The Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God

The following is a paper written for my apologetics and ethics class.

---

The cosmological argument for the existence of God is one of the most venerable arguments of classical apologetics. It seeks to infer the existence of God from the existence of the cosmos or of objects within it.¹ It comes in two main forms which I will attempt to treat concurrently: the temporal form, which is based on the existence of a cause or explanation for the beginning of the universe, and the nontemporal form (or argument from contingency), which seeks an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing.

The temporal form of the cosmological argument is best known today as the Kalām cosmological argument, which was originally developed by Muslim philosophers but is widely promoted today by Christian apologists like William Lane Craig.² It has the following structure: 1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause 2) The universe began to exist 3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.³ It is temporal in that is seeks to locate the cause of the beginning of the universe (both temporal and ontological), identifying this "first cause" with God.

The nontemporal form of the cosmological argument, or "argument from contingency" is perhaps stronger since it does not depend on the assumption that the universe began to exist. It is best known as the work of Thomas Aquinas, who assumed (per Aristotle) for the sake of argument that the universe is eternal, since its createdness could only be known by revelation.⁴ It has the following logical form: 1) If any contingent beings exist, a necessary being exists (as the ultimate cause of their contingent existence) 2) Some contingent beings exist 3) Therefore, a necessary being exists.⁵ Unlike the temporal form, the nontemporal form does not seek to locate God as the "first cause" of the universe, but rather as the nontemporal reason for its existence when it could just as easily have not existed (this is what it means to be contingent), as the reason why there is something rather than nothing.

Besides their temporal/nontemporal focus, the premises of these arguments correlate fairly closely. The first premises seem evident from everyday experience and common sense: we expect there to be a reason or explanation for everything, even if we don't know it; we never consider that something might "just exist" for literally no reason at all. We implicitly hold to what Gottfried Leibniz called the "principle of sufficient reason", that nothing is true or exists without there being a sufficient reason for its being so and not otherwise,⁶ for objects in the universe; why should it not also hold for the universe as a whole? This principle is also foundational to the scientific method.

The second premise is supported by philosophy and science, Mathematically, apologists argue, it doesn't make any sense to say that the universe is literally eternal, with no beginning; infinity is just a concept, and it is absurd to propose that (for instance) an actually infinite amount of time has progressed in the universe.⁷ As well, this objection does not answer the nontemporal form of the argument which assumes a beginningless universe; claiming that the universe (or the existence of matter and energy) is necessary as well as eternal simply makes the cosmos itself into Aquinas' necessary being and is actually closer to pantheism (identifying God with the cosmos) than scientific naturalism. So it is fairly uncontroversial to claim that the universe is contingent, that it could have been (or not been) other than it is. Scientifically, twentieth-century cosmology has strongly supported the Big Bang theory, which postulates a clear beginning to the universe;⁸ the second law of thermodynamics also indicates that the universe has a finite age.

If these premises are both accepted, some conclusions can be drawn about the first cause/necessary being. (Granting that it is not simply the universe itself) At the very least, it would have to be outside space and time, eternal, and omnipotent in order to be the first/ultimate cause of everything else. To avoid an infinite regress of causes, it must be uncaused, self-existent, or necessary. If we grant that the universe had a beginning, it also seems that this being must be personal, since if the first cause were merely impersonal or mechanical, then the universe would be coeternal with it.⁹

Unsurprisingly, skeptics have raised a number of objections to the cosmological argument. A common one is to point out that no explanation or cause is given for the first cause/necessary being whose existence is being proven. This is taken to be a form of special pleading, a convenient exemption from the general rule of causality which is argued for everything else; if God does not need a prior cause, why does the universe?¹⁰ As well, it is argued that the first cause whose existence the argument seeks to prove is hardly the God of Christianity, since it provides no evidence for, say, his singularity, goodness, immanence, continuing interaction with the universe, or even continuing existence.¹¹ As its employment by Enlightenment philosophers demonstrates, the cosmological argument works just as well for deism (not to mention Islam) as it does for Christianity.

Other objections take issue with the premises of the argument. A variety of scientific theories have offered alternatives to the Big Bang as the beginning of the universe, such as the steady state model, a cyclic universe with an endless series of collapses and "bounces", vacuum fluctuation models, chaotic inflation theory, and the many-worlds hypothesis.¹² Another approach is to argue that it because time is a property of the universe, it simply makes no sense to speak of anything "before" the Big Bang, or of its having a "cause", since both of these concepts are dependent on time.¹³

Other objections question the first premise, that everything has a cause. This is true on an everyday level, but is causality truly universal? In other words, since we know our concept of causality via inductive reasoning, can we use it deductively as a premise of the cosmological argument? Already, quantum physics seems to present a counterexample, making causality less than universal. If we can't assume that the principle of sufficient reason applies in a truly ultimate sense, then it would seem we can't be sure of the soundness of the cosmological argument. Perhaps the question of why we exist is unanswerable, or simply meaningless.¹⁴

The objection that no cause is sought for the first cause is a misunderstanding of the argument. The first premise only applies to contingent entities, or objects that begin to exist. Since the first cause is understood by definition as beginningless or necessary, no prior cause or explanation is needed to explain it. "It is not arbitrary to deny that God has a cause, because, if God did have a cause, he would not be God."¹⁵ Some forms of this objection are reducible to objections to the second premise; if the universe is caused/had a beginning, then it is reasonable to seek an explanation for it. If what is being objected to is simply the possibility of a necessary/eternal being, that is a whole different, more philosophical argument.

Objections to the second premise are unconvincing. Attempts to get around the Big Bang and show how the universe may have no beginning tend to be highly speculative and nearly as faith-based as theism. Additionally, they apply only to the temporal form of the argument: even if our universe is part of some infinite series or tree of universes, the existence of the whole series is still yet to be explained.¹⁶ The question "why is there something rather than nothing?" is unanswered, since it is dependent only on the contingency (not the finitude) of the universe. As previously mentioned, if naturalists argue that besides being eternal, the universe is not contingent (i.e. it is necessary), the resulting worldview would seem to be closer to pantheism (the universe itself is God), which is not a place I think many skeptics would like to go.¹⁷

The objection that it makes no sense to speak of anything "before" the Big Bang, or its having a cause, is very interesting, since it actually gets at a central mystery of Christian theology proper, the eternality of God, from a scientific angle. It is true that there is no "before" the Big Bang in the temporal sense. But according to what the vast majority of Christians believe about God, he is able to exist and act outside of space and time in ways we cannot even imagine, which does not make it any less possible. It seems more accurate to say that the kind of causality we are talking about when speaking of a "first cause" is more (onto)logical than temporal.

Objections to the first premise are, in my view, the strongest, or at least the most consistent within a position of philosophical naturalism. The idea of the universe being a quantum fluctuation only pushes the question back, since it assumes the preexistence of the quantum vacuum.¹⁸ But objecting to the a priori assumption of universal causality seems at least somewhat promising: perhaps the causality that we consider a universal pattern of reality does not apply on the highest level. Can we be sure? Perhaps the existence of something rather than nothing is absurd, a "brute fact" for which no explanation can be given or should be sought. I know of no refutation of this proposition. But it does seem profoundly at odds with the drive of science to rationally seek explanations for everything. Why give up this quest when it comes to the ultimate reason? At the very least, claiming the universe came from nothing or that its cause is unknowable would seem to be just as much a faith-based claim as claiming that it was created.

Once unacceptable responses have been pared away, debates on the cosmological argument reduce to questions of the principle of sufficient reason: does the existence of the universe have a cause or explanation? This is a question whose answer cannot be "proven" one way or another by logic, science, or anything else. Apologetics can point out this underlying difference between theism and naturalism, but cannot overcome it; this is what is meant when someone points out that "you can't argue someone to Christ." Nonetheless, the cosmological argument is valuable in that it demonstrates the difference between positions and how each is consonant with its respective worldview. It can help to overcome derision and caricatures from each side and promote honest, significant dialogue which has the potential to create real faith.

---

1. C. Stephen Evans and R. Zachary Manis, Philosophy of Religion: Thinking About Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 67.
2. William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 96.
3. Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence that Points Toward God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 98.
4. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Growth of Medieval Theology (600–1300), vol. 3 of The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 290–291.
5. Evans and Manis, Philosophy of Religion, 69–70.
6. Craig, Reasonable Faith, 99.
7. Strobel, The Case for a Creator, 102–104.
8. Strobel, The Case for a Creator, 104–107.
9. Strobel, The Case for a Creator, 111.
10. Austin Cline, “Cosmological Argument: Does the Universe Require a First Cause?”, About Religion, < http://atheism.about.com/od/argumentsforgod/a/cosmological.htm> (17 February 2015).
11. Evans and Manis, Philosophy of Religion, 70.
12. Craig, Reasonable Faith, 128–134, 144–150.
13. Cline, “The Cosmological Argument.”
14. Evans and Manis, Philosophy of Religion, 75.
15. Evans and Manis, Philosophy of Religion, 71.
16. Evans and Manis, Philosophy of Religion, 74.
17. Evans and Manis, Philosophy of Religion, 73; Craig, Reasonable Faith, 109.
18. Strobel, The Case for a Creator, 117.

