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I'm talking about the satisfaction of God's justice; I'm not saying that God himself has need of anything. If God has a perfect standard of justice, then would it not need to be satisfied? If not, then how could we call it justice?
I don't think God has a perfect standard of justice, although He is perfectly just. the reason I say that is because the Cross is the most unjust thing that has ever happened in the history of the world.
Crandaddy has basically offered an Orthodox understanding here, if you would all relax.It is not the case that we are so profoundly fallen that our ability to have any (positive) knowledge of God at all is completely destroyed. (1) We can know that God exists. (2) We can know that He alone is supremely, perfectly good. (3) Related to our ability to know that He is the supreme Good is our ability to know that He is the supreme Lawgiver and the supreme Standard of righteousness, (4) Whose natural law we transgress when we commit sin.
So let me get this straight. (5) When I commit sin, I am willfully violating God's perfect standard of righteousness, (6) I am therefore justly deserving of appropriate consequences for my sin, and it is the case that (7) Christ offers me mercy from these consequences by offering Himself as the satisfaction of God's requirement of perfect righteousness that I could never offer by myself? Is this what you're saying?
Ah, but at the same time, you can apply ones we also see in humans. Watch:This is why you cannot, cannot, cannot apply fallen human logic, reasoning, and attributes to God.
God is God, He is not human
He is above and beyond anything our finite minds can conceive.
By what standard of justice do you say this, then?
doesn't sound very just to me.
*It takes until #7 to get to Christ, whereas we would have Christ be the means by which the Christian could and would extrapolate 1-7, instead of beginning with a blend of truisms comprised of Old Testament statements about God and classical Hellenistic statements about a Divine entity (none of which are then necessarily false).
By natural law, I mean the standard of righteousness that is intrinsic to our very ontological composition as personal beings, and that prescribes our behaviors as such. When a personal individual (willfully) commits an act that transgresses this standard, he incurs real ontological damage to his personhood as a direct consequence of his sinful act.*We may or may not object to your use of natural law, depending on how it's fleshed out.
The consequences of sin are just and deserved insofar as they're understood by us to be violations of the natural law. From a comprehensive, ontological, God's-eye point of view, however, they're simply what sin naturally entails. God doesn't punish people for their sin so much as sin is simply its own punishment, when all is said and done.*Your #6 seems fine except for "justly deserving", which is a bit confusing. Instead of simply suffering the consequences of sin, now we have this idea that God has to impute some sort of label of "deserving" or not deserving punishment. The "deserving punishment" part seems unnecessary, an add-on which the transcendent God would have no use for, and may simply reflect certain fallen systems of law (though not all). We would certainly agree that God judges us, and that our ultimate state is given from God vis-a-vis who we really are and what we want.
I don't see anything I disagree with here.*7 Is an Orthodox statement about the atonement, provided that "righteousness" is communion with God, the proper fulfillment of the telos of man, which is to be high priest of creation, even like the el/theos, offering thanksgiving and glorification to God in a manner re-capitulating the thanksgiving and glorification offered by the entire creation in diverse ways, and fulfilling the economic Laws of God given to Israel when he was called out from among the nations, and all for the fulfillment of the economy of God, which is the salvation of the world.
No, sin is an ontological disease whose natural end result is eternal death (i.e., hell). Salvation through Christ is the cure for this disease. There are no laws or labels at the ontological level.And that Christ does not save me from the consequences of sin as from an imputed label or accusation of "guilty", in such a manner as if the label were to be removed, the formerly accused themselves would be neither better or worse apart from the formerly impending external punishment.
Justice means setting things right, it can't be reduced to the proper meting out of punishment.
Nevertheless, our forensic conceptualizations of sin do have a real, objective basis, and they are indispensable to orthodox soteriology because they are the correct and healthy way for us to understand what happens at the ontological level.
That is what happens when a lot of people understand a small bit of a Church's high theology that has trickled down to the popular level. Palamas, St. Maximus the Confessor, etc., are not easy men to understand.I didn't really think that Orthodoxy as a whole had run headlong into heresy, but when I see some Orthodox (not all) cast aspersions on forensic soteriology or justification as Western error, I do get alarmed. It strikes me as a heretical corruption of the Gospel, or dangerously close to it at least.
