text: Exactly.
  
  Until modern times, the notion that the Christ Event (the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus) caused our immortality (God became human in order that we might become divine, as Byzantine spirituality proclaims) was extraordinarily difficult to grasp. They assumed, as do huge numbers of modern humans, that TIME is the ultimate context within which everything takes place. Therefore, that something later (the Christ Event) could cause something earlier (the immorality of humanity from the beginning) was unthinkable.
  
  We, on the other hand, are taught by cosmologists that the time-space matrix and interchangeable matter-energy both came into existence with the big bang. Outside of our cosmos, where God exists, the Christ Event causing our immortality from our emergence, is a no-brainer. 
  
  The Orthodox dealt with the issue of a later event causing prior effect with their highly developed ritual of Holy Saturday (the harrowing of hell, in Western terms).