My Journey, Part 13.3: Faith Alone?

This is part 13.3 of my rebooted series on my journey from Evangelicalism to Eastern Orthodoxy. The full series can be found here:

1	Back to the beginning
2	Cracks appear
3	Questions multiply
4	Questioning the "gospel"
5	The big question
6	A better hermeneutic
7	Explorations in epistemology
7.5	Excursus on oversystematization
8	Back to the gospel
9	The new direction
10	Ecclesiological foundations
11.1	Sola scriptura
11.2	The insufficiency of Scripture
11.25	Addenda on sola scriptura
11.3	Holy Tradition
12	Bridging the cracks
13.1	Orthodoxy and Genesis 1–3
13.2	A Better Atonement (Against Penal Substitution)
13.3	Faith Alone?
13.4	The Colour and the Shape of the Gospel
14	Worshipping with the Church
15	Mary, Saints, Baptism, and Other Odds/Ends
16	Looking Back, Coming Home

The next contrast I would like to draw between evangelical and Orthodox visions of the gospel concerns the doctrine of justification by faith alone and the application of salvation to human beings. The theology, that is, exemplified in statements like these from the Westminster Confession:

Those whom God effectually calleth, he also freely justifieth: not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ's sake alone; not by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness; but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them, they receiving and resting on him and his righteousness by faith; which faith they have not of themselves, it is the gift of God. Faith, thus receiving and resting on Christ and his righteousness, is the alone instrument of justification; yet is it not alone in the person justified, but is ever accompanied with all other saving graces, and is no dead faith, but worketh by love. (XIII.1,2)

Good works are only such as God hath commanded in his holy Word, and not such as, without the warrant thereof, are devised by men out of blind zeal, or upon any pretense of good intention. These good works, done in obedience to God's commandments, are the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith: and by them believers manifest their thankfulness, strengthen their assurance, edify their brethren, adorn the profession of the gospel, stop the mouths of the adversaries, and glorify God, whose workmanship they are, created in Christ Jesus thereunto, that, having their fruit unto holiness, they may have the end, eternal life. Their ability to do good works is not at all of themselves, but wholly from the Spirit of Christ. And that they may be enabled thereunto, besides the graces they have already received, there is required an actual influence of the same Holy Spirit to work in them to will and to do of his good pleasure; yet are they not hereupon to grow negligent, as if they were not bound to perform any duty unless upon a special motion of the Spirit; but they ought to be diligent in stirring up the grace of God that is in them. (XVIII.1-3)

I feel fairly justified (no pun intended) in asserting that while penal substitutionary atonement is considered the default behind-the-scenes theology of how the gospel basically works, justification by faith alone is virtually considered to be what the gospel really, basically is, particularly in its more classical formulations. It was the key revelation of Luther's "evangelical experience" that touched off the Reformation. It is enshrined in one of the five solae of Protestant theology. It is the sine qua non of the "raw gospel", the article by which the church stands or falls, the last thing you can take out before you stop having a condensed statement of the gospel and start having no gospel at all.

During my journey into doubt about this gospel, I began questioning four dichotomies I saw in the gospel of justification by faith alone—overly stark distinctions made, things separated that I felt belonged together, concepts set in tension that I saw as complementary. These problems were most identifiable with Martin Luther's theology, but I saw echoes of them throughout much of Protestantism, not least in the Reformed theology with which I am more familiar. I will refer to them by the following pairings: Law/Gospel, Nature/Grace, Faith/Works, and Justification/Sanctification. I have already written of the tendency of distinctions like these to foster negative definitions of the "gospel". When I began to explore Orthodox theology, it confirmed these suspicions. Given that a good deal of my problems with living the "Christian life" within evangelicalism arose from these questions, this was a powerful witness to me for the Orthodox faith.

Aside: you may have been noticing in this and the last few posts that, except for the Old Testament sacrificial system and a few aspects of the Atonement, I haven't been making much of a positive biblical case for my points. This is partially a methodological change due to my shift from relying on the Bible alone as the final authority for matters of faith and practice to viewing it as existing within Holy Tradition.  But more precisely, it is because of my realization that the Bible is not self-interpreting (hence the need for tradition), and that many disagreements among Christians over what Scripture "says" are actually disagreements on the best way to interpret it. Much like conversations of apologetics between theists and skeptics, citing Scripture as evidence in these discussions may not be helpful since people holding different positions simply interpret it in different ways so as to agree with their convictions. Hence my greater reliance on theological, philosophical, and historical arguments for the following points, with Scripture (interpreted according to Orthodox tradition, and hence in a way that Reformed evangelicals may disagree with) in more of a supporting role.

Speaking of historical arguments, Jaroslav Pelikan mentions in his history of Christian doctrine the difficulty the Reformers had finding patristic evidence for justification by faith alone (though they believed it was implicit from Augustinian anthropology and orthodox Trinitarian theology):

[Luther and Melanchthon's] distinctive account of the means of appropriating redemption, the doctrine of justification by faith, was, at least in the form it took in the theology of the Reformers, a doctrine for which it proved to be extremely difficult to document a continuous history in the ancient church, despite the claim that there was proof for it not only in the Scriptures but also in the church fathers, or, at any rate, that there were 'traces [vestigia]' of it. Not only this particular answer to the question of justification, but even the very question of justification itself, was anything but a commonplace in patristic thought, Eastern or Western. (4.157)

Without further ado, on to the Law/Gospel tension.

Law/Gospel

How can we see the bad news of the gospel as clearly and "bad-ly" as possible so the good news seems all the better to us?

How does the revelation of Jesus Christ transform the whole of reality for us, 

including the Old Testament?

In classical Protestant theology, the "law" (in the broader, more ambiguous sense I pointed out last time) is considered to have three uses: to partially restrain sin and maintain some kind of civic order; to condemn sin, show us our guilt, and drive us to seek grace through Christ; and as a guide by which Christians may righteously live out their life of repentance. Lutheran theology tends to place the most weight on the second use, while Reformed theology pays more attention to the third as well. It is the second use, and by extension the more Lutheran flavor of evangelicalism, that I will be specifically critiquing here, though the same kind of teaching tends to appear in Reformed evangelicalism in attenuated form. It is the tendency to make the law the "bad news" which is contrasted with and answered by the "good news" of the gospel. Pelikan writes extensively about Luther's theology in this regard. First, to remove any doubt that Luther was exemplary of the distorted view of God's justice I described last time (emphasis added):

In the language of the Bible, God's justice against sin was called 'the wrath of God,' or as Luther called it, 'the wrath of his severity.' The wrath of God was an even graver consequence of sin than was the corruption of sin itself, bringing with it as it did the curse of God and the punishment of death. Nowhere in the Bible did Luther find the doctrine of the wrath of God more profoundly stated than in Psalm 90, traditionally ascribed to Moses, who was here 'Moses at his most Mosaic, that is, a stern minister of death, God's wrath, and sin,' and who in this psalm expressed 'all that can possibly be said about man's tragic condition.' Since God was eternal and omnipotent, his fury or wrath toward self-satisfied sinners is also immeasurable and infinite.' (4.132)

To Luther, the law was the proclamation of this justice/wrath, meant to accuse and terrify the conscience by revealing sin and the awful wrath of God in order to drive the sinner toward repentance (in other words, to allow them to have their own "evangelical experience" as Luther did).

it was the function of divine law to declare what was right in the sight of God and thus to reveal the wrath of God against sin. Far from bringing confidence and assurance, the law brought only accusation and terror to the conscience, 'the terrible and indescribable wrath of God,' for the law was 'the word that denounces sin.' The law was indeed an illumination, but 'a light that illumines and shows, not the grace of God, or righteousness and life, but the wrath of God, sin, death, our damnation in the sight of God, and hell.' (4.133-134)

The law of God, which was one of the 'enemies' over whom Christ the victor prevailed, was as well a divine demand that man had the obligation to fulfill but could not obey. (4.163)

Luther's strong emphasis on the second use of the law is evident, as is his relative demotion of the third use:

Luther could go so far as to declare that 'the law was not put in our hands for us to fulfill it, but was put in the hands of Christ, who was to come, for him to fulfill it.' (4.163)

As is well-known, in his hermeneutic approach Luther saw Scripture in terms of a sharp distinction between law and gospel (which was not exactly the same as Marcion's division between the testaments, since elements of both law and gospel could be found in each testament):

