Incarnational Union Soteriology Research Paper

In very simple words as one could put it, Incarnational Union Soteriology is this: God goes to hell, so that hell goes to God. More exactly, Incarnational Union Soteriology is a soteriology that focuses on the Incarnation, the Word becoming Flesh, and in the words of the Church fathers that "[i]n Christ, God becomes human, so that humans can become God" (CP2 28). It is through the Incarnation that humanity is divinized, yet in order for us to share divinity with God, God must become and share in our humanity. Christ could not have possibly healed us without being both fully human and fully divine, as without human nature he could not have the sickness to understand, nor the medicine to heal us. As stated above, God had to become human in …show more content…
Even Christ, as Johnson writes, was "no exception to perhaps the only ironclad rule in all of nature, [he] died, his life bleeding out in a spasm of state violence" (6), further connecting the Incarnation to the natural world in that not even he, God, can escape the universal law of "death," but also more specifically that God chose to take on and suffer in this body made of "stardust" in order to unite this "stardust" that is stained in sin to the cure, the untouched, pure divinity in this painful, harrowing way. Following up, "humans becoming God" also lies within the Resurrection, where Christ descended into hell in order to bring hell and all of creation to God. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ was not only a feat for God, but also a feat for creation, that through Christ, as Johnson writes, it is the "outcome of his death [that] signals [that] a blessed future awaits all who go through the shattering of death, which is everyone" (6). This again connects all beings with God, that the same fate of death to divinity is possible for all of creation through our own "Resurrections" into new life with