I have come to believe the traditional Western soteriological concepts of satisfaction atonement and penal substitutionary atonement are a novel and incorrect interpretation of what Christ did for us on the Cross. By novel, I mean of course that the former is nearly a thousand years old, and the latter is nearly five hundred, but there is an ancient way, preserved in the Eastern Churches, which dates back to the Apostles and is found in Patristic writings going back to the early second century, and I would argue is also more compatible with sacred scripture. Allow me to explain:
God is love, but gave us free will. The one thing God cannot do is force us to love Him. People can act against God, and when people fail to love God and love their neighbor, and engage in murder, theft, fornication, sexual perversion, and so on, they align themselves against God, so the light of God which is everywhere present in the World to Come will become a self-inflicted torture for them.
To save us from that fate, because we all have engaged in those sins, God in the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, put on our fallen human nature and sanctified it and glorified it, so that if we believe in Him, which is facilitated by the grace of the Holy Spirit because otherwise our depravity is such that we could not freely choose to accept Christ as our Lord, God and Savior, by being baptized and receiving the seal of Holy Spirit sacramentally, we are grafted onto the mystical body of Christ, the Christian Church, and there, through the Eucharist, we receive the medicine of immortality, by eating the very body of our Lord given for the remission of sin, and drinking His blood, the blood of the New Covenant, for the remission of sin and life everlasting. In this manner we participate in the incarnate Word of God’s all-sufficient self-sacrifice on the Cross, and receive sacramental grace, partaking of the divine nature, and in this manner, if we persevere in true living faith, and not a dead hypocritical faith St. James warns us about in His epistles, our souls will repose in Heaven until the last trumpet, when we will be raised incorruptible, and those of us with living faith and love of God, and those on who He will have mercy, will be granted life eternal in Paradise at the Last Judgement by Christ Pantocrator, and not be condemned with those who have chosen to reject God’s love, and thus self-destructively deny themselves Paradise, which St. John Chrysostom states is the worst torment of all.
Ultimately, the reason why God died was to show us what it means to be human, so in a sense, yes, in that God had to suffer in order to procure salvation for us. Thus, the Passion on the Cross was Christ our God ransoming us from our own self-destructive harm, which our adversary the devil delights in, but this ransom is not paid to the Father, because Christ and the Father are One God together with the Holy Spirit, nor to the devil, because he has no rights, but rather, His all sufficient sacrifice tramples down death by death, and thus by His resurrection, death was swallowed up in victory.
The error of penal substitutionary atonement, which did not exist prior to John Calvin, or satisfaction atonement, which was created in the late 11th century by Anselm of Canterbury, is that it ignores the unity of the Trinity and suggests the Father is enraged at us; wrath is a sin, and God is incapable of sin, so St. Paul uses it figuratively to refer to being in a state of opposition to God and thus experiencing his love, which is a consuming fire, as torture.
The following two lectures, by Fr. John Behr and Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, explain fully my soteriological beliefs, which are taken from the early Church via the three great Eastern churches (the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and the Assyrian Church of the East), and also from John Wesley, who explained Theosis using a term, Entire Sanctification, that is as easily understood by Anglophones as Theosis is by Greek speakers.
Fr. John Behr discusses the reason why Christ had to die on the Cross, and how this is central to Christianity, as well as addressing nonsense like the Gnostic Gospels and the quest of liberal theologians to uncover the “Historical Jesus” in the hopes of promoting their pet theologies, such as Unitarian Universalism, neo-Gnosticism, Womanist Theology, Queer Theology, and other nonsense:
Metropolitan Kallistos Ware on the other hand outlines the ancient Eastern Orthodox doctrine on Salvation in Christ, and specifically addresses the errors of penal substitutionary atonement, satisfaction soteriology, and universalism.
Lastly, I would note, as Metropolitan Kallistos Ware does in his video, that the soteriology of Anselm and Calvin, in its portrayal of the Angry Father who demands the death of his only begotten son in order to forgive some of humanity has done so much to alienate people from Christianity in recent years. If we want to convert atheists to Christ in the present climate, we must set aside the relatively recent fire and brimstone theology reflected in Jonathan Edward’s sermon Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God, which was effective in its day, and indeed as a Congregationalist I am proud of it for reviving piety and humility among the often arrogant Yankees whose church, which is my church, was transitioning out of the spiritual darkness of Puritanism and into a more traditional, highly liturgical Protestant community.
But that was then, and as Protestants have encountered intimately the Christian East, we have seen a better theology, the actual theology and soteriology of the early Church which we attempted to recreate in the Reformation with only limited success (namely, communion in both kinds and vernacular services). And the Light of the East offers us a new way to talk about salvation that Atheists have not heard, which confounds their objections which are predicated on Western theological and soteriological concepts.
