Reply #6: Salvation also connotes reward for righteousness and that is also the opposite [View All]

[patrice]

of the life of Yeshua, who resisted the coercion and violence of his church-state because that was the right thing to do and for no other reason, no reward. Being Saved, i.e. Salvation, has a lot of quid pro quo about it now. It's also highly associated with rising from the dead and eternal life, both of which are assumed to be me the particular person, that I am rising from the dead on judgment day and going to heaven, and that self-centered "Salvation" also is not necessarily true of the life of Christ or anyone else. The Creeds may say these things, but they don't say exactly what eternal life or heaven is. Whatever your soul is, it isn't necessarily the you that you know as you and there's nothing in dogma that contradicts that. It's us who added all of that stuff about Salvation being ME, ME, ME living forever, because that's what we want.

P.S. I think I have broken the semantic frame you proposed in this response, though, but there is a little justification in this, since the things I am thinking about here are sort of related to Gnosticism, which was part of the early Christian cultural context. Remember John the Baptist was part of a community of mystic Jews known as the Essenes.