Forget Salvation, You Were Never Meant to Be Saved. You Were Meant to Be Finished.
The ancient Christian teaching that rewrites everything you thought you knew about the “plan of salvation”
What if I told you that the earliest Christians didn’t believe you needed to be “saved” in the way you’ve been taught? They didn’t go around trying to get you to be saved or say a sinner’s prayer.
Neither were they concerned with rescuing you from a divine courtroom, nor with being acquitted by a celestial judge focused on justice and handing out punishment. Nor were they overly concerned with being whisked away to some disembodied heaven where you float on clouds and sing hymns forever.
What if the original Christian vision was far stranger, far more ambitious, and far more beautiful than any of that? What if these things: plain, precious, and basic, have been lost in the Christian traditions of the West but are just as valid today, maybe even more important, than they were 2000 years ago?
What if the whole point of the Gospel, the actual, ancient, pre-denominational point, was that you are an unfinished creature, and that, in the words of Saint Athanasius, “God became human so that humans could become God?“
I know. That sentence probably made half of you lean forward (LDS readers likely heard in this an echo of the (in)famous Lorenzo Snow couplet) and the other half reach for the “unsubscribe” button. Stay with me. What I’m about to lay out for you is not some fringe theory. It is the beating heart of the oldest continuous Christian tradition on earth. And it will reframe everything you think you know about the plan of salvation, creation, the fall, redemption, and the end of the world.
It all starts with a day that doesn’t exist on your calendar.
This is the first part of a series on the Eighth Day. In upcoming posts for paid subscribers only, we’ll explore how Orthodox Christians “hallow” physical space through blessings and holy water—and why they bless not just houses and churches, but cars, animals, fields, and rivers. We’ll look at the specific prayers of the Great Blessing of the Waters at Theophany and what they reveal about the Eighth Day’s power over the material world. And we’ll go deep into the Orthodox understanding of the “end times”—an eschatology so different from Left Behind that it will feel like discovering a new religion.
This is the kind of theology that doesn’t get written about in most places, and your support makes it possible to keep going deeper.
