Salvation: Jesus's Mission and Ours

by John B. Cobb Jr.

What would Jesus do? This is an old question that Christians of each successive generation have had to pose anew if they want to be faithful disciples. In other words, what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus today? A simple answer that has served Christians for centuries is to do as he did. To turn that simple prescription into a plan for living, many have turned the socio-economic emphasis discerned in the gospels into a contemporary ethic of justice. Less discernable, however, has been the political reality of Jesus’s teaching and the existential stakes behind it. In this book, Cobb argues that Jesus’s mission was to save his people from their bent toward a violent, military-style attempt to overthrow their Roman occupiers. Jesus believed this attempt would be self-destructive, so his mission was to teach the way of nonviolence. Saving his people from Rome and from themselves was the most inclusive mission possible at that time. To follow Jesus today is to adopt the most inclusive mission of our day. That is, our mission must be to save the world from its self-destructive path to climate chaos and to establish instead an ecological civilization.

164 pages, Paperback

Published August 13, 2020

About the author

John Boswell Cobb Jr. was an American theologian, philosopher, and environmentalist. Cobb was regarded as a preeminent scholar in the field of process philosophy and process theology, the school of thought associated with the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. He was the author of more than fifty books. In 2014, Cobb was elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences.