Salvation is personal, but this hardly needs emphasis… What does need emphasis is that Salvation in the Bible is also social. Ancient Israel’s story is a story of the creation of a new people, a nation, a community.

Salvation is about life together. Salvation is about peace and justice within community and beyond community. It is about shalom, a word connoting not simply peace as the absence of war, but peace as the wholeness of a community living together in peace and justice. Salvation is never only an individual affair in the Hebrew Bible.

The emphasis upon social salvation continues in the New Testament. In the teaching of Jesus, social salvation is expressed in the theo-political metaphor at the heart of his activity, the Kingdom of God. For Paul also, salvation is social (as well as personal). He was creating new communities “in Christ” whose life together embodies an alternative vision to that of empire.