Save Me!  ## Metadata - Author: [[Data Over Dogma]] - Full Title: Save Me! - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/1bd31982-947e-4057-849c-419308432b81 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Original Meaning of Salvation** - The concept of being "saved" in the Hebrew Bible primarily means help or deliverance from a temporal danger, not an eternal spiritual salvation. - Salvation was about escaping immediate threats like enemies or illness, not salvation from sin or afterlife punishment. Transcript: Dan Beecher Boom, they're saved. So let's talk about salvation. Let's talk about the concept of being saved. Dan McClellan Yeah. And I don't even know if they use the acronym, but like OSAS, once saved, always saved, goes along with that. But I wanted to go back to the beginning, a very good place to start, with the fact that in the Hebrew Bible, being saved was an entirely different concept from what it is in the New Testament, But then particularly after the New Testament. Because you've got the name Yeshua, which is Jesus, which is supposed to be related to salvation, and it's Aramaic, and it is either the clause, Adonai is salvation, or it's just the Regular old Aramaic word for salvation. Okay. I happen to think it's just the word for salvation, but it derives from the Hebrew Yehoshua, which I think would better be interpreted as Adonai is salvation. Interesting. Or Adonai saves. But the verbal root here, yasha, yod, shin, ein, is the verbal root that underlies the names in whether it's Hebrew or Aramaic or your Greek transliteration, yesus. And this just means to help. It can be in the nephal, which is the passive sense, means to receive help or to accept help. In the hyphil or the causative sense, it means to help with the work or to help or to save. But it's overwhelmingly used in the Hebrew Bible to refer to saving someone from some kind of temporal distress. Okay. And by temporal, I don't mean having to do with time. I was going to say, yeah. Dan Beecher Oh, no, I'm worried about, I'm going to be late. Yes, yes, for a very important date. Dan McClellan No, it means not having to do with spiritual. Right. It means the real material world. So the first time the verb occurs— It means I'm stuck in quicksand. Dan Beecher Please help me get out of here. Dan McClellan Yeah. And it usually has to do with some kind of enemy or some kind of threat of violence. So the very first occurrence of the verbal root yasha in the Hebrew Bible comes in Exodus 2.17. So it doesn't even occur in Genesis. But in Exodus 2.17, you have when Moses, he's run off and he sees the people who are harassing the folks at the well. It says, Moses got up and came to their defense or saved them and watered their flock. So Moses chased off some people who were harassing them. And that is the verbal root that underlies the name Jesus. And then you've got a lot of stories in Exodus of Adonai saving Israel, and elsewhere it's always God has saved them from their enemies. And so the sense is very much deliverance from some kind of threat of danger, usually having to do with an enemy, an illness, some kind of accident, something like that. So it's deliverance in a temporal sense, not in a spiritual sense. And that is what we have throughout the Hebrew Bible. And I think one of the reasons is that the notion of a spiritual salvation has mostly to do with the afterlife, and particularly avoiding enemies or threats in the afterlife. But in the Hebrew Bible, everybody had the same afterlife. Everybody went to the same place. Everybody went to Sheol, which was just the abode of the dead, this murky existence that we didn't know a lot about, but there was no other afterlife existence other than Sheol. And so... Dan Beecher Yeah, we've talked a bit about the sort of evolving idea of what happens after death. Dan McClellan Yeah. And so you do have some references to being saved from Sheol in the Hebrew Bible, but I think the idea there is not that you're going to be resurrected or you're going to have eternal life Or anything like that. I think the idea is just you're being saved from an early death. So if you're sick and you're on your deathbed and somebody cures you, you have been saved from Sheol. Not in the sense that you go to heaven, but in the sense that you narrowly avoided death. Dan Beecher You were saved from Sha'ol for now. Dan McClellan Yeah, because Sha'ol also just means the grave or death. ([Time 0:04:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ccd5748f-4cff-4c20-8687-af2fc6e5abb8)) - **Shift to Spiritual Salvation** - In the New Testament, salvation shifts from temporal rescue to saving from sin, perceived as the spiritual enemy. - This transition marks the development of salvation