Unfortunately, "forensic" and "juridical" understandings of sin and the atonement, at least on this side of the pond, have been so taken up by, and identified with, the Calvinistic and evangelical teachings on penal substitution, that those words are often used to refer exclusively to that theory of the atonement itself. I think that's where a lot of the confusion arises, especially among converts from those traditions.
That is what happens when a lot of people understand a small bit of a Church's high theology that has trickled down to the popular level. Palamas, St. Maximus the Confessor, etc., are not easy men to understand.
My guess is that this will balance out in time.
You cant have Christianity with only apophatic theology. There would be nothing to have, you would be stuck with pagan neoplatonism (at best).
.
100 percent apophatic theology would be more like Zen Buddhist meditation.
Continuing Anglican self-understanding is romantic and ahistorical, not realistic. This is why in the end I stopped attending Continuing Anglican churches and instead started attending the Episcopal Church, because I found the internal contradictions of the CA movement too much to bear and I figured that Continuing Anglicans were schismatic at heart in a way that Episcopalians and the Anglican Communion did not intend to be. Continuing Anglicans have had decades to reunite with the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, or even among themselves, but they haven't taken that seriously, so I deemed that spiritually unhealthy to continue to worship in that environment.
Well, maybe, but I cant really see the Episcopals as being in any better a state. TBH I do not think the continuers are at heart schismatic - i think they were pushed into schism by Episcopals who were essentially moving in the direction of apostacy.
Continuing Anglican self-understanding is romantic and ahistorical, not realistic. This is why in the end I stopped attending Continuing Anglican churches and instead started attending the Episcopal Church, because I found the internal contradictions of the CA movement too much to bear and I figured that Continuing Anglicans were schismatic at heart in a way that Episcopalians and the Anglican Communion did not intend to be. Continuing Anglicans have had decades to reunite with the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, or even among themselves, but they haven't taken that seriously, so I deemed that spiritually unhealthy to continue to worship in that environment.
I don't see anything wrong with the 1979 prayer book and the Episcopal Church's polity is the same as the early Church.
And here's a brief bit of history on the circumstances in the Episcopal Church that led to the Affirmation of St. Louis and the ensuing Continuing Anglican movement.The Continuing Anglicans concerns were largely picayune, in my mind, especially considering Anglicans owed much of their liturgy to a man who was far more liberal for his era than many of them wanted to admit. Most of the Continuers were hitched to an ecclessiology that would have been foreign to Cranmer. If they wanted to disagree with him, they could do that alot more faithfully by submitting to the Orthodox Church or to Rome. But the CA movement has alot of fragile egos and people that need to think they deserve the title "metropolitan" for having a few thousand congregants.
Yes there is material heresy in the Episcopal Church in some areas but it is not yet formal heresy articulated in canons and liturgy. Being a material heretic is not enough to justify schism.
Reunification doesn't just happen overnight, you know. Already the UECNA, ACC, and APCK have intercommunion agreements with each other, and the unification of our churches has been seriously discussed, and is a very real possibility in the not-too-distant future.
Here's a list of 20 differences between the 1928 and 1979 prayer books, as compiled by the late Peter Toon+.
I don't see anything wrong with the 1979 prayer book and the Episcopal Church's polity is the same as the early Church. The Continuing Anglicans concerns were largely picayune, in my mind, especially considering Anglicans owed much of their liturgy to a man who was far more liberal for his era than many of them wanted to admit. Most of the Continuers were hitched to an ecclessiology that would have been foreign to Cranmer. If they wanted to disagree with him, they could do that alot more faithfully by submitting to the Orthodox Church or to Rome. But the CA movement has alot of fragile egos and people that need to think they deserve the title "metropolitan" for having a few thousand congregants.
Yes there is material heresy in the Episcopal Church in some areas but it is not yet formal heresy articulated in canons and liturgy. Being a material heretic is not enough to justify schism.
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