ABSTRACT
Marilyn McCord Adams presents a distinctive approach to salvation in Christ relative to the defeat of horrors. Adams notes Paul Tillich's statement relative to the history of soteriology that for the ancients, death was the problem; for the medievals as for both Protestants and counter-reformers, sin was the problem; for modern man, meaning is the problem. Adams explains the fundamental reason why the human condition generally and Divine-human relations specifically are non-optimal is that God has created us radically vulnerable to horrors, by creating us as embodied persons, personal animals, enmattered spirits in a material world of real or apparent scarcity. It also explains the eventual post-mortem beatific intimacy with God is an incommensurate good for human persons; Divine identification with human participation in horrors confers a positive aspect on such experiences by integrating them into the participant's relationship with God.
