title: Salvation in Christianity

text: In Christianity, salvation (also called deliverance or redemption) is the "saving [of] human beings from sin and its consequences, which include death and separation from God" by Christ's death and resurrection, and the justification following this salvation.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: While the idea of Jesus' death as an atonement for human sin was recorded in the Christian Bible, and was elaborated in Paul's epistles and in the Gospels, Paul saw the faithful redeemed by participation in Jesus' death and rising. Early Christians regarded themselves as partaking in a new covenant with God, open to both Jews and Gentiles, through the sacrificial death and subsequent exaltation of Jesus Christ. Early Christian notions of the person and sacrificial role of Jesus in human salvation were further elaborated by the Church Fathers, medieval writers and modern scholars in various atonement theories, such as the ransom theory, Christus Victor theory, recapitulation theory, satisfaction theory, penal substitution theory and moral influence theory.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Variant views on salvation (soteriology) are among the main fault lines dividing the various Christian denominations, including conflicting definitions of sin and depravity (the sinful nature of mankind), justification (God's means of removing the consequences of sin), and atonement (the forgiving or pardoning of sin through the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus).


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Salvation in Christianity, or deliverance or redemption, is the "saving [of] human beings from death and separation from God" by Christ's death and resurrection.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Christian salvation not only concerns the atonement itself, but also the question of how one partakes of this salvation, by faith, baptism, or obedience; and the question of whether this salvation is individual or universal. It further involves questions regarding the afterlife, e.g. "heaven, hell, purgatory, soul sleep, and annihilation." The fault lines between the various denominations include conflicting definitions of sin, justification, and atonement.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: In the West (differentiating from Eastern Orthodoxy) Christian hamartiology describes sin as an act of offence against God by despising his persons and Christian biblical law, and by injuring others. It is an evil human act, which violates the rational nature of man, as well as God's nature and his eternal law. According to the classical definition of Augustine of Hippo, sin is "a word, deed, or desire in opposition to the eternal law of God".


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Christian tradition has explained sin as a fundamental aspect of human existence, brought about by original sin—also called ancestral sin, the fall of man stemming from Adam's rebellion in Eden by eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Paul espouses it in Romans 5:12–19, and Augustine of Hippo popularized his interpretation of it in the West, developing it into a notion of "hereditary sin," arguing that God holds all the descendants of Adam and Eve accountable for Adam's sin of rebellion, and as such all people deserve God's wrath and condemnation—apart from any actual sins they personally commit.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Total depravity (also called "radical corruption" or "pervasive depravity") is a Protestant theological doctrine derived from the concept of original sin. It is the teaching that, as a consequence of the fall of man, every person born into the world is enslaved to the service of sin as a result of their inherent fallen nature and, apart from the irresistible or prevenient grace of God, is utterly unable to choose to follow God, refrain from evil, or accept the gift of salvation as it is offered. It is advocated to various degrees by many Protestant confessions of faith and catechisms, including those of some Lutheran synods, and Calvinism, teaching irresistible grace. Arminians, such as Methodists, also believe and teach total depravity, but with the distinct difference of teaching prevenient grace.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: In Christian theology, justification is God's act of removing the guilt and penalty of sin while at the same time making a sinner righteous through Christ's atoning sacrifice. The means of justification is an area of significant difference among Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism. Justification is often seen as being the theological fault line that divided Catholic from the Lutheran and Reformed traditions of Protestantism during the Reformation.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Broadly speaking, Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Christians distinguish between initial justification, which in their view ordinarily occurs at baptism; and final salvation, accomplished after a lifetime of striving to do God's will (theosis or divinization).


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: "Theosis" is a transformative process whose aim is likeness to or union with God, as taught by the Eastern Orthodox Church and Eastern Catholic Churches. As a process of transformation, "theosis" is brought about by the effects of "catharsis" (purification of mind and body) and "theoria" ('illumination' with the 'vision' of God). According to Eastern Christian teaching, "theosis" is very much the purpose of human life. It is considered achievable only through a synergy (or cooperation) between human activity and God's uncreated energies (or operations). The synonymous term "divinization" is the transforming effect of divine grace, the Spirit of God, or the atonement of Christ. "Theosis" and "divinization" are distinguished from sanctification, "being made holy," which can also apply to objects; and from "apotheosis", also "divinization," ).


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Catholics believe faith which is active in charity and good works () can justify, or remove the burden of guilt in sin, from man. Forgiveness of sin exists and is natural, but justification can be lost by mortal sin.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: In the Protestant doctrine, sin is merely "covered" and righteousness imputed. In Lutheranism and Calvinism, righteousness from God is viewed as being credited to the sinner's account through faith alone, without works. Protestants believe faith without works can justify man because Christ died for sinners, but anyone who truly has faith will produce good works as a product of faith, as a good tree produces good fruit. For Lutherans, justification can be lost with the loss of faith.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: The word "atonement" often is used in the Old Testament to translate the Hebrew words (, m.sg.) and (, m.pl.), which mean "propitiation" or "expiation". The English word "atonement" originally meant "at-one-ment", i.e., being "at one", in harmony, with someone. According to Collins English Dictionary, it is used to describe the saving work that God did through Christ to reconcile the world to himself, and also of the state of a person having been reconciled to God. According to "The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church", atonement in Christian theology is "man's reconciliation with God through the sacrificial death of Christ."


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Many Christians believe that atonement is unlimited; however, some Christians teach that atonement is limited in scope to those who are predestined unto salvation, and its primary benefits are not given to all of mankind but rather to believers only.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: A number of metaphors and Old Testament terms and references have been used in the New Testament writings to understand the person and death of Jesus. Starting in the 2nd century CE, various understandings of atonement have been explicated to explain the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the metaphors applied by the New Testament to understand his death. Over the centuries, Christians have held different ideas about how Jesus saves people, and different views still exist within different Christian denominations. According to biblical scholar C. Marvin Pate, "there are three aspects to Christ's atonement according to the early Church: vicarious atonement [substitutionary atonement], the eschatological defeat of Satan [Christ the Victor], and the imitation of Christ [participation in Jesus' death and resurrection]." Pate further notes that these three aspects were intertwined in the earliest Christian writings but that this intertwining was lost since the Patristic times. Because of the influence of Gustaf Aulén's 1931 study, the various theories or paradigms of atonement which developed after the New Testament writings are often grouped under the "classic paradigm," the "objective paradigm," and the "subjective paradigm".


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: In the Hebrew writings, God is absolutely righteous, and only pure and sinless persons can approach him. Reconciliation is achieved by an act of God, namely by his appointment of the sacrificial system, or, in the prophetic view, "by the future Divine gift of a new covenant to replace the old covenant which sinful Israel has broken." The Old Testament describes three types of vicarious atonement which result in purity or sinlessness: the Paschal Lamb; "the sacrificial system as a whole," with the Day of Atonement as the most essential element; and the idea of the suffering servant (Isaiah 42:1–9, 49:1–6, 50:4–11, 52:13–53:12), "the action of a Divinely sent Servant of the Lord who was 'wounded for our transgressions' and 'bear the sin of many'." The Old Testament Apocrypha adds a fourth idea, namely the righteous martyr (2 Maccabees, 4 Maccabees, Wisdom 2–5).


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: These traditions of atonement offer only temporary forgiveness, and (offerings) could only be used as a means of atoning for the lightest type of sin, that is sins committed in ignorance that the thing was a sin. In addition, have no expiating effect unless the person making the offering sincerely repents of their actions before making the offering, and makes restitution to any person who was harmed by the violation. Marcus Borg notes that animal sacrifice in Second Temple Judaism was not a "payment for sin," but had a basic meaning as "making something sacred by giving it as a gift to God," and included a shared meal with God. Sacrifices had numerous purposes, namely thanksgiving, petition, purification, and reconciliation. None of them was a "payment or substitution or satisfaction," and even "sacrifices of reconciliation were about restoring the relationship." James F. McGrath refers to 4 Maccabees 6, "which presents a martyr praying 'Be merciful to your people, and let our punishment suffice for them. Make my blood their purification, and take my life in exchange for theirs' (4 Maccabees 6:28–29). Clearly there were ideas that existed in the Judaism of the time that helped make sense of the death of the righteous in terms of atonement."


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: In the Jerusalem , from which Paul received this creed, the phrase "died for our sins" probably was an apologetic rationale for the death of Jesus as being part of God's plan and purpose, as evidenced in the scriptures. The phrase "died for our sins" was derived from Isaiah, especially Isaiah 53:1–11, and 4 Maccabees, especially 4 Maccabees 6:28–29. "Raised on the third day" is derived from Hosea 6:1–2:


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Soon after his death, Jesus' followers believed he was raised from death by God and exalted to divine status as Lord () "at God's 'right hand'," which "associates him in astonishing ways with God." According to Hurtado, powerful religious experiences were an indispensable factor in the emergence of this Christ-devotion. Those experiences "seem to have included visions of (and/or ascents to) God's heaven, in which the glorified Christ was seen in an exalted position." Those experiences were interpreted in the framework of God's redemptive purposes, as reflected in the scriptures, in a "dynamic interaction between devout, prayerful searching for, and pondering over, scriptural texts and continuing powerful religious experiences." This initiated a "new devotional pattern unprecedented in Jewish monotheism," that is, the worship of Jesus next to God, giving a central place to Jesus because his ministry, and its consequences, had a strong impact on his early followers. Revelations, including those visions, but also inspired and spontaneous utterances, and "charismatic exegesis" of the Jewish scriptures, convinced them that this devotion was commanded by God.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: The meaning of the of 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 for Paul is a matter of debate, and open to multiple interpretations. For Paul, "dying for our sins" gained a deeper significance, providing "a basis for the salvation of sinful Gentiles apart from the Torah."


