# What salvation is (Soteriology)

Our first sin was to not trust God at His word.

1. He told us to not eat of the Tree of Knowing Morality.
2. If we had trusted God's nature, we would have waited, and He would have given it to us when we were ready for it.
3. Instead of building [meaning](meaning.md) through waiting, we decided to consume the [knowledge](understanding.md) early.
4. Since then, we make irreversible snap judgments of moral injustice that generate [feelings of anger](mind-feelings-anger.md) of anger.
5. That anger is the basis for a multitude of sins including vengefulness, conceit, and bitterness.
6. The only pathway out for us now, irrespective of our eternal state, is through replacing our wisdom with God's.
7. To gain God's wisdom, we must trust Him like we were supposed to in the first place, though the situation has gotten far worse for us.

God has a two-step approach to salvation:

1. We are given a thorough-enough [understanding of our sin](theology-sins.md) through the Hebrew Law.
    - The Law indicates we've all sinned more than we realize.
    - This Law also indicates that we are woefully incapable in any individual or political sense to fulfill it.
    - The conclusion, if we believe it, is that we are utterly condemned by God in one way or another.
    - This condemnation is only redeemable through a sacrifice that pays for our sins.
2. Jesus, as God, chose to become the moral sacrifice for all our sins.
    - We are therefore compelled by moral imperative to [believe in His sacrifice](https://theologos.site/gospel/).

We are also, in response to that, responsible to strive to not sin again, assisted by the Holy Spirit.

- However, even then, God's grace is sufficient to cover all sins.
- This grace includes the [habitual](https://adequate.life/habits/) sins we will invariably fall into as long as our bodies are still programmed to them.

Due to the metaphysical nature of reality conforming to a relationship with god, the consequences of sin has created irredeemable damage to this universe.

- All fauna (and plenty of flora) moved from a sacrifice-based approach (i.e., give and trust God to receive what is needed) to a survival-based approach (i.e., take as much as needed without considering what is being destroyed).
- It is entirely possible entropy and other forms of physical decay have been magnified from their original parameters.

## Conflicts regarding salvation

The idea of salvation is very straightforward, but the Gospel itself is [highly controversial](https://theologos.site/gospel/).

Further than that, other debates have raged about some of the idiosyncrasies.

Closely connected to this, but not quite, is the [predestination](theology-predestination.md) debate.

- It holds a tremendous amount of sway here because it determines how God frames His decisions.
- In other words, the way we understand God's scope of understanding determines God's capacity to make decisions regarding salvation.

Since the early Catholic scholars, there has been one singular question: does man achieve salvation through God's divine influence, or does an individual make the conscious and completely self-driven choice to choose God.

- It is a deductive reality that God has to have some influence in the matter (i.e., Romans 1, among others).
- It is also a deductive reality that God can't have *complete* influence in the matter, since that would take away our agency entirely.

Two extreme denominational camps have formed around both extremes.

- Many Reformed Christians lean into complete determinism, starting with the fandom around John Calvin.
  - The assertion essentially dictates that man is such a lowly and pathetic individual that they are incapable of all moral goodness whatsoever (i.e., Kantian ethics), and the only goodness they could ever have comes straight from God Himself.
  - Their attitude betrays their error, since Paul demonstrates a type of boldness that certainly comes from something more naturally-occurring than simply being a "puppet" of God's design.
- Sometime around the Progressive Era, John Wesley asserted an opposite stance: that everyone makes their choice of their own will.
  - The idea is that we are the deciders of our fate, and God can only work around it. It's by His choice (obviously), but He makes it a hard and fast rule.
  - Their attitude betrays their error as well, since their boldness often leads to false doctrine of many varieties.
  - They are also theologically in error, since God *does* work on people's hearts without their consent (e.g., hardening Pharaoh's heart against Moses).