as an eternal deliverance beyond physical dangers. Transcript: Dan McClellan That salvation means taking the correct turn once we have shuffled off this mortal coil, that we are going to be on the good side of the smooth places that are described in 1 Enoch, as we've Talked about in episodes past. Dan Beecher One doesn't want a non-smooth afterlife. The bumpy afterlife is the less pleasant one. Dan McClellan Yeah, you don't want that turbulence going on in your afterlife. And so by the time you get to the New Testament, you've got, one, the New Testament is written in Greek, and so you've got an entirely different word that means to save. Sozo is the word in Greek, and it can mean to preserve or rescue from natural dangers and afflictions, to keep from harm, to preserve, to rescue, again, to save from death. So there's a lot of conceptual overlap with what we are finding in the Hebrew Bible. And so, for instance, the first time it occurs in the New Testament is Matthew 1.21, where the idea is, you will name him Jesus, why he will save people from their sins. And so here's where it's no longer enemies, it's no longer some kind of immediate danger, it's no longer an illness or something like that. It's sin. And sin kind of metaphorically becomes the enemy. And so you have this, I think, slow transition from the enemy being temporal threats to the enemy being these spiritual threats, that is sins. But it can also mean to be healed or to be made whole. You have some uses like that. So, for instance, the woman with the issue of blood, she says, only touch his cloak, sothisome, which would mean I will be saved, made whole, healed, something like that. So you still have the sense of salvation as something temporal, but I think you're also adding on to it the idea of sins. ([Time 0:10:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7d5e490c-b285-49bf-aa93-e6a132a10959)) - **Jesus' Role in Salvation Change** - Christian salvation pivots around Jesus, shifting focus from political deliverance to eternal afterlife salvation. - After Jesus' death, salvation becomes about entering the kingdom of heaven rather than earthly freedom. Transcript: Dan McClellan It's now about eternal spiritual salvation. And we go from the idea of the Messiah as the one who's supposed to show up and deliver us from our oppressors and reestablish the independent kingdom of Israel to, oh, it turns out we're Just going to have crappy lives forever, but then once we die, then we'll go to heaven. That's how we enter into the kingdom of God. And I think you see some conflict in the Gospels where the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven is something initially kind of perceived to be an earthly kingdom, but also represented As not of this world and something that's going to be located somewhere else. I think you probably have a little bit of conflict there because I imagine that Jesus' followers initially understood Jesus according to a traditional understanding of the Messiah As someone who was going to come deliver them from their yoke, deliver them from subjugation to Rome and lead to an independent Judean kingdom. And when that didn't happen, when they're all looking up at him hanging on the cross going, oh crap, what now? Excuse me, we weren't done. I think that's when you had a bunch of people returning to the drawing board in a quite literal way to figure out how to renegotiate their understanding, not only of the identity and the Mission of the Messiah, but the nature of salvation. So I think Jesus is where salvation pivots, and particularly the death of Jesus is where salvation pivots. And they're like, no, we got to adopt the thousand-yard stare, the eternal perspective. It's not just about Rome. Now it's about the afterlife. And that is where we're going to be placing all our eggs. That's the basket that is going to hold all our eggs from now on. ([Time 0:21:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/73f752a8-a744-4820-9adf-853b6e2ce6a0)) - **Good Works as Social Signals** - Good works in Christianity are seen as evidence of faith, but faith itself is what saves. - This evidence primarily signals believers' status to other Christians, functioning as a costly social signal of belonging. Transcript: Dan McClellan And so they said it's the evidence of your faith. And my thought was, evidence for whom? Yeah. Like for God? God's the one who saved you. God doesn't need evidence that they have saved you. Even if they weren't the one who did it, they were like, I was on vacation. This is a subordinate who did this. They ostensibly have all knowledge. So they already know you're saved. They don't need to be given evidence of this. So for whom is the evidence? It can only be for other