In its strict sense as the good news of salvation through the victory of Christ, the gospel stood in the sharpest possible contrast to the law. Out of that contrast Luther shaped one of the most pervasive themes of his theology of the cross. 'The truth of the gospel is this,' he said, 'that our righteousness comes by faith alone, without the works of the law,' and therefore the only 'real theologian' was one 'who knows well how to distinguish the gospel from the law.' 'The knowledge of this topic, the distinction between the law and the gospel,' he went on, 'is necessary to the highest degree, for it contains a summary of all Christian doctrine.' Everyone was to learn to make this distinction 'not only in words, but in feeling and in experience.' (4.168)

Moses and Christ thus served as contrasting figures representing these two divine dispensations:

The use of Moses and Christ to represent the law and the gospel had a precedent in the New Testament itself, where 'grace and truth' were the line of demarcation between what had come through Moses and what had come through Christ. (Jhn 1:17) The law, as the word of Moses directed to the outer life of men, was able to instruct and sanctify only the flesh, whereas the gospel, as the word of Christ directed to the inner life of men, was able to instruct and sanctify the spirit. It was the special ministry of Moses to proclaim the wrath of God in the law, and the death that was the consequence of man's disobedience. Thus Luther portrayed Christ as speaking to Moses: 'I will not preach as you, Moses, are obliged to preach. For you must proclaim the law. ... Therefore your preaching produces only wretched people; it shows them their sins, on account of which they cannot keep the law.' (4.168)

For, as Melanchthon's Apology of the Augsburg Confession summarized the Lutheran distinction, 'all Scripture should be divided into these two chief doctrines, the law and the promises.' It was the intention and function of the law, the Apology went on to declare, to be 'the word that convicts of sin. For the law works wrath, it only accuses, it only terrifies consciences.' This it did because no one could live up to its demands: not only a completely upright and moral life, but an upright heart, a motivation for life that loved God above all things and loved the neighbor perfectly. Hence it was in a tone of irony that both the Old and the New Testament said of the works of the law that 'he who does them shall live by them,' since no one could. To the argument of Erasmus that the presence of so many commands in both the Old and the New Testament implied an ability to obey them, Luther retorted: 'Reason thinks that man is mocked by an impossible commandment, whereas I maintain that by this means man is admonished and awakened to see his own impotence.' Once the penitent sinner had been awakened this way by the proclamation of the law to recognize his true condition before God, the law had performed its task and must yield to the promise of the gospel, which the sinner accepted by faith alone, without any merit or reliance on the works of the law. The forgiven sinner 'died to the law,' was no longer bound by it, no longer owed it obedience, and did not even know it any longer. To be justified by faith alone meant to live by the gospel alone. (4.170-171)

These quotes should be sufficient to illustrate the law/gospel dichotomy I'm referring to. I've already explained my difficulties with this take on the law in post 5. First, I wondered why we don't let the "law" (whose primary job, according to Luther, is to show us our sin, full us with guilt and terror and the wrath of God, and drive us to repentance) convict us of breaking the Sabbath, or eating pork. They're in there, after all! (Exo 20:8-11, Lev 11:7) This is indicative of the fact that the "law", in Lutheran theology, is not, in fact, exactly coextensive with the Mosaic law; in terms of its actual demands, it seems more like the natural law or law of conscience (see Rom 2:14-15), though it is still spoken of as being given by Moses. The distinctive Jewishness of the Mosaic law is largely ignored, and it is instead thought of as a demand on all mankind that brings a curse (ultimately, death) onto the whole human race. So Pelikan:

Although both the law and the gospel had come by the revelation of God, there was this difference between them: the gospel could be known only through such revelation, while the law of Moses was, at least in principle, coextensive with the law of nature and was valid only insofar as it was the same as the law of nature. (4.170)

Second, as I realized years ago, the Lutheran understanding of the law only works on an individual level; when applied historically, it leads to absurdity. In the quotes above Luther calls the law as bringing "only accusation and terror to the conscience," as "one of the 'enemies' over whom Christ the victor prevailed," a foil for the good news of the gospel, able to sanctify only the exterior (and by implication, inevitably producing Pharisees, Luk 11:39), a "stern [ministry] of death, God's wrath, and sin", whose promises of life through obedience were given only in irony because they were impossible. And then God leaves his "chosen" people with it as the foundation for their civil and religious life for thousands of years and calls it a gift! Hence my struggle with seeing the law (which, I cannot remind you enough, was supposedly given by God as a good thing) either as the problem from which the gospel saves us, or a deliberately ineffective solution to it. Luther's view of the law reduces the historical narrative of the gospel (as opposed to the personal narrative of individual salvation) to a farce.

But especially (again as I described in post 5), I struggled with doubts arising from the seeming incompatibility between Paul and the Old Testament, between commands to seek righteousness from obeying the law (Lev 18:5, Deu 6:25), assurances that it is possible (Deu 30:11-14), and Paul's writing that it was impossible and not even intended all along. As I journaled:

Why does God seem to command people to seek life through [the law] if it was never intended? ... God never wanted Pharisees—He never intended for anyone to actually try to be justified by obeying the law. So how do you explain His commanding them to obey it all so they would live? I picture Him saying it with a wink—'By the way, this is all impossible, but just play along.' If God never intended anyone to be saved by the law, why was He so emphatic about obeying it so you might live? Lev 18:5, Deu 6:25... And this after the establishment in Abraham of justification by faith—what were they supposed to think? 'Wait, so if we disobey the law, does that nullify our righteousness by faith?' (2012-12-13) 

It almost seems like God did expect the Israelites to be justified by law. Was the whole system of law a big joke, delivered with a wink, with Christ the punchline that God expected the Israelites to 'get'? 'You will be declared righteous by obeying the whole law (only you can't, this way doesn't work, you just have to believe like Abraham)' (2013-1-12)

(From the 4.170-171 quote above, it seems that Luther's answer would be an unhesitant "Yes")

If God never intended for people to seek salvation through the law, why did He tell them to and say they could do it? [Deu 30:11-14] If Abraham had already established the precedent of salvation by faith, why was the law then given at all? (2013-1-20)

Now I see more clearly that was was really incompatible was not Paul and the law, but the Lutheran readings of Paul and the law which viewed the law as an (impossible) way to "earn" righteousness and salvation before God, as more of an enemy of man than a gift, and the gospel as freedom from the law's condemnation. Again, in the Reformed tradition with which I am more familiar, this is not the whole picture of the law, but it is definitely part of it. And I no longer believe it should be.

The contrasting Orthodox teaching on law and gospel may be a little underwhelming, because Orthodoxy makes much less of a big deal of it than Protestantism does, dependent as it is on Luther's theology. Much of the difference is a result of the eastern view of God's justice, as I explained last time. Apart from the Anselmian understanding of God's justice as the need to avenge his honor or punish sin, the law no longer looks like an enemy we are saved from; it certainly does still reveal sin and our inability to live up to it righteously, but its function is not so one-dimensionally negative, simply to terrify and condemn. Much like God's justice (which is of course closely associated with it), the law has a positive role to play in salvation (restraining sin, helping Israel to enjoy God's grace, making known his will and promises) as well as a negative one. And even in its negative usage, because Orthodoxy sees death as a consequence of sin rather than a penalty, it is easy to see that the law is not the real problem, but rather only points it out. As Fr. Stephen Freeman often says, we do not have a "legal problem" with sin; the problem of sin is not that it brings us under legal guilt or condemnation according to the law, but that it separates us from the Author of life and being, causing us to die. The law points out the problem; it does not create it.

Also and significantly, Orthodox theology distinguishes between the different kinds of "law" in Paul's theology. My study Bible lists at least six in Romans alone: the Mosaic law (2:12-14), natural law (2:14-15), the "laws" (or principles) or works and faith (3:27), the law of sin (Rom 7:25, 8:2), and the law of the Spirit. (8:2) This means that the Mosaic law with its "curse" (Gal 3:10) is distinguishable from natural law (which is what is incumbent on all mankind); thus the idea of death as the "curse" of the law from which Christ saves us is undone, and sin is seen not to be equivalent to Pelagianism or being "of works of the law". (The New Perspective on Paul, which I wrote about in post 8, reminds us that "works of the law" are not simply any moral effort, and is more inclined to view the Babylonian captivity and continued alienation of Israel from God and his promises as the "curse" of Gal 3:10,13) And by dissociating the Mosaic law from Paul's "law of works" or "law of sin and death", Luther's negative portrayal of the law is softened and balanced considerably. My study Bible summarizes on the Mosaic law:

The Law is good, but cannot be kept. It is revelation from God, but not an end in itself. The purpose of the Mosaic Law is (a) to reveal the difference between good and evil; (b) to make the world accountable to God (Rom 3:19); (c) to manifest sin (3:20); and (d) to be a schoolmaster to lead us to Christ (Gal 3:24). Though it is not opposed to the grace of God, the Law cannot save us or make us righteous.

So the law is by no means sufficient on its own to bring anyone to life, but this does not entail the Lutheran conclusion that it is bad and harmful, a "stern ministry of sin and death", or an enemy from which the gospel saves us. To impugn the law like this is to blaspheme against its giver.

