvation" It Means Liberation: Why It Matters

Explaining the revolutionary idea at the heart of a word that's been ruined beyond recognition

Today's newsletter, the first in a series based on my book, The God Who Riots: Taking Back the Radical Jesus, delves into the opening chapter, "Saved from What?". I started with a chapter about salvation because my book is an attempt to bring this radical vision of Jesus down to earth—to right here, right now. And today we’re going to do that with the concept of salvation.

I told yall I wrote a book.

What is Salvation, Really Though?

We’re about to get pretty nerdy in this deep dive into the Bible, but don’t worry if you’re not familiar with the Bible. I’ll explain.

Salvation is one of the most important themes in the Bible.

But why care about what the Bible says about an ancient abstract doctrine like salvation? Because this ancient wisdom is more relevant than ever. It has nothing to do with a god and a devil trading souls. It’s a way of understanding how we free ourselves from oppression here and now.

The Bible isn’t about securing your soul’s salvation from a torturous afterlife. It never was. Let’s start at Exodus, a foundational salvation story. The Israelites cried out for God's deliverance from Egyptian slavery, and they were saved. Later, when Babylon conquered Israel, they cry out for salvation again, this time from exile. And all those books about all those prophets are about giving their people hope for the day they’re liberated from every empire that oppresses them.

We get to the New Testament and the concept of salvation persists. But it gets a little more personal. Peter, in Acts 2 challenges people to “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” The people respond by building a community that shared property and took care of one another. And the text says “And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.”

But is that salvation?

Absolutely.

Perhaps a more fitting translation would be "liberation." But that’s only because we’ve ruined a word that was never meant to be about afterlife soul insurance. It’s about the ongoing work of physical liberation in this life, in this world, for all people.

Why does this distinction matter?

Our faith should empower us to embody salvation in a tangible and practical way. “Are you saved?” is the wrong question. Instead, ask yourself “How can I contribute to liberation?” And that ranges from aiding friends in need to dismantling oppressive systems. That’s salvation.

What About Personal Salvation Though?

Mason and I are threads guys now. Follow me @whoisdamon

Last year when I was promoting my book I went on my friend Mason Mennenga’s podcast, A People’s Theology, and when we talked about this chapter on salvation he brought up our evangelical backgrounds. Both Mason and I were raised evangelical. Evangelicals tend to emphasize salvation as a personal transformation, but neglect the aspect of collective liberation. But nowadays we’re in community with Christians who tend to emphasize salvation as collective liberation, but often neglect the aspect of personal transformation. “Maybe that’s our evangelical days speaking,” Mason suggested to me with a smile, “but you really want to keep that to be a core part of what transformation means—that it’s not simply communal and collective, but the personal is really a part of it.”

Later, I reflected on that throwaway comment from Mason—that my insistence of keeping an emphasis on personal transformation in salvation could be a result of my evangelical upbringing.

But the difference now is that I used to think of personal transformation as something that primarily happens inside you. Now I know it’s about choosing to live a different kind of life.

Who was Jesus, Really Though?

After all, there’s a reason Jesus recruited followers and taught them how to do everything he did. He was there to teach them a new way of life—a way so radical that it got him executed.

But other people also claimed to be the Messiah back then and they were executed on crosses too. If we set aside the miraculous claims that the gospels make about Jesus, what made his movement different from the others? Most scholars agree there was likely a Jewish teacher named Jesus who was executed on a cross, which is known to have been a punishment by the Roman government for the crime of sedition. And that’s pretty much all they can agree upon from a historical perspective. But when all those other supposed Messiahs were executed their followers went home and decided they were wrong about who the Messiah was, and they waited for another. But Jesus’s followers went home and decided they were wrong about what the Messiah was. And they began teaching about becoming the collective body of the Messiah (Hebrew: mashiach, Greek: christos).

What prompted this shift? Was it the result of Jesus physically coming back from the dead, visions of Jesus, or maybe a reinterpretation of Jesus’s teachings that took place over several years? The answer to that question is a matter of faith. What I’m endlessly intrigued by, however, is simply that shift: from waiting for God to save them to uniting as the embodiment of God in the world, beginning the work they were waiting for. That’s incarnation. God is embodied in Jesus and then keeps on going, becoming further enfleshed through our hands and feet.

