Among Protestants, salvation has mainly been viewed in forensic terms, through a crime and punishment perspective, where issues of guilt, judgment, and forgiveness are the main issues. Though a sinner, I am forgiven because of Christ's sacrifice and God's grace.
While there has been a lot of pushback about these soteriological themes, especially the package called penal substitutionary atonement, guilt and forgiveness are clearly Biblical motifs when it comes to salvation. So I am not dismissing this perspective.
What I am suggesting, however, is that when you read the church fathers their concerns are more ontological than forensic. Specifically, while they are concerned with the issue of guilt in the wake of sin, they are also deeply concerned with the ontological damage of sin. When separated from God material reality, due to its insubstantial and ghostly nature, is doomed to decay and corruption. Ontologically separated from God, material reality is teetering on the brink of non-being, fading into non-existence.
Much of what we witness in the world is this slide into corruption and non-being. Sickness, decay, damage, and death. Given this situation, what the world needs is less a clean slate, an innocent verdict in a court of law, than ontological repair. This is what happens in the Incarnation and resurrection, the reunion of flesh and Spirit. In Christ, the ontological rift between material reality and Spirit is healed, rescuing us from the forces of death and decay. That is how the church fathers viewed salvation. Salvation is ontological repair, where, as Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 15, the corruptibility of material reality is clothed in incorruptibility. Our transition into the spiritual realm doesn't make us ghostly souls, but makes us more solidly real.
