I can answer, at least, one fairly concrete question that was in there. Are people capable of good or improvement, apart from salvation? I think the obvious answer is yes. The Bible has saved people doing bad things and unsaved people doing good things, which sometimes lead to salvation, sometimes not (or at least its not spelled out so clearly).
The Bible does make the case that people cannot be good enough to save themselves, they can’t be good like God or Jesus are able to be good, good enough to meet a heavenly standard for salvation. But in a more simple sense of better or worse actions, kind vs cruel, generous vs greedy, wise vs foolish, all people have the ability to do either well or badly, to improve or become worse. And it must be so. Otherwise all ethical/moral theory is incoherent, and the only measure of good or bad or better or worse is merely by salvation.
Salvation is meant to be an ultimate fix for a fundamental brokenness in humankind and for eternal salvation. It doesn’t in its acquisition confer immediate ethical or practical perfection in your actual actions or even conscience. You’re saved before God, despite the fact that, by any actual moral calculus, you have a long way to go and are very imperfect.
Salvation doesn’t invalidate the moral calculus (the law), it transcends it, and in fact you need it; partly for the practical good of mankind, partly to lead you to the fact you can’t quite reach perfection and salvation through it, and partly so you have a measure to even know whether you are living better or worse than you could or should (regardless of the question of salvation) or in need of salvation (if you aren’t). The temptation to dispose of the law as an irrelevant stumbling block has no small part to do with what an obstacle the false piety and false morality of the people of God has often proved to be.
Sodom and Gamorrah were destroyed because they were so specifically bad, and bad in a way that they had no excuse for not knowing (the basic moral truths of the world are asserted as being universally known or discoverable, being written in the fabric of the world and the hearts of men), whereas other people groups and individuals in the Bible were viewed as being more or less noble, closer to or further from God and his heart.
There was a divide between Israel and other nations, but both Israel itself and the other nations often occupied various positions on the scale of how well or badly they were doing, and God cared about and had patience with and sought to punish and teach all of them. The people of Israel were a special focus; they were getting private tutoring from God to try to raise their moral ideas to a higher level. They were called to belonging first, to an identity and faith, but then they had to go on a very long journey to find out what that meant. And the law was that path.
In any case, Christ is the ultimate hope for salvation in Christianity, but the moral law is something all men are subject to and need, regardless of time, place, particular beliefs, etc. It is a universally applicable measuring stick, and is needed for growth and for the practical business of living life in the world, regardless of all other factors. That doesn’t make it sufficient, but it is necessary.
That’s why those institutions exist, to restrain evil on the earth (ideally). And those are objective systems, laws, practices, standards, codes of conduct, processes, punishments, that can be worked on and made objectively better or worse.
So that’s a long way of saying, yes, there is hope for humanity at large, maybe not hope for salvation for the worst. But then again, you never know. The power to change the worst of us is never entirely out of question. And there remains still it us at least the hope for the restraint of evil in the systems we create, reinforce, develop, or neglect. We can’t hope to save the soul of a nation or corporation, because they literally don’t have one, but we can work to make it more or less just, whether we or its members are saved or unsaved. And the best way to do that is to strive to make our own conduct honest and just. Moral control over others is much better to restraining evil than it is to producing good. And an authoritarian and false morality is always waiting in the wings
Those questions will exist whichever side of that you find yourself on. Saving everyone would be a great help toward providing a platform from wihh all can be convicted that just treatment of women is needed. But, even if we can’t have that (and some of the saved aren’t always on board themselves, and there are some of the unsaved who are), we can still enforce the standards necessary for the restraint of evil in our society and seek to make our standards and practices and systems more helpful toward enforcing that justice.
We need preachers, but we also need policemen. Salvation is the ultimate hope, but we still need soldiers and judges and laws aid organizations and traffic codes and labor practices and environmental regulations and building codes and all the stuff you need to guide people to make living in society work, so we don’t unintentionally or intentionally step on each other.
None of them are sufficient for a good life, or sufficient for salvation or moral perfection, but they’re all helpful, all useful, all necessary. Maybe not for perfection, but on Earth most societies aren’t aiming for perfection; the Bible itself says we won’t see it. They just want to be better. This doesn’t invalidate in any way the ultimate importance of the evangelist or their work, only that the work of the evangelist doesn’t invalidate and make meaningless all other kids of work (even doctors!), nor the standards by which we measure their relative success.
And on a practical level, the large number of even unsaved people who clearly agree about the existence and weight of the moral law should show us that, no, it’s not hopeless, in general, to encourage moral behavior of the unsaved. In fact there are sometimes unsaved people who end up encouraging moral behavior in the saved. For the very reason that God’s law is not the private possession of Christians. It’s universal, transcendent, and objective. Which means any person who really goes looking for it should be able to find it and realize some form of their own sinfulness and how their behavior relates to the law, better or worse. Because it’s universal and exists outside us, all of us are subject to it, and we are capable of being measured against it, saved or not, and capable of being encouraged (or even forced, by the law or by social pressure, or even by force of war) to follow it better. It’s not a solution to the particular problem of salvation and perfection before God, but it is a universally applicable standard that all men and women can access and be instructed by. Its power in that regard exists no matter what, even if it is insufficient for salvation or perfection. And so it has value and is necessary for human life and human society. It’s not the ultimate thing, or the best thing, but it’s still a good and necessary thing. Its an object of love and instruction to David. It’s a standard for instruction in wisdom, in navigating the complexities of life of all kinds. It’s a mean for discerning and fighting injustice, in or own lives and in the laws a ruler must create and enforce (and since in our society we create our own laws, this burden falls to all of us).
On a side note, if it weren’t the case that the law is an objective, transcendent thing, accessible to all, salvation would be irrational and by chance. As an unsaved person, you would have no way of knowing you were unsaved or doing anything wrong, no way or knowing if you were doing better or worse (because no measure would be available to you) and there would be no path out of it (or even to realizing you were in that predicament) that you could produce; it would have to be forced on you from the outside. You can’t follow a map you can’t possibly ever see or comprehend. In which case, you have no agency. You didn’t choose either your state of being unsaved, and who can blame you for being that which you did not choose nor are possible of being aware of nor not being, and you are incapable of choosing to become saved, it just happened on you from the outside. I’m not saying some Christians haven’t embraced this position, only that it makes much of the Bible and the things people, including God, said in it nonsense. The Bible is very clearly, in the language commonly used to talk about people, Jews or Christians or gentiles, saved or unsaved, and their actions, universalist about the moral law. It’s just out there, and everyone knows or should know it. And those who don’t are doing bad and need to change their ways. It’s particularlist about salvation. Salvation is a particular problem, an ultimate problem with a particular solution. Not everyone has access to it in the same way as the moral law. The moral law was written in the firmament and the hearts of men, Christ’s death is a particular thing you have to hear about and understand and believe in. You can’t reach knowledge of it merely by contemplation or observation, like the moral law. Someone has to reveal it to you. It’s a surprise, particular solution to a universally known problem.
Mr Nobody's Patented Blog 