2 - Scholarly Approaches to Physicalist Soteriology

Summary

Physicalist soteriology is a scholarly category created by the nineteenth-century German liberal Protestants. Because they immediately connected physicalism with heterodoxy, subsequent scholars have – through methodologically untenable approaches – frequently rejected physicalism as a logic that has no historical existence. A review of scholarship on physicalist soteriology – within development of doctrine studies, studies of individual early Christian authors, and deification studies – reveals that physicalist soteriology has been subsumed into other scholarly projects and has rarely been the direct subject of scholarly study. The six major early Christian proponents of physicalist soteriology, namely Athanasius, Hilary of Poitiers, Marius Victorinus, Gregory of Nyssa, Cyril of Alexandria, and Maximus the Confessor, are introduced.