Soteriology

STEPHEN THOMAS

The ecumenical councils of the Orthodox Church do not give a soteriology or doctrine of salvation, but offer rather a rich and exhaustive Christology. Nevertheless, there is a profound soteriology underlying the Christology which the fathers used to support it. The main idea of salvation found in the eastern fathers, as well as western fathers such as Pope St. Leo the Great of Rome, concerns the victory over death which Christ won, and the victory over all the morbid limitations which humanity has acquired though sin, the alienation from God. Orthodox soteriology is extremely hopeful because it thinks of salvation as a victory over the malicious powers exercised by the demons (Heb. 11.35). It has two elements, which com­plement one another: salvation is, firstly, ther­apy, and, secondly, deification or divinization.

The victory motif dominates Orthodox liturgical texts, especially in the paschal liturgy. Continually repeated during the paschal season is the following poem: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on those in the graves, bestowing life” (Pentekostarion 1990: 27).

In Orthodox soteriology sin and death are personified as forces which belong to the sphere of the Devil and the demons, who, through divine respect to their free­will, are still active until the judgment. Christ’s voluntary sacrifice on the cross brought the depths of suffering into inti­mate contact with the divine light, so that suffering could be transfigured and con­quered. The victorious Christ descended to Hades, conquered the power of the Devil, and brought out the souls imprisoned there. While this idea is found in medieval Cathol­icism, in the form of the harrowing of hell, it is not as prominent as it is in the Orthodox services which accord to Holy Saturday an essential role in the process by which Christ saves humankind: “He quenched Death by being subdued by Death. He who came down into Hades despoiled Hades; And Hades was embittered when he tasted of Christ’s flesh” (Pentekostarion 1990: 37).

Therapy, the dominant Orthodox expres­sion of salvation theology (Larchet 2000), consists of the transformation of the human situation which has been damaged by sin, liberating it from its subordination to corruption, an ephemeral life of passion turned away from God which leads to death. Orthodoxy teaches that humanity was seduced by the Devil at an early stage in its development, and the whole human race contracted illness, which is both spiri­tual (sin, passion) and physical (illness and death), a malaise not caused or willed by God (Larchet 2002: 17). Particular sins issue from this sickness and are a form of madness or blindness rather than a deliberate revolt, pro­voking the divine compassion. The union of the divine and human natures in Christ heals the damaged human nature in its root. In these terms St. Athanasius explains why the divine Word and Son of God had to become human: only a divine nature could raise up the human nature (Athanasius 1971: 185). Equally, Christ had to have a human nature: St. Gregory of Nazianzus argues that Christ had to have a human intellect, in addition to the divine mind, because the mind especially was in need of salvation (Hardy 1995: 221). While the cross is the victory, the whole incarnation is saving, since every aspect of the human nature is healed by contact with the divinity, during the course of the Savior’s earthly life. The sacraments, or mysteries, heal the various dimensions of human life, the Eucharist having a special place in divinizing the human person through recep­tion of the holy gifts, Christ’s deifying body and blood. However, salvation also means more than healing. Salvation is the process of the believer’s deification, establishing the likeness to God intended for the original creation. The rays of God’s goodness, being uncreated, draw humankind up into the uncreated dimension.

The various theories of the atonement in Catholic and Reformed Christianity, which present a rationale for Christ’s death upon the cross, are foreign to Orthodoxy. In Cur Deus Homo, Anselm of Canterbury explained the relationship of incarna­tion to salvation very differently from St. Athanasius. Anselm uses the idea of the infinite offense to the honor of the deity, which Christ put right by his death upon the cross, a sacrifice earning an infinite trea­sury of merit upon which sinful Man could draw (Anselm 1998: 283). Calvin thought in terms of the infinite majesty of God and the wrath provoked by human sin, which Christ suffered instead of us. But in Calvinism grace attained by the sacrifice is only received by those who are predestined to receive it; in this sense, the sacrifice is not for all. Orthodoxy, however, teaches that Christ offered “the life-giving and unslain sacrifice” (Pentekostarion 1990: 30) for all people. There was no debt required by God to appease his wrath or satisfy justice, and there is no transaction between Father and Son to effect human salvation. In Orthodox soteriology God goes far beyond justice; his mercy is paramount, (Alfeyev 2000: 292–7), still less is there pre­destination to hell (Isaac of Nineveh 1995: 165). Christ’s sacrifice was that he “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Phil. 2.7). Christ obeyed the Father, becoming “obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2.8), in the sense that he united his will to that of the Father and assumed a human nature in order to heal and deify it: to save it from corruptibility and the sinking into nothing­ness, by offering Life.

SEE ALSO: Cross; Deification; Ecumenical Councils; Eucharist; Healing; Judgment; Mys­tery (Sacrament)

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Alfeyev, H. (2000) The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications.

Anselm (1998) The Major Works, ed. B. Davies and G. R. Evans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Athanasius (1971) Contra Gentes and De Incarnatione, ed. and trans. R. W. Thomson. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Aulen, G. (2003) Christus Victor. Eugene, Ontario: Wipf and Stock.

Hardy, E. R. (1995) The Christology of the Later Fathers. Philadelphia: Westminster/John Knox Press.

Isaac of Nineveh (1995) The Second Part, trans. S. Brock. Louvain: Peeters.

Larchet, J.-C. (2000) Therapeutique des maladies spirituelles. Paris: Cerf.

Larchet, J.-C. (2002) Theology of Illness, trans. J. and M. Breck. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Pentekostarion (1990) Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery.