Of Human Bondage and Divine Grace

Deliverance from bondage is at the heart of the Christian message. It is also, as this volume demonstrates, the message in the hearts of men and women living religiously in diverse traditions around the world.
Of Human Bondage and Divine Grace is the first bringing together of multitraditional insights on a single religious theme. It comprises 20 papers by 12 scholars, representing the Hindu, Buddhist, Ancient Greek, Jewish, Shinto, Greek Orthodox, Muslim, Roman Catholic, and Protestant conceptions of bondage and grace.
Bondage has been understood as the soul's being tainted from primordial beginnings, or as being unable to say the right thing in a gracious way at an appropriate time, as an evaluation of the soteriological inefficacy of one's self-agency, or as a recognition of brokenness and estrangement among persons.
Amid all the various conceptions of release from bondage, there is agreement that one does not free oneself. Deliverance may be seen as a consequence of the natural order of reality, or of God's action among us. The soteriological initiative does not lie within one's own volition, and is not the result of one's own cognition.