A $1.50 word that I learned from Stephen Batchelor's book Confession of a Buddhist Atheist: "soteriology". It's the theology of salvation. Batchelor uses it in an important paragraph in Chapter 8:

... I realized that what I found difficult to accept in Buddhism were precisely those ideas and doctrines that it shared with its Indian sister religion Hinduism. Rebirth, the law of karma, gods, other realms of existence, freedom from the cycle of birth and death, unconditioned consciousness: these were all ideas that predated the Buddha. For many of his contemporaries, such notions would have been uncritically accepted as a description of how the world worked. They were not, therefore, intrinsic to what he taught, but simply a reflection of ancient Indian cosmology and soteriology.

(cf. Valorization of Mind over matter (2010-05-16), ...) - ^z - 2010-06-08