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Hello, in St Paul's letter to the Galatians he wrote,

Christ has set us free. Stand fast therefore and do not submit again to a Yoke of slavery.

This conception of redemption as freedom from bondage is crucial for Judeo-Christian thought.

In Christianity, the liberation is from original sin, a transformation from fallenness to salvation, not just for mankind, but for individual human beings.

The content of that journey is moral, gaining redemption by becoming better.

So why is the idea of transformation so appealing to human beings, to what extent were Christian views of redemption borrowed from Judaism?

How did thinkers such as Marx and Freud reinterpret the concept of redemption and can redemption retain its value in a world without God?

Does its continuing power signify a deep psychological need in mankind?

With me to discuss redemption is the Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harris, Janet Soskis,

reader in philosophical theology at Cambridge University, and Stephen Mulhall, fellow and tutor in philosophy at Oxford University.

Richard Harris, can you explain exactly what we mean by Christian redemption?

Well, in the Hebrew scriptures, there's a great sense of pain and anguish about human life, and a longing that God would intervene to put right everything that is wrong, where he would overcome evil and vindicate the good.

And Christians believed, from the word go, that this time had dawned that in Jesus God was acting, to vindicate the good, to overcome evil.

And they believed that the consummation of that process would be very soon when it would be revealed, and all would be radiant, if you like, to the glory and the beauty and the love of God revealed in Jesus.

And everything that was evil and nasty would simply be overcome.

Now, they explored that in various metaphors, about that as the heart of it, and they believed that through faith in Jesus Christ, the people who put their faith in Him would, as it were, come through this testing, purging process to eternal life, conceived in various ways, sometimes on this earth, sometimes beyond space and time, sometimes not quite sure whether it's on this earth.

But in some sense, in eternal life with God.

So you're saying in brief that this idea came about because of the pressure of a conviction that the world was coming to an end?

I think the heart of it is a feeling that somewhere along the line in human history has gone tragically and dramatically wrong, that human, to put it in more theological terms, that human life is, as it were, a strange or alienated from God.

And therefore, only God Himself can act to put things right.

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