To recap, the fall of humanity from the instant of creation had hamartiological effects and ontological effects. In the last few posts we've worked through the hamartiological side of this equation, drawing attention to the atonement made available to us from the foundation of the world and the necessity of us responding to that atonement.
And yet, sin isn't the only thing involved with our fall from grace. As described in the early posts of this series, when humanity severed its connection with God it experienced an "ontological drop" into contingency. Created being began drifting toward non-being. Death, disease, damage and decay came to shadow creaturely existence.
Without God's intervention all of created being would fade away. Creatures, being creatures, cannot hold themselves in being. Thus, death is the destiny of everyone and everything.
Given this slide toward non-being, God acts to reconnect creation with Himself. An ontological cord is created to tether creation to God, preventing its slide into non-existence. The establishment of this connection is called the Incarnation. In the Incarnation, God's Being is connected to created being. The hypostatic union of Christ's two natures, human and divine, is the ontological cord God provides to reconnect the severed ontological relation between God and the cosmos.
Perhaps the best patristic expression of these ideas comes from Athanasius in Contra Gentes:
For the nature of created things, having come into being from nothing, is unstable, and is weak and mortal when considered by itself...So seeing that all created nature according to its own definition is in a state of flux and dissolution, therefore to prevent this happening and the universe dissolving back into nothing, after making everything by his own eternal Word and bringing creation into existence, [God] did not abandon it to be carried away and suffer through its own nature, lest it run the risk of returning to nothing...lest it suffer what would happen...a relapse into non-existence, if it were not protected by the Word.
Again, in the Incarnation creation and God are reconnected and, following Athanasius, this halts our drift into non-being. Where the first Adam breaks the ontological connection with God the second Adam restores the connection. The Incarnation is God's response to the "ontological drop" of created existence into contingency. This is how the Incarnation, following a great deal of patristic thought, is, in itself, salvific. Where the cross of Christ concerns the hamartiological aspects of our salvation, the Incarnation concerns the ontological. Christmas saves as much as the cross.
The hypostatic union of the Incarnation, the connection between Christ's two natures, created being and uncreated Being, establishes an "ontological bridge" between our contingent existence and God's own Life. As contingent creatures, the only way we can escape from non-being is to cross over this bridge. If we fail to cross this bridge our being remains contingent and continues its drift toward non-being. Death remains our destiny.
For those who cross over the ontological bridge contingency is overcome through our reconnection with God's vivifying life. For those connected to Christ, death has been defeated.
