What is Salvation?

A reader writes ..

Just watched the video clip “Conversations on being a heretic” and when it got to the part where you said something to the effect “when you have moved to the new paradigm some of the old questions don’t make sense anymore”, I was nodding my head up and down so much others around me must’ve thought I was jamming to some cool hip hop tune in my head.
Growing up a PK (preacher’s kid) in a Southern Baptist home and as an ex-Campus Crusade staff member hasn’t left me without several questions of theology and faith, as you may imagine! To the point, primarily about the meaning of salvation as it is used throughout all scripture – just as you briefly mentioned at the end of the video. Much too often, (always?) that term is used and thrown around, within and across paradigms, as if everyone knew what it meant. But rarely, never?, is there a stop to define the term. There is just this assumed understanding of the meaning and then the conversation, or sermon, or paragraph goes on… As you mentioned it is only when we see how the term is used in the Old Testament, how those people experienced salvation, that we can understand what it means, and doesn’t mean, in the N.T.
If people realized that the will of God IS, indeed, our salvation, but as understood in O.T. terms, as it were, then maybe this understanding would inform how we lived out our salvation and help turn our attention to priorities of the kingdom. I encourage you because of your position in the conversation and your skill in communication, to lead this conversation to discovering again, for the first time!, the meaning of salvation.

Thanks – I first explored the word salvation in Adventures in Missing the Point, but gave it a more thorough treatment throughout A New Kind of Christianity.