Salvation is a religious concept, and every religion includes a doctrine of salvation, a soteriology. Or can you think of a religion that does not? It is not essential to a religion that it be theistic, as witness the austere forms of Buddhism, but it is essential to every religion as I define the term that it have a soteriology. A religion must show a way out of our unsatisfactory predicament, and one is not religious unless one perceives our life in this world as indeed a predicament, and one that is unsatisfactory. Sarvam dukkham! But the definition of 'religion' is not what I want to discuss. Surely some religions include a soteriology (think of Hinduism, Buddhism, and the three Abrahamic religions) and so it is worth inquiring into just what salvation is or could be.
1. One can speak of loss and salvation in purely physical senses, but this is not what is meant in religious contexts. A drowning man who is saved from death is not saved religiously speaking. He is saved physically; his ordinary mundane life is preserved so that he can go back to doing what he was doing before. His being rescued may work a moral or spiritual transformation in him, temporary or permanent, but then again it might not. Back on terra firm, he might just go back to eating, drinking, copulating, and piling up loot.
My first point, then, is that there is a purely physical concept of salvation. Now distinguish three questions: What is saved? From what is it saved? For/to what is it saved? On the physical conception, the physical body is saved from physical destruction to live on materially, 'carnally,' with carnal aims and projects such as amassing consumer goods, 'having fun', and so on.
2. I take it to be obvious that the religious concept of salvation cannot be identical to the purely physical concept, pace some cultured despisers of religion who would attribute to believers the most primitive of notions. But could there be salvation, religiously speaking, that was merely spiritual and in no sense physical? Could it be that religious salvation, properly understood, is salvation at the level of meaning and awareness but not at the level of physical existence? Could religious salvation be identified with salvation from meaninglessness, absurdity, anomie? Could it consist in a transformation of consciousness, a metanoia (change of mind) in which the vanity and horror of life is somehow redeemed?
Imagine a raw and overcast day in Poland in 1944. A naked Jew stands before an SS man who is about to shoot him down and send him tumbling into a mass grave. Suppose at that moment the Jew's intensity of despair gives way to a mystical experience: he is suddenly filled with love for all things including his murderers. He is suffused with a sense of the ultimate rightness of the world and everything in it despite the way it appears from our ordinary finite and relative perspectives. For a moment he is one with the ONE and all partiality, conflict, and meaninglessness are redeemed. For a moment he is lifted out of time into eternity. Evil is seen to be a sort of perspectival illusion. He accepts his death as a meaningful part of a meaningful whole and his life as well, despite his belief that there is no resurrection of the body or persistence of the individual soul after death. We could call this salvation in the mystical sense. It is a salvation from meaninglessness but not from physical destruction. It is a transformation of consciousness whereby one transcends one's ordinary egoic, time-bound, point of view and moves from the nunc movens of time into the nunc stans of eternity.
Salvation in this mystical sense can be likened to waking up from a very bad dream. The evil happenings in a bad dream are not redressed when one wakes up but are simply blotted out and seen to have been unreal. If a crime is committed against me in a dream, I may demand justice in the dream, but upon awakening, I do not demand justice but simply dismiss the dream-events as unreal. The dream-problems are not so much solved as dissolved. Now this life is no dream, strictly speaking, but on a mystical approach it could be likened to a dream, in which case salvation could be likened to a process of awakening from a bad dream.
In the case of physical salvation, it is the body that is saved; it is saved from physical destruction; and it is saved for the purpose of a continuation of its carnal existence. But paradox threatens when we turn to the case of mystical salvation. What or who is saved? Presumably it is not the individual soul that is saved when said soul awakens from the 'dream' of the phenomenal world with its diremptions and conflicts and plurality of individuals pitted against one another. The individual soul is rather 'extinguished' in nirvanic bliss, or 'absorbed' into the ocean of Brahman. Thus the individual soul or jivataman ceases to exist. But the Atman remains. This Atman, however, being identical to Brahman, does not need to be saved. The mystical approach, at least on the Hindu scheme, seems to face a dilemma: Either the jivatman or the Atman is saved. But it cannot be the jivatman that is saved since it is precisely lost, absorbed into the 'ocean' of undifferentiated Brahman. Neither can it be the Atman that is saved since it was never lost in the coils of mayic illusion in the first place.
3. Religious salvation is not a mere physical salvation. But I doubt that it can be identified with what I am calling mystical salvation: it is not (though it may involve) a transformation of consciousness in which the apparent meaninglessness and evil and vanity of life is redeemed. Religious salvation seems to involve both elements. Or at least this is the case in orthodox Christianity which preaches the resurrection of the body. The Christian does not look forward to existence as a pure spirit after death, but to an embodied existence. Thus he looks forward to having his individual physical life saved. Saved, but also tranformed, since the post-resurrection body will be a body not heir to the usual fleshly incapacities and debilities.
A second form of religious salvation could be described as Platonic. Here there is no tincture of physical salvation. The body dies and good riddance. One thinks of Plotinus who was ashamed of his embodiment and held matter to be evil. Yet the salvation is not merely mystical as I have employed this word: it is not just a matter of achieving a saving insight into the ultimate sense and rightness of things. It would involve this as well as a continuation of one's existence as an individual person. Thus one is saved from utter annihilation and saved for a higher life.
4. It may be the religious salvation, properly understood, eventuates utlimately in mystical salvation. Imagine surviving your bodily death and living on with a 'subtle body' or a 'resurrection body.' One might experinence this as better than our present predicament, but still want something more: a more intimate communion with the Absolute, one in which one become One with it, sublated into it, without simply losing one's identity. But now we are hard by the bounds of intelligibility.
For a quite different approach to the nature of salvation, see Jim Ryan's Salvation I. I should say that my post is not a response to Jim's. I wrote mine months ago; it is just that today I finished it.