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Traditionally, this is interpreted as meaning that Jesus' death was an "atonement" for sin, or a ransom, or a means of propitiating God or expiating God's wrath against humanity because of their sins. With Jesus' death, humanity was freed from this wrath. In the classical Protestant understanding humans partake in this salvation by faith in Jesus Christ; this faith is a grace given by God, and people are justified by God through Jesus Christ and faith in him.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: More recent scholarship has raised several concerns regarding these interpretations. The traditional interpretation sees Paul's understanding of salvation as involving "an exposition of the individual's relation to God." According to Krister Stendahl, the main concern of Paul's writings on Jesus' role, and salvation by faith, is not the individual conscience of human sinners, and their doubts about being chosen by God or not, but the problem of the inclusion of Gentile (Greek) Torah observers into God's covenant. Paul draws on several interpretative frames to solve this problem, but most importantly, his own experience and understanding. The from 1 Cor.15:3-5 refers to two mythologies: the Greek myth of the noble dead, to which the Maccabean notion of martyrdom and dying for ones people is related; and the Jewish myth of the persecuted sage or righteous man, in particular the "story of the child of wisdom." For Paul, the notion of 'dying for' refers to this martyrdom and persecution. According to Burton Mack, 'Dying for our sins' refers to the problem of Gentile Torah-observers, who, despite their faithfulness, cannot fully observe commandments, including circumcision, and are therefore 'sinners', excluded from God's covenant. Jesus' death and resurrection solved this problem of the exclusion of the Gentiles from God's covenant, as indicated by Romans 3:21–26.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: According to E.P. Sanders, who initiated the New Perspective on Paul, Paul saw the faithful redeemed by participation in Jesus' death and rising. But "Jesus' death substituted for that of others and thereby freed believers from sin and guilt," a metaphor derived from "ancient sacrificial theology," the essence of Paul's writing is not in the "legal terms" regarding the expiation of sin, but the act of "participation in Christ through dying and rising with him." According to Sanders, "those who are baptized into Christ are baptized into his death, and thus they escape the power of sin [...] he died so that the believers may die with him and consequently live with him." James F. McGrath notes that Paul "prefers to use the language of participation. One died for all, so that all died (2 Corinthians 5:14). This is not only different from substitution, it is the opposite of it." By this participation in Christ's death and rising, "one receives forgiveness for past offences, is liberated from the powers of sin, and receives the Spirit." Paul insists that salvation is received by the grace of God; according to Sanders, this insistence is in line with Judaism of until 200 CE, which saw God's covenant with Israel as an act of grace of God. Observance of the Law is needed to maintain the covenant, but the covenant is not earned by observing the Law, but by the grace of God.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Several passages from Paul, such as Romans 3:25, are traditionally interpreted as meaning that humanity is saved by faith Christ. According to Richard B. Hays, who initiated the ""Pistis Christou" debate," a different reading of these passages is also possible. The phrase can be translated as 'faith in Christ', that is, salvation by believing in Christ, the traditional interpretation; or as 'faithfulness of Christ', that is, belief "through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ." In this view, according to Cobb, Jesus' life and death was not seen by Paul as an atonement, but as a means to participate in faithfulness. In this interpretation, Romans 3:21–26 states that Jesus was faithful, even to the cost of death, and justified by God for this faithfulness. Those who participate in this faithfulness are equally justified by God, both Jews and Gentiles. While this view has found support by a range of scholars, it has also been questioned and criticized.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: In the Gospels, Jesus is portrayed as calling for repentance from sin, and saying that God wants mercy rather than sacrifices (Matthew 9:13). Yet, he is also portrayed as "giving His life [as] a ransom for many" and applying the "suffering servant" passage of Isaiah 53 to himself (Luke 22:37). The Gospel of John portrays him as the sacrificial Lamb of God, and compares his death to the sacrifice of the Passover Lamb at Pesach.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Christians assert that Jesus was predicted by Isaiah, as attested in Luke 4:16–22, where Jesus is portrayed as saying that the prophecies in Isaiah were about him. The New Testament explicitly quotes from Isaiah 53 in Matthew 8:16–18 to indicate that Jesus is the fulfillment of these prophecies.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: The classic paradigm entails the traditional understandings of the early Church Fathers, who developed the themes found in the New Testament.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: The ransom theory of atonement says that Christ liberated humanity from slavery to sin and Satan, and thus death, by giving his own life as a ransom sacrifice to Satan, swapping the life of the perfect (Jesus), for the lives of the imperfect (other humans). It entails the idea that God deceived the devil, and that Satan, or death, had "legitimate rights" over sinful souls in the afterlife, due to the fall of man and inherited sin. During the first millennium CE, the ransom theory of atonement was the dominant metaphor for atonement, both in eastern and western Christianity, until it was replaced in the west by Anselm's satisfaction theory of atonement.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: In one version of the idea of deception, Satan attempted to take Jesus' soul after he had died, but in doing so over-extended his authority, as Jesus had never sinned. As a consequence, Satan lost his authority completely, and all humanity gained freedom. In another version, God entered into a deal with Satan, offering to trade Jesus' soul in exchange for the souls of all people, but after the trade, God raised Jesus from the dead and left Satan with nothing. Other versions held that Jesus' divinity was masked by his human form, so Satan tried to take Jesus' soul without realizing that his divinity would destroy Satan's power. Another idea is that Jesus came to teach how not to sin and Satan, in anger with this, tried to take his soul.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: The ransom theory was first clearly enunciated by Irenaeus (), who was an outspoken critic of Gnosticism, but borrowed ideas from their dualistic worldview. In this worldview, mankind is under the power of the Demiurge, a lesser god who created the world. Yet, humans have a spark of the true divine nature within them, which can be liberated by gnosis (knowledge) of this divine spark. This knowledge is revealed by the Logos, "the very mind of the supreme God," who entered the world in the person of Jesus. Nevertheless, the Logos could not simply undo the power of the Demiurge, and had to hide his real identity, appearing in a physical form, thereby misleading the Demiurge, and liberating mankind. In Irenaeus' writings, the Demiurge is replaced by the devil.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Origen (184–253) introduced the idea that the devil held legitimate rights over humans, who were bought free by the blood of Christ. He also introduced the notion that the Devil was deceived in thinking that he could master the human soul.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Gustaf Aulén reinterpreted the ransom theory in his study (1931), calling it the Christus Victor doctrine, arguing that Christ's death was not a payment to the Devil, but defeated the powers of evil, particularly Satan, which had held mankind in their dominion. According to Pugh, "Ever since [Aulén's] time, we call these patristic ideas the way of seeing the cross."


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: The recapitulation view, first comprehensively expressed by Irenaeus, went "hand-in-hand" with the ransom theory. It says that Christ succeeds where Adam failed, undoing the wrong that Adam did and, because of his union with humanity, leads humanity on to eternal life, including moral perfection. Theosis ("divinisation") is a "corollary" of the recapitulation.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: In the 11th century, Anselm of Canterbury rejected the ransom view and proposed the satisfaction theory of atonement. He allegedly depicted God as a feudal lord whose honor had been offended by the sins of mankind. In this view, people needed salvation from the divine punishment that these offences would bring, since nothing they could do could repay the honor debt. Anselm held that Christ had infinitely honored God through his life and death and that Christ could repay what humanity owed God, thus satisfying the offence to God's honor and doing away with the need for punishment. When Anselm proposed the satisfaction view, it was immediately criticized by Peter Abelard.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformers reinterpreted Anselm's satisfaction theory of salvation within a legal paradigm. In the legal system, offences required punishment, and no satisfaction could be given to avert this need. They proposed a theory known as penal substitution, in which Christ takes the penalty of people's sin as their substitute, thus saving people from God's wrath against sin. Penal substitution thus presents Jesus saving people from the divine punishment of their past wrongdoings. However, this salvation is not presented as automatic. Rather, a person must have faith in order to receive this free gift of salvation. In the penal substitution view, salvation is not dependent upon human effort or deeds.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: The penal substitution paradigm of salvation is widely held among Protestants, who often consider it central to Christianity. However, it has also been widely critiqued, and is rejected by liberal Christians as un-Biblical, and an offense to the love of God. According to Richard Rohr, "[t]hese theories are based on "retributive" justice rather than the "restorative" justice that the prophets and Jesus taught." Advocates of the New Perspective on Paul also argue that many New Testament epistles of Paul the Apostle, which used to support the theory of penal substitution, should be interpreted differently.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: The "governmental theory of atonement" teaches that Christ suffered for humanity so that God could forgive humans without punishing them while still maintaining divine justice. It is traditionally taught in Arminian circles that draw primarily from the works of Hugo Grotius.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: The "moral influence theory of atonement" was developed, or most notably propagated, by Abelard (1079–1142), as an alternative to Anselm's satisfaction theory. Abelard not only "rejected the idea of Jesus' death as a ransom paid to the devil", which turned the Devil into a rival god, but also objected to the idea that Jesus' death was a "debt paid to God's honor". He also objected to the emphasis on God's judgment, and the idea that God changed his mind after the sinner accepted Jesus' sacrificial death, which was not easily reconcilable with the idea of "the perfect, impassible God [who] does not change". Abelard focused on changing man's perception of God – not to be seen as offended, harsh, and judgemental, but as loving. According to Abelard, "Jesus died as the demonstration of God's love", a demonstration which can change the hearts and minds of the sinners, turning back to God.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: During the Protestant Reformation in Western Christianity, the majority of the Reformers strongly rejected the moral influence view of the atonement in favor of penal substitution, a highly forensic modification of the honor-oriented Anselmian satisfaction model. Fausto Sozzini's Socinian arm of the Reformation maintained a belief in the moral influence view of the atonement. Socinianism was an early form of Unitarianism, and the Unitarian Church today maintains a moral influence view of the atonement, as do many liberal Protestant theologians of the modern age.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: During the 18th century, versions of the moral influence view found overwhelming support among German theologians, most notably the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. In the 19th and 20th century, it has been popular among liberal Protestant thinkers in the Anglican, Methodist, Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches, including the Anglican theologian Hastings Rashdall. A number of English theological works in the last hundred years have advocated and popularized the moral influence theory of atonement.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: A strong division has remained since the Reformation between liberal Protestants (who typically adopt a moral influence view) and conservative Protestants (who typically adopt a penal substitutionary view). Both sides believe that their position is taught by the Bible.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: A related theory, the "moral example theory", was developed by Faustus Socinus (1539–1604) in his work (1578). He rejected the idea of "vicarious satisfaction". According to Socinus, Jesus' death offers us a perfect example of self-sacrificial dedication to God."


