Understanding Orthodoxy: How we think and talk about God by Archbishop Lazar

THINKING THEOLOGICALLY
    INTENT

    We are not going to re-examine the already familiar list of conflicting beliefs that separate the Western creeds from the Orthodox Christian Church, but rather speak of the way so many people think and talk about God — the way they "theologize" about Him. Roman Catholicism and Protestantism have essentially the same mind — the same culture and history — and, in the final analysis, the same religion; hence, it is not difficult to delineate both together as "Western" in their theological approach and trace this fact to the idea and method of law or what we would call the "juridical concept" of religion, begun in the universities of the Latin Middle Ages.
    The theology, or rather the approach to theologizing, in the Orthodox Christian Church, is sharply different from the Western approach. Her theologizing is different because her Christianity is different — and it is this, more than any other factor, which accounts for the so-called "separation of the Churches" — or, more precisely, the schism of the old Roman patriarchate from the Eastern patriarchates of the Christian Church, and ultimately the creation of the Roman Catholic Church by Charlemagne.

  Thus, if our evidence has any meaning, we may characterize the Western approach to "theologizing" as "legal" and its theologians as "lawyers." Their aim has been the achievement of universal "righteousness" through juridical justice, an approach that makes the concept of righteousness moralistic in a way that many Eastern theologians would perceive as a kind of "moral fascism." The process had been toward the rational elucidation of faith — ordinarily defined as "assent without knowledge" — to "the certainty of rational knowledge" actually produced by reflective reasoning within the realm of the legal concept. Even for fundamentalists (who claim not to theologize), the "sola scriptura" interpretations of the Bible have been clearly shaped and formed by the juridical legal concept.

    THE "MYSTIC"
    Orthodox Christian Theology

    The authentic patristic theologizing of the Orthodox Church is not an intellectual enterprise, but the struggle for the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, as the Holy New Testament Prophet St Seraphim of Sarov reminds us. This acquisition of the Holy Spirit leads to union with God in Christ (theosis); thus, Orthodox theologians have been neither academicians nor lawyers but "mystics," though in an Orthodox Christian understanding of the word. In the West, theology has been primarily a dialectical exercise, while in the East, it has been perceived primarily as an ontological process, an existential experience, that is, the theology must be shaped by a living encounter, an actual experiencing in contemplative prayer (theoria) of the object of the theologizing.
    One of the greatest of the authentic Church fathers, St Gregory the Theologian (328-390) presents us with a typical example of "mystical" theologizing in his Theological Orations. In the first Oration (I, 1-2), he spoke against "the proud ones" who "delight in profane rhetoric, and oppositions of science falsely so-called, and strive about words which have no profit (1Tm.6:20; 2Tm.2:14)."The proud ones [who theologize rationalistically]" cheapen the faith and thereby put "our great mystery" in danger of becoming of "little moment." Then, he declares:

        Not to everyone, my friends, does it belong to theologize about God; not to everyone — the subject is not so cheap and low; and also, not before every audience, nor at all times, nor on all points; but only on certain occasions, and before some people, and within certain limits.
        Not by all or to all men, because it is permitted only to those who have  been examined and are masters of contemplation, and who have been previously purified in soul and body, or, at the very least, are being purified. For the impure to touch the pure is, we may say, perilous, just as it is unsafe to fix weak eyes on the rays of the sun.
        We are permitted to theologize only when we are free from all external defilement or disturbances, and when that which rules within us is neither confused by vexatious images. For it is necessary to be dispassionate to know God... to whom the subject is of genuine concern, and not those who make theology a matter of pleasant gossip, like any other thing, after the races or the theatre or dinner. To such men as these, idle jests and petty contradictions about this subject is part of their amusement (I, 3).