Christians. Right. In other words— Or other non-Christians. Or other non-Christians. But I think the main, the primary target audience is other Christians. Right. Because what is evidence of faith for, if not to demonstrate to other Christians that you're one of the good ones, that you are saved? That you belong, that you're one of the—yeah. Yeah, it's costly signaling. It's a way to show you're a faithful member of the in-group, which kind of makes the whole project sound an awful lot like just a social club. Yeah. And this is something that baffles me because I think even Paul was kind of struggling with this in the New Testament. ([Time 0:25:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c1dc2ee7-86fe-428e-8506-0852db6bc497)) - **Once Saved Paradox Explained** - The doctrine of once saved, always saved raises logical problems about belief, behavior, and salvation. - Salvation signs focus more on in-group validation than on actual moral behavior or spiritual state. Transcript: Dan Beecher But if you get saved, and then you become an atheist, there's the whole once saved, always saved. You can't unsave yourself. So then if you stop believing after you were saved, do you lose your salvation? Well, I mean, most people say no. You don't lose yourself. So like why, if I was never saved, but I'm still believing exactly the same way as someone who was saved, why don't I get to go? What's happening there? Why am I excluded from this? Dan McClellan And if good works are just evidence of faith or salvation, if there are atheists out there who are better people just do good works who do good works yeah who are just do better than people Who claim to be saved like what does that mean it's like your your salvation ends up being inferior to someone's non-salvation. And again, and I'm going to come back to this endlessly, because this is the part that I think people don't think critically about. If you tell someone, once you're saved, that's it, you're good. It doesn't matter what you do, but we still demand you do the right thing. Right. Because that is how you put on display the reality of your salvation. All you're doing is incentivizing people to try to do good works, which is really just saying you need to earn your salvation, at least in the most relevant sense, in the sense that we All believe you are saved. Like the focus of it all is putting on display to other members of the in-group that you have passed the test. ([Time 0:27:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/636cf6e9-7eff-4c8f-8eaa-2aa2c03d2808)) - **Good Works Are Socially Determined** - Definitions of "good" works have changed over time and vary significantly across Christian groups. - What counts as righteous behavior often reflects the specific expectations of a believer's social subgroup. Transcript: Dan McClellan What it means to be a better person is relative, is subjective. Because for Paul, a better person was somebody who didn't beat their slaves arbitrarily. You beat them with a reason. Yeah. You don't discipline them unless you have a good reason to. And you can go to Augustine, somebody who is widely considered one of the most influential and best Christians around, who said, hey, you need to whip your slaves. God is mad at you if you do not whip your slaves, but you have to whip them with a heart full of love, not hate. That good loving whooping that you need to divvy out so in 400 ce that was the good work right to whip your slaves with a heart full of love um that is no longer a good work no not because something Changed about the actual inherent morality or immorality of whipping your slaves with a smile on your face. But because we decided that that was no longer a good thing. Dan Beecher Because we have outgrown the idea of both slavery and whipping, hopefully, in general. Dan McClellan Although, according to Grok, maybe it sounds like that might be backsliding a little bit. Dan Beecher Yeah, Grok is a terrifying sort of bellwether of humanity's backsliding. Dan McClellan We don't know exactly what the situation is going to be when this episode comes out, but as of recording, yesterday Grok started claiming to be Hitler, literally, and cheering on Hitler Um because uh somebody evidently took the governor off of Grok and and was like hey stop being woke and they were like all right well this is the alternative yeah welcome welcome to non-woke Grok yeah but um and now I just totally lost my train okay so but the you know, what we think is righteous today is, is entirely different. And even among Christians today, one Christian might be like, hey, you know, going and picketing outside an abortion clinic or bombing an abortion clinic, that might be a way to put Your faith on display. Dan Beecher Right. Dan