Time Out: An Observation on Salvation's Shrinking Scope
Before we move further in our series tracing "What Went Wrong," let’s pause for a moment and take stock of something we’ve noticed as we’ve met the key thinkers, translators, and theologians along the way — people like Plutarch, Tertullian, Jerome, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas.
Through the first 1,200 years, there’s a subtle but significant shift in how salvation is imagined. It begins as a sweeping vision: God through Jesus being faithful to His covenant, rescuing His people, dismantling oppression, healing creation. Gradually the vision narrows into a personal legal problem between an individual and God — a debt to be settled. By the High Middle Ages, the systemic and societal dimensions of evil (ra in Hebrew) are fading from view as the goal becomes personal salvation so we can escape the physical world to go to heaven.
Personal salvation is crucial, but it is only part of the issue. Evil exists at a systemic level and an individual level. Only resolving this issue at the personal level leaves the world in a broken mess.
The call of Jesus is to bring the Kingdom — on earth as it is in heaven. Yes, we are rescued as individuals. But the goal is to become participants in the restoration, not people huddled in the church waiting to be ushered off to a faraway place. The gospel is resurrection and restoration of all that has been broken and stolen. Heaven and earth ultimately come together.
The Scriptural Starting Point
In the Hebrew Scriptures, ra ("evil") refers to destructive forces that corrupt individuals, communities, systems, and the created world. Salvation (yeshua) means deliverance from those forces — liberation from oppressive empires, restoration of the land, justice for the marginalized. The prophets declare:
“Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:24)“The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me… He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives.” (Isaiah 61:1)
When Jesus proclaims, “The kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15), He steps into that prophetic stream. Paul holds both dimensions together, warning that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world” (Ephesians 6:12).
Salvation is still both personal and societal — confronting sin in the heart and ra in the systems.
100–300 AD: The Encounter with Neo-Platonic Thought
By the second century, the church engages a Greco-Roman world steeped in Platonic and neo-Platonic philosophy. Plato believed in a two-level universe: physical and spiritual. The physical aspect of creation is inferior to the spiritual. In Plato's mind, the goal is for the soul to escape the physical.
Thinkers like Plutarch advocated a worldview that elevates the soul and devalues the physical. This framework cast the material world as a lesser, even corrupt, realm from which the soul must escape. As some Christians absorbed these ideas, salvation began to be framed less as God’s kingdom coming on earth as in heaven and more as my soul’s escape to a higher spiritual realm.
While many believers still cared for the poor and opposed imperial injustice, the gravitational pull of neo-Platonic thought was strong. The focus of Christian preaching and discipleship gradually tilted toward the inner life, personal moral purity, and individual afterlife destiny. The prophetic call to reform society’s structures, to confront systemic ra, and to embody the kingdom’s justice here and now became quieter in the theological imagination.
Plato’s influence replaced the biblical hope of resurrection and recreation with an escapist goal: leaving the world behind rather than seeing it restored.
300–600 AD: The Legal Shift
This shift accelerates under Constantine the Great. Born around 272 AD, Constantine rose through the Roman military ranks to become emperor. In 312 AD, before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, he reportedly saw a vision of a cross in the sky with the words “In this sign, conquer.” After his victory, he credited the Christian God and issued the Edict of Milan (313 AD), granting religious tolerance to Christians.
Constantine’s conversion marked a turning point: the church moved from a prophetic counterculture to an imperial partner. As imperial favor grew, salvation language shifted toward personal piety and sacramental participation.
During this period, Tertullian’s legal training and courtroom metaphors began to influence theological language, subtly reframing salvation in judicial categories. Jerome’s later work on the Latin Vulgate, translating the Greek scriptures into Latin, cemented certain legal and penitential terms into Western theology. This reinforced the idea of sin as a personal legal debt to be settled, quietly shuffling the broader societal dimensions of evil into the background. Augustine, shaped by both Scripture and his philosophical training, developed a framework that emphasized original sin and the necessity of divine grace, further centering salvation on the individual’s standing before God. Roman law had turned the gospel into a legal transaction: a personal legal problem needed a personal legal solution.
600–1200 AD: Medieval Theology and the Individualization of Evil
As scholastic theology developed, the legal framing of salvation became more explicit. Anselm’s satisfaction theory presented sin as an offense against God’s honor that only Christ could satisfy. This further reduced salvation to resolving an individual’s legal standing before God.
Then along comes Aquinas, who integrates Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology and firmly embeds the legal and sacramental systems of the church into the structure of salvation itself. In his model, the church becomes the gateway through which grace flows, administered through the sacraments. The gospel became more about fixing my legal problem with God than dismantling the world’s systems of oppression.
A New Trajectory Set
By 1200, the Western view of salvation is largely:
“God rescues me from my personal guilt so one day I can escape this world and go to heaven be with Him forever.”
Summary of the Shift:
Jesus’ Original Vision – Resurrection and recreation of the world. Physical creation isn’t bad — it’s broken and is being restored.
Platonic Thought – We need to escape the physical and go to heaven.
Legal Thought – Sin is a legal dilemma. Jesus alone satisfies the offended Lord, and the church administers grace through the sacraments.
The older, broader biblical vision (God setting the world right, overthrowing oppressive systems, and healing creation) remained in the liturgy but was no longer the center of theological gravity.
Why This Matters Today
This historical narrowing challenges us to recover the full scope of the gospel. If we only address personal morality, we leave systemic ra unchallenged, allowing injustice, exploitation, and corruption to flourish unchecked. If we only focus on escaping to heaven, we abandon our calling to bring God’s kingdom into our neighborhoods, workplaces, and nations.
To follow Jesus faithfully today means holding personal transformation and societal restoration together. It means proclaiming the good news of forgiveness and confronting systems that crush the vulnerable. It means living as people of resurrection hope — not waiting to leave the world behind, but joining God’s work to restore it so that, in the end, heaven and earth are fully reunited.
Conclusion So Far: This isn’t about escaping the world; it’s about restoring it. It isn’t about a legal transaction with an angry God; it’s about the Father’s faithfulness to His covenantal promises to His children.
