Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 83:1 (Spring 2021)
Article: Assuming Salvation: Cosmic Christ And Incarnation In Creation Theology
Author: Randall E. Otto

WTJ 83:1 (Spring 2021) p. 131

Assuming Salvation: Cosmic Christ And Incarnation In Creation Theology

Randall E. Otto

Randall E. Otto is Affiliate Faculty in the Christian Ministries program for Southwestern College in Wichita, KS, a Mentor in Humanities for Thomas Edison State University in Trenton, NJ, and Visiting Professor in Critical Reasoning for Chamberlain School of Nursing, global campus. He has also served for nearly thirty years as a Presbyterian pastor.

The patristic dictum, “what is not assumed is not healed,” targeted defective Christologies that compromised the fullness of human salvation by denying Christ’s complete humanity in the incarnation. Creaturely theology’s assertion that the Logos assumed all flesh to save all creatures transgresses the bounds of that dictum’s context and use, involving deeper Christological and trinitarian concerns inherent in panentheism, what Maximus would have described as a “defective God.” Christology is also at stake, since a proposition in Christology may not contradict a proposition about the Trinity. Whereas the patristic principle asserted the necessity of the Logos becoming fully human to save humanity, creation theology obviates that necessity in assuming that God’s identification and suffering with all creation in ongoing incarnation thereby saves all creatures apart from the once for all atoning work of Christ on the cross and his resurrection from the dead, everywhere in Scripture limited to humanity. His having become flesh means the Logos, God the Son, became fully human for the salvation of human beings and cannot be taken to mean that he permanently entered all biological life, which compromises orthodox teaching on the Trinity, Christology, and the significance of the incarnation.

In the fall of 379 or spring of 380, Gregory of Nazianzus urged those who would know and serve God to “gain mastery over the materiality that drags one downwards. But before one has elevated this materiality as far as possible, and has sufficiently purified one’s ears and one’s intelligence, I do not think it is safe either to accept a position of spiritual leadership or to devote oneself to theology.”1 This counsel against inordinate focus on materiality is from the same theologian whose famous words against the Apollinarians are

WTJ 83:1 (Spring 2021) p. 132

a favorite of creaturely theologians who maintain the Logos was made flesh in all cosmic material to save all things.

“That which He has not assumed He has not healed” (Ep. 101), from the summer of 382 or fall of 383,2 are words of “the Theologian,” as Gregory was called, ...