“Salvation” is a term which arises most clearly in the Christian tradition – the idea that God’s love through Jesus Christ will save humans from their sinful state. However, other religions have parallel concepts. Rather than salvation, Jews speak of “redemption” for individuals, for Israel and indeed for all nations. In Islam the closest parallel is found in the term najat which means “escape or deliverance from the fires of hell to the pleasures of paradise by following God’s guidance.” In Judaism, Christianity and Islam the human condition from which we all begin is one of sin or disobedience to God, and it is from that state that we need to be saved. When we turn to Hinduism and Buddhism, however, it is human ignorance rather than sin that is our baseline human experience. Our ignorance traps us in a seemingly unending series of lives – of birth, aging, sickness and death repeated over and over. This apparently endless series of suffering, death and rebirth is the human condition that leads one to long for “release from rebirth” – the Hindu and Buddhist functional parallel to the idea of salvation. “Release” for Hindus is referred to as moksa, while Buddhists call it nirvana.

In his classic work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, the psychologist William James suggests that we humans innately seek for a wider sense of ourselves through which saving experiences come. This “wider self,” says James, might well be the door that the divine uses to enter into the lives of humans here on earth. In the chapters that follow we are introduced to different perceptions of the divine, of our human condition, and of the “wider sense of self” through which salvation may come. In the history of the human search for salvation we find not only differences between religious but also a great variety of understandings within each tradition. What is common, however, is the basic insight found in all the religious traditions “that this world is not a place in which we are hopelessly lost, that evil or illusory as the world may be, and sinful or ignorant as we are, there is a way, a path, that leads from darkness to light, from lostness to salvation.”

Harold Coward: Sin and Salvation in the World Religions: A Short Introduction