    What, according to St Gregory the Theologian and the other fathers, may we know about God? A summary of their theology is found in Concise Exposition of the Orthodox Faith by St John the Damascene:

        We, therefore, both know and confess that God is without beginning, endless, eternal and everlasting, uncreated, unchangeable, invariable, simple, immaterial, invisible, uncircumscribable, infinite, beyond knowledge and definition, incomprehensible, good, just, creator, almighty, omniscient, sovereign judge…of one essence in three persons: the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all one in every respect save that the Father is, the Son is begotten, the Holy Spirit proceeds... (I, 2).

    Perhaps nothing could more clearly reveal the mystical quality of Orthodox Christian theology than these words of Saint Gregory of Nyssa:

        Seeing that you have stretched forth that which is before you with a great desire, and you never experience complete satiation in your progress, nor are you aware of any limit to the good, as your longing calls you on to ever more and more: here is a place that is so vast that he who runs in it will never be able to reach the end of his course. And yet from another point of view, this course has stability; for God said, `I will set you on the rock' (Ex.33:22). But here we have a very great paradox: motion and stability are identical. For usually speaking, one who is rising is not standing still, and the one who is standing still is not rising. But here, one arises precisely because he is stationary.
        I think this idea quite fills all that we have already said. When God speaks of a place, He does not mean a space which can be quantitatively measured, but rather by using the analogy of a measurable surface, He is guiding the reader to a reality which is infinite and without limit. (St Gregory of Nyssa)

Moreover, St Gregory the Theologian says of his contemplation of the Holy Trinity:

            So soon as I conceive the One I am illumined by the splendour of the Three: As soon as I distinguish  Three, I am carried back into the One. When I consider any of the Three, I think of Him as the whole....I cannot grasp the greatness of the One so as to attribute a greater greatness to the rest. When I contemplate the Three together, I see but one torch, and cannot divide or measure out the undivided light.

    It may be that much of the difficulty the West has with the dogma of the Trinity arises from their desire to explain things which cannot be explained, but can only be experienced in theoria.