While I reject his Universalism, Dr. David Bentley Hart delights me with his rebuttal of the New Atheism movement, Atheist Delusions, and it is not a coincidence that he is Eastern Orthodox (albeit not a particularly faithful EO one might argue given he believes in Universalism, for which Origen was anathematized at the Fifth Ecumenical Council).
God is love, but gave us free will. The one thing God cannot do is force us to love Him. People can act against God, and when people fail to love God and love their neighbor, and engage in murder, theft, fornication, sexual perversion, and so on, they align themselves against God, so the light of God which is everywhere present in the World to Come will become a self-inflicted torture for them.
To save us from that fate, because we all have engaged in those sins, God in the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, put on our fallen human nature and sanctified it and glorified it, so that if we believe in Him, which is facilitated by the grace of the Holy Spirit because otherwise our depravity is such that we could not freely choose to accept Christ as our Lord, God and Savior, by being baptized and receiving the seal of Holy Spirit sacramentally, we are grafted onto the mystical body of Christ, the Christian Church, and there, through the Eucharist, we receive the medicine of immortality, by eating the very body of our Lord given for the remission of sin, and drinking His blood, the blood of the New Covenant, for the remission of sin and life everlasting. In this manner we participate in the incarnate Word of God’s all-sufficient self-sacrifice on the Cross, and receive sacramental grace, partaking of the divine nature, and in this manner, if we persevere in true living faith, and not a dead hypocritical faith St. James warns us about in His epistles, our souls will repose in Heaven until the last trumpet, when we will be raised incorruptible, and those of us with living faith and love of God, and those on who He will have mercy, will be granted life eternal in Paradise at the Last Judgement by Christ Pantocrator, and not be condemned with those who have chosen to reject God’s love, and thus self-destructively deny themselves Paradise, which St. John Chrysostom states is the worst torment of all.
Ultimately, the reason why God died was to show us what it means to be human, so in a sense, yes, in that God had to suffer in order to procure salvation for us. Thus, the Passion on the Cross was Christ our God ransoming us from our own self-destructive harm, which our adversary the devil delights in, but this ransom is not paid to the Father, because Christ and the Father are One God together with the Holy Spirit, nor to the devil, because he has no rights, but rather, His all sufficient sacrifice tramples down death by death, and thus by His resurrection, death was swallowed up in victory.
The error of penal substitutionary atonement, which did not exist prior to John Calvin, or satisfaction atonement, which was created in the late 11th century by Anselm of Canterbury, is that it ignores the unity of the Trinity and suggests the Father is enraged at us; wrath is a sin, and God is incapable of sin, so St. Paul uses it figuratively to refer to being in a state of opposition to God and thus experiencing his love, which is a consuming fire, as torture.
The following two lectures, by Fr. John Behr and Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, explain fully my soteriological beliefs, which are taken from the early Church via the three great Eastern churches (the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and the Assyrian Church of the East), and also from John Wesley, who explained Theosis using a term, Entire Sanctification, that is as easily understood by Anglophones as Theosis is by Greek speakers.
Fr. John Behr discusses the reason why Christ had to die on the Cross, and how this is central to Christianity, as well as addressing nonsense like the Gnostic Gospels and the quest of liberal theologians to uncover the “Historical Jesus” in the hopes of promoting their pet theologies, such as Unitarian Universalism, neo-Gnosticism, Womanist Theology, Queer Theology, and other nonsense:
Metropolitan Kallistos Ware on the other hand outlines the ancient Eastern Orthodox doctrine on Salvation in Christ, and specifically addresses the errors of penal substitutionary atonement, satisfaction soteriology, and universalism.
Lastly, I would note, as Metropolitan Kallistos Ware does in his video, that the soteriology of Anselm and Calvin, in its portrayal of the Angry Father who demands the death of his only begotten son in order to forgive some of humanity has done so much to alienate people from Christianity in recent years. If we want to convert atheists to Christ in the present climate, we must set aside the relatively recent fire and brimstone theology reflected in Jonathan Edward’s sermon Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God, which was effective in its day, and indeed as a Congregationalist I am proud of it for reviving piety and humility among the often arrogant Yankees whose church, which is my church, was transitioning out of the spiritual darkness of Puritanism and into a more traditional, highly liturgical Protestant community.
But that was then, and as Protestants have encountered intimately the Christian East, we have seen a better theology, the actual theology and soteriology of the early Church which we attempted to recreate in the Reformation with only limited success (namely, communion in both kinds and vernacular services). And the Light of the East offers us a new way to talk about salvation that Atheists have not heard, which confounds their objections which are predicated on Western theological and soteriological concepts.
While I reject his Universalism, Dr. David Bentley Hart delights me with his rebuttal of the New Atheism movement, Atheist Delusions, and it is not a coincidence that he is Eastern Orthodox (albeit not a particularly faithful EO one might argue given he believes in Universalism, for which Origen was anathematized at the Fifth Ecumenical Council).
