Winning Our Salvation 2

How exactly did Jesus Christ win our salvation? Joseph Conti has another idea in mind. Although quite different from what I proposed awhile back, both ideas bear a slight similarity. That is, both affirm that salvation stems not primarily from Jesus Christ's death on the cross, as many Christians would like to emphasize:

"...Christ saves" - but from what? What are we being saved from? From death? From suffering? From sin? From exactly what? The answer that the Christian mystics supply is astonishing...The mystics teach us that at each stage of our journey to God, God saves us in a distinct way from a special limiting force that, at that stage of the journey, is blocking a fuller life in Him. Thus, in the first movement of our journey, God saves us from the wrongly-oriented ego.

He does this by sending awakening conversion graces, which invite us to see that our highest good is in Him. As we lovingly respond, God leads us to divine intimacy, which results in our coming to the illuminative Way, the ego's single-hearted attachment to God, and then beyond the ego to the unitive state. But God stil has more saving work in us to do. For though the unitive state is a state of Light, it is not fully transparent to the Light, in ways that we will explain presently. Thus begins the second movement to salvation.

This second and final Way God saves us is to deliver us beyond all self: for the medium of self, even the God-united egoless self, does not give us God as God is in Himself, but only God as God is in ourselves. The ultimate gift God wants to give us is to know Him as He knows Himself.

Joseph Conti
Holistic Christianity

Pause and pray.