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: A number of theologians see "example" (or "exemplar") theories of the atonement as variations of the moral influence theory. Wayne Grudem, however, argues that "Whereas the moral influence theory says that Christ's death teaches us how much God loves us, the example theory says that Christ's death teaches us how we should live." Grudem identifies the Socinians as supporters of the example theory.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Hong Kong Baptist University Department of Religion and Philosophy lecturer Domenic Marbaniang, drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche, sees the Divine voluntary self-giving as the ultimate embracement of humanity in its ultimate act of sin, viz, deicide, or the murder of God, thus canceling sin on the cross.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Southern Baptist theologian David Jeremiah writes that in the "shared atonement" theory the atonement is spoken of as shared by all. To wit, God sustains the Universe. Therefore, if Jesus was God in human form, when he died, the entirety of humanity died with him, and when he rose from the dead, the entirety of humanity rose with him.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Some theologians maintain that "various biblical understandings of the atonement need not conflict". Reformed theologian J. I. Packer, for example, although he maintains that "penal substitution is the mainstream, historic view of the church and the essential meaning of the Atonement... Yet with penal substitution at the center", he also maintains that " and other Scriptural views of atonement can work together to present a fully orbed picture of Christ's work". J. Kenneth Grider, speaking from a governmental theory perspective, says that the governmental theory can incorporate within itself "numerous understandings promoted in the other major Atonement theories", including ransom theory, elements of the "Abelardian 'moral influence' theory", vicarious aspects of the atonement, etc.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Anglican theologian Oliver Chase Quick described differing theories as being of value, but also denied that any particular theory was fully true, saying, "if we start from the fundamental and cardinal thought of God's act of love in Jesus Christ [...] I think we can reach a reconciling point of view, from which each type of theory is seen to make its essential contribution to the truth, although no one theory, no any number of theories, can be sufficient to express its fullness."


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Others say that some models of the atonement naturally exclude each other. James F. McGrath, for example, talking about the atonement, says that "Paul [...] prefers to use the language of participation. One died for all, so that all died (2 Corinthians 5:14). This is not only different from substitution, it is the opposite of it." Similarly, Mark M. Mattison, in his article "The Meaning of the Atonement" says, "Substitution implies an "either/or"; participation implies a "both/and."" J. Kenneth Grider, quoted above showing the compatibility of various atonement models with the governmental theory, nevertheless also says that both penal substitution and satisfaction atonement theories are incompatible with the governmental theory.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Some confusion can occur when discussing the atonement because the terms used sometimes have differing meanings depending on the contexts in which they are used. For example:


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: According to Eastern Christian theology, based upon their understanding of the atonement as put forward by Irenaeus recapitulation theory, Jesus' death is a ransom. This restores the relation with God, who is loving and reaches out to humanity, and offers the possibility of "theosis" or divinization, becoming the kind of humans God wants us to be.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: In Eastern Orthodoxy and Eastern Catholicism salvation is seen as participation in the renewal of human nature itself by way of the eternal Word of God assuming the human nature in its fullness. In contrast to Western branches of theology, Eastern Orthodox Christians tend to use the word "expiation" with regard to what is accomplished in the sacrificial act. In Orthodox theology, expiation is an act of offering that seeks to change the one making the offering. The Biblical Greek word which is translated both as "propitiation" and as "expiation" is "hilasmos" (I John 2:2, 4:10), which means "to make acceptable and enable one to draw close to God". Thus the Orthodox emphasis would be that Christ died, not to appease an angry and vindictive Father or to avert the wrath of God upon sinners, but to defeat and secure the destruction of sin and death, so that those who are fallen and in spiritual bondage may become divinely transfigured, and therefore fully human, as their Creator intended; that is to say, human creatures become God in his energies or operations but not in his essence or identity, conforming to the image of Christ and reacquiring the divine likeness (see "theosis").


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: The Orthodox Church further teaches that a person abides in Christ and makes his salvation sure not only by works of love, but also by his patient suffering of various griefs, illnesses, misfortunes and failures.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: The Catholic Church teaches that the death of Jesus on the Cross is a sacrifice that redeems man and reconciles man to God. The sacrifice of Jesus is both a "gift from God the Father himself, for the Father handed his Son over to sinners in order to reconcile us with himself" and "the offering of the Son of God made man, who in freedom and love offered his life to his Father through the Holy Spirit in reparation for our disobedience."


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: The Catholic view of Christ's redemptive work was set forth formally at the Sixth Session of the Council of Trent. The council stated that Jesus merited the grace of justification, which is not only the remission of sin but the infusion of the virtues of faith, hope and charity into the Christian. A justified Christian is then said to be in the state of grace, which can be lost by committing a mortal sin. The view that prevailed at the Council of Trent has been described as a "combination of the opinions of Anselm and Abelard." Catholic scholars have noted that Abelard did not teach that Jesus was merely a good moral example, but that Christians are truly saved by His sacrifice on the Cross. The moral transformation of the Christian is not the result of merely following Christ's example and teachings, but a supernatural gift merited by the sacrifice of Jesus, for "by one man's obedience many will be made righteous."


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: While the initial grace of justification is merited solely by the sacrifice of Jesus, the Catholic Church teaches that a justified Christian can merit an increase in justification and the attainment of eternal life by cooperating with God's grace. The grace of final perseverance preserves a justified Christian in the state of grace until his or her death.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: The Catholic Church shares the Eastern Christian belief in divinization, teaching that "the Son of God became man so that we might become God." However, in contrast with the Eastern Orthodox notion of theosis in which the divinized Christian becomes God in his energies or operations, the Catholic Church teaches that the ultimate end of divinization is the beatific vision, in which the divinized Christian will see God's essence.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: In Protestantism, grace is the result of God's initiative without any regard whatsoever to the one initiating the works, and no one can merit the grace of God by performing rituals, good works, asceticism, or meditation. Broadly speaking, Protestants hold to the five "solae" of the Reformation, which declare that salvation is attained by "grace alone" in "Christ alone" through "faith alone" for the "Glory of God alone" as told in "Scripture alone". Most Protestants believe that salvation is achieved through God's grace alone, and once salvation is secured in the person, good works will be a result of this, allowing good works to often operate as a signifier for salvation. Some Protestants, such as Lutherans and the Reformed, understand this to mean that God saves solely by grace, and that works follow as a necessary consequence of saving grace. Others, such as Methodists (and other Arminians), believe that salvation is by faith alone, but that salvation can be forfeited if it is not accompanied by continued faith, and the works that naturally follow from it. A minority rigidly believe that salvation is accomplished by faith alone without any reference to works whatsoever, including the works that may follow salvation (see Free Grace theology).


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Lutherans believe that Christ, through His death and resurrection, has obtained justification and atonement for all sinners. Lutheran churches believe that this is the central message in the Bible upon which the very existence of the churches depends. In Lutheranism, it is a message relevant to people of all races and social levels, of all times and places, for "the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men" (Romans 5:18). All need forgiveness of sins before God, and Scripture proclaims that all have been justified, for "the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men" (Romans 5:18).


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Lutheranism teaches that individuals receive this free gift of forgiveness and salvation not on the basis of their own works, but only through faith ("Sola fide"):


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Saving faith is the knowledge of, acceptance of, and trust in the promise of the Gospel. Even faith itself is seen as a gift of God, created in the hearts of Christians by the work of the Holy Spirit through the Word and Baptism. Faith is seen as an instrument that receives the gift of salvation, not something that causes salvation. Thus, Lutherans reject the "decision theology" which is common among modern evangelicals.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Calvinists believe in the predestination of the elect before the foundation of the world. All of the elect necessarily persevere in faith because God keeps them from falling away. Calvinists understand the doctrines of salvation to include the five points of Calvinism, typically arranged in English to form the acrostic "TULIP".


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Arminian soteriology—held by Christian denominations such as the Methodist Church—is based on the theological ideas of the Dutch Reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609). Like Calvinists, Arminians agree that all people are born sinful and are in need of salvation. Classical Arminians emphasize that God's free grace (or prevenient grace) enables humans to freely respond to or to reject the salvation offered through Christ. Classical Arminians believe that a person's saving relationship with Christ is conditional upon faith, and thus, a person can sever his or her saving relationship with Christ through persistent unbelief. The relationship of "the believer to Christ is never a static relationship existing as the irrevocable consequence of a past decision, act, or experience."


