Theological Viewpoints of Salvation And Mission - A Global Perspective Based On The Mizo Baptist Missionaries

Tracing the concept of 'being saved from the book of Acts to various missiological conversations on biblical salvation, this book investigates into a missiological soteriology, focusing on the question of who is saved and who is not. On the same topic, a case study was conducted among the Mizo Baptist Missionaries to find out their viewpoints on the Christian concept of salvation, especially in relation to the unevangelized. The findings have added rich local views on knowing who is saved and who is not. Seeing the importance of the relationship between missional theory and practice resulting into what is called glocalization, the book advocates "glocal perspective" in the context of World Christianity where evangelical conversations have often engaged on soteriological missiology.

Andrew Lalhmangaiha (Ph.D., Asbury Theological Seminary, USA) is currently Dean of Missionary Training at the Academy of Integrated Christian Studies (AICS), Aizawl. Before he joined AICS in 2005, he and his wife worked in Himachal Pradesh, India, as missionaries of the Zoram Evangelical Fellowship (ZEF).

As theologian David Ford has rightly said, "salvation is a topic where most key theological issues can be seen to converge," salvation, in its broad scope, serves as the converging center of Christian theological reflections. Salvation consists of religious answers given on the meaning and end of human lives, and thus, is central in any religious teaching. Much of today's conversations on inter-religious comparisons centered on the question of salvation. Within Christianity, different theological confessions are often defined by their stances on what they mean by salvation, and not on whether they take salvation seriously.

Salvation and conversion are two sides of the same coin, and they both closely relate to the Christian missionary endeavor. Theologically speaking, Christian mission centered on God's redemptive mission of the entire creation. At the heart of that mission is God's saving of sinful human beings in and through Jesus Christ. The call to experience God's salvation in Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit is the foundational call for the missionary vocation. The meaning of the Greek euangel is understood to be the good news of God's salvation in Christ. The saving knowledge of Christ is most commonly taken by conservative evangelical Christians to be the dividing line between the saved and the unsaved. "Being saved" is what defines evangelical Christianity, the prime mover of the modern missionary movement. Traditional evangelicals unabashedly advocate the experience of salvation as the defining factor of being Christian. Seeing a crucial tension between a broader understanding of salvation by Christian missiological scholarship and a much narrower conception by practicing evangelical missionaries, Dr. Andrew Lalhmangaiha investigated how the two viewpoints may meet. The outcome of the study is a combination of a good theological survey on salvation in relation to other religions on the one hand, and a well-grounded empirical research on local conceptions of salvation by Mizo Baptist missionaries and mission advocate on the other hand. Employing how local and global relate to each other current studies on globalization, Dr. Lalhmangaiha adapted the concept of "glocalization" as a way of integration from which he carefully analyzed the Mizo Baptist missionary conceptions. On specific questions such as knowing who is saved and who is not, the study points out that local practitioners do have surprisingly rich questions.