Nature/Grace

How can we proclaim clearly and consistently that it is God, not man, who accomplishes the work of salvation?

What can we learn of our own union with God from the union of Christ's natures?

This teaching is at the root of the episode of doubt I had during Summer Project, as described in post #2. It is the tendency of expositions of the gospel according to evangelicalism to set our agency and God's agency, or human nature and divine grace, in opposition to each other, e.g. in the Westminster Confession's statement, "Their ability to do good works is not at all of themselves, but wholly from the Spirit of Christ." Examples of this kind of human agency-degrading rhetoric are incredibly common. The theological term for it is monergism, from the Greek meaning "one work" (namely, God's). This page lists numerous statements expressing monergistic theology, of which I will quote a few examples:

I say that man, before he is renewed into the new creation of the Spirit's kingdom, does and endeavours nothing to prepare himself for that new creation and kingdom, and when he is re-created has does and endeavors nothing towards his perseverance in that kingdom; but the Spirit alone works both blessings in us, regenerating us, and preserving us when regenerate, without ourselves... - Martin Luther
The first part of a good work is the will, the second is vigorous effort in the doing of it. God is the author of both. It is, therefore, robbery from God to arrogate anything to ourselves, either in the will or the act. - John Calvin
To say that we are able by our own efforts to think good thoughts or give God spiritual obedience before we are spiritually regenerate is to overthrow the gospel and the faith of the universal church in all ages. - John Owen
There is no true believing or trusting to the report of the gospel, but what is the effect of the working of a divine power on the soul for that end. - Thomas Boston
There can be but one will the master in our salvation, but that shall never be the will of man, but of God; therefore man must be saved by grace. - John Bunyan
What God requires of us he himself works in us, or it is not done. He that commands faith, holiness, and love, creates them by the power of his grace ... - Matthew Henry
Faith is a fruit of the Spirit, and not the cause of a spiritual experience. - Jonathan Edwards
It is not your hold of Christ that saves, but his hold of you! - C.H. Spurgeon
Faith, repentance, and holiness are no less the free gifts of God than eternal life. - Augustus Toplady
Sanctification is not a work of nature, but a work of grace. It is a transformation of character effected not by moral influences, but supernaturally by the Holy Spirit. - Charles Hodge
We can do nothing, it is all of God... If God had not quickened us we should still be dead. A dead man cannot give himself life. God quickened us, and because God has put new life into us we are alive in Christ Jesus, and in the realm of the Spirit. - D.M. Lloyd-Jones
Infants do not induce, or cooperate in, their own procreation and birth; no more can those who are 'dead in trespapasses and sins' prompt the quickening operation of God's Spirit within them. - J.I. Packer
Faith is the evidence of new birth, not the cause of it. - John Piper
Regeneration, however it is described, is a divine activity in us, in which we are not the actors but the recipients. - Sinclair Ferguson
God's grace in Christ is not merely necessary but is the sole efficient cause of salvation... We deny that salvation is in any sense a human work. Human methods, techniques or strategies by themselves cannot accomplish this transformation. Faith is not produced by our unregenerated human nature. - Cambridge Declaration

Hopefully this selection of quotes is sufficient to show you the basic pattern. As they indicate, monergism is applied with special force and focus to regeneration, the moment of salvation when God transforms the sinner's heart, creates faith and love for him where there was previously sin and unbelief, and is said to be "born again" in the John 3 sense. Of the evangelical tendency to focus on the "moment of salvation' I will say more next post. For now, the following quotes help tie monergistic teaching in with regeneration (meaning, literally, "new birth"): we are made anew and given faith entirely by the work of God operating through the Holy Spirit.

It is entirely the work of grace and a benefit conferred by it that our heart is changed from a stony one to one of flesh, that our will is made new, and that we, created anew in heart and mind, at length will what we ought to will. - John Calvin
Conversion is not a repairing of the old building, but it takes all down, and erects a new structure... The sincere Christian is quite a new fabric, from the foundation to the top-stone. He is a new man, a new creature; all things are become new. Conversion is a deep work, a heart work. It makes a new man in a new world. It extends to the whole man, to the mind, to the members, to the motions of the whole life. - Joseph Alleine
A man's conversion is nothing, his believing is nothing, his profession is nothing unless he is made to be a new creature in Christ Jesus... If our faith has not brought with it the Holy Spirit, if, indeed, it is not the fruit of the Spirit...then our faith is presumption, and our profession is a lie. - C.H. Spurgeon

More specifically, the thrust of monergism is not whether God's grace is necessary for regeneration, but whether it is sufficient for salvation; in other words, whether we cooperate with grace in some way while still relying on it, or whether God's grace is what saves us apart from any action, work, or response on our part. Our faith, in other words, is an effect, not a cause, of regeneration. This quote from Reformed apologist James White illustrates the point:

The [Roman Catholic] Council of Trent anathematizes anyone who says you can be saved without the grace of God. The Reformers, however, never claimed Rome believed you can be saved apart from grace. That wasn't the debate. The debate of the Reformation was never, ever about the necessity of grace, it was always about the sufficiency of grace. That remains the issue today in so many contexts.

But monergism is also applied to life after regeneration. Just as the Christian life starts entirely by grace, so it is said to continue entirely by grace. To be actively avoided is the arch-heresy of Pelagianism, or "works-righteousness", of substituting yourself for Jesus as your functional savior. It is the lie that our salvation, our relationship with God, is in any way dependent on us rather than on his grace, that after he has purchased our righteousness we still have to earn it with our own effort. As Paul asks the Galatians, "Having begun with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh?" (3:3) Keeping one's life centered on God and his all-sufficient grace is a constant struggle for the Christian.

Of the concept of a moral economy in which righteousness and salvation can be "purchased" and "earned" I have already said enough. Instead I would like to address monergism's distinction between nature and grace, or between human agency and divine agency, between what we do and what God does. I am no longer able to accept this dichotomy since I have found it to be impossible to live consistently, as I have described in posts #2 and 8. You simply can't step aside and let God's grace replace (or cause) your actions, your choices, your initiative. It doesn't consistently make sense to "let go and let God", as they say. You have to be doing something. "Actively" believing in God's grace and expecting him to do the rest without doing something yourself is no way to live the Christian life (at the same time, believing itself becomes a "work" that we are responsible for doing). How do you just "believe" or "trust" apart from concrete action, anyway? I expect many Reformed Christians would agree—so why do they continue to make statements of monergism that leave no real place for human agency?

I suspect the reason is that monergism conflates total dependence on God for the beginning and continuation of salvation with the irrelevance or uselessness of human agency. In other words, salvation is "all about" God and what he does/has done, rather than about what we do, and it necessarily involves despairing of your own efforts and "giving it up to God", letting him "take over" for us and do what we cannot do ourselves. According to monergism, if salvation depends entirely on God, it cannot therefore involve us except as passive recipients and objects of grace. In terms of the Nature/Grace duality, what we are unable to do by nature because our nature is sinful, God has done and does entirely by his grace.

I would disagree with this. I do not believe that if salvation depends on God's grace, it cannot also depend on our participation.  While there is abundant biblical support for saying that human cooperation/free will is not sufficient for anyone to be saved, saying that it is not necessary for salvation takes you into dangerous territory. Most basically, this is because the Nature/Grace dichotomy is simply bunk. As created beings, everything we are is of grace. There is no corner of our nature where God's grace is absent; speaking of our acting "on our own" in the way monergists do, as the opposite of stepping back and letting grace take over, simply doesn't make sense. We exist at all because of God's creative grace. We enjoy free will because of God's grace, because he created us in his image, as beings reflecting (imperfectly) his own total freedom. The exercise of our freedom is (or can be, at least), simultaneously, the working of God's grace in us (because he made us this way) and the willing and acting of a free, personal being other than God. (See Phil 2:12-13 for a clear description of this dynamic) His grace already, invisibly pervades our lives even if we don't know him. God made us to love and enjoy him freely, willingly, personally, as creatures made in his image and reflecting the divine freedom, and so it is to be expected that he would save us in a way consistent with this.  The essence of the Pelagian heresy is not found in actively exercising our human will towards salvation, but in doing so in a way that rejects faith and excludes trust in the necessary grace of God.