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: The Five Articles of Remonstrance that Arminius's followers formulated in 1610 state the beliefs regarding (I) conditional election, (II) unlimited atonement, (III) total depravity, (IV) total depravity and resistible grace, and (V) possibility of apostasy. However, the fifth article did not completely deny the perseverance of the saints; Arminius said that "I never taught that a true believer can… fall away from the faith… yet I will not conceal, that there are passages of Scripture which seem to me to wear this aspect; and those answers to them which I have been permitted to see, are not of such a kind as to approve themselves on all points to my understanding." Further, the text of the Articles of Remonstrance says that no believer can be plucked from Christ's hand, and the matter of falling away, "loss of salvation", required further study before it could be taught with any certainty.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Methodism falls squarely in the tradition of substitutionary atonement, though it is linked with Christus Victor and moral influence theories. Methodism also emphasizes a participatory nature in atonement, in which the Methodist believer spiritually dies with Christ as He dies for humanity.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Methodism affirms the doctrine of justification by faith, but in Wesleyan theology, justification refers to "pardon, the forgiveness of sins", rather than "being made actually just and righteous", which Methodists believe is accomplished through sanctification. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Churches, taught that the keeping of the moral law contained in the Ten Commandments, as well as engaging in the works of piety and the works of mercy, were "indispensable for our sanctification".


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Methodist soteriology emphasizes the importance of the pursuit of holiness in salvation, a concept best summarized in a quote by Methodist evangelist Phoebe Palmer who stated that "justification would have ended with me had I refused to be holy." Thus, for Methodists, "true faith..."cannot" subsist without works".


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: While "faith is essential for a meaningful relationship with God, our relationship with God also takes shape through our care for people, the community, and creation itself." Methodism, inclusive of the holiness movement, thus teaches that "justification [is made] conditional on obedience and progress in sanctification", emphasizing "a deep reliance upon Christ not only in coming to faith, but in remaining in the faith."


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Obedience to Jesus and a careful keeping of the Ten Commandments, in addition to loving one another and being at peace with others, are seen as "earmarks of the saved".


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Christian universalism is the doctrine or belief that all people will ultimately be reconciled to God. The appeal of the idea of universal salvation may be related to the perception of a problem of Hell, standing opposed to ideas such as endless conscious torment in Hell, but may also include a period of finite punishment similar to a state of purgatory. Believers in universal reconciliation may support the view that while there may be a real "Hell" of some kind, it is neither a place of endless suffering nor a place where the spirits of human beings are ultimately 'annihilated' after enduring the just amount of divine retribution.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Churches of Christ are strongly anti-Calvinist in their understanding of salvation, and generally present conversion as "obedience to the proclaimed facts of the gospel rather than as the result of an emotional, Spirit-initiated conversion." Some churches of Christ hold the view that humans of accountable age are lost because of their sins. These lost souls can be redeemed because Jesus Christ, the Son of God, offered himself as the atoning sacrifice. Children too young to understand right from wrong, and make a conscious choice between the two, are believed to be innocent of sin. The age when this occurs is generally believed to be around 13.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Beginning in the 1960s, many preachers began placing more emphasis on the role of grace in salvation, instead of focusing exclusively implementing all of the New Testament commands and examples.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: The Churches of Christ argue that since faith and repentance are necessary, and that the cleansing of sins is by the blood of Christ through the grace of God, baptism is not an inherently redeeming ritual. One author describes the relationship between faith and baptism this way, ""Faith" is the "reason why" a person is a child of God; "baptism" is the "time at which" one is incorporated into Christ and so becomes a child of God" (italics are in the source). Baptism is understood as a confessional expression of faith and repentance, rather than a "work" that earns salvation.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: According to the doctrine of The New Church, as explained by Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), there is no such thing as substitutionary atonement as is generally understood. Swedenborg's account of atonement has much in common with the Christus Victor doctrine, which refers to a Christian understanding of the Atonement which views Christ's death as the means by which the powers of evil, which held humanity under their dominion, were defeated. It is a model of the atonement that is dated to the Church Fathers, and it, along with the related ransom theory, was the dominant theory of the atonement for a thousand years.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: According to Jehovah's Witnesses, atonement for sins comes only through the life, ministry, and death of Jesus Christ. They believe Jesus was the "second Adam", being the pre-existent and sinless Son of God who became the human Messiah of Israel, and that he came to undo Adamic sin.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Witnesses believe that the sentence of death given to Adam and subsequently his offspring by God required an equal substitute or ransom sacrifice of a perfect man. They believe that salvation is possible only through Jesus' ransom sacrifice, and that individuals cannot be reconciled to God until they repent of their sins, and then call on the name of God through Jesus. Salvation is described as a free gift from God, but is said to be unattainable without obedience to Christ as King and good works, such as baptism, confession of sins, evangelizing, and promoting God's Kingdom, that are prompted by faith. According to their teaching, the works prove faith is genuine. "Preaching the good news" is said to be one of the works necessary for salvation, both of those who preach and those to whom they preach. They believe that people in the "last days" can be "saved" by identifying Jehovah's Witnesses as God's theocratic organization, and by serving God as a part of it.


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that the atonement of Jesus Christ is infinite and the central principle that enables the "plan of redemption" which is often also called the "plan of salvation". In the Book of Mormon the prophet Amulek teaches that the "great and last sacrifice will be the Son of God, yea, infinite and eternal. And thus he shall bring salvation to all those who shall believe on his name" There are two parts of salvation, conditional and unconditional. Unconditional salvation means that the atonement of Jesus Christ redeems all humanity from the chains of death and they are resurrected to their perfect frames. Conditional salvation of the righteous comes by grace coupled with strict obedience to Gospel principles, in which those who have upheld the highest standards and are committed to the covenants and ordinances of God, will inherit the highest heaven. There is no need for infant baptism. Christ's atonement completely resolved the consequence from the fall of Adam of spiritual death for infants, young children and those of innocent mental capacity who die before an age of self-accountability, hence all these are resurrected to eternal life in the resurrection. However, baptism is required of those who are deemed by God to be accountable for their actions (Moroni 8:10–22)