    ESSENCE AND ENERGY
   
    In describing God with apophatic or negative language, St John tells that "the hidden God" may be compared to nothing created, hence there can be no analogia such as Augustine of Hippo erroneously taught. There can be absolutely no analogy between God and created things, and any attempt to make such an analogy is, without fail, idolatry. We can only say what He is not, and hedge ourselves about to keep us from falling into idolatry or heresy. Because He has made Himself known to the world as the Holy Trinity, we may make references to Him in kataphatic language as "good" or "just" or "merciful," and so forth, but such terms have no reference to His essence and offer no analogies. As St John Damascene observes in another passage, "It is not within our capacity to say anything about God or even to think of Him, beyond the things which have been divinely revealed to us, whether by the Word or by some manifestation, or by the divine oracles, whether of the Old or New Testaments."
    This "theologizing" will gain more significance for us when we understand that St John Damascene and both the holy fathers before him and those after him do not come to these conclusions about God through speculation. Speculation, incidentally, is the source of post-Orthodox Western innovations, which led to the tampering with the Apostolic Tradition and, consequently, to a theory of doctrinal development among the Scholastics — a theory whose fine-tuning climaxed in Cardinal John Henry Newman's An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). For this reason, too, the West felt they had much more to say about God's nature and so-called "attributes" than is found either in the Scipture or the authentic holy fathers. The East would not accept as holy fathers such writers as Origin, Tertullian, Lactanius or Augustine of Hippo, whose theologizing introduces neo-platonism and seeks to explore the essence and inner nature of God, even if only by pantheistic analogies. Their theology is the child of law and Hellenistic philosophy (even that of Tertullian who declared the philosophers to be the "patriarchs of heretics"). It is this same theologizing that led to the production of the filioque — the idea that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, a model of the Trinity nowhere found in Scripture or the fathers .
    Western theologians also pictured God in almost human, anthropomorphic terms, not in relation to the Incarnation of the Son, but in relation to the Father also, and to the Essence of God, on account of their "legal theology" (as we shall see) and, because following Augustine, they did not distinguish between God in Himself (apart from the creation) and the arrangement of Hypostases ("Persons") upon His entering time in His Plan for the Divine ekonomy (dispensation; providence and salvation), for the creature — in which the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son.
    The Western lack of distinction between the Essence and Energy of God is of singular importance. Like so many of the heresies and errors in the West, this one also arose from Augustine of Hippo.
    The lack of an awareness of the distinction between God's Essence and His Energy led to a dry and rigid theology of "Essence," which was empty of every real notion of freedom. So little can be said of the Essence of God that no vital and valid concept of the interaction between God and man could be elucidated. This theology must, therefore, be formed in legal terms that express "laws" of theology, just as science lays down the "laws of nature." This will help explain the West's thoroughly heretical doctrine of atonement. Essence based theology (or "Essential theology") is subject to necessity, just as natural philosophy is subject to natural necessity. Thus Western theology is never "ontology" but is always a phenomenology of Essence. In this way, Western theology is an exposition of rational arguments, a sort of legal mathematics rather than a quest for meaning.
    Meaning presupposes an interaction between man and God, between the cosmos and God. If, however, one does not theologize in terms of the Energy of God, but only in terms of His Essence, then there can be no such interaction. Rather, the world is filled by an absence of God, as in Bergman's films, an absence which is the source of cosmic absurdity.
    Evangelical Protestants, unable to comprehend or cope with this problem reduced the interaction between man and God to a sentimental, pietistic slogan, and meaningless, emotionalistic "relationship with Jesus" and an egoistic "Christ as my own personal Saviour." The real and immediate both personal and collective "relationship" between man and God would remain both incomprehensible and unattainable under such circumstances and every effort to substitute such pietistic emotionalism for the truth can lead only to delusion and perhaps pantheism.
    Finally, the West in its "theologizing" failed to maintain the patristic witness to the Uncreated Energies of God. This is the "mystical theology" which reveals that in Himself God is forever hidden while through His Energies (e.g., divine grace) He guides and protects the world. It is by virtue of these Energies that the saved shall participate in God, that is, the Uncreated Energy of grace, a gift of the Holy Spirit through God the Son Who became man.
    The Uncreated Energies of God were clearly understood, though not regularly discussed in much detail in the Church until this "mystical theology" was challenged by the Augustinian West in the 14th century. Our holy and God-bearing father, St Gregory Palamas (1296-1359) stepped forward to defend it at that time. In the process of this defence, all the ancient manifestations and expressions of the Uncreated Energy, from the Burning Bush of Moses to the manifestations of divine grace always at work in the Church, were given exposition in a more concrete form. Again, St Gregory's reasoning was not legal or rationalistic, not "scientific." Moreover, the God preached by St Gregory was not "the most real Being" of Western rational categories as, for example, the classification of God as the "Primal Cause." His God was beyond rational knowledge; He is not "Being" at all. As St Gregory Palamas mentions, God Himself presented His Person as "The One Who Is." He did not refer to Himself as actus purus as the West does. God is beyond any understanding of His Being, but He is still the Source of all beings and personal hypostases.
    Saint Gregory did not claim to have discovered the distinction between "Essence" and "Energy" in God. He was not in search of "objectivity" through methodical doubt and logic. Neither should we forget that St Gregory was a monk and a holy man whose success as a defender of the Faith came from God — from his vital encounter with the indwelling Holy Spirit.
    Unlike Anselm of Canterbury, for example, who sought to prove, whenever possible, all aspects of his religion "by reason alone," without revelation or faith, St Gregory's theology rested upon the divine and immutable Tradition of the Church, upon faith grounded in experiential encounter.