However, this renewed faith expression wouldn't have been possible without those early Jewish Christians reengaging with the Hebrew prophets, particularly Isaiah.

What’s the Suffering Servant, Really Though?

In Isaiah we find four songs about a suffering servant chosen to liberate Israel (Is. 42:1-4, 49:1-6, 50:4-9, 52:13-53:12). In the first song God describes the servant to Isaiah, “I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations…He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth, and the coastlands wait for his teaching.” In the second song God says, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

In my evangelical ministry days a fellow minister pulled me aside to confess something and get my advice. He said, “I was reading Isaiah the other day, and…” He looked around to make sure nobody was listening, and quietly said, “I had a universalist thought.” The guilt and shame in his voice caught me off guard. Even back then it sounded like a silly thing to worry about but I tried to be serious out of respect. He informed me that I was the only one he had told besides his girlfriend, and he asked for my advice. I told him to dive deeper and explore what he found, instead of avoiding it. He immediately rejected my suggestion, and whispered, “I can’t. I’m about to be licensed!” Our conversation was cut short and he never brought it up again. He also never told me what passage in Isaiah he was reading, but I’m pretty sure it was this one about salvation reaching everyone on earth.

But again, like every other Hebrew prophet that preached about salvation, Isaiah’s focus wasn’t the afterlife.

Written to Israel during Babylonian exile, Isaiah sought to empower his people with a revolutionary prophecy that reinterpreted the suffering of Israel as an integral part of their larger destiny toward liberation.

Liberation theologian, Ignacio Ellacuría, also talked about salvation as intertwined with historical liberation. He writes, “The theology of the Servant proposes that the encounter with Yahweh occurs in history and that that encounter thus becomes the locus both of Yahweh’s intimate presence with the people and of the people’s response and responsibility.”¹

The Servant symbolizes self-emancipation, urging God's people to join God in liberating themselves. The cry to God for freedom from oppression is redirected back to God's people.

Who really liberates the oppressed?

“It is only the oppressed,” Paulo Friere reveals in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors.” The oppressed liberate themselves because they understand what needs to change better than their oppressors ever could. “The latter,” Friere argues, “as an oppressive class, can free neither others nor themselves.”²

Where do you see this phenomenon play out today? To name a few, I see it in the ongoing fights for trans rights, the emerging push for workers' rights, and the efforts of Indigenous activists fighting to reclaim sovereignty. These movements can only be led by those who directly experience the oppression we struggle against.

“It is easy to regard the oppressed and needy as those who are to be saved and liberated,” Ellacuría writes, “but it is not easy to see them as saviors and liberators.”³ We tend to look outward for change from above when change can only come from below.

The Radical Stream

Regarding the Christian use of the Suffering Servant symbol, it's misleading to consider Isaiah's Servant Songs as predictive descriptions of Jesus. This usage also risks perpetuating the antisemitic idea that Judaism is just some sort of preparatory stage for Christianity. Isaiah’s prophetic symbol of the servant wasn’t about Jesus—or any individual for that matter. Isaiah was calling Israel to become the servant collectively, as a nation. And so Jesus’s Jewish followers found inspiration in the Servant songs. It was an acknowledgment that Jesus took up Isaiah’s call to join the work of the servant and so Jesus’s followers were going to commit their lives in the same way.

Jesus’ life inspired his Jewish followers to return to the roots of their faith tradition and recover the most radical stream within it—the prophetic stream that called them to become servants of liberation. And they based their newfound faith on that radical stream.

I feel like that’s what I’m doing with my own faith. In my case, I’m going back to the roots of the Christian tradition, and recovering the radical streams throughout its history and basing my faith on those radical streams—those people that were empowered by their faith to join God in liberating the world.

And I wrote a whole book about it! And I plan to continue fleshing it out in this newsletter. Stay tuned for the next one, and make sure you’re subscribed.

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1. Ignacio Ellacuría, Ignacio Ellacuria: Essays on History, Liberation, and Salvation (New York: Orbis Books, 2013), 212.

2. Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1970; London: Penguin Books, 2017), 30.

3. Ellacuría, 199.