title: Salvation in Christianity

text: Oneness Pentecostals teach that the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ are the only means by which atonement can be obtained for dying humanity, and which makes the free gift of God's salvation possible. They believe that all must put faith in the propitiatory work of Christ to gain everlasting life. According to United Pentecostal theology, this saving faith is more than just mental assent or intellectual acceptance, or even verbal profession, but must include trust, appropriation, application, action, and obedience. They contend that water baptism is one of the works of faith and obedience necessary for Christ's sacrificial atonement to be efficacious.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: The deportation of the Crimean Tatars (, Cyrillic: Къырымтатар халкъынынъ сюргюнлиги) or the Sürgünlik ("exile") was the ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide of at least 191,044 Crimean Tatars carried out by the Soviet authorities from 18 to 20 May 1944, which was supervised by Lavrentiy Beria, head of Soviet state security and the secret police, and which was ordered by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Within those three days, the NKVD used cattle trains to deport mostly women, children, and the elderly, even Communist Party members and Red Army members, to mostly the Uzbek SSR, several thousand kilometres away. They were one of the several ethnicities who were subjected to Stalin's policy of population transfer in the Soviet Union.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: The deportation was officially presented as collective punishment for the claimed collaboration of some Crimean Tatars with Nazi Germany, but modern experts say that the deportation was part of the Soviet plan to gain access to the Dardanelles and acquire territory in Turkey, where the Tatars had Turkic ethnic kin, or to remove minorities from the Soviet Union's border regions.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: Nearly 8,000 Crimean Tatars died during the deportation, and tens of thousands perished subsequently due to the harsh exile conditions. The Crimean Tatar deportation resulted in the abandonment of 80,000 households and 360,000 acres of land. An intense campaign of detatarization followed to try to erase the remaining traces of Crimean Tatar existence. In 1956, the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev condemned Stalin's policies, including the deportation of various ethnic groups, but did not lift the directive forbidding the return of the Crimean Tatars despite allowing most other deported peoples to return. The Crimean Tatars remained in Central Asia for several more decades until the perestroika era in the late 1980s, when 260,000 Crimean Tatars returned to Crimea. Their exile had lasted 45 years. The ban on their return was officially declared null and void when the Supreme Council of Crimea declared on 14 November 1989 that the deportations had been a crime.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: By 2004, the number of Crimean Tatars who had returned to Crimea had increased their share of the peninsula's population to 12 percent. The Soviet authorities had neither assisted their return nor compensated them for the land they lost. Neither Ukraine nor the Russian Federation provided reparations, compensated those deported for lost property, or filed legal proceedings against the perpetrators of the forced resettlement. The deportation and subsequent assimilation efforts in Asia represent a crucial period in the history of the Crimean Tatars. Between 2015 and 2019, the deportation was formally recognized as genocide by Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Canada.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: The Crimean Tatars controlled the Crimean Khanate from 1441 to 1783, when Crimea was annexed by the Russian Empire as a target of Russian expansion. By the 14th century, most of the Turkic-speaking population of Crimea had adopted Islam, following the conversion of Ozbeg Khan of the Golden Horde. It was the longest surviving state of the Golden Horde. They often engaged in conflicts with Moscow—from 1468 until the 17th century, Crimean Tatars were averse to the newly-established Russian rule. Thus, Crimean Tatars began leaving Crimea in several waves of emigration. Between 1784 and 1790, out of a total population of about a million, around 300,000 Crimean Tatars left for the Ottoman Empire.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: The Crimean War triggered another mass exodus of Crimean Tatars. Between 1855 and 1866 at least 500,000 Muslims, and possibly up to 900,000, left the Russian Empire and emigrated to the Ottoman Empire. Out of that number, at least one third were from Crimea, while the rest were from the Caucasus. These emigrants comprised 15–23 percent of the total population of Crimea. The Russian Empire used that fact as the ideological foundation to further Russify "New Russia". Eventually, the Crimean Tatars became a minority in Crimea; in 1783, they comprised 98 per cent of the population, but by 1897, this was down to 34.1 per cent. While Crimean Tatars were emigrating, the Russian government encouraged Russification of the peninsula, populating it with Russians, Ukrainians, and other Slavic ethnic groups; this Russification continued during the Soviet era.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: After the 1917 October Revolution, Crimea received autonomous status inside the USSR on 18 October 1921, but collectivization in the 1920s led to severe famine from which up to 100,000 Crimeans perished when their crops were transported to "more important" regions of the Soviet Union. By one estimate, three-quarters of the famine victims were Crimean Tatars. Their status deteriorated further after Joseph Stalin became the Soviet leader and implemented repressions that led to the deaths of at least 5.2 million Soviet citizens between 1927 and 1938.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: In 1940, the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic had approximately 1,126,800 inhabitants, of which 218,000 people, or 19.4 percent of the population, were Crimean Tatars. In 1941, Nazi Germany invaded Eastern Europe, annexing much of the western USSR. Crimean Tatars initially viewed the Germans as liberators from Stalinism, and they had also been positively treated by the Germans in World War I.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: Many of the captured Crimean Tatars serving in the Red Army were sent to POW camps after Romanians and Nazis came to occupy the bulk of Crimea. Though Nazis initially called for murder of all "Asiatic inferiors" and paraded around Crimean Tatar POW's labeled as "Mongol sub-humanity", they revised this policy in the face of determined resistance from the Red Army. Beginning in 1942, Germans recruited Soviet prisoners of war to form support armies. The Dobrujan Tatar nationalist Fazil Ulkusal and Lipka Tatar Edige Kirimal helped in freeing Crimean Tatars from German prisoner-of-war camps and enlisting them in the independent Crimean support legion for the "Wehrmacht". This legion eventually included eight battalions, although many members were of other nationalities. From November 1941, German authorities allowed Crimean Tatars to establish Muslim Committees in various towns as a symbolic recognition of some local government authority, though they were not given any political power.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: Many Crimean Tatar communists strongly opposed the occupation and assisted the resistance movement to provide valuable strategic and political information. Other Crimean Tatars also fought on the side of the Soviet partisans, like the Tarhanov movement of 250 Crimean Tatars which fought throughout 1942 until its destruction. Six Crimean Tatars were even named the Heroes of the Soviet Union, and thousands more were awarded high honors in the Red Army.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: Up to 130,000 people died during the Axis occupation of Crimea. The Nazis implemented a brutal repression, destroying more than 70 villages that were together home to about 25 per cent of the Crimean Tatar population. Thousands of Crimean Tatars were forcibly transferred to work as "Ostarbeiter" in German factories under the supervision of the Gestapo in what were described as "vast slave workshops", resulting in loss of all Crimean Tatar support. In April 1944 the Red Army managed to repel the Axis forces from the peninsula in the Crimean Offensive.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: A majority of the hiwis (helpers), their families and all those associated with the Muslim Committees were evacuated to Germany and Hungary or Dobruja by the Wehrmacht and Romanian Army where they joined the Eastern Turkic division. Thus, the majority of the collaborators had been evacuated from Crimea by the retreating Wehrmacht. Many Soviet officials had also recognized this and rejected claims that the Crimean Tatars had betrayed the Soviet Union "en masse". The presence of Muslim Committees organized from Berlin by various Turkic foreigners appeared a cause for concern in the eyes of the Soviet government, already wary of Turkey at the time.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: Soviet publications blatantly falsified information about Crimean Tatars in the Red Army, going so far as to describe Crimean Tatar Hero of the Soviet Union Uzeir Abduramanov as Azeri, not Crimean Tatar, on the cover of a 1944 issue of "Ogonyok" magazine - even though his family had been deported for being Crimean Tatar just a few months earlier. The book "In the Mountains of Tavria" falsely claimed that volunteer partisan scout Bekir Osmanov was a German spy and shot, although the central committee later acknowledged that he never served the Germans and survived the war, ordering later editions to have corrections after still-living Osmanov and his family noticed the obvious falsehood. Amet-khan Sultan, born to a Crimean Tatar mother and Lak father in Crimea, where he was born and raised, was often described as a Dagestani in post-deportation media, even though he always considered himself a Crimean Tatar.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: Officially due to the collaboration with the Axis Powers during World War II, the Soviet government collectively punished ten ethnic minorities, among them the Crimean Tatars. Punishment included deportation to distant regions of Central Asia and Siberia. Soviet accounts of the late 1940s indict the Crimean Tatars as an ethnicity of traitors. Although the Crimean Tatars denied that they had committed treason, this idea was widely accepted during the Soviet period and persists in the Russian scholarly and popular literature.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: On 10 May 1944, Lavrentiy Beria recommended to Stalin that the Crimean Tatars should be deported away from the border regions due to their "traitorous actions". Stalin subsequently issued GKO Order No. 5859ss, which envisaged the resettlement of the Crimean Tatars. The deportation lasted only three days, 18–20 May 1944, during which NKVD agents went house to house collecting Crimean Tatars at gunpoint and forcing them to enter sealed-off cattle trains that would transfer them almost to remote locations in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. The Crimean Tatars were allowed to carry up to 500 kg of their property per family. The only ones who could avoid this fate were Crimean Tatar women who were married to men of non-punished ethnic groups. The exiled Crimean Tatars travelled in overcrowded wagons for several weeks and lacked food and water. It is estimated that at least 228,392 people were deported from Crimea, of which at least 191,044 were Crimean Tatars in 47,000 families. Since 7,889 people perished in the long transit in sealed-off railcars, the NKVD registered the 183,155 living Crimean Tatars who arrived at their destinations in Central Asia. The majority of the deportees were rounded up from the Crimean countryside. Only 18,983 of the exiles were from Crimean cities.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: On 4 July 1944, the NKVD officially informed Stalin that the resettlement was complete. However, not long after that report, the NKVD found out that one of its units had forgotten to deport people from the Arabat Spit. Instead of preparing an additional transfer in trains, on 20 July the NKVD boarded hundreds of Crimean Tatars onto an old boat, took it to the middle of the Azov Sea, and sank the ship. Those who did not drown were finished off by machine-guns.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: Officially, Crimean Tatars were eliminated from Crimea. The deportation encompassed every person considered by the government to be Crimean Tatar, including children, women, and the elderly, and even those who had been members of the Communist Party or the Red Army. As such, they were legally designated as special settlers, which meant that they were officially second-class citizens, prohibited from leaving the perimeter of their assigned area, attending prestigious universities, and had to regularly appear before the commandant's office.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: During this mass eviction, the Soviet authorities confiscated around 80,000 houses, 500,000 cattle, 360,000 acres of land, and 40,000 tons of agricultural provisions. Besides 191,000 deported Crimean Tatars, the Soviet authorities also evicted 9,620 Armenians, 12,420 Bulgarians, and 15,040 Greeks from the peninsula. All were collectively branded as traitors and became second-class citizens for decades in the USSR. Among the deported, there were also 283 persons of other ethnicities: Italians, Romanians, Karaims, Kurds, Czechs, Hungarians, and Croats. During 1947 and 1948, a further 2,012 veteran returnees were deported from Crimea by the local MVD.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: In total, 151,136 Crimean Tatars were deported to the Uzbek SSR; 8,597 to the Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic; and 4,286 to the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic; and the remaining 29,846 were sent to various remote regions of the Russian SFSR. When the Crimean Tatars arrived at their destination in the Uzbek SSR, they were met with hostility by Uzbek locals who threw stones at them, even their children, because they heard that the Crimean Tatars were "traitors" and "fascist collaborators." The Uzbeks objected to becoming the "dumping ground for treasonous nations." In the coming years, several assaults against the Crimean Tatars population were registered, some of which were fatal.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: The mass Crimean deportations were organized by Lavrentiy Beria, the chief of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, and his subordinates Bogdan Kobulov, Ivan Serov, B. P. Obruchnikov, M.G. Svinelupov, and A. N. Apolonov. The field operations were conducted by G. P. Dobrynin, the Deputy Head of the Gulag system; G. A. Bezhanov, the Colonel of State Security; I. I. Piiashev, Major General; S. A. Klepov, Commissar of State Security; I. S. Sheredega, Lt. General; B. I. Tekayev, Lt. Colonel of State Security; and two local leaders, P. M. Fokin, head of the Crimea NKGB, and V. T. Sergjenko, Lt. General. In order to execute this deportation, the NKVD secured 5,000 armed agents and the NKGB allocated a further 20,000 armed men, together with a few thousand regular soldiers. Two of Stalin's directives from May 1944 reveal that many parts of the Soviet government, from financing to transit, were involved in executing the operation.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: On 14 July 1944 the GKO authorized the immigration of 51,000 people, mostly Russians, to 17,000 empty collective farms on Crimea. On 30 June 1945, the Crimean ASSR was abolished.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: Soviet propaganda sought to hide the population transfer by claiming that the Crimean Tatars had "voluntarily resettle[d] to Central Asia". In essence, though, according to historian Paul Robert Magocsi, Crimea was "ethnically cleansed." After this act, the term "Crimean Tatar" was banished from the Russian-Soviet lexicon, and all Crimean Tatar toponyms (names of towns, villages, and mountains) in Crimea were changed to Russian names on all maps as part of a wide detatarization campaign. Muslim graveyards and religious objects in Crimea were demolished or converted into secular places. During Stalin's rule, nobody was allowed to mention that this ethnicity even existed in the USSR. This went so far that many individuals were even forbidden to declare themselves as Crimean Tatars during the Soviet censuses of 1959, 1970, and 1979. They could only declare themselves as Tatars. This ban was lifted during the Soviet census of 1989.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: The first deportees started arriving in the Uzbek SSR on 29 May 1944 and most had arrived by 8 June 1944. The consequent mortality rate remains disputed; the NKVD kept incomplete records of the death rate among the resettled ethnicities living in exile. Like the other deported peoples, the Crimean Tatars were placed under the regime of special settlements. Many of those deported performed forced labor: their tasks included working in coal mines and construction battalions, under the supervision of the NKVD. Deserters were executed. Special settlers routinely worked eleven to twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Despite this difficult physical labor, the Crimean Tatars were given only around to of bread per day. Accommodations were insufficient; some were forced to live in mud huts where "there were no doors or windows, nothing, just reeds" on the floor to sleep on.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: The sole transport to these remote areas and labour colonies was equally as strenuous. Theoretically, the NKVD loaded 50 people into each railroad car, together with their property. One witness claimed that 133 people were in her wagon. They had only one hole in the floor of the wagon which was used as a toilet. Some pregnant women were forced to give birth inside these sealed-off railroad cars. The conditions in the overcrowded train wagons were exacerbated by a lack of hygiene, leading to cases of typhus. Since the trains only stopped to open the doors at rare occasions during the trip, the sick inevitably contaminated others in the wagons. It was only when they arrived at their destination in the Uzbek SSR that the Crimean Tatars were released from the sealed-off railroad cars. Still, some were redirected to other destinations in Central Asia and had to continue their journey. Some witnesses claimed that they travelled for 24 consecutive days. During this whole time, they were given very little food or water while trapped inside. There was no fresh air since the doors and windows were bolted shut. In Kazakh SSR, the transport guards unlocked the door only to toss out the corpses along the railroad. The Crimean Tatars thus called these railcars "crematoria on wheels." The records show that at least 7,889 Crimean Tatars died during this long journey, amounting to about 4 per cent of their entire ethnicity.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: The high mortality rate continued for several years in exile due to malnutrition, labor exploitation, diseases, lack of medical care, and exposure to the harsh desert climate of Uzbekistan. The exiles were frequently assigned to the heaviest construction sites. The Uzbek medical facilities filled with Crimean Tatars who were susceptible to the local Asian diseases not found on the Crimean peninsula where the water was purer, including yellow fever, dystrophy, malaria, and intestinal illness. The death toll was the highest during the first five years. In 1949 the Soviet authorities counted the population of the deported ethnic groups who lived in special settlements. According to their records, there were 44,887 excess deaths in these five years, 19.6 per cent of that total group. Other sources give a figure of 44,125 deaths during that time, while a third source, using alternative NKVD archives, gives a figure of 32,107 deaths. These reports included all the people resettled from Crimea (including Armenians, Bulgarians, and Greeks), but the Crimean Tatars formed a majority in this group. It took five years until the number of births among the deported people started to surpass the number of deaths. Soviet archives reveal that between May 1944 and January 1945 a total of 13,592 Crimean Tatars perished in exile, about 7 per cent of their entire population. Almost half of all deaths (6,096) were of children under the age of 16; another 4,525 were adult women and 2,562 were adult men. During 1945, a further 13,183 people died. Thus, by the end of December 1945, at least 27,000 Crimean Tatars had already died in exile. One Crimean Tatar woman living near Tashkent recalled the events from 1944:


