Does not the NT make that argument?
Death is the
penalty of sin (
Ro 6:23),
the
death of all the animal sacrifices--the
pattern for the true atoning sacrifice--was
penalty for sin ((
Lev 5:6, 7, 15, 6:6, 26:41, 43),
Christ
died as the sin offering penalty
for our sins (
Ro 8:3,
1 Co 15:3-4, 2 Co 5:21),
he was delivered over to (the penalty of)
death for our sin
Ro 4:25).
Does not the "Gospel of
Isaiah" 43. . .
v. 5 (as in
Lk 23:16,
22),
10, etc. make that argument. . .or the Messianic Psalm 22?
What Metropolitan Kallistos Ware notes in the lecture I linked to, is that while Christ undeniably saved us by offering Himself as a sacrifice, he stresses that problems arise when one seeks to define who the sacrifice was offered to. Scripture does not say that the Penalty was paid to the Father or that the punishment due to us was inflicted by the Father, nor do the Fathers.
Likewise the offering was not due to the devil, since the devil has no rights. St. Augustine, joking about the complexity of this question, suggested in jest that Christ died to trick the devil, since being both God and Man, the devil could not hold him and was thus confounded. Now, lest there should be any confusion, I should note that part of the Christus Victor approach to soteriology does affirm that Christ despoiled Hell by His harrowing of it, and we see this reflected in the Paschal Homily of St. John Chrysostom, but this Trampling Down Death by Death occurs as a result of the Incarnate Word presenting Himself as a sacrifice to free mankind from the oppression of Hades.
Rather, the important thing is that as the supreme act of love, God, in the person of Jesus Christ, paid the wages of sin, by dying for us, but not to the person of the Father, since God paying Himself makes no sense, and the Father being in all respects perfect and thus devoid of pride has no wounded honor that must be satisfied as Anselm of Canterbury suggested.
In a sense, one could argue that since we incurred the debt and were the beneficiary of the payment, and since sin was not created by God but is a destructive act which is the uncreatable reality of having sentient self aware beings, regardless of whether or not one subscribes to determinism or free will, sin is an act of self-destruction which God seeks to discourage us from doing; since He is Love, His Laws are not arbitrary legislation but rather are meant to discourage us from harming ourselves or others, because doing so will lead to our death and possibly that of others. Sinning is like playing with explosives, or abusing certain drugs which cause extreme behavior, that will cause you to die and possibly others. Thus, we are the beneficiaries of God conquering sin through His incarnation, but not the sole beneficiaries, for the angels rejoiced at the Incarnation, because they knew what it meant for humans, for them and for God, and the devil tried to interfere with it, pointlessly, because of his extreme depravity and such infinite pride that he thought he could set the persons of the Trinity, who are coessential, coequal and coeternal, against each other, or set the human will of Christ against His divine will (that Christ has two wills was doctrinally established by the Sixth Ecumenical Council; Monothelitism was a heresy invented in an attempt to reconcile the Oriental Orthodox to Chalcedon, but it failed, since the Oriental Orthodox saw it as heretical, and the foremost Eastern Orthodox like St. Maximus the Confessor likewise identified it as heresy; for preaching against it St. Maximus had his tongue cut off on the orders of the Emperor and died six days later. However it has been suggested that the Maronite Catholics were Monothelites before joining the Roman Church during the crusades; if so, this would explain why they separated from the Syriac Orthodox and migrated to forts they built in the mountains of Lebanon, and also why they were so fond of the Pope of Rome, and being isolated in Lebanon, might have thought that Monothelitism, which was championed by Pope Honorius I, the only Pope of Rome* or primate of an Orthodox church** to advocate a heresy later anathematized by one of the Seven Ecumenical Councils shared by the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics, was still Roman Catholic doctrine, and that the successors of Honorius
* Pope Honorius I was so notorious for this reason that in the Renaissance there was a grimoire compiled that was spuriously attributed to him, and the idea that Honorius I dealt in black magic was something that people could think of. Interestingly, at that time the Roman Catholic Church rejected the existence of witchcraft and anathematized those who believed in it, but then people started practicing it; it seems unlikely that witchcraft however is, as some suggest, an ancient continuation of Pagan religions, but rather is chiefly the product of 19th and early 20th century fantasists dabbling in the occult. There is of course alchemy and hermeticism, which are also now in the occult, but prior to the discovery of hydrogen, alchemy was somewhat respected, and it was the discovery of the element hydrogen that established modern chemistry in the 18th century as a respected science, just as astronomy developed from the occult superstition of astrology.
** Interestingly, the only ancient Patriarchate never to have embraced a heresy as defined by the Eastern Orthodox Church is the Patriarchate of the Church of Romania, and for this reason the His Beatitude the Patriarch of Romania wears distinctive white versions of the black cassock and exorason (cloak) worn by all other Eastern Orthodox Patriarchs and the Eastern Orthodox Pope of Alexandria. It should be noted that while it is a fact of course that the Romanian Orthodox Patriarch has never engaged in a heresy, there are other Patriarchates and autocephalous churches whose leaders can make the same claim, for example, to the best of my knowledge, this list includes but is not limited to the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Czech-Slovak Orthodox Church, the Polish Orthodox Church, the Church of Greece under the Archbishop of Athens rather than the Ecumenical Patriarchate (which suffered from Arian, Nestorian and Iconoclast Patriarchs forcibly installed by the Byzantine Empire, and possibly Patriarch Cyril Lukaris embraced Calvinist theology, which is monergist and thus contradicts the Fifth Ecumenical Council) and the Orthodox Church in America . ***
*** Here follows an excursus for the benefit of my Oriental Orthodox friends
@dzheremi,
@coorilose ,
@Pavel Mosko , and my Eastern Orthodox friends
@prodromos @psalti chrysostom and
@HTacianas , and others who frequently enjoy liturgical content, and also my Roman Catholic friends
@concretecamper and
@Reader Antonious.