N.T. Wright, in his book Justification, makes the point that monergism, especially as it pertains to the Christian life after regeneration, implies a distrust or marginalization of the Holy Spirit and his indwelling in us. The working of the Spirit does not exclude human effort but purifies and redeems it, making possible true synergism (God and man working together in salvation). Wright says it better:

But the point about the holy spirit, at least within Paul's theology, is that when the spirit comes the result is human freedom rather than human slavery. When God works within a community, or an individual, the result is that 'they will and work for his good pleasure' (Philippians 2:13). (164)

the more the spirit is at work the more the human will is stirred up to think things through, to take free decisions, to develop chosen and hard-won habits of life and to put to death the sinful, and often apparently not freely chosen, habits of death.  (164)

True freedom is the gift of the spirit, the result of grace; but, precisely because it is freedom for as well as freedom from, it isn't simply a matter of being forced now to be good, against our wills and without our co-operation (what damage to genuine pastoral theology has been done by making a bogey-word out of the Pauline term synergism, 'working together with God'), but a matter of being released from slavery precisely into responsibility, into being able at last to choose, to exercise moral muscle, knowing both that one is doing it oneself and that the spirit is at work within, that God himself is doing that which I too am doing. If we don't believe that, we don't believe in the spirit, and we don't believe Paul's teaching. Virtue is what happens ... when the spirit enables the Christian freedom to choose, freely to develop, freely to be shaped, freely to become that which is pleasing to God. (164)

from one point of view the spirit is at work, producing these fruits (Galatians 5:22f), and from another point of view the person concerned is making the free choices, the increasingly free (because increasingly less constrained by the sinful habits of mind and body) decisions to live a genuinely, fully human life which brings pleasure--of course it does!—to the God in whose image we human beings were made. (167)

Humans become genuinely human, genuinely free, when the spirit is at work within them so that they choose to act, and choose to become people who more and more naturally act (that is the point of 'virtue' as long as we realize it is now 'second nature', not primary), in ways which reflect God's image, which give him pleasure, which bring glory to his name, which do what the law had in mind all along. That is the life that leads to the final verdict, 'Well done, good and faithful servant!' The danger with a doctrine which says 'you can't do anything and you mustn't try' is that it ends up with the servant who, knowing his master to be strict, hid his money in the ground. (168)

Orthodoxy has given me even more reason to reject monergism. Robin Phillips, writing of his journey from Calvinism to Orthodoxy, goes further than I did and actually calls it a heresy. His summary:

If all Calvinism were to be encapsulated by a single term it would be the word Monergism. The term comes from the Greek mono meaning “one,” and erg meaning “work,” and describes the notion that salvation is affected by only one agent, namely God. As R.C. Sproul explains it, “A monergistic work is a work produced singly, by one person… A synergistic work is one that involves cooperation between two or more persons or things.” While there is certainly a sense in which the Bible teaches that God is the only agent effecting salvation, Monergism goes wrong in denying that human beings are able to co-operate in the process of regeneration and salvation.

After acknowledging the good points of monergism (that it takes God's sovereignty, the fact that grace removes any ground for boasting, and that all the good we do is God working in us seriously), Phillips clarifies that "Where Monergism needs to be critiqued is when it takes these truths and formalizes them into a tight system, drawing further extrapolations which end up excluding important Biblical teaching about the role of human co-operation in the salvation process."

The center of Phillips' critique of monergism is that it "essentially sets up the relationship between God and man (as well as grace and nature) like two transactions in a zero-sum game." In other words, it views the accomplishment of salvation like a pie, and assigning any of that pie to man means taking some of it away from God, which is unacceptable. Ascribing any freedom, responsibility, or role in salvation to man means taking away from God's sovereignty and freedom. In monergism God's very divinity is thought to be based on his being the only free agent in the universe, especially as pertains to salvation. It is precisely this kind of zero-sum thinking as pertains to God and man that Phillips (and I, and the Orthodox Church) finds unacceptable. Contrasting with this is St. Maximos the Confessor, who believed (with the Orthodox consensus) that because humans are made in the image of God, they possess the same kind of self-determining freedom as God, constrained but not eliminated by our finitude and bondage to sin.

Phillips came to reject monergism because of "how it tinctured various practical areas of the Christian life." It leads to the conclusion (which I still struggle with) that prayer can't actually change things, since then it would be a 'work' and make God less than fully sovereign. "The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects" (Jas 5:16) indeed. Monergism inhibits pastoral ministry by creating an expectation of God acting independently of any human instrumentality; all we can do is preach the gospel to them (why do even this?) and let God do the rest. The grace-nature dichotomy which led Reformed worship to do-emphasize visual aids to worship to avoid distracting from God is also in tension with the worship of the early church which (as I will get into in two more posts) was "intensely material", involving icons, relics, incense, etc.

Phillips also asks the question: is God responsible for things he accomplishes through secondary means? If not (as is commonly believed by monergists), "then we are left with a system in which we can take the credit for most of the acts God performs in this world, since God accomplishes most things through means." But if so, how is God not then responsible for acts of sin and evil?

But while these are plenty of reasons to reject monergism as a false teaching, it is in a follow-up article that Phillips presents his reasons for actually considering monergism a heresy  (which, in Orthodoxy, does not simply mean any false teaching but one that contradicts a dogma/essential teaching of the Church). It goes back to the sixth ecumenical council (680-681) which condemned as heresy the teachings of monothelitism (Christ had only one, divine will, and no human will) and monoenergism (Christ is animated by only one 'energy', whatever that means). Both of these were thought to imply monophysitism (the previously-condemned heresy that Christ has only one, divine nature and is not fully human) The council affirmed that Christ has two natures, two wills, and two energies (human and divine), which always work together synergistically in the same way that we are called to cooperate our human wills with God's divine will. Vladimir Lossky interestingly explains a little more of this mystery and how divine will differs from human will:

The two wills proper to the two natures [of Christ] are different, but He who wills is one, though He wills in conformity with each of the two natures. The volition also has one object, because the two wills are united, the human will being freely subject to the divine will. However, this liberty is not our free will—γνωμη, that faculty of choice which belongs to the person. In fact, the divine person of the Word had no need to choose or decide by deliberation. Choice is a limitation, characteristic of our debased liberty; if the humanity of Christ could will in a human way, His divine person did not choose, it did not exercise free will as do human persons. (The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 147)

You may be sensing where this is going. Monergism, much like the similarly-named monoenergism and monothelitism, is driven by zero-sum thinking regarding human and divine agency, the assumption that more freedom and responsibility for man means less for God, and God must have it all. In support of this, Phillips asks: in Calvinism, was Christ's human will sovereignly predestined to obey the Father, or was it exempt from the predestination of the rest of the human race? This question puts Calvinism in a bind. If Christ's human will was not predestined, then this sets a powerful precedent for truly synergistic cooperation between the human and divine wills. If it can be true for Christ (who is supposed to typify what humanity is made to be), why is it so unthinkable for other humans? But it if was predestined, then besides the confusing idea of Christ predestining himself, his human will seems to be reduced to a passive tool of the divine will—the key tenet of monothelitism.

In other words, monergism is a heresy because its key points about the relation between the human will and the divine will, when applied consistently to Christ's wills, result in heresy. Whatever you say about us and God, you should be able to say about Christ's human and divine natures. Once the analogy between Christ's two natures and our relations with God (an important belief of Orthodox Christology) is accepted, we see that synergism is implicit in the Christological canons of the ecumenical councils. This is why Orthodox synergism does not accept the zero-sum conception of human and divine agency, or nature and grace, but affirms that the work of salvation, just like Jesus himself, is 100% divine and 100% human. While salvation undoubtedly depends entirely on God, it also depends on us, on our active and free (albeit grace-enabled) cooperation with his working; God does not simply "help those who help themselves", but he also does not save apart from their active participation. Lossky interestingly describes this as God condescending to our liberty, which is a very interesting way to think about free will:

With a certain excusable inexactitude, one could say that God in His providence condescends to the liberty of men. He acts as a result of this liberty, co-ordinating his actions with the acts of created beings, in order to govern the fallen universe by accomplishing His will without doing violence to the liberty of creatures. (139)

Faith/Works

How are works indispensable to salvation without contributing to it or effecting it in any way?

Faith and works both justify, both are important to our salvation, and they should not be separated.

We come to an important point of divergence between Orthodoxy and evangelicalism. The faith/works distinction is very important to the evangelical gospel, and that of most Protestants. Reformation theology is very clear that the work of salvation is not dependent on our works (deeds, actions) in any way, but on our faith in Jesus Christ. (And this faith is still not what is effectual in accomplishing salvation; it is only the condition for receiving what is completely the work of God) Again, this distinction is correlated with (though far from particular to) Luther's theology, or more specifically his realization of how God in his justice could deal with us not according to our works (which are never sufficient to merit salvation) but according to Christ's righteousness, imputed to us by faith. Pelikan describes this insight:

Believing that [the justice of God in Rom 1:17] referred to 'the active justice of God,' which dispensed rewards and punishments, both temporal and eternal, in accordance with what the sinner deserved, Luther perceived such a 'gospel' to be a condemnation, not a consolation: 'Did God have to heap misery upon misery by the gospel, and by the gospel threaten us with his justice and wrath?' He found an answer to his question in a 'new definition of justice,' when he concluded that the justice of God revealed in the gospel was 'passive justice,' with which God invested the sinner through faith in Christ. (4.138)

