Bonhoeffer: Salvation is Cosmic, not Individualist
From Bonhoeffer’s letters:
Hasn’t the individualistic question about personal salvation almost completely left us all? Aren’t we really under the impression that there are more important things than that question…? I know it sounds pretty monstrous to say that. But, fundamentally, isn’t this in fact biblical? Does the question about saving one’s soul appear in the Old Testament at all? Aren’t righteousness and the Kingdom of God on earth the focus of everything, and isn’t it true that Rom. 3.24ff. is not an individualistic doctrine of salvation, but the culmination of the view that God alone is righteous? It is not with the beyond that we are concerned, but with this world as created and preserved, subjected to laws, reconciled, and restored. What is above this world is, in the gospel, intended to exist for this world; I mean that, not in the anthropocentric sense of liberal, mystic pietistic, ethical theology, but in the biblical sense of the creation and of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
[John de Gruchy. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Witness to Jesus Christ (Making of Modern Theology) (p. 280). Kindle Edition.]
This seemed at least tangentially related to the current debate on the New Perspective on Paul.
My name is Aaron Rathbun, and I'm a graduate student in philosophical theology at Yale Divinity School. Husband and father of three, my chief interests are postsecular political theology, critical theory, postfoundationalist epistemology and hermeneutics. My hope is to serve the Church, to best be "in this world, but not of it." 
I agree with Bonhoeffer’s contextualized call not to ignore the larger need for a salvation beyond the personal and mystical level of the individual, whose end can be a self righteous cultural narcissism. However, I would not conclude this as an absolute argument to ignore, for lack of a better metaphor, the human heart. Hence, I would suggest it must be both, and what needs redirecting is our overemphasis on either. In a “post-western” world we continue to be vulnerable to modernist approaches to the nature of human experience as if we (humans) can be sectioned off in neat academic and theological categories. To talk about salvation as “cosmic” is a useful metaphor if it includes, in a quantum sense, the awareness of the connectivity of all these aspects that influence one another. Consequently, I must see the counter metaphor of salvation, “The Fall,” as not simply a human experience, but one of the cosmos (within time), and the “Reign of God” as a real and constructed idea about what conditions humans (cosmic/self) will need for restoration and reconciliation to a former relating to the eternal and to each other. However, I am always limited to the construction of cosmos as it relates to the human condition, even as it draws me out of an anthropocentric notion of reality.