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: Estimates produced by Crimean Tatars indicate mortality figures that were far higher and amounted to 46% of their population living in exile. In 1968, when Leonid Brezhnev presided over the USSR, Crimean Tatar activists were persecuted for using that high mortality figure under the guise that it was a "slander to the USSR." In order to show that Crimean Tatars were exaggerating, the KGB published figures showing that "only" 22 per cent of that ethnic group died. The Karachay demographer Dalchat Ediev estimates that 34,300 Crimean Tatars died due to the deportation, representing an 18 per cent mortality rate. Hannibal Travis estimates that overall 40,000–80,000 Crimean Tatars died in exile. Professor Michael Rywkin gives a figure of at least 42,000 Crimean Tatars who died between 1944 and 1951, including 7,900 who died during the transit Professor Brian Glyn Williams gives a figure of between 40,000 and 44,000 deaths as a consequence of this deportation. The Crimean State Committee estimated that 45,000 Crimean Tatars died between 1944 and 1948. The official NKVD report estimated that 27 per cent of that ethnicity died.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: Stalin's government denied the Crimean Tatars the right to education or publication in their native language. Despite the prohibition, and although they had to study in Russian or Uzbek, they maintained their cultural identity. In 1956 the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, held a speech in which he condemned Stalin's policies, including the mass deportations of various ethnicities. Still, even though many peoples were allowed to return to their homes, three groups were forced to stay in exile: the Soviet Germans, the Meskhetian Turks, and the Crimean Tatars. In 1954, Khrushchev allowed Crimea to be included in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic since Crimea is linked by land to Ukraine and not with the Russian SFSR. On 28 April 1956, the directive "On Removing Restrictions on the Special Settlement of the Crimean Tatars... Relocated during the Great Patriotic War" was issued, ordering a de-registration of the deportees and their release from administrative supervision. However, various other restrictions were still kept and the Crimean Tatars were not allowed to return to Crimea. Moreover, that same year the Ukrainian Council of Ministers banned the exiled Crimean Tatars, Greeks, Germans, Armenians and Bulgarians from relocating even to the Kherson, Zaporizhia, Mykolaiv and Odessa Oblasts in the Ukrainian SSR. The Crimean Tatars did not get any compensation for their lost property.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: In the 1950s, the Crimean Tatars started actively advocating for the right to return. In 1957, they collected 6,000 signatures in a petition that was sent to the Supreme Soviet that demanded their political rehabilitation and return to Crimea. In 1961 25,000 signatures were collected in a petition that was sent to the Kremlin.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: Mustafa Dzhemilev, who was only six months old when his family was deported from Crimea, grew up in Uzbekistan and became an activist for the right of the Crimean Tatars to return. In 1966 he was arrested for the first time and spent a total of 17 years in prison during the Soviet era. This earned him the nickname of "Crimean Tatar Mandela." In 1984 he was sentenced for the sixth time for "anti-Soviet activity" but was given moral support by the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, who had observed Dzhemilev's fourth trial in 1976. When older dissidents were arrested, a new, younger generation emerged that would replace them.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: On 21 July 1967, representatives of the Crimean Tatars, led by the dissident Ayshe Seitmuratova, gained permission to meet with high-ranking Soviet officials in Moscow, including Yuri Andropov. During the meeting, the Crimean Tatars demanded a correction of all the injustices of the USSR against their people. In September 1967, the Supreme Soviet issued a decree that acknowledged the charge of treason against the entire nation was "unreasonable" but that did not allow Crimean Tatars the same full rehabilitation encompassing the right of return that other deported peoples were given. The carefully worded decree referred to them not as "Crimean Tatars" but as "citizens of Tatar nationality who having formerly lived in Crimea […] have taken root in the Uzbek SSR", thereby minimizing Crimean Tatar existence and downplaying their desire for the right of return in addition to creating a premise for claims of the issue being "settled". Individuals united and formed groups that went back to Crimea in 1968 on their own, without state permission, but the Soviet authorities deported 6,000 of them once again. The most notable example of such resistance was a Crimean Tatar activist, Musa Mamut, who was deported when he was 12 and who returned to Crimea because he wanted to see his home again. When the police informed him that he would be evicted, he set himself on fire. Nevertheless, 577 families managed to obtain state permission to reside in Crimea.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: In 1968 unrest erupted among the Crimean Tatar people in the Uzbek city of Chirchiq. In October 1973, the Jewish poet and professor Ilya Gabay committed suicide by jumping off a building in Moscow. He was one of the significant Jewish dissidents in the USSR who fought for the rights of the oppressed peoples, especially Crimean Tatars. Gabay had been arrested and sent to a labour camp but still insisted on his cause because he was convinced that the treatment of the Crimean Tatars by the USSR amounted to genocide. In 1973, Dzhemilev was also arrested for his advocacy for Crimean Tatar right to return to Crimea.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: Despite de-Stalinization, the situation didn't change until Gorbachev's perestroika in the late 1980s. A 1987 Tatar protest near the Kremlin prompted Gorbachev to form the Gromyko Commission which found against Tatar claims, but a second commission recommended "renewal of autonomy" for Crimean Tatars. In 1989 the ban on the return of deported ethnicities was declared officially null and void and the Supreme Council of Crimea further declared the deportations criminal, paving the way for the Crimean Tatars to return. Dzhemilev returned to Crimea that year, with at least 166,000 other Tatars doing the same by January 1992. The 1991 Russian law "On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples" rehabilitated all Soviet repressed ethnicities and abolished all previous Russian laws relating to the deportations, calling for the "restoration and return of the cultural and spiritual values and archives which represent the heritage of the repressed people."


