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It is of enormous significance that for centuries, countless African American Christians have affirmed ‘Salvation’ as vitally connected with spaciousness, deliverance, rescue, liberation or freedom…. [I]n the African American experience, the nature of salvation is to provide space— psychic, physical and spiritual—in which to function as a free being…

For [the African American theologian-author-mystic-pastor] Howard Thurman, the mark of a free being was the unshakable belief that ‘no experience, no event at any particular moment in time or space exhausts what life is trying to do’; there ought not be the sinking down of ‘our hopes and our dreams and our yearnings to the level of the events of our lives.’ Salvation, then, challenges each believer to assume responsibility for self and nurture within the society. Living one’s faith and transmitting the message of salvation are part and parcel of recognizing one’s responsibility for human nurture…

[S]uch salvation includes three critical elements. First, salvation is a revolutionary spaciousness and freedom through the assertion of inner authority, breaking bonds of confinement and invalidating the reality of dead-ends. To have salvation is to know through experience and faith that God will ‘make a way out of no way.’…

Second, to be saved is to have engaged in dissent and resistance… Having salvation is to transpose terrors, absurdities, angst, depression, and all manner of external and mental demons into a new harmonious song…

Third, salvation is…an abiding knowledge and confident expectation… To be saved is to live acknowledging the reality of infinite creative possibilities, the inexhaustibility of hope, and a divine invitation for all persons—regardless of race, class or sex—to experience everlasting life.

Excerpted from “Waymaking and Dimensions of Responsibility: An African American Perspective on Salvation” by Genna Rae McNeil. This essay was published by Beacon Press in 1999 in Courage To Hope: From Black Suffering To Human Redemption—Essays in Honor of James Melvin Washington, edited by Quinton H. Dixie and Cornel West. Dr. McNeil serves as Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is co-author with Dr. Quinton H. Dixie, et al. of the forthcoming history, Witness: Two Centuries of African American Faith and Practice at the Abyssinian Baptist Church of Harlem, New York, 1808-2008.