So, the principal question that concerns most of us before converting to Christianity is, "How can I be saved from Hell?" Maybe we should be asking about the character of God. Maybe we should be asking what true worship looks like. Or maybe we should be asking about the mystery of the Holy Trinity. But most of us are concerned about our eternal destiny, and given the outrageous enormity of the idea of the Hell, it is perfectly reasonable to want to avoid it. Pascal wagered everything to avoid Hell, and he said we should, too. Heaven, on the other hand, is such an abstraction that it doesn't exercise much imaginative appeal. We are supposed to long for an eternity in the presence of God, but most of us really want to continue the good times we had on earth: Christmas mornings with family, going out to eat with our spouse, hanging out with friends, or taking a pleasant walk through the woods. Maybe a vacation at the beach. I for one hope the moon is in heaven. And if I was honest with myself, I would say I want TV, too, but that seems frivolous. Anyhow, Scripture doesn't promise any of that, and the images of heaven in the Book of Revelation are so strangely urban and oddly symbolic that folks were doing good to come up with angels playing harps.
So, back to the initial question: "How can I be saved from Hell?" which leads to our first verse, the one every Christian knows and a lot of non-Christians have heard—John 3:16: "For God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life." This verse seems simple, but if you study it a bit, it raises a lot of questions: For example, the Greek word for "world" is cosmos, which can also mean ordered existence, that is, the "world system." Did Jesus come to save the world system? That seems unlikely since it was the "world system" that put him to death.
On the other hand, there's the next verse, John 3:17: "For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved." The Greek word for "save" is sozo but the word in verse in 17 is the aorist passive form of sozo: sothe; that is, "that the cosmos might be saved." However, another meaning of sozo is "to heal," so verse 17 could be translated to read that Christ "came that the cosmos might be healed." Could cosmos be translated as "world order" in the context of healing? Christ did challenge the institutions and hierarchies of his day, both religious and political. He desired the coming of the Kingdom of God, and he preached the inversion of the world hierarchy in which the "last are first, and the first are last." But inversion is not the same thing as destruction or even replacement. Perhaps the inversion of the hierarchy is the "healing of the world system." Think about it: If the "world system" had converted to the way of Jesus and undergone an inversion, it wouldn't have put Jesus to death. In fact, in the Kingdom of God, no one is put to death, ever. People would still die—can't anybody change that—but they wouldn't be put to death. (Can we even imagine a world like that? That sounds a lot like "everlasting life" to me!)
Speaking of "death," it's also worth considering that the Greek word for "perish" in John 3:16 is, roughly transliterated, apoletai, a form of apollumai: "to destroy." For what it's worth, apollumai is etymologically connected with the name of the Greek god Apollo. We typically associate Apollo with the sun—a later association in Greek mythology—or with the lyre and poetry. But in Book One of the Iliad, Apollo answers the prayer of Chryses, one of his priests, by wiping out the Greek soldiers with a plague. As a destroyer god, Apollo lives up to his name in the Iliad. In this sense, the God of the New Testament, theos, is set in opposition to Apollo. Theos Pater, God the Father, is a saving not a destroying God.
The relation of Father and Son raises another question, namely, what does "begotten" mean? The Greek word for "begotten," roughly transliterated, is monogene. The Scripture Direct app translates monogene as "unique," and there is good support for that translation in other verses. But mono means "one" and gene is related to the Greek genos, meaning "birth, origin, race, kin, and family." Genos is derived from gignomai, a verb meaning to "become, be born, or engender," and geno and gignomai stem from the older Proto-Indo-European root, gene-—a verb that means "to give birth, beget, or produce." So, "only begotten" or "only born" works as well as "unique" and in fact, better because Jesus refers to himself as uios, that is, a "son." Sons [and daughters] are "begotten, not made." The Nicene Creed says that the "Son is consubstantial with the Father," with "consubstantial" meaning "one in substance," i.e., "one in being," with the Father. Of course, how the Son can be "begotten" and "one in being" at the same time is a mystery, which means that no one really knows what it means. "Unique" is definitely a simpler translation but not nearly so interesting.
The words for "everlasting life" are zoon aionion, which can mean "eternal life" but can also mean an open-ended indeterminate time as in 1 Corinthians 2:6, "We do, however speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age (this aeon) or of the rulers of this age (this aeon), who are coming to nothing." Clearly, St. Paul is not using aeon to mean "eternal life," but is Jesus? I like to think that the Jesus of John's Gospel is using aeon in the same way St. Paul uses it, but I don't know.
But all of this is beside the point, right?
The point is that "whosover believes in him [Christ]," pisteuon eis auton is saved from being destroyed (or "lost," another possible translation of apoletai). The Greek verb pisteuo can mean "think to be true," "trust," "entrust," or in Scripture Direct's magnificent tautology, "to have Christian faith." But of course, "faith in Christ" is "Christian faith." What else could "Christian faith" mean? A tautology is the same fallacy as "begging the question," so the question remains: What constitutes "faith in Christ"?
Or put the question this way: "What does faith in Christ entail?" That'll be the next consideration in Bulfinch's Theology.