    THE LAWYER AND THE LAWS OF NECESSITY
    The Theology of the non-Orthodox West

    The method of"theologizing" in the West has been described as "legal" (and philosophical), its theologians as "lawyers." Can this assertion be justified? Something else must be said before we address this question. By the 12th century, medieval law, civil and ecclesiastical, had not only become a "science," but the exemplar for all other intellectual disciplines, including "theology." The connection between law and theology can be seen, for instance, in their common technique.
    Both practised the art of posing questions, followed by objections to it. A contrary statement is made which favours the position implicit in the question. Often beginning with the response, "I answer that" the complete argument for the affirmative position is made, appealing to logic, to more ecclesiastical and secular authorities, Scriptures, ending with a "solution" or "conclusion" to the question. The writer, then, answers the initial objections to his position. There is no better use of this technique in the Latin Middle Ages than the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274).
    This way of reasoning was borrowed from the canon and civil lawyers in the universities. They adapted Roman and Germanic law and customs; and, at the same time, they were probably inspired by thinkers of the 11th and 12th centuries, such as Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) and Abelard of Paris (1079-1143), who did not hesitate to subject the aspects of the Christian Faith to criticism. They were the pioneers of a new era, an era which began with the development of a new concept of the Church as a legal, corporate entity alongside her own definition of herself as "the mystical body of Christ."
    Anselm provides us with the perfect example of legal-juridical theologizing. In his famous Why God Became Man (Cur Deus Homo), he hoped to provide those who implored him to write such a work with the understanding of something in which they already believe — that Christ is God incarnate. "Although what ought to be sufficient," he explains, "has been said by the holy fathers and their successors, yet I will take pains to disclose to the inquirers what God has seen fit to lay open to me." Anselm states that he will proceed "by questions and answers," "objections and replies," inasmuch as this method makes the subject "more plain to many." "Therefore, the rational existence of the truth must first be shown, I mean the necessity, which proves that God ought to or could have condescended to those things which we affirm".
    Why God Became Man is Anselm's "Doctrine of the Atonement" — a term unfamiliar and alien to the Church fathers — the reason why God had to save man through the Cross. We ought to be aware that his teaching on this matter is an innovation, unknown to the Christian world until his time. The theory of "the Atonement" was indeed an attempt to interpret the Scriptures differently from the witness delivered to the Church by the holy fathers and, therefore, tacit in Anselm's theologizing is a view of the Church and her doctrine as evolving and that previously non-existent doctrine could be created, even when it radically altered the previously existing doctrine of the Church.
    Anselm abandoned the ancient belief of the Church that Christ was our "ransom." He gave Himself as a victim to the grave in order to accomplish the liberation of man (Mk.10:45; 1Tm.2:16). Before we go any further, we must strongly point out that the Greek word, lytron being used here refers to something of value being given; it does not bear the connotation of "blackmail," but as something completely voluntary given without constraint. In the Book of Hosea, which we are about to quote, the term for ransom is padah which means to "set free." As the Lord revealed to the Prophet, "I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death" (Hos. 13:14). Dying and rising voluntarily from the dead, Christ destroyed the tyranny of the devil who controlled the human race through the power and fear of death, "Man was all his lifetime held in bondage to him who held the power of death" (Hb.2:14-15). Thus, having freed the race of Adam from death and sin, Christ offered a "new creation" to God the Father. We can redeem or ransom something only from the one who holds it in bondage or captivity. Mankind had sold himself into bondage through sin (Rm.7:14).
    It is clear that man was "ransomed" out of bondage to Satan by being freed from the power and fear of death (Hb.2:14-15; 1Tm.2:5-6), whereas the Western Doctrine of Atonement clearly states that man was redeemed from God the Father, and that this was acccomplished by a legal fiction. It requires the notion that God Himself is subject to immutable laws which require a juridical justice before He is allowed to offer a fiction of forgiveness (a fiction since punishment and forgiveness are mutually exclusive).
    The ambition of Anslem was to provide the Church with a rationalized legal explanation of Christ's death "by necessary reasons." To summarize, He depicted God in terms of the current legal system, as a feudal Lord who demanded "satisfaction" for the offence done to His honour by man. Formerly, sin was understood as an act of the passions which alienated man from God (not God from man). In the hands of Anslem and his Scholastic colleagues, sin was now a wrongful, that is, illegal or illicit act, desire or thought which violated God's Justice (justitia) — a breach of law. The "original sin" of the first man, in particular, had everlasting consequences because it dishonoured the eternal Judge. This also provided a novel Doctrine of Original Sin, also unheard of by the Church fathers, who spoke of the Ancestral Sin, as a poisoning of the stream, but never conceived of Original Sin as inherited guilt, as the West defined it.
    God's justice, Anselm shockingly asserts, demands a "satisfaction" which no mortal can make. Man must be punished and forfeit the blessedness for which he was created. But this would frustrate God's purpose once again so God had to do something about it. Who, then, could "atone" or "make up for," "pay the price for" the offence to God's honour or, what is the same thing, the violation of His justice? From his legalistic point of view, Anselm could not conceive that God could simply dismiss man's guilt and its consequences; it would be contrary to Anselm's (and the West's) concept of His juridical justice. Only God could make satisfaction and only man was required to do so. The answer was the God-man. He alone could atone for the offence and fulfil the demands of divine justice. The Incarnation of Jesus Christ is necessary, Anselm asserted, and His Cross was necessary, if God was to be compensated. Since only the Son is equal to the Father, only the Son of God could pay the price of sin, reconciling man to God and thereby restore the creation to its original purpose. In such a legal system, the reality is that what is asserted here is that Christ redeemed man from God.