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: By 2004 the Crimean Tatars formed 12 per cent of the population of Crimea. The return was fraught: with Russian nationalist protests in Crimea and clashes between locals and Crimean Tatars near Yalta, which needed army intervention. Local Soviet authorities were reluctant to help returnees with jobs or housing, After the dissolution of the USSR, Crimea was part of Ukraine, but Kyiv gave limited support to Crimean Tatar settlers. Some 150,000 of the returnees were granted citizenship automatically under Ukraine's Citizenship Law of 1991, but 100,000 who returned after Ukraine declared independence faced several obstacles including a costly bureaucratic process.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: In March 2014, the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation unfolded, which was, in turn, declared illegal by the United Nations General Assembly (United Nations General Assembly Resolution 68/262) and which led to further deterioration of the rights of the Crimean Tatars. Even though the Russian Federation issued Decree No. 268 "On the Measures for the Rehabilitation of Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek, Crimean Tatar and German Peoples and the State Support of Their Revival and Development" on 21 April 2014, in practice it has treated Crimean Tatars with far less care. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a warning against the Kremlin in 2016 because it "intimidated, harassed and jailed Crimean Tatar representatives, often on dubious charges", while the representative body the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People was banned.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: The UN reported that of the over 10,000 people left Crimea after the annexation in 2014, most were Crimean Tatars, which caused a further decline of their fragile community. Crimean Tatars stated several reasons for their departure, among them insecurity, fear, and intimidation from the new Russian authorities. In its 2015 report, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that various human rights violations were recorded in Crimea, including the prevention of Crimean Tatars from marking the 71st anniversary of their deportation.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: Historian Edward Allworth has noted that the extent of marginalization of the Crimean Tatars was a distinct anomaly among national policy in the USSR given the party's firm commitment maintaining the status quo of not recognizing them as a distinct ethnic group in addition to assimilating and "rooting" them in exile, in sharp contrast to the rehabilitation other deported ethnic groups such as the Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Balkars, and Kalmyks experienced in the Khrushchev era.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: Between 1989 and 1994, around a quarter of a million Crimean Tatars returned to Crimea from exile in Central Asia. This was seen as a symbolic victory of their efforts to return to their native land. They returned after 45 years of exile.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: Not one of the several ethnic groups who were deported during Stalin's era received any kind of financial compensation. Some Crimean Tatar groups and activists have called for the international community to put pressure on the Russian Federation, the successor state of the USSR, to finance rehabilitation of that ethnicity and provide financial compensation for forcible resettlement.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: Despite the thousands of Crimean Tatars in the Red Army when it attacked Berlin, the Crimean Tatars continued to be seen and treated as a fifth column for decades. Some historians explain this as part of Stalin's plan to take complete control of Crimea. The Soviet sought access to the Dardanelles and control of territory in Turkey, where the Crimean Tatars had ethnic kin. By painting the Crimean Tatars as traitors, this taint could be extended to their kin. Scholar Walter Kolarz alleges that the deportation and the attempt of liquidation of Crimean Tatars as an ethnicity in 1944 was just the final act of the centuries-long process of Russian colonization of Crimea that started in 1783. Historian Gregory Dufaud regards the Soviet accusations against Crimean Tatars as a convenient excuse for their forcible transfer through which Moscow secured an unrivalled access to the geostrategic southern Black Sea on one hand and eliminated hypothetical rebellious nations at the same time. Professor of Russian and Soviet history Rebecca Manley similarly concluded that the real aim of the Soviet government was to "cleanse" the border regions of "unreliable elements". Professor Brian Glyn Williams states that the deportations of Meskhetian Turks, despite never being close to the scene of combat and never being charged with any crime, lends the strongest credence to the fact that the deportations of Crimeans and Caucasians was due to Soviet foreign policy rather than any real "universal mass crimes".


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: Modern interpretations by scholars and historians sometimes classify this mass deportation of civilians as a crime against humanity, ethnic cleansing, depopulation, an act of Stalinist repression, or an "ethnocide", meaning a deliberate wiping out of an identity and culture of a nation. Crimean Tatars call this event "Sürgünlik" ("exile"). The perception of Crimean Tatars as "uncivilized" and deserving the deportation remains throughout the Russian and Ukrainian settlers in Crimea.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: Some activists, politicians, scholars, countries, and historians go even further and consider the deportation a crime of genocide or cultural genocide. Norman Naimark writes "[t]he Chechens and Ingush, the Crimean Tatars, and other 'punished peoples' of the wartime period were, indeed, slated for elimination, if not physically, then as self-identifying nationalities." Professor Lyman H. Legters argued that the Soviet penal system, combined with its resettlement policies, should count as genocidal since the sentences were borne most heavily specifically on certain ethnic groups, and that a relocation of these ethnic groups, whose survival depends on ties to its particular homeland, "had a genocidal effect remediable only by restoration of the group to its homeland." Soviet dissidents Ilya Gabay and Pyotr Grigorenko both classified the event as a genocide. Historian Timothy Snyder included it in a list of Soviet policies that “meet the standard of genocide." On 12 December 2015, the Ukrainian Parliament issued a resolution recognizing this event as genocide and established 18 May as the "Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Crimean Tatar genocide." The parliament of Latvia recognized the event as an act of genocide on 9 May 2019. The Parliament of Lithuania did the same on 6 June 2019. Canadian Parliament passed a motion on June 10, 2019, recognizing the Crimean Tatar deportation of 1944 (Sürgünlik) as a genocide perpetrated by Soviet dictator Stalin, designating May 18 to be a day of remembrance. On 26 April 1991 the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic, under its chairman Boris Yeltsin, passed the law On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples with Article 2 denouncing all mass deportations as "Stalin's policy of defamation and genocide."


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: A minority dispute defining the event as genocide. According to Alexander Statiev, the Soviet deportations resulted in a "genocidal death rate", but Stalin did not have the intent to exterminate these peoples. He considers such deportations merely an example of Soviet assimilation of "unwanted nations." According to Amir Weiner, the Soviet regime sought to eradicate "only" their "territorial identity". Such views were criticized by Jon Chang as "gentrified racism" and historical revisionism. He noted that the deportations had been in fact based on ethnicity of victims.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: In 2008, Lily Hyde, a British journalist living in Ukraine, published a novel titled "Dreamland" that revolves around a Crimean Tatar family return to their homeland in the 1990s. The story is told from the perspective of a 12-year-old girl who moves from Uzbekistan to a demolished village with her parents, brother, and grandfather. Her grandfather tells her stories about the heroes and victims among the Crimean Tatars.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: The 2013 Ukrainian Crimean Tatar-language film "Haytarma" portrays the experience of Crimean Tatar flying ace and Hero of the Soviet Union Amet-khan Sultan during the 1944 deportations.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: In 2015 Christina Paschyn released the documentary film "A Struggle for Home: The Crimean Tatars" in a Ukrainian–Qatari co-production. It depicts the history of the Crimean Tatars from 1783 up until 2014, with a special emphasis on the 1944 mass deportation.


title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

text: At the Eurovision Song Contest 2016 in Stockholm, Sweden, the Ukrainian Crimean Tatar singer Jamala performed the song "1944", which refers to the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in the eponymous year. Jamala, an ethnic Crimean Tatar born in exile in Kyrgyzstan, dedicated the song to her deported great-grandmother. She became the first Crimean Tatar to perform at Eurovision and also the first to perform with a song with lyrics in the Crimean Tatar language. She went on to win the contest, becoming the second Ukrainian artist to win the event.


title: The Sundays

text: The Sundays were an English alternative rock band, formed in the late 1980s, which released three albums throughout the 1990s.


title: The Sundays

text: The band's beginnings came with the meeting of singer Harriet Wheeler and guitarist David Gavurin while attending Bristol University. Wheeler had played gigs with Cruel Shoes, an early incarnation of the band Jim Jiminee. The duo soon augmented the band with bassist Paul Brindley and drummer Patrick Hannan.


title: The Sundays

text: The Sundays secured a recording contract with Rough Trade Records. Their debut single was "Can't Be Sure". Their first album, "Reading, Writing and Arithmetic", was released in 1990, along with their next single "Here's Where the Story Ends", and became a UK top 5 hit. The band were often missidentified as being The Primitives another UK based alternative rock band from Coventry as their vocalists had very similar voices.


title: The Sundays

text: With Rough Trade's financial troubles and the band's decision to manage themselves, the Sundays' next single, "Goodbye", did not emerge until 1992. Their next album, "Blind", arrived the same year, reaching the UK top 15. The single "Love" reached number 2 on the US Modern Rock charts. The band toured in support of these recordings.


title: The Sundays

text: In 1997 their third album, "Static & Silence", was followed by the release of their most successful single to date, "Summertime", which made the UK top 15. The album itself reached the UK top 10. However, the band has been on a lengthy hiatus since those releases, with Wheeler and Gavurin focusing on raising their two children.


title: The Sundays

text: Vocalist Harriet Wheeler and guitarist David Gavurin met as students at Bristol University in the mid-1980s. Wheeler was from Reading, the daughter of an architect and a teacher, and studied English literature. Gavurin was from Wembley and actively pursued a degree in the Romance languages, particularly French and Spanish. The two fell in love and began living together. Following graduation they wrote music in their free time while collecting unemployment benefits. Except for Wheeler's vocal duties in a band called Jim Jiminee, the couple had no musical background. Commenting on his desire to compose, Gavurin said, "It was something I'd always wanted to do, although I never wanted to be in a band when I was younger, like many kids do. It just dawned on me gradually." Wheeler displayed similar feelings: "There was never a time I wanted to be incredibly famous, or in a pop group," she said. "It just seemed a great thing to do to spend time working on something that's your own."


