Human salvation has been at the heart of Christian theological debate ever since the earliest centuries of Christianity. In this period, some Christians argued that because all of humanity falls in Adam, the incarnation of Christ, who is the second Adam, must also have a universal effect. Ellen Scully here presents the first historical study of Early Christian theology regarding physicalist soteriology, a logic by which Christ's incarnation has universal effects independent of individual belief or consent. Analyzing the writings of Athanasius, Hilary of Poitiers, Marius Victorinus, Gregory of Nyssa, Cyril of Alexandria, and Maximus the Confessor, she offers an overview of the historical rise and fall of the theological logic of physicalist soteriology. Scully also provides an analysis of how Early Christian theological debates concerning ascetism and ensoulment models have caused Christian narratives of salvation history to become individualistic, and suggests how a contemporary study of physicalist soteriology can help reverse this trend.

‘This erudite scholarly analysis of theological method is highly useful for scholars in the field … Recommended.’

J. P. Blosser Source: CHOICE

‘Human Salvation in Early Christianity traces a distinct, if short-lived and minority, feature of early Christian thought: ‘physicalism.’ The term is not new, but in this book Ellen Scully aims to regularize (and correct) loose treatments of this feature over the last two centuries of scholarship. She does so both to aid further historical scholarship on late ancient thought and to make that scholarship useful for constructive contemporary appropriation. … Scully’s book ably criticizes such problems from earlier generations of scholars who assumed too much on behalf of ‘physicalism.’ This book exposes their misinterpretations based on too strong a sense of what physicalism ‘must’ be, combined frequently with only incidental treatment of it in studies focused on other topics. It brings the kind of focused attention that is required to clarify the actual contours of a pattern of thinking, its intellectual conditions and logical entanglements with other topics, and more.’

Brad Boswell Source: Ancient Jew Review