    Anselm's speculation on the Atonement (among other things) laid the foundation for a new jurisprudence. He answered all the questions in relation to Christ's redemption in terms of legalistic, juridical justice, legal justice, justice as "the right order of things," or, in this case, "the order of creation" formed by God. Anselm argued that sin, left to itself, would constitute a deficiency in the justice of God. To be sure, God is merciful, but from a legalistic point of view, His mercy could not be allowed to trump His justice. In the words of Professor Berman, Anselm's theology is a "theology of law."
    Unlike this Western theory of Atonement, the teaching of the Orthodox Church on the purpose of the Incarnation or "God become man" is a doctrine of divine condescension and co-suffering love. Man's salvation is not the result of a legal transaction, but of God's co-suffering love. He looked upon man not only as a sinner, but as a victim of the devil, a slave to death, suffering from a sinful condition not entirely of his own making. Unlike the Western theory of Atonement in which the Son is punished in our place on the Cross to compensate God for His offended majesty, in the doctrine of the Orthodox Church, Christ goes voluntarily to Calvary to "destroying death by [His] Death and upon those in the grave bestowing life" (Paschal Troparion).
    That the doctrine of Atonement should have been shaped in the medieval West by concepts of legal juridicalism, while in the East, the doctrine remained an ontological process of union with God through the Holy Spirit, made possible by the victory of Jesus Christ and His recapitulation of creation, is perhaps the most vivid example of the difference between the Eastern and Western processes and approaches to theology.
    Of course, religious doctrines and liturgical forms changed with the Protestant Reformation, but not the manner of theologizing. Not without reason did Alexander Herzen call it "the final stage of the Middle Ages." In fact, Western theologizing did not really change until the 19th century when all the intellectual disciplines were overwhelmed by a new "historical consciousness" initiated by the German philosoper Georg Hegel (1770-1831). The ideas of "changes" and "development" came to dominate the thinking of the West. History explained the existence of everything explainable. Karl Marx is the most famous example of this attitude.
    From this "philosophy of history" grew "Protestant liberalism" — the father of which was Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Differentiating "liberalism" and "conservativism," Protestantism re-examined the divinity of Christ and the inerrant Bible as the inspired word. The former questioned and often rejected both, following rather the lead of modern science and philosophy. Liberals held that Christianity must now, as it has before, change to accommodate the times.
    Having subjected the Old and New Testaments to brutal analysis, liberal theologians went in quest of the "true Jesus," "the historical Christ" as opposed to the what they considered to be the "mythical Christ of Faith" found in the Bible. Not a few 19th century thinkers argued that Christianity is a religion of purely naturalistic origin which, in some instances, depended on fraud to establish and spread its message. Necessarily, then, these theologians and Biblical critics changed, if they did not simply reject, everything in Christianity which they viewed as "traditional." Yet, theologizing remained ever the same. Theologians were still lawyers and "Christianity" was on trial (as it still is by such essentially liberal Protestant forces as the "Jesus Seminar" and the Ecumenical Movement.
    Take up any text on the "principles of systematic theology" and the reader (with any knowledge of Western theology and its history) will discover no fundamental change of spirit and method.
    As a paradigm of modern theologizing, we turn to the eminent Lutheran theologian, Bishop Gustav Aulen (1879-1977), former Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Lund (Sweden). He writes that "theology" is a "science" (albeit some deny it). Whatever the case, theologians customarily view theology as an intellectual discipline whose only purpose is to understand the Faith. He makes no mention of holiness as the precondition of theologizing — whether understood as the study of anything pertaining to religion or as only the "knowledge of God." In his The Faith of the Christian Church, Aulen delineates "the function of systematic theology."
    First, this theology "has as its object of study the Christian faith. The intention of the discipline is to clarify the significance and meaning of the Christian faith with all the means at its disposal." The task is not to prove or defend the Faith, but to offer a critical analysis of it. "Theology" must not pretend to tell people what they ought to believe. "Everything is concentrated on the attempt to understand the faith and to present the ideas and viewpoints of faith itself with the greatest possible clarity."
    Furthermore, since the Christian Church is divided, theology is not bound by confessional limitations. Looked at this way, "the function of systematic theology is purely scientific insofar as its task is to clarify the significance of the Christian faith. It can serve the Christian life only by performing this scientific study without any secondary purpose."
    We have read such words before: "study" means to be "scientific" (as Aulen admits); and to be "scientific" is to discover, record, verify, formulate, unafraid to use the results of other science and philosophy, even as Aquinas used Aristotle. As the Scholastics before him, Aulen sought to "understand the faith." He wanted more than what the Scriptures (which rest on faith) and the Church fathers (who have been superseded) have to offer. Reason is his tool in the achievement of this end. His use of reason differs in no fundamental way from Scholastic and Reform theologians, although he would have furiously denied that his modern philosophizing was "legal." Aulen's mind was shaped by his Western religion and culture which never dispelled the power of law.