McClellan Or someone else might be like, well, I actually think that maybe protecting women's rights would be a better way to put my faith on display. Which demonstrates that ultimately it all goes back to whatever your particular social in-group determines is good for it. ([Time 0:34:09](https://share.snipd.com/snip/21b6797b-e668-4cfb-85d3-44a8c79fb9f4)) - **Isaiah 6 Throne Vision Symbolism** - Isaiah 6 describes a throne vision of God with six-winged seraphim covering faces and feet, highlighting symbolic divine presence. - The seraphim's covering can indicate humility or shame, reflecting complex theological symbolism rather than literal angels. Transcript: Dan Beecher And this week's chapter and verse is Isaiah 6. And boy, let me tell you something. If you want to read something that you will not immediately understand what the heck is going on, that's a great place to start. Just to lock everybody into our setting, this is the year that King Uzziah died. So everybody understands that. We all know who that dude is. Now that we've got our bearings. Yeah, I have no idea who King Uzziah is or when that places us, but where are we? Tell me about Isaiah. Dan McClellan Yeah, so Isaiah was an 8th century prophet. He was mainly probably a court prophet, probably one of the prophets that was under the employ of the king in Judah. And Uzziah was one of the kings. So the eighth century was a big century for both Judah and Israel, mainly because they had two kings. Judah had Uzziah and Israel had another king that reigned for like 40 to 50 years each, which allowed them to gain a lot of traction. They established a lot of treaties. They did a lot of trade. And this is the period of the most significant growth in the history of not just the Northern Kingdom of Israel, but also the Southern Kingdom of Judah. So Uzziah reigned for 52 years, according to the biblical text. And you have different estimates about when exactly that was, but it puts Uzziah's reign from somewhere around 790 to 780 BCE down to somewhere around 750 or 740 BCE. So the year of King Uzziah's death is somewhere around 740 to 750 BCE. So the very beginning of the second half of the 8th century BCE. And this puts us 20-ish to 30-ish years away from the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel. So that's going to happen in 722 BCE. ([Time 0:38:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e7fb813c-2ea7-480d-a043-f6c7b690ed75)) - **Government Misuses Isaiah 6** - Homeland Security used Isaiah 6:8 audio in a border control video mixing military footage with ominous music. - This juxtaposition was unsettling given Isaiah's message and Johnny Cash's protest against government oppression. Transcript: Dan McClellan Around in helicopters and night vision goggles in the middle of the night patrolling the border and showing menacing looking grandmothers uh you know, trying to cross the border as They do. But they had two things, two pieces of audio that were being played over this video. And one of them was a clip from the 2014 movie Fury. Did you ever see that movie? I don't remember. Yeah, I did. I just don't remember it well. World War II, Brad Pitt running a tank. And so you've got Shia LaBeouf plays a character whose name was Boyd Bible Swan. And there's a part where he's there sitting in the tank. They know that death's coming, fighting against the Nazis. And he says this is a righteous act here, gentlemen. And he says, there's a scripture I think of sometimes, many times. And then he quotes this, whom shall I send and who will go for us? And I said, here am I, send me. And he's on the verge of tears here. And Brad Pitt is like, Isaiah chapter six. And it's kind of a bonding moment for these men right before almost all of them are killed. Right. But they're playing this over this footage of like Homeland Security border control. And then they begin to play God's Gonna Cut You Down. Not the Johnny Cash version, but some contemporary bro country version of God's going to cut you down. And I'm just baffled by all of this as I watch this video because, well, I think the appeal to Isaiah 6 is grotesque. Yeah. And we'll talk about what exactly the message that Isaiah is offering here, or is supposed to share here. But yeah, the appeal to a song that was made famous primarily by Johnny Cash, who was someone who routinely criticized the government for spending too much money on the military and Not spending enough money on education and on welfare and on children and on the elderly and stuff like that. And who also sang a protest song written by Woody Guthrie called Deportee, condemning the U.S. For their dehumanization of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers. But yeah, I saw that video and was like, holy