Question regarding Justification.

[Daniel Hoseini]

"And yet there is an example of a Reformer from the 18th century. This was John Wesley, an Anglican priest who managed to transcend the bonds of Western neo-theologisms and returned to the common Christian heritage of the Greek fathers. Going back to what he calls 'primitive Christianity,' he took from the early Christians the concept of salvation as the healing of humanity. The Christ's event for him seized to be a legal transaction between God and the devil and a punishment of the Son by the Father for the satisfaction of honor or for the appeasement of the angry God. Following Irinæus, Oringenus, Athanasius, he saw Christ's incarnation as the loving condensation of God in order to lift up the humanity and bring it closer to Divinity, for 'God became man so that man may be deified.' Following Gregory the Theologian, he saw the incarnation as God assuming humanity to heal it, for what is not assumed cannot be healed. The idea of judgement and juridical justification gave way in his understanding to allow for God's love and transforming power for the perfecting and sanctification of fallen humanity. Wesley recognized in the early fathers that in the proces of salvation man's free will participates with the free-flowing grace of God, because the image of God in man has not been completely destroyed by the Fall, as Augustin had thought, it was only distorted and disfigured and can still exercise his free will to choose good, it can still respond to the love of God so that man may be transformed and reach sanctification or theosis. Wesley incorporates the practical ascetic teaching of the fathers - fasting, confessing, praying and the Eucharist - into a specific method for a modern man to assist him in his really willful transformation by God's grace and love into a new renewed and healed man. Hence the term the 'methodism' and 'Methodist church' were adopted. It is my estimation that this is the place where East and West need to meet, not at the Reformation, not at the Roman post-Charlemagne rationalistic and humanistic neo-theological production line of ideas. We cannot meet at the unchecked juridical Augustinian river of thought that did not take into account carefully the theological tradition before him. But we can only meet at what I call the 'golden era of the common eastern Christian heritage' of the 2nd to the 5th centuries, which offers both the ascetic discipline intellectual approach, as the reach mystical symposium of spiritual offerings drawn from the centuries of Christian suffering and sacrifice, the lessons to be learned will be many, salvation will be seen not as a juridical transaction, but in the light of the Resurrection and the transformation of the humanity in the theanthropos Christ, who is God and Man (Τheanthropos, Θεάνθροπος), the incarnate Logos who defeated sin in his flesh, abolished death by death and raised human nature, deified it and glorified it as He ascended to Heaven and seated at the right hand of the Father. That is salvation. The true unity of Christianity can only be achieved in the one Church which would be in continuity and concord with its primitive Christianity. It will only be within this same primitive Christianity where Christology was debated and clarified that the great chasm between the primitive Christianity and the modern salvation theories will be breached... I feel today that I have come here in the motherland of Luther and Melanchthon, at the 'Grand Zero' of the Reformation, to the church of Wittenberg and its modern offspring as the ambassador of the ancient orthodox patriarchs Joseph and Jeremias in person to suggest a return to the ancient roots and the common Christian heritage which proceeds Augustin, Charlemagne and the medieval papacy of supremacy and infallibility. I came to suggest a return to the time before the invention of odd neo-theologies of atonement - and I'm not trying to insult anyone - and far before the introduction of indulgencies and purgatory. Having experienced some of the pain of the consequences of this divisions wrought by the Reformation, I prepose the return to the ancient Church. its life and practices, its teaching and worship. These I believe would be the only effective way to help jumpstart the proces of attaining the union and communion of all Christians, which Melanchthon and his friend desired so much, but failed to accomplish. In other words, we need to firstly come into communion with the primitive Church, learn how to speak the same theological idiom, as well as understand it in the same way. Then we will be able to initiate the sensible and comprehensible dialogue with each other, beginning always with the same theological presuppositions and remaining always on the same page, As the foundation we are building gets established, then we will be able to address all the new ideas developed in the subsequent centuries and decide what fits and what does not, because today Christianity offers so many conflicting ideas, so many conflicting theologies that don't make any sense, if you look at them together. Until then we will continue to be broken and divided, unable to communicate clearly with one another of the events of one another." (Priest Panagiotis Papageorgiou)

The Protestant Reformation and the Orthodox Christian East - YouTube