    CONCLUSION

    If the theologizing of the authentic Church fathers and the Orthodox theologians who followed them is "mystical," it is precisely because they never abandoned "the tradition of the Apostles." They recognize that "theology" (knowledge of God) and the other teachings (ekonomy) of the Church constitute "the Faith" of the Church. What they have delivered to us by way of their writings, hymns, and icons comes from Christ, certified in the Holy Spirit.
    The saving Truth of the Church never changes. It is today what it was when it was first delivered to the believing community. Of course, from time to time, when confronted with heresy, her Councils placed the Faith in words (formulas) — such as the Symbol of Faith (the Nicean Creed) which was recited at baptism and during the Divine Liturgy. If theologians express theology using a vocabulary developed by earlier philosophers, it is not with the purpose of transforming what we believe into something we can know scientifically, but to defend, to explain, to give it form in order to instruct her children and to let the world know where she stands.
    There is a "ladder of knowledge" even as there is a "ladder of virtues." Some things the Church professes must be held on faith, others human reason can prove or explain, while the highest things are grasped only by a special knowledge — one bestowed by the Holy Spirit. This kind of knowledge is not cognitive, but comes by uncreated grace to the holy ones among God's Own. These are the dispassionate (apatheia), the strugglers, men and women who, like St Mary of Egypt, live in this world as if without being in this world. In their contemplation of things divine, the Holy Spirit rewards them with a vision of heavenly realms and another age; and sometime, as with St Arsenios of Constantinople or St Symeon the New Theologian, they are visited by God's Uncreated Light, a revelation of the future Glory which is the destiny of His elect.
    To conclude, the purpose of Christian theologizing is not "faith becoming rational knowledge" (fides quaerens intellectum), nor even the rational or beatific vision of God; but "the acquisition of the Holy Spirit" Who gives "to us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge (epignoseos) of Him that has called us to glory and virtue: whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these you might become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust" (2Pet.1:3-4).

