 Christ and salvation PETER BOUTENEFF Christian Orthodoxy has never restricted its doctrine of salvation to a single plane. Rather, the answers to the questions of how we are saved, and even what it means to be saved, rest simultaneously in multiple dimensions or paradigms. Salvation is understood as theosis (‘deification’), as communion, as illumination of understanding, as freedom from captiv- ity; it is achieved through Christ’s Incarnation, his divine-humanity, his teaching, his sacrifice on the Cross, the Church. Yet the registers within which we consider salvation are distinct only in human logic, where each must be discussed within its own boundaries: in truth they are thoroughly interdependent and distil to one reality. What unites all Orthodox thinking about salvation is the total focus on Jesus Christ. Christ is ‘the way, the truth, and the life’ (Jn :); we know no other name by which we may be saved (cf. Acts :). He is our salva- tion. But it goes the other way as well: our thinking about Christ centres on salvation. All of the patristic, conciliar and liturgical formulations about the person of Christ – some of which are abstruse and technical, some of which were arrived at through martyrdom – are ultimately concerned with our salvation. The pursuit of an understanding of the person of Christ utterly consumes Christian thinking precisely because everything is at stake. It is a matter of eternal life and death. This chapter will therefore maintain a double focus: on soteriology – reckoning on salvation – and on Christology – reckoning on Christ: two sides of the same coin. THE NEED FOR SALVATION The first point to establish about salvation is that we need it. To many, whether believers or not, this is already obvious. We need not look far into the world or into our own selves to know that the world, and we human beings first and foremost, are not well. To a Christian, the idea that this  Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2009 https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521864848.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press