Protestant soteriology, then, has as one of its axioms the distinction between faith and works: salvation, justification, regeneration, and all the promises of the gospel are not dependent on anything we work, earn, do, or merit, but only on our faith, which is itself not meritorious but simply allows us to receive God's grace (unmerited favor). Justification is by faith alone, as distinctly opposed to works (or some kind of faith-works mixture, which is what the Reformers accused the Catholic Church of peddling). John Piper, in his book the Future of Justification, emphasizes that the change in the divine disposition (justification) is secured by "the death and righteousness of Christ, counted as ours through faith alone. ... The one and only instrument through which God preserves our union with Christ is faith in Christ—the purely receiving act of the soul." (184) Making salvation in any way dependent on works is dangerous: "If we make the mistake of thinking that our works of love (the fruit of God's Spirit) secure or increase God's commitment to be completely for us, now and in the last judgment, we compromise the very reason that these works of love exist, namely, to display the infinite worth of Christ and his work as our all-sufficient obedience and all-sufficient righteousness." (185)

Of course, this faith-works distinction is presented with somewhat of an awkward challenge in interpreting James 2:24, presented here in context (emphasis added):

14 What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? 15 If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, be warmed and filled," without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? 17 So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. 18 But some one will say, "You have faith and I have works." Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith. 19 You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder. 20 Do you want to be shown, you shallow man, that faith apart from works is barren? 21 Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar? 22 You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by works, 23 and the scripture was fulfilled which says, "Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness"; and he was called the friend of God. 24 You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone. 25 And in the same way was not also Rahab the harlot justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out another way? 26 For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so faith apart from works is dead. (Jas 2:14-26)

If justification is by faith alone, what can James mean here? Again there is Protestant consensus: works do not in any way secure or accomplish salvation, but they do confirm it. The faith that allows us to truly receive justification, if it is authentic, should produce good works (or "fruit", in the biblical terminology; see Mat 3:8, 12:33; John 15). Again (it cannot be emphasized enough) these good works do not save us, but they should be expected to follow after the faith that does save us. This article explains three ways in which deeds relate to salvation: we are justified by Christ's deeds and the righteousness therein, we are invited to "work out our salvation" (Phil 2:12) and actively live by the Spirit (Rom 8:13, Gal 6:7-8) after we have been saved, and we will be rewarded for our good works at the last judgment. Works are not the ground of salvation, but they do have a place in it. In James' terminology, our faith is "completed by works" (2:22).

In short, the relationship between faith and works in Protestant theology is strictly one-directional: only faith saves us, and this faith gives rise to works, so salvation does not depend in any way on works. This is the intent of the doctrine of justification by faith alone.

Section three of this article contains a short summary of the Orthodox view on the Protestant faith/works distinction. The second paragraph is highly descriptive:

It is futile to rehash here the centuries of debate between Protestants and Roman Catholics on this issue. Let it suffice to say that for Orthodox, the debate over grace and works is something that has never found a foothold. It is an entirely Western argument, founded upon false concepts of grace and free will as largely espoused by St. Augustine. While acknowledging that the Church did synodally uphold the Blessed Hierarch's defense against Pelagianism, his views on grace and free will that were later to fuel theological debates in the West remained foreign to the ethos of Orthodoxy. They are not supported by the patristic consensus.

It goes on to critique the Protestant handling of James by pointing out the obvious fact that is skirted around: the only time in the Bible when the words "faith" and "alone" appear together is in James 2:24, where James specifically denies that faith alone justifies. In light of this, it is amazing that justification by faith alone has become such a cornerstone of Protestant soteriology. James does not say anything about faith and works justifying differently, or works being the confirmation of faith which alone justifies; he simply says they both justify. In light of this, 2:22 is read as a succinct description of synergism, like Phil 2:12-13. In the eastern reading, it is much easier to see James and Paul as being in agreement without forcing James to fit into a mold set by Paul, which is what I believe Luther did (he famously called it the "epistle of straw" and expressed the wish that it be removed from the canon). Roland Bainton, in his biography of Luther, describes his reading as "a Pauline construction upon James. The conclusion was a hierarchy of values within the New Testament. First Luther would place the Gospel of John, then the Pauline epistles and First Peter, after them the three other Gospels, and in a subordinate place Hebrews. James, Jude, and Revelation." (Here I Stand 259-261) In other words, the traditional Protestant reading of James amounts to an eisegesis of (Luther's interpretation of) Paul's theology into James' words.

The distinction and asymmetrical relationship between faith and works characteristic of Reformation theology is not a part of Orthodox theology. Apart from a juridical understanding of justification and zero-sum thinking about divine vs. human agency, it doesn't make sense to claim that works (with none of the meritorious connotations they have accrued in the west, but simply meaning "active, willing participation in the work of God") confirm our salvation without contributing to it. There is no worry that this will lead to works becoming a means to "earn" salvation because authentic salvation is not something it makes sense to "earn" like a wage. In Orthodoxy, salvation is not simply a one-time verdict of justification and monergistic act of regeneration (the temporal priority and singularity of justification is important for making it prior to and independent from works) but is more holistic, continuing throughout and even after life, so the believer can say with equal honesty, "I have been saved," "I am being saved," and "I will be saved." "Faith" and "works" are not opposing principles, nor is faith a substitute for works, but they are the two sides of how we respond to and cooperate with God's grace as part of our new life in Christ. (The New Perspective on Paul echoes this point, and also reminds us that "works" is not an abbreviation for "works of the law')

I should mention that I am acquainted with the kind of dead works which Luther and other Reformation theologians so endlessly warn against. Sometimes I am tempted to reassure myself (or claim to others) that I am doing "all right" spiritually because I read my Bible and pray every morning, or because I give away a good portion of my income to charity and missions, or because I am fasting from meat for Great Lent. This would be to turn my works (good as they are) into a crown of laurels and rest on them, thinking that they in any way excuse me from continuing to battle for holiness. To do so would indeed be sin. Where I differ from Luther is that I do not think that this impulse is the basis of all sin or the ultimate heresy lurking behind every theological bush, or that my works can earn "merit" that counts toward my salvation in some kind of cosmic juridical economy of salvation. I believe it makes sense to focus more on the positive, Spirit-breathed role of works as the dynamic counterpart to faith after conversion than on the dangers of false works and self-righteousness, both because this puts the emphasis on what we are saved to rather than on what we are saved from and because it helps avoid the confusion I went through over what exactly one is supposed to "do" vs. allow God to do after becoming a Christian.

Justification/Sanctification

How can we encourage believers to live out their salvation without making God's promise of justification by faith alone seem dependent on works?

How do the promises of God come together in the mystery of deification?

The last dichotomy relating to the gospel I'd like to emphasize is that between justification and sanctification. In typical Protestant usage, justification refers to "the establishment (or re-establishment) of the right relation between God and man" (Pelikan 4.147) by way of the forgiveness (non-imputation) of our sin and the positive imputation of Christ's righteousness to us. This theme, and the fact that it came gratuitously on the basis of faith, apart from any merit or effort on our part, was considered by Luther (and classical Protestantism) as the very heart of the gospel, the article by which the church stands or falls, as seen in passages like Psa 32:1-2, Rom 4:4-8 (which quotes it), or 2 Cor 5:19: "in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them". Calvin defines justification with his usual precision:

A man is said to be justified in the sight of God when in the judgment of God he is deemed righteous, and is accepted on account of his righteousness; for as iniquity is abominable to God, so neither can the sinner find grace in his sight, so far as he is and so long as he is regarded as a sinner. ... Thus we simply interpret justification, as the acceptance with which God receives us into his favor as if we were righteous; and we say that this justification consists in the forgiveness of sins and the imputation of the righteousness of Christ. (3.11.2)

Thus the lifeblood of the reformers' gospel was an essentially forensic exchange: our sin and its curse are imputed to Christ, and his perfect, alien righteousness is imputed to us apart from anything we could do to earn it. Though most clearly taught by Paul in Romans and Galatians, according to Luther, the doctrine of justification was the central teaching of the Scriptures, "the very voice of the gospel". (4.148) In the miraculous exchange of imputation, "God reckons imperfect righteousness as perfect righteousness and sin as not sin, even though it really is sin" (4.149), which makes true life and the enjoyment of God's rich mercy possible. One more Pelikan quote illustrating the centrality of forgiveness/justification to the gospel (which is not, of course, said to be only the message of justification, essential though it is):

A coworker expressed Luther's teaching when he defined the gospel as 'the knowledge of the grace and mercy of God through Christ,' a message that announced 'the forgiveness of all sins and the inheritance of eternal life' through Christ, who was the 'mercy seat' of God. Another coworker put it more simply still: 'The gospel is a promise'; for 'the gospel teaches that Christ, the Son of God, has been given for us and is our righteousness before God. And one of Luther's own definitions read: 'The gospel is a discourse about Christ, that he is the Son of God and became man for us, that he died and was raised, that he has been established as Lord over all things.' (4.167)

All of this is thus to be kept distinct (but not separate) from the doctrine of sanctification, which encompasses the believer's continuing life in Christ, growth in holiness, and conformity to his image after the verdict of justification. Sanctification is still understood as the work of God, wholly dependent on his grace and power, but (depending on your Protestant tradition) also somehow involving the cooperation of the Christian. Once saved/justified entirely by grace, the believer is enabled by the Spirit to cooperate with God and "work out your salvation with fear and trembling" (Phil 2:12). Again, for anyone who is in Christ and has already been justified, salvation is secure and does not depend in any way on works; it is more accurate to say that sanctification makes our already-accomplished salvation manifest is allows us to enjoy it and its manifold blessings.

