Marilyn McCord Adams ( Christ and Horrors , Cambridge, 2006) proposes to demonstrate the coherence of Christology not by starting with sin and explaining how Christ has dealt with sin, but by starting with “horrors” and asking, What must Christ be and do if He is going to rescue us from the horrors of human existence. She defines horrors as experiences and evils that have “life-ruining potential,” things that “degrade the individual by destroying the possibility of positive personal meaning.”

Horror-defeat comes in three stages: a unity between a person’s horror-participation and his personal beatific vision of God; healing of the “horror-participant’s meaning-making capacities” that enables him to “recognize and appropriate some of the positive significance laid down in Stage I; and “recreating our relation to the material world so that we are no longer radically vulnerable to horrors.” In short, to defeat horror, we need God, God incarnate specifically, and the resurrection of the dead.

It’s a provocative and perhaps illuminating approach, but in Adams’s hands it comes at considerable cost. She begins with the claim that Divine-human relations, and human life generally, are “non-optimal,” and asks why that would be the case. Her answer is that there are a number of “metaphysical mismatches” that leave human beings vulnerable to horrors: a mismatch within human nature that makes human development painful, vulnerable, often botched; a mismatch between human nature and the material world; and “the enormous gap between Divine and human personal capacities . . . . What we are and what Divinity is make communication difficult and trust hard to win.”

This is not, she claims, gnostic. In fact, at the heart of her construct is God’s love for the material world and His desire to unite with it: “matter - material creation generally - must be good because God loves it . . . . Likewise, personality must be good because God is personal. Both are good; neither is intrinsically evil. Gnosticism and materialism are both false!” But then she adds: “Radical vulnerability to horrors arises because human psycho-spiritual powers are not reliably great enough to achieve and sustain an appropriate functional coordination between these two dimensions of human being in a material world such as this.” So, matter is good; but being material makes it difficult for us to commune with God.

Despite her protests, this is a form of gnosticism; and it is a denial of the original goodness of creation. When God pronounced all things good, He wasn’t merely talking about “matter” as such. He was talking about the whole cosmic and human condition. That is to say: It was good that God made man vulnerable, that He made man to develop and grow through fits and starts. To protest those features of the human condition is to protest createdness.

Adams wants to avoid dealing in “free will” constructs, which focus on sin. Unless we are willing to attribute the horrors to God Himself (which she does: “God participates in the horrors that God has perpetuated on us!”), we’re not going to be able to dispense with sin, with a fall, with the contingency of the horrors.