Every great project — religious and secular alike — answers one question: how does a human being get out of his own imperfection? By personal effort or by common cause? By grace or by history? By God or by revolution? Augustine, Luther, Rousseau, Marx, Solovyov — each gives an answer. And each answer becomes a political program.
Augustine divided humanity into two cities: the Earthly City and the City of God. Salvation is possible — but it is predestined. God knows in advance who will be saved. A person cannot earn salvation by works — only receive grace. This frees him from presumption — and opens a question that will never close: then why try at all?
Luther burned the papal bull in public — and by that gesture declared: the church hierarchy does not save. No indulgences, no pilgrimages, no good works bring anyone closer to God. Faith alone. A personal encounter with Scripture alone. This is theology at its most individualist — and, in Max Weber's version, it gave birth to capitalism: if each person answers for himself before God, he begins to work with a different energy.
Rousseau said something that seemed obvious and turned out to be explosive: man is good by nature. All evil comes from society, from property, from inequality. So salvation is not personal but collective: society must be rebuilt so that it stops spoiling people. This idea went into the Declaration of the Rights of Man. And into the French Terror. Rousseau died eight years before the Revolution — but the Revolution thought in his words.
Marx built a secular soteriology — a theory of salvation without God. Humanity falls into alienation under the rule of capital. History moves dialectically toward liberation. The proletariat is the new messiah, the revolution is the Last Judgment, communism is the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Marx denied religion as opium — and created the most religious of secular ideologies.
Solovyov rejected both Western individualism and revolutionary collectivism. His "all-unity" is not the dissolving of the person into the whole but its full unfolding through love. Every human being bears the image of God. History is the process in which that image is to be embodied. Godmanhood is not a metaphor but a program. This is the most original Russian answer to the question of salvation — and the most demanding.
If Marx took the idea of salvation from Christianity and removed God — what is left of the idea itself?