Of the other Eastern Orthodox primates, while black is the predominate color, His Holiness the Patriarch of Moscow and the Metropolitans of ROCOR, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the Belarussian Orthodox Church, the Church of Japan, and the Orthodox Church of America, and other churches currently or formerly a part of the Russian Orthodox church, and all bishops of these churches with the rank of Metropolitan, such as the Metropolitan of St. Petersburg, wear a white headdress, except for that worn by His Holiness the Catholicos of the ancient Church of Georgia, which after the abolition of the Moscow Patriarchate under Czar Peter “the Great” was forcibly annexed, only to be restored to autocephaly together with the restoration of the Moscow Patriarchate when the Czar abdicated, shortly before the Bolsheviks seized power. The Patriarchs of Moscow and Georgia wear a distinctively shaped headdress, the difference being the Georgian version is black and the Muscovite version white. Likewise the Serbian Orthodox Patriarch wears a somewhat different looking headdress than that of all other Eastern Orthodox bishops except perhaps other Serbian bishops. Curiously the Rabbis of the Romaniote Jews of Greece either copied aspects of the Serbian Orthodox design or produced a similar looking headdress unintentionally.
His Beatitude Greek Orthodox Pope of Alexandria, when wearing his full Eucharistic vestments, wears a mitre different in appearance from the mitres worn by other Eastern Orthodox bishops and also by His Holiness the Coptic Orthodox Pope and the Patriarchs of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches when celebrating the Divine Liturgy. I suspect the design used by the Greek Orthodox
the Oriental Orthodox primates, black is worn by the Coptic Pope of Alexandria and the two Catholicoi who run the two worldwide parts of the Armenian Apostolic Church, the senior Catholicos of Holy Etchmiadzin in Armenia and the junior Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia, who exists because for a brief time after the Armenians conquered Cilicia, there were two Armenian kingdoms simultaneously, and during the Cold War the Soviet occupation of Armenia split the diaspora between the two Catholicoi, althougj they have since reconciled, and the two Armenian Patriarchs who preside over the autocephalous Armenian Apostolic Churches of Constantinople and Jerusalem. The Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate wears a red cassock cut in the Eastern pattern sometime, with a red cap like those worn by Eastern Orthodox priests, while at other times he wears a black Western style cassock with red trim and a red sash, identical to that usually worn by Roman Catholic cardinals, but with a distinctive black turban, attire also worn by all Syriac Orthodox bishops and the Catholicos of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church. The Ethiopian Orthodox Patriarch (and presumably his Eritrean counterpart) wears a white Eastern style cassock with a large white turban.
The Catholicos-Patriarchs of the Assyrian Church of the East, and his counterpart at the much smaller Ancient Church of the East*** when not wearing the black and purple cassock like those worn by Roman Catholic bishops and Syriac Orthodox priests, wears a purple cassock of the Eastern style. He and his brother bishops in the Assyrian churches also wear a fez with rings around it called a shashta; the subordinate leader of the Chaldean Catholic Church, who has a title which would freak out Jack Chick, the Patriarch of Babylon, used to wear a similar headdress to that, a fez wrapped in purple or if the Patriarch is made a Cardinal, crimson cloth, called a Shash, but the current Patriarch, appointed during the Pontificate of Pope Francis, discontinued wearing it because the other Chaldean bishops were not allowed to wear this vestment.
This is of course absurd because the Pope and the leaders of the Coptic Catholics, Maronite Catholics, Syro Malabar Catholics, Syriac Catholics and some other Eastern Catholic churches continue to wear headdress distinct from their subordinates, especially if they become members of the College of Cardinals, and a better solution which would have preserved a beautiful traditional vestment would have been to expand the use of the Shash within the Chaldean church.
*** They separated from the former in a schism in the late 1960s due to the realization that the last of the hereditarys Patriarch Mar Shimun, and his hereditary predecessors, were not canonical, since the ancient canon law of the Church of the East prohibited any bishop from naming his successor, requiring instead that the Patriarch be elected by the Holy Synod, like in every other Eastern or Orthodox church aside from Eastern Catholic churches where I believe the Pope of Rome is involved in the decision, and also the change to the Georgian Calendar instituted by Mar Shimun, but since that time, Mar Shimun was assasinated and Mar Dinkha elected to replace him, and the other issues dividing the two churches have become largely irrelevant, and a reunion is expected in the near future. It should be noted that since Assyrian bishops are supposed to be celibate, like their Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox counterparts, and were presumably monastic when the Assyrians had monasteries, the hereditary Patriarchate which appeared in the 17th century when I suppose the church was distracted by the Jesuit-influenced schism of the Arabic speaking Chaldeans of Baghdad, who broke communion with the Assyrians and entered into communion with Rome, was not from father to elder son but father to younger son or uncle to nephew. Thus it was inherited by close relatives from the same family, but not from father to elder son, who rather inherited the job of siring the next Patriarch.
