The Alternate Soteriologies of the Judaeo-Christian Tradition

Soteriology is the religious doctrine of spiritual salvation. The first answer you will get from most Christians on how to find salvation will be some form of the following injunction: "accept Christ as your savior and believe that he died on the cross to save us from our sins." Yet there have always been the added doctrines of repentance and good works. The troubling matter is that Christians have traditionally not believed their Jewish siblings are saved, because Jews do not believe that Christ is the Savior. What Christians fail to grasp is that Jews have been concerned with salvation from the beginning, and that their rite of Yom Kippur is as solemn and moving a ceremony as Good Friday. Yom Kippur is the focus of Judaic repentance and salvation, but it emphasizes salvation in this life. It is both a personal and communal recognition of and meditation on human moral fallibility and the harm we do each other and ourselves, either through ignorance, insouciance, fear, anger or greed. Yom Kippur is a day to renew one's personal covenant and for the human community to renew their covenant with God. The covenant in question is not worthiness for the piece of real estate called Canaan. It is about the privilege of continuing to live in this world, where we have the opportunity to make a positive difference in our own soul and in the lives of others. It is also the culmination of their New Year Festival, which begins on Rosh Hashanah, and the great metaphor is "for God to inscribe one's name once again in the Book of Life". It is a beautiful ceremony, and as a Christian, I have never found anything in it that is not in agreement with the spirit of Christianity. In fact, it leads to an important realization: Jews do not need the Crucifixion to be saved. They've got the salvation thing well in hand. Christians need to consider that Jesus himself set up the meditation for spiritual salvation before there was any foreshadowing of unavoidable doom on the cross. It came in the form of what we call the Lord's Prayer. This prayer, which many scholars believe is the most authentic utterance of Jesus reported by the gospel writers, is more like a recipe for establishing and maintaining a good covenant with God, and thereby, salvation. The key phrase is a metaphorical one: "forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors", or in an alternate version, "forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespasses against us". This is one of the greatest challenges a Christian faces, but there were Jews in the Qumram sectarian community who were writing in Aramaic (Jesus' mother tongue) on the same difficult moral realization before Jesus began his ministry. There are people who harm us out of moral indifference, our of malice, out of ignorance, out of jealousy, and any number of other bizarre psychological reasons. We ourselves, even if blessed with spiritual guidance, meet with difficulties in this life that cause us to hurt the feelings or condition of others, and to harm ourselves, out of fear or lack of reflection, or maybe even for the same reasons listed above for why others choose to hurt us. We want God to forgive us for these errors, even as we seek to repair the damage we have done in our thoughtlessness. Jesus' pairing of "forgive and you shall be forgiven" demonstrates his own soteriology, before people decided after he had died that his soteriology devolved from his Crucifixion. Jesus saw everything and everyone as interconnected with each other and with God. We want God to understand our moral frailty and give us another chance, but so we must do the same for each other, that the world might be healed. Of course, common sense dictates that we protect ourselves, remove ourselves from those who are bent on doing harm, because they are incapable of moral reason, either because of sociopathology or a thoroughly abused or neglected childhood, or because they were taught not to care. And we must remember that to forgive is not to condone a misdeed. But while Jesus certainly would not want us to continue to be victims of such people, he does want us to pity them (for their actions reflect an inner hell), and to forgive them is to let go of the harm they have done that cripples us. I do not say that I find this easy or always do-able. It would be nice if everyone you might forgive were people who were mostly good or well-intentioned, but had made a mistake, a misjudgment, an error born of impulsive haste. This is sometimes the case. There are impoverished youths who commit crimes in the desperation and confusion of adolescence who later repent of their wrongs in the spiritual maturity and healing gratitude of a second chance in adulthood. And one need not tell a person you have forgiven them -- in fact, such an act might in some cases be dangerous or unappreciated. The forgiveness can be expressed in the silence of prayer, in the private sanctuary of the mind. It is more about letting go of the bitterness so that the heart can be free again. The Lord's Prayer and the great sermons of social conscience of Jesus are the essential link Christianity has with Judaism in terms of spiritual renewal. Through his words and exemplary acts of compassion, Jesus gave us the means to salvation before he was executed on the cross by due process of Roman Law and its colonial judicial system. If Jesus had lived out a full life and simply died of old age like so many rural rabbis of his kind before and since, he would still have imparted to us a solid soteriology. No, Jews do not need to believe in the Cross to have salvation. They worship the same God Christians do, and before his untimely death, Jesus left behind for searching Gentiles moral directions to the Way of Judaism.