Thanks. However, I do not possess "any introductory text on Orthodox soteriology" and, thus, remain quite ignorant.
Is not God angry at sin? Is not the wrath of God to be unleashed at the Last Day against sinners?
Your answer is precisely what I understand most Christians to provide. In this scenario God does not have a precise or absolute standard of "real righteousness" but one which seems to be based on some sort of sliding scale in which an individual does his best and then relies on God to make up the difference with His mercy. One of the problems with this scenario is that it cannot account for those who believe they have "real righteousness" but do not, in fact, have "real righteousness". For example, I will pick on the RCC's, since neither you nor myself are members of that denomination. It is a mortal sin, according to the RCC, to fail to attend weekly mass. I have encountered many excellent, moral, ethical, and committed Catholics who, for various reasons, do not attend mass each and every Sunday and yet who are convinced that they possess "real righteousness". They also fall back on the rationale that God's mercy is such that they will find their way into heaven in due time via Purgatory.
Alas, that’s incorrect. Your criticism of our soteriology amounts to a straw-man, since you are mischaracterizing it based on a misinterpretation of what
@prodromos is saying. Indeed I would say that Orthodox soteriology is almost the opposite of what you describe in every conceivable way. The Orthodox Christian throws himself before God in literal prostration begging for mercy owing to an acute awareness of our sinful nature. Comparisons to Western soteriology fail because Orthodox hamartiology, while anti-Pelagian, is also non-Augustinian, instead relying on St. John Cassian, whose soteriology used to be prevalent in the Roman church before the drift into Scholastic theology which led to their alienation from us (Roman Catholics regard St. John of Damascus as the last Patristic theologian whereas we have Church Fathers from the 19th and 20th century, so for us the Patristic era never ended, and we aim to do theology in the same way as St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, St. Gregory Nazianzus, St. Athanasius the Great, St. Basil the Great, St. John Chrysostom and St. John the Theologian, using the same liturgical texts, the same prayers and simply rejecting the various changes like Purgatory and Papal Supremacy that emerged from Scholastic Theology’s reassessment of Christian doctrine.
Insofar as Protestants reacted against the Scholastic theology of the Renaissance era Roman church, and did not have easy access to information on the Eastern Orthodox Church, and at the time the Oriental Orthodox were impossibly distant and obscure, and incorrectly regarded by the few who knew of them as heretics (with the exception of Martin Luther, interestingly), it would not be until much later when Anglican-Orthodox dialogue starting in the 17th century and continuing in the 18th century with John Wesley and in the 19th century with various Anglo Catholic exchanges with the Orthodox that the West regained access to Orthodox theology, which led to the phenomenon of Western converts to Orthodoxy starting among Anglo Catholics (Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, memory eternal) was actually rather late to that party by about 50 years), which then became more generalized and has now become something of a cultural phenomenon.
But there is no cause for consternation, because the text I mentioned is readily available online as are all other Patristic texts, from websites such as Christian Classics Ethereal Library as well as various Orthodox-specific sites. And every Christian should have knowledge of St. John of Damascus.
Of course the most definitive guide to salvation in the Orthodox Church is in our liturgy, and right now, in Lent, our service books are positively brimming with Soteriological details. If you read the texts for our services of Baptism, Chrismation, the Divine Liturgy (Holy Communion), Holy Unction and the Pannikhida, or memorial service, and the burial service, along with the Triodion, which is the hymnal and service book containing the propers for Lent and Holy Week, and the Pentecostarion, which contains the propers for Pascha (Easter Sunday), Antipascha (Thomas Sunday, also known as Low Sunday, the week after Pascha), the Ascension, Pentecost Sunday and All Saints Day*, you would obtain complete expertise of the soteriology of the Eastern Orthodox Church, which is basically identical to that of the Oriental Orthodox. The main advantage is that all of the Eastern Orthodox service books are now available online for free, whereas those of the Ethiopian and Armenian churches have not been completely translated into English, the Coptic texts outside the Coptic Reader app, which is complete and impressive, are kind of hit or miss, and the Syriac Orthodox LRD app, published by the Malankara Orthodox, is impressive, but does not contain a complete translation of all Syriac Orthodox hymns in the
Beth Gazo (the “House of Treasure”), and thus is missing some relevant content and additionally is abbreviated in other respects as well.
So by reading our liturgies, one can attain a level of knowledge of Orthodox doctrine that surpasses that of even many Orthodox. More than any other church, we believe in Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi, and thus the entire experience of Orthodoxy is encoded in books such as the Typicon, the Triodion, Pentecostarion, Octoechos, Euchologion, Liturgikon, Menaion, etc, and these have been freely available online in multiple translations for some time.
Indeed if one has an account with the Internet Archive’s online library services for the Print Disabled one can access the famed “Nasser Five Pounder”, the
Divine Prayers and Services of the Orthodox Catholic Church of Christ by Fr. Seraphim Nasser, which is reknowned for its compactness, its weight, as well as its completeness; while not as complete as reading the entire Lenten Triodion, it has the most important parts of it, and the Pentecostarion, and the most important feasts of the Festal Menaion, so that many a parish has historically used it for all of its English language services in the absence of more complete volumes.
I should also note that since most Orthodox hymns that one would find in the Nasser Five Pounder or the other books I’ve mentioned were composed between 400 and 1,000 AD, and some are older, they represent prime examples of Patristic literature unadulterated by post-Patristic theological influences. They are as deserving a place in the library of Patristic texts as much as anything written by St. Augustine of Hippo, but unfortunately despite being the living liturgy of nearly 300 million people, including some of the most persecuted Christians in the world for the past few centuries, in places like the former Soviet Union and Syria, they languish in a state of undeserved academic obscurity along with nearly all the writings of the Armenian, Georgian and Ethiopian Fathers and most of the Syriac Fathers, and frankly, most of the Greek and Latin fathers as well, since aside from St. Augustine, most early church fathers are not well read outside of the Eastern churches and the seminaries of those Western churches that take a particular interest in Patristics.
*This we celeebrate the Sunday after Pentecost since Pentecost and the Feast of the Holy Trinity were, like Christmas and Theophany (the Baptism of Christ, sometimes called Epiphany), the same thing in the Early Church, and just as the Armenians still celebrate the Nativity on Theophany (January 6th, or January 18th in Jerusalem where they and all other Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Christians use the Julian calendar, leaving the Roman Catholics and Protestants to use the Gregorian Calendar, the Orthodox still celebrate the Feast of the Holy Trinity on Pentecost Sunday together with the Feast of the Holy Spirit, while having an additional day dedicated to the Holy Spirit on Pentecost Monday.
** featuring only the most frequently used of the 86 Anaphoras (Eucharistic prayers) used by the Syriac Orthodox, who hold the record (the Maronites, before Vatican II, had over 50, but now have six, and the Ethiopians have fourteen, and the Armenians used to have fourteen but now only have one, and the Copts and the Church of the East each have three, with the Eastern Orthodox having two in common use plus the Presanctified Liturgy, plus one less commonly used liturgy, and a Presanctified version of that liturgy, two rarely used liturgies, and several Western Rite liturgies which are mostly based on either the Anglican or pre-schism Roman Rite liturgies.
