From corruption to glory: the son's redemptive assumption of fallen humanity in dogmatic dialogue with T. F. Torrance

For much of the Western theological tradition, divine-human reconciliation has been marred with a form of dualism between God’s saving work and the humanity of Jesus Christ, claims T.F. Torrance, a manifestation of what he dubbed the “Latin Heresy”. Here we examine Torrance’s attempt to recontextualise reconciliation within the constitution of the incarnate Son, to recover the soteriological principle of the Eastern Fathers that what is “unassumed is unhealed”, and thus move away from external, forensic or juridical categories of atonement by threading Christ’s assumption of fallen human nature through the very heart of his doctrine of the incarnation. Where contemporary debate of such a notion has struggled is in ambiguity of terms - some clarity must be brought to defining “fallenness”, particularly in relation to the Classical-Reformed categories of original guilt and corruption. The state of Christ's humanity also renders several dogmatic questions surrounding, namely, the integrity of His suffering and temptation; the temporal consistency of incarnational atonement being instantaneous and continuous; the consistency in application of the non-assumptus to human "person" as well as "nature"; the success of the non-assumptus in preventing the instrumentality of Christ's humanity; and the role of the Spirit in the incarnation. Beyond this, contentious historical work has left both “fallenness” and “unfallenness” theologians divided in interpretation of the same sources, with both Eastern and Western Fathers, in places, being made subservient to later theological structures and vocabulary, and the conceptual schism between the two exacerbated. This too, we seek to address. Emancipated from these constrictions, and perhaps with some common ground found, the fallenness debate should be able to progress more constructively.