Devotion and service
Whenever humankind has been deemed to need divine aid for salvation, there has been an emphasis on a personal relationship with the saviour-god concerned. Such relationship usually connotes faith in and loving devotion and service toward the deity, and such service may involve moral and social obligations. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the bhakti cults of India afford notable examples. Christianity adds a further requirement in this context: because human nature is basically corrupted by sin, God’s prevenient (antecedent, activating) grace is needed before the human will can be disposed even to desire salvation.
Varieties of salvation in world religions
Ancient Egypt
The Pyramid Texts of ancient Egypt provide the earliest evidence of the human quest for salvation. They reveal that by about 2400 bce a complex soteriology connected with the divine kingship of the pharaohs had been established in Egypt. This soteriology was gradually developed in concept and ritual practice and was popularized; i.e., the original royal privilege was gradually extended to all the classes of society, until by about 1400 bce it had become an elaborate mortuary cult through which all who could afford its cost could hope to partake of the salvation it offered. This salvation concerned three aspects of postmortem existence, as imagined by the ancient Egyptians, and, in the concept of Osiris, it involved the earliest instance of a saviour-god. An elaborate ritual of embalmment was designed to save the corpse from decomposition and restore its faculties so that it could live in a well-equipped tomb. This ritual imitated the acts that were believed to have been performed by the gods to preserve the body of Osiris, with whom the deceased was ritually assimilated. The next concern was to resurrect the embalmed body of the dead person, as Osiris had been resurrected to a new life after death. Having thus been saved from the consequences of death, the revivified dead had to undergo a judgment (presided over by Osiris) on the moral quality of his life on earth. In this ordeal, the deceased could be saved from an awful second death only by personal integrity. If he safely passed the test, he was declared maa kheru (“true of voice”) and was admitted to the beatitude of the realm over which Osiris reigned.
This Osirian mortuary cult, with its promise of postmortem salvation, was practiced from about 2400 bce until its suppression in the Christian era. In some respects, it constitutes a prototype of Christianity as a salvation religion.
Hinduism
Running through the great complex of beliefs and ritual practices that constitute Hinduism is the conviction that the soul or self (atman) is subject to samsara—i.e., the transmigration through many forms of incarnation. Held together with this belief is another, karma—i.e., that the soul carries with it the burden of its past actions, which conditions the forms of its future incarnations. As long as the soul mistakes this phenomenal world for reality and clings to existence in it, it is doomed to suffer endless births and deaths. The various Indian traditions offer ways in which to attain moksha (“release”; “liberation”) from the misery of subjection to the inexorable process of cosmic time. Basically, this liberation consists in the soul’s effective apprehension of its essential unity with brahman, the Absolute or supreme reality, and its merging with it. Most of the ways by which this goal may be attained require self-effort in mastering meditation techniques and living an ascetic life. But in the devotional (bhakti) movements associated with Vishnu and Shiva, an intense personal devotion to the deity concerned is believed to earn divine aid to salvation.
Buddhism
Buddhism accepts the principles of samsara and karma (Pali: kamma), but it differs in one important respect from the Hindu conception of human nature. Instead of believing that an atman passes through endless series of incarnations, Buddhism teaches that there is no such preexistent, eternal core of an individual that migrates from body to body. Each individual consists of a number of physical and psychic elements (khandhas; Sanskrit skandhas) that combine to create the sense of personal individuality. But this combination is only temporary and is irreparably shattered by death, leaving no element that can be identified as the soul or self. By a subtle metaphysical argument, however, it is maintained that the craving for personal existence generated by the khandhas causes the birth of another such personalized combination, which inherits the karma of a sequence of previous combinations of khandhas.
The enlightenment attained by the Buddha was essentially about the cause of existence in the phenomenal world, from which suffering inevitably stemmed. Buddhist teaching and practice have, accordingly, been designed to acquaint people with their true nature and situation and enable them to free themselves from craving for existence in the space-time world and so attain nirvana. Traditionally, this goal has been presented in negative terms—as the extinction of desire, attachment, ignorance, or suffering—creating the impression that Buddhist salvation means the complete obliteration of individual consciousness. In one sense, this is so, but, in terms of Buddhist metaphysics, ultimate reality transcends all the terms of reference relevant to existence in this world.
Theoretically, the Buddhist initiate should, by his own effort in seeking to eradicate desire for continued existence in the empirical world, achieve his own salvation. But, as Buddhism developed into a popular religion in its Mahayana (“Greater Vehicle”) form, provision was made for the natural human desire for assurance of divine aid. Consequently, belief in many saviours, known as bodhisattvas (“buddhas-to-be”), developed, together with elaborate eschatologies concerning human destiny. According to these, before the ultimate attainment of nirvana, the faithful could expect to pass through series of heavens or hells, according to their merits or demerits and the intensity of their devotion to a bodhisattva.