title: The Sundays

text: After the couple completed several songs – and migrated to London – they enlisted the support of bassist Paul Brindley and drummer Patrick Hannan, who had also attended Bristol University. Hannan's brother, Nick had also been a member of Jim Jiminee, which briefly featured Wheeler as vocalist (see paragraph above). The band chose the name "The Sundays" as it was the only one everyone could agree upon. Demo tapes were sent out to several London clubs after the group felt energized by their efforts; Gavurin stated in a "Rolling Stone" interview that "by the end of the year we were thinking, 'Hang on a minute, some of this [music] is good!'" Responses to the tape were enthusiastic and an employee at Vertigo Club offered the band an opening slot for an upcoming show in August 1988. "By chance there were three reviewers from the top music papers there," said Wheeler. "They were supposed to review the main band, but instead they wrote about us." The group subsequently became the focus of a record label bidding war, which author Peter Buckley described as a "frenzy". They eventually signed with Rough Trade Records and had a distribution deal signed for the United States with DGC Records.


title: The Sundays

text: The Sundays released their first single "Can't Be Sure" in January 1989. It topped the British indie charts and received acclaim as one of the best singles of 1989. The group performed three songs in a session with popular disc jockey John Peel. These songs would later turn up on their debut album, "Reading, Writing and Arithmetic". The group worked on their debut for over a year. "A lot of bands who get signed, who have been playing the circuit for years, have 30 songs for the first album," said Gavurin. "But we didn't have enough for our first album, let alone our second. We can't write to deadline. You can't force a whole load of songs out quickly." Asked whether the band felt pressured when working on the album, Wheeler responded, "No, because to start off with, we're far more critical of ourselves than anyone else, and that's more a concern to us than what the press think." Gavurin also commented: "The main pressure we felt was with the single, and even then, we thought, well, they're either going to like it or they're not, and there's not much we can do to influence that."


title: The Sundays

text: "Reading, Writing and Arithmetic" was released in April 1990 and became a commercial success, reaching number 4 on the UK charts and peaking at number 39 on the "Billboard" 200 in the United States. It went on to sell over half a million copies worldwide. Critical reception was very positive; "Rolling Stone" writer Ira Robbins referred to it as "an alluring slice of lighter-than-air guitar pop, a collection of uncommonly good songs graced by Harriet Wheeler's wondrous singing." The single "Here's Where the Story Ends" was particularly successful in the USA due to radio play and MTV rotation. The Sundays devoted nearly a year to an "exhausting" promotional tour, which encompassed America, Europe, and Japan. The tour was considered successful, although it was not without some mishaps; a London show had to be rescheduled due to Wheeler losing her voice and the group experienced some amusement when a Dallas, Texas, show was advertised with the slogan "See The Sundays on Sunday with ice-cream sundaes".


title: The Sundays

text: The band experienced some hardships leading up to the recording of their second album. In 1991 Rough Trade Records went bankrupt, which caused the band to sign with Parlophone Records in the UK. Their debut went out of print in the UK and would stay that way until 1996. Constant touring coupled with their decision to manage themselves hampered the group's creative output, which was already slow due to Gavurin and Wheeler, the main songwriters, "being chained by pokiness and perfectionism when it [came] to writing and recording music." Additionally, the band kept a "low public profile", which fuelled rumours that the group had disbanded. The Sundays eventually released a new single, "Goodbye", a minor hit, in Autumn 1992. The release came almost three years after their last UK show. The "Goodbye" B-side, a cover of The Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses", also appeared on the US release of "Blind" as well as in the movie "Fear" (1996), on the for the popular television series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", and in the episode 01x01 of the series "Friends from College" (2017).


title: The Sundays

text: Their next album, entitled "Blind," was finally released in October 1992. The album experienced commercial success similar to their debut when it peaked at number 103 on the "Billboard" 200, and sold nearly half a million copies. Critical reception was also positive, but some critics thought the album lacked the quality songwriting of its predecessor. Despite "Blind's" initial appeal with audiences, it drifted off the charts by the summer of 1993. The Sundays toured Britain in the winter of 1992. The shows were "rapturously received by fans starved of fresh product or gigs." An American tour was greeted with sold-out shows. Gavurin explained that they weren't necessarily attempting to promote the new album: "A lot of people didn't see us the first time we played over here, and they want to hear earlier material. So we're playing half and half." In the end the tour was cut short in light of exhaustion and homesickness.


title: The Sundays

text: The band holidayed in Thailand and decided to take a break upon returning to England. It would be five years before another album was released. During this time the only appearance of the band was their cover of "Wild Horses" by The Rolling Stones appearing in a 1994 American Budweiser television commercial. Gavurin and Wheeler expressed a desire to settle down. Wheeler gave birth to the couple's daughter, Billie, in March 1995. They also built a recording studio in their home, not only to save on the cost of renting a studio, but also to expand their creative freedoms. Their third, and most recent album, "Static & Silence", was released in the autumn of 1997 to mixed reviews. Although the band retained much of the same sound that they developed on previous albums, they added horns to a number of tracks for "Static & Silence". The album was not as successful as "Reading, Writing and Arithmetic", however the single "Summertime" became their most successful hit to date on the UK chart and achieved a top 10 spot on the US Alternative Rock chart. It was The Sundays' third most successful single in the US, behind "Here's Where the Story Ends" (which made it to number 1 on the US Alternative Rock chart) and "Love" (which made it to number 2).


title: The Sundays

text: In April 2014, Adam Pitluk, the editor of American Airlines' magazine "American Way", tracked down and conducted an interview with Wheeler and Gavurin in which he put forward the idea of a reunion. They responded "First let's see if the music we’re currently writing ever sees the light of day, and then we can get on to the enjoyable globe-trotting-meets-concert-planning stage."


title: The Sundays

text: On 10 October 2014, during an interview on BBC Radio 6 Music's "Radcliffe & Maconie" radio programme, David Baddiel described Dave Gavurin as his "oldest mate" and stated that "they [Dave and Harriet] are doing music, but whether they ever put that out there, I’ve no idea. They're the most paranoid people about actually putting stuff out there." Fans who have seen the Sundays live will remember hearing one or two tracks that were never released. "Something More" and "Turkish" featured in many of their sets, but the only copies are live bootlegs.


title: The Sundays

text: In an interview with the C86 Show Podcast released on August 18th 2020, Patrick Hannan revealed that Harriet and David had "never stopped making music" and that there are a number of tracks on which he had played drums. Patrick stated that these recordings may never be released.


title: WWE Hall of Fame (2022)

text: The 2022 WWE Hall of Fame was a professional wrestling event produced by WWE that featured the introduction of the 23rd class into the WWE Hall of Fame. The ceremony took place on April 1, 2022, at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas, the night preceding WrestleMania 38. It aired live at 10pm Eastern Time on Peacock in the United States and the WWE Network internationally, immediately after the airing of WWE's regular Friday night program, "SmackDown". The event was headlined by the induction of The Undertaker into the WWE Hall of Fame.


title: WWE Hall of Fame (2022)

text: The 2022 WWE Hall of Fame was scheduled to be held on April 1, 2022, at the American Airlines Center in Dallas Texas, the night before WrestleMania 38. The ceremony was announced to take place live at 10pm Eastern Time, immediately after the airing of WWE's Friday night program, "SmackDown". It aired on Peacock in the United States and the WWE Network in international markets. On February 18, 2022, The Undertaker was announced as the first individual inductee for the WWE Hall of Fame Class of 2022. The news was responded to with extensive praise from WWE fans, the professional wrestling community, and media outlets alike.


title: WWE Hall of Fame (2022)

text: In the week following the heavily publicized Undertaker inductee news, media outlets observed that many WWE fans had advocated for the idea of The Undertaker to be the sole inductee for the Class of 2022, reasoning that his legend status in the company would warrant such an honor. The solo dedication was also publicly endorsed by fellow Hall of Famer Bubba Ray Dudley, Class of 2018, sharing as well of his opinion that such an event would be an entertainment draw and sell out the arena.


title: WWE Hall of Fame (2022)

text: The character of "The Undertaker" was created by WWE Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Vince McMahon, who made a rare media appearance on "The Pat McAfee Show" on March 3, where he announced that he would be inducting The Undertaker into the WWE Hall of Fame. In praising The Undertaker both inside and outside of character in a heartfelt message, McMahon elaborated that this induction would be one of the most difficult endeavors of his life because of his longtime history with The Undertaker, what they had been through together, and how close they had been behind the scenes. Reacting to the heavily publicized announcement from McMahon, The Undertaker issued a Twitter response later that same day, which read:


title: WWE Hall of Fame (2022)

text: On March 7, Bleacher Report and WWE announced that Vader would be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame Class of 2022 posthumously. On March 14, Complex.com and WWE announced that Queen Sharmell would be inducted into the Class of 2022. The announcement of Sharmell's induction was met with widespread mixed reactions as fans either reacted positively to the news while others criticized the choice citing her lack of credentials within WWE and WCW.


title: WWE Hall of Fame (2022)

text: On March 25, FoxSports.com and WWE announced that former WWE wrestler Shad Gaspard would be receiving the Warrior Award posthumously, with his wife Siliana and son Aryeh accepting the award. On March 28, David Shoemaker of The Ringer and WWE announced that The Steiner Brothers (Scott Steiner and Rick Steiner) would be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame Class of 2022. For the first time in 6 years, no Legacy Wing inductions took place.


title: WWE Hall of Fame (2022)

text: With an unprecedented induction that displayed his various Deadman genres on mannequins, Calaway made a 137-minute speech that opened with a 10-minute, emotional standing ovation from the live audience that brought Calaway to tears. Calaway's speech, hailed by media outlets as matchless and beyond compare, shared his collection of life philosophies for success.


title: Prana

text: In yoga, Indian medicine and Indian martial arts, prana (, ; the Sanskrit word for breath, "life force", or "vital principle") permeates reality on all levels including inanimate objects. In Hindu literature, prāṇa is sometimes described as originating from the Sun and connecting the elements.