ABSTRACT
It has been argued that any account of the economy of salvation must take full account of the totality and particularity of the Gospel accounts of the incarnate Christ. This is because Christian orthodoxy witnesses to the faith that the historical mission of the incarnate Son expresses the eternal nature of the triune God. The nub of the issue is the way in which the incarnate Son's relations with others, and indeed his whole engagement with the temporality of human history, is to be characterized. The fact of Jesus' limitation, his immediacy to God bounded by immersion in human history, was itself within the providence of God. The economy of salvation, therefore, cannot be properly understood by focusing solely on the incarnate Word. The kind of understanding of incarnation and limitation is able to offer some illumination in relation to the tension between providence and tragedy as descriptive of the place of Judas Iscariot in Christology.