    A BRIEF SUMMARY OF
THE NATURE OF REDEMPTION

    The Orthodox concept of redemption may be briefly epitomized as follows: the meaning of "atonement" is really "to remove (or overcome) the cause of separation." In other words, man is separated from God by sin (that is, by his constant "missing of the mark") and so he is in bondage to death. Since man sins continually because of the power of death (which is held by Satan), sin separates man from God and death perpetuates the separation (and vice versa). By death, we fall short (again, by "missing the mark" — sin) of our original destiny, which is to live through unity with the Creator. We are ransomed by Christ from the power of death, so that we can become partakers of the divine essence and share in immortality, which is belongs to God alone.
    The following summary of the Orthodox teaching about redemption is drawn from various works by Fr John Romanides:

    Christ saves men, who have fallen through their own fault into the power of the devil, by breaking that power. He became Man for this purpose; He lived and died and rose again that He might break the chains by which men were bound. It is not His death alone, but the entire Incarnation, of which His death was a necessary part, that freed men from their captivity to Satan. By becoming Man, living a sinless life, and rising from the dead (which He could not have done unless He had first died), He introduced a new power into human nature. This power is bestowed on all men who are willing to receive it, through the Holy Spirit. Those who receive it are united with Christ in His Mystical Body, the Church; the corrupted human nature (the bad habits and evil desires, which St Paul calls "the old man": Rm.6:6; Eph.4:22; Col.3:9) is driven out by degrees until at last it is expelled altogether, and the redeemed person becomes entirely obedient to the will of God, as our Lord Himself was when on earth. The prisoner is set free from the inside; both his mind and body are changed; he comes to know what freedom is, to desire it and, by the Holy Spirit working within him, to break his chains, turn the key and leave the dungeon. Thus he is freed from the power of sin. God forgives him, as an act of pure love; but the condition of his forgiveness is that he must sin no more. "While we were yet sinners Christ died for us" (Rm.5:8-9) but, if we continue to be sinners, Christ's death for us will have been in vain; and we are made capable of ceasing to be sinners by the power of Christ's Resurrection, which has given us the power to struggle against sinfulness, toward moral perfection.

    The advantage of this Orthodox teaching is that it is firmly based on the New Testament. "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself" (2Cor.5:19); the act of reconciliation is effected by God in the Person of His Son, for it is man that needs to be reconciled to God, not God that needs to be reconciled to man. Throughout the New Testament we find the proclamation that Christ has broken the power of the devil, to which mankind was subject (see Lk.10:17-18); 11:22; 1Cor.15:25; Gal.1:4; Col.2:15; 2Tm.1:10; Hb.2:14; Jn.10:11; 12:31; 16:11; 1Jn.3:8; and frequently in Rev.). Moreover, this teaching of the atonement requires no "legal fiction," and attributes no immoral or unrighteous action to God. Man is not made suddenly good or treated as good when he is not good; he is forgiven not because he deserves to be forgiven, but because God loves him, and he is made fit for union with God by God's own power, his own will cooperating. He is saved from the power of sin by the risen life of Christ within him, and from the guilt of sin by God's forgiveness, of which his own repentance is a condition.
    Thus, salvation consists in the union of the faithful with the life of God in the Body of Christ (the Holy Church) where the Evil-One is being progressively and really destroyed in the life of co-suffering love. This union is effected by Baptism (the Grace of regeneration) and fulfilled in the Holy Communion of the Body and Blood of Christ, and in the mutual, cooperative struggle of Orthodox Christians against the power and influence of the Evil-One. This is precisely why the last words of the "Lord's Prayer" are, "deliver us from the Evil-One," and not "deliver us from evil."

Glory to Jesus Christ!
+Archbishop Lazar

Comments

[Eric H Janzen]

Very interesting Archbishop. I really appreciated the section on Anselm and the difference between Christ as our ransom vs. Christ as our substitute for punishment. The Eastern view certainly brings God's mysterious and incredibly rich love to the forefront of our understanding of who he is.

blessings,
eric h janzen