I have already done most of the legwork, in this post and the last, to say everything I need to about justification: its overly forensic definition and concept of imputation, how and why these things are viewed differently in the Orthodox Church, and its overcentralization to the gospel. To recap, God's justice, wrath or law, is not an enemy we are saved from but rather sin, death, and the devil; God is always unconditionally ready and willing to forgive without fear of compromising the "cosmic moral order"; there is no concept of merit as in the west that allows imputation to make sense; God is not at enmity with us and in need of reconciliation to us but rather the other way around; God's justice is more properly "satisfied" by the destruction of sin than by its punishment; and the resurrection is as important to justification as the crucifixion. As well, justification is held to be one dimension of salvation rather than nearly synonymous with the whole thing, a continuing rather than instantaneous reality, and it includes cleansing from sin as well as forgiveness.

For the moment I will focus on how all of these things affect the role of sanctification. Its very presence in Protestant vocabulary as a distinct concept is telling; as justification is ushered to the very "heart of the gospel", sanctification is correspondingly, necessarily marginalized, even if it is still affirmed as real and important. In my opinion there is simply no way to continue to speak of and approach justification in the way the early reformers did without making sanctification ancillary to salvation. You "get saved" by justification, then "confirm" or "manifest" your (already effectual and accomplished) salvation through sanctification. The latter simply seems (or seemed to me, at least) like an advance on the Christlike perfection that is already guaranteed you in heaven through justification. It is like the icing on the cake of salvation.

In post 4, I mentioned an analogy of the gospel as a bridge spanning from Death to Life and my observation: "The whole focus of evangelicalism is the bridge—how wonderful it is that it's there, and getting other people to cross it." (2012-10-14) The crossing of the bridge in this analogy corresponds to justification, and the problem is that so much attention is paid to getting across that bridge (and leading others to do the same) that relatively little thought is given to what to do once you're on the other side. Crossing the bridge, being justified, is the really important thing; everything after that is a sort of bonus. I have long found this depiction of the gospel unsatisfying, as I wondered in November 2011. What is the point of crossing the  bridge, of establishing a relationship with God? What happens next? Does the "raw gospel" end there? As I will cover more next time, the elevation of justification over sanctification means the prizing of the beginning moment of salvation over its continuing dimension. But if we are saved to eternal life (John 3:16) and not just an amazing conversion experience, there has to be a lot more to it than this.

As I mentioned last time, in Orthodox soteriology there is no analogue to Luther's justification-sanctification dichotomy and its various denominational flavors. Far from being nearly synonymous with it, justification is only one (comparatively minor) part of the rich tapestry of the gospel of salvation. As Eric Jobe explains, justification in Orthodoxy significantly differs from its Protestant usage in that it pertains to entering and maintaining a right relationship with God; it pertains not only to the beginning of salvation but its continuation. (That article also helpfully describes the relation between faith and works) Conversely, as Jobe says in his second article on the atonement the Orthodox liturgy of chrismation involves the pronunciation to the baptized, "Thou art justified. Thou art illumined. Thou art sanctified. Thou art washed"—treating both justification and sanctification as instantaneous events occurring at the moment of salvation. In Orthodox though there is little or no distinction drawn between being declared (or "recognized as") righteous and becoming righteous; they come together as one organic whole. There is no room for the towering, dogmatic view of justification promulgated by the Reformers; no single aspect of salvation should be ascribed this much importance and centrality. To do so is to throw the gospel dangerously out of balance.

This journal article by Ross Aden, a Lutheran theologian, helpfully compares Lutheran and Orthodox views on justification and sanctification. He observes firsthand the effects of the dichotomies I have been pointing out: "The Orthodox think of one continuous process, whereas the Lutherans distinguish the initial act of justification and regeneration from the process of sanctification." (90) Why, Aden goes on to ask, do Lutherans tend to contrast justification and sanctification (or describe the relation between them as strictly one-way)? He proposes that this impulse comes from fear of confusing (here come the other dichotomies) "works with faith, law with gospel, or sanctification with justification, and [making] all the promises of God concerning forgiveness of sin and everlasting life unintelligible and uncertain"—the pastoral concern to assure the troubled conscience and keep it from anxiety over whether it has done enough to be justified. "If what sinners are and do is not distinguished from what Christ is and does for them, then something besides the work of Christ might be assumed to be a condition of that divine sentence. And then the sense of the unconditional character of salvation would be lost and sinners would become anxious." (91)

He draws from Gerard Forde, another Lutheran theologian, in blaming the forensic metaphor of justification for this gap between redemption and ethics (as Schweitzer described it). Traditional Lutheranism and traditional Catholicism, representing the two sides of the Reformation, are in agreement on this matter; they are both "controlled by the fundamental metaphor of the divine law court, a metaphor which fails at the critical point because it cannot answer the very question of how the work of Christ changes the sinner." (92) In my own words, the anxiety of the guilty conscience that can never do enough to satisfy the righteousness/justice of God (to which Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone is the solution) is an artifact of the distorted view of God's justice that I described last time which envisions it as his severity and wrath against sin, his inward-oriented demand for perfection and punishment of imperfection which punishes the guilty with death and must be "satisfied" by a meritorious blood sacrifice. Once this caricature is discarded and replaced with a biblical-patristic understanding of God's justice, justification is seen not to be the very heart of the gospel, and the need for all the traditional Lutheran dichotomies vanishes.

Aden goes on to describe the Orthodox alternative and the possibilities it presents as a soteriology free from the legal metaphor for salvation. The Christian east and west basically agree on the nature of salvation as communion with God, but differ on the obstacles to this communion that must be removed: sin and guilt (both our own and inherited) and the demands of divine justice vs. mortality and human corruption/weakness. In Orthodoxy there is also a more developed doctrine of what we are saved to, namely intimate communion with God through theosis. "Thus the Orthodox hope of salvation in its broadest sense is more than hope of a divine sentence of 'not guilty' or even of a beatific vision; it is 'human participation in the being of God ... a total sharing in the Triune life.' In such a perspective, no division can exist between justification and sanctification." (96) In summary:

This way of understanding the saving action of God is relational, not mechanical, that is dynamic, not static. What Lutherans have divided into justification and sanctification, Orthodoxy sees as two aspects of the single process of human transformation into union with the divine life. This growth in grace is initiated by the person and work of Christ; applied in baptism; nourished by the deifying grace of the Holy Spirit in Word, sacrament, and the disciplines of the spiritual life; expressed in love; and finally completed in the full realization of the goal for which humans were created: attainment of the likeness of God through personal intercommunion with Him. (99)

This, to me, is what it really means to distinguish between, but not separate, justification and sanctification.

Summary

The Lutheran pattern of soteriology with its need to draw up all of these sharp distinctions which I have been critiquing is based on the same misguided assumptions about God's justice which I addressed last time; PSA and its presuppositions constitute the thread which, when pulled out, begins to unravel the rest of the classical Protestant formulation of the gospel. The Law/Gospel dichotomy is unnecessary because the curse of the law and God's wrath are not truly the enemies the gospel saves us from; God is not the author of death and his justice does not need to be "satisfied" by punishment of sin in order to forgive. The Nature/Grace and Faith/Works dichotomies are dependent on a juridical understanding of justification as a legal verdict or change in the divine disposition that has to be "earned" by merit gained from obeying the law, combined with the concern that none of this merit come from us. The Justification/Sanctification dichotomy is likewise unnecessary because the point of justification is not simply, as Luther thought, to ease the anxious conscience plagued by fears of never measuring up to God's impossible standard of perfection; the problem is our own sin and estrangement from the author of life, not our failure to measure up to a standard of demanding, inward-oriented justice and the threat of subsequent punishment. In the Orthodox vision of the gospel, the well-worn but ultimately unworkable Reformation distinctions between faith and works, between "justification by faith alone" and "works-righteousness", are no longer necessary. There is no more risk of slipping into what I have previously called "the negative gospel", a gospel better-defined by what it is not than by what it is. (Though for converts like me, the danger of defining the gospel as the negation of its Protestant incarnation is real)

Orthodoxy offers a fleshed-out vision of the gospel that is more rigorously incarnational and Trinitarian. This manifests in its synergistic relation of faith and works which avoids the zero-sum thinking of monothelitism and its modern reiteration, monergism. What is true of the relation between Christ's natures is true of us and God in the application of salvation to mankind. Lossky succinctly relates the personal and incarnational aspects of the gospel: "What man ought to have attained by raising himself up to God, God achieved by descending to man." (136) Likewise, bringing justification and sanctification together also demonstrates closer cooperation between the Trinity: the Father justifying, the Son vivifying, the Spirit sanctifying, all as part of one (not two) great work of salvation. In Orthodox theology I see a much more holistic, less disjointed development of the gospel, which is one of the strongest reasons I feel drawn to it.