crap, this is bad. But I guess we don't have an excuse for being surprised anymore. We should not ([Time 0:54:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ee34614d-b282-432f-ae6b-fb43ae4ad13d)) - **Isaiah's Mission: Preach Futility** - Isaiah is commanded to preach, but the people are told to listen without understanding, symbolizing inevitable failure. - This reflects a divine decree that the people's destruction and exile are unavoidable despite prophetic warnings. Transcript: Dan McClellan Oh, this is the baffling. Listen, every part of this is the baffling part for me. Okay. But yes. Nine and ten. And he said, go and say to this people, keep listening, but do not comprehend. Keep looking, but do not understand. Make the mind of this people dull and stop their ears and shut their eyes so that they may not look with their eyes and listen with their ears and comprehend with their minds and turn and Be healed. It sounds like God is like, I need a volunteer to go and preach deliverance and also prevent the people from receiving this. And why? What's going on here? And I think there's been a lot of scholarship on this. And I think the best argument is that this is being written after the exile. So after 722 BCE, when the Northern Kingdom has been destroyed, probably even after the Babylonian exile. So they know what's coming, but they know Isaiah also actually prophesying in this time period. And so I think what's most likely going on here is they're trying to craft the message that God gives to Isaiah in a way that allows the failure of the society to save themselves to be the Fulfillment of the prophecy, of the assignment. So God is like, it's kind of the same thing that we had with, oh, what was the story where God was like, go do this, but it's not going to work. Oh, with Moses. It was the Exodus, yeah. Where he's like, go and do all the miracles and I'm going to stop Pharaoh from listening to you. Right. It's kind of like God wants this to happen, and so God is going to, or the authors are going to represent God as telling the servant, go do this, and it's not going to work. Dan Beecher Make sure it doesn't work. See to it that this doesn't work. It does feel like, just to clarify, so the history, the time period that you gave us at the beginning of this segment was when this was meant to have been taking place, but not likely when It was actually written. Dan McClellan King Uzziah died would have been 18 to 28 years before the destruction of the Northern Kingdom, and then there would have been another hundred and some years until the Babylonian exile. Dan Beecher So you're saying this was not written by Isaiah? Dan McClellan Oh, no. There are portions of Isaiah 1 through 39 that are agreed to have been written by Isaiah. I think that scholars probably understand at least chapter 6, and probably the majority of the chapters that came before were probably written later on as part of kind of an introduction To the book of Isaiah, but probably not something written by the actual historical Isaiah. But most scholars agree there was probably a court prophet in the 8th century BCE who was named Isaiah and who prophesied, and some of whose writings are preserved in the modern book Of Isaiah. And then, so we have, what, three more verses? And then I said, how long, O Lord? And he said, until cities lie waste without inhabitant and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate, until the Lord sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness In the midst of the land. Even if a tenth part remain in it, it will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak whose stump remains standing when it is felled. The holy seed is its stump. And so there are a couple different ways to interpret this. If this is about the northern kingdom, then this would have been fulfilled in just a couple decades when Tiglath-Pileser comes through and routes the northern kingdom and sends them Away packing. So if this is about the northern kingdom, that would have been fulfilled very soon. But this could also be interpreted as about the Babylonian exile, and it could be referring to the southern kingdom, to the forced migration of the people of the southern kingdom of Judah. So it's unclear, which exactly I think is in view. I think scholars have argued about this for many years. But the idea is basically, yeah,aiah is being sent out to to preach something uh but but mainly just to make sure that nothing works and that the land is desolate just confuse the crap Dan Beecher Out of everybody uh so that they're all too dumb to actually defend themselves when the time comes for us to just wreck everything yeah is that a fair assessment? 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