My Journey, Part 13.2: A Better Atonement (Against Penal Substitution)

This is part 13.2 of my rebooted series on my journey from Evangelicalism to Eastern Orthodoxy. The full series can be found here:

1	Back to the beginning
2	Cracks appear
3	Questions multiply
4	Questioning the "gospel"
5	The big question
6	A better hermeneutic
7	Explorations in epistemology
7.5	Excursus on oversystematization
8	Back to the gospel
9	The new direction
10	Ecclesiological foundations
11.1	Sola scriptura
11.2	The insufficiency of Scripture
11.25	Addenda on sola scriptura
11.3	Holy Tradition
12	Bridging the cracks
13.1	Orthodoxy and Genesis 1–3
13.2	A Better Atonement (Against Penal Substitution)
13.3	Faith Alone?
13.4	The Colour and the Shape of the Gospel
14	Worshipping with the Church
15	Mary, Saints, Baptism, and Other Odds/Ends
16	Looking Back, Coming Home

We come to one of my most important shifts in thinking about the gospel, and one of my strongest reasons for choosing Orthodoxy over evangelicalism: atonement theology. That is, the branch of soteriology which asks, "Why did Christ [have to] die? What benefit or blessing does his death on the cross confer? How does the atonement work?" There is a real danger of hair-splitting in this inquiry, of allowing analysis of the atonement to take the place of obtaining its grace. But in my view, even more dangerous is simply concluding (perhaps because of denominational disagreements on the subject) that atonement theology doesn't matter, that Christ's death simply saves us and we don't have to know any more than that.

This is an example of the kind of relativism-bred-by-pluralism that I grew tired of within Protestantism. It is not immediately obvious how the Messiah's death is so vital to our salvation; the biblical authors devote attention (sometimes in significant amounts) to the atonement; therefore I believe it is important and worth studying, rather than simply glossing over. And, in the Orthodox understanding of atonement, it is especially important because western Christianity has almost entirely bought into a dangerous distortion of atonement theology.

I am speaking, of course, about satisfaction theology, and more specifically penal substitutionary atonement (PSA).

The purpose of this post is a thorough refutation of this doctrine (which was the #1 reason I had trouble sharing the gospel as an evangelical Christian) and a presentation of the atonement theology of the early church, which is still believed, sung, and prayed by the Orthodox Church today. The different between western and Orthodox understandings of the atonement can be summed up by the contrasting questions:

How can God mercifully forgive sinners while justly punishing sin?

How can God restore his justice by destroying sin and bringing dead sinners to life?

History of Penal Substitution

The prehistory of satisfaction

For context, I'll attempt to give a quick summary of the historical roots of PSA. Its precursor, the satisfaction theory of atonement, was primarily developed by medieval Latin theologians, but language of "satisfaction" (making reparations owed for harm done) began to be used in the early church. The second-century father Tertullian introduced the idea of repentance as "making satisfaction" to the Lord, within the context of the developing doctrine of penance. After Tertullian introduced satisfaction into the vocabulary of the church, the fourth-century theologian Hilary of Poitiers was the first to apply it to the death of Christ, interpreting the cross as an act of satisfaction made by Christ to God on behalf of sinners. At the time, relatively little was made of this idea of the crucifixion as satisfaction.

Anselm and the satisfaction theory of atonement

Satisfaction theology really took off during the transition from a patristic mindset to a scholastic one (which brought an increased focus on reason and systematization that has marked western theology ever since). One of the central questions addressed by theology of salvation (which was increasingly thought about in terms of a "plan" or "order" of salvation) around this time was the reconciliation of God's justice, understood as his wrath/severity toward sin, with his mercy (sound familiar?). The cross in particular was increasingly seen as the point at which these attributes came together and when salvation for humanity was decisively realized, even more so than the resurrection; atonement theology occupied a dominant place in soteriology. The atonement was thought of as an objective transaction of some kind between mankind God, mankind, and the devil, but there was much room for clarification within the old dogmas.

With this increased attention placed on it, the old patristic construal of the cross as some kind of a trap or fishhook for the devil was considered insufficient and gave way to Christ-crucified-as-victor-over-sin-and-death, but still more to Christ-crucified-as-victim, or even as a sacrificial victim in the Old Testament sense of the words "sacrifice" or "atonement". At the same time, a critical shift in the commonplace ransom theory of atonement was taking place. In the patristic understanding, Christ's death purchased our freedom from sin and death by acting as a ransom to the devil. But Latin theologians realized this approach had problems: how could God actually owe anything to the devil? What kind of legitimate claim could he possibly have over God, or us? And was it not idolatry to offer a sacrifice to a mere created being? Instead, insofar as the atonement was a sacrifice, it seemed it must be a sacrifice offered to God. But what could this mean? Enter Anselm.

Anselm was one of the theologians who helped initiate the Scholastic movement, which saw the development of reason as a distinct (but parallel) faculty to faith. Possibly alluding to Augustine, he wrote, "I believe that I may understand." Man's ability to reason was closely linked to the "image of God" and was believed to be intact even after the fall, unlike the moral likeness. So Anselm strongly believed that reason actively exercised could and should complement faith. To that end, in his book Cur Deus Homo? ("Why God Human?") he set out to explain the necessity of the Incarnation from reason alone, "without paying attention to Christ". In the process, he also explained how Christ's death could be a sacrifice offered to God without compromising the doctrine of divine immutability (as if the atonement fulfilled some need or satisfied some desire in God himself, or somehow changed him in his attitude toward us).

To do this, Anselm defined a concept that Jaroslav Pelikan refers to as "rightness", or maybe "uprightness". This is basically a quality of a creature in relation to its Creator which entails honoring him rightly, closely related to "truth" and "righteousness". In effect, Anselm said, we justly owe God a "debt of honor" (in other words, is its we, not God, who need to offer a sacrifice as payment). This concept of "rightness" applies to particular creatures but also more essentially to the creation itself; this cosmic debt of honor constitutes a sort of "moral order of the universe", the honor owed by creation at-large to God as Creator. The fall of man (and the fall of Satan and his angels before) constituted major disruptions or deficits of this moral order. Because of God's perfect justice, he could not simply ignore this breach in his honor or forgive sins by fiat, as this would violate the very moral order that God has to uphold to be consistent with his justice; the debt of honor had to be paid, either by punishment or some other means of satisfaction. (The concept of "satisfaction" already being known from the penitential system of the medieval church as "reparation or restoration of that which one had taken away by sinning", and simply being expanded to a cosmic scale)

So according to Anselm, the situation for humanity is something like this: we owe God a debt of honor/obedience, of which we defraud him because of our sins and because any good we do to make up for them was owed to God anyway, and so we owe God satisfaction for this dishonor. As Millard Erickson explains, "sin is basically failure to render God his due. By failing to give God his due, we take from God what is rightfully his and dishonor him." And even if we returned what we took, we owe him additional compensation for the injury we have done to his honor. How could God's justice be vindicated, the moral order of the universe be upheld, without his simply punishing humanity eternally for its sin?

So this is why God became man: no one but man owed God satisfaction for guilt, but only a being of infinite worth such as God could provide it. Anselm's reasoning for the logical necessity of the incarnation went like this: "Only man was liable for satisfaction, only God was capable of total satisfaction; therefore, 'it is necessary that a God-man render it.'" So the atonement of Christ was a sacrificial payment for satisfaction offered to God, by God in the flesh, on behalf of man. Because of their seemingly logically necessary nature, in the Christian west Anselm's conclusions were seen as a necessary implication of orthodox (Chalcedonian) Christology. Pelikan summarizes the Anselmian consensus: "Christ was what he was in order to do what he did."

The Reformation twist

Buoyed by the Scholastic movement and codified by Aquinas, the satisfaction theory of atonement remained the dominant one up until the Reformation (and beyond, in the Catholic Church), with some additions well-known among Protestants that pertain to the communication of Christ's satisfaction to the faithful, like the idea of man making satisfaction for his own sins through penance and of a "Treasury of Merit" filled by Christ and the saints from which we can draw. Of course the reformers rejected any implication that the atoning sacrifice of Christ on the cross was insufficient for salvation. But how was it sufficient?  They tended to answer this question in a way that differed subtly from Anselm.

In my analysis, much of this shift was due to the increased focus of early Protestant theology on the seriousness of sin, against Catholic teachings which were seen as neo-Pelagian. So sin replaced Anselm's concepts of honor or "rightness" as the focus of the atonement. The big problem of the human condition was still understood as God's wrath for sins resulting in death, but this was simply because sin was an affront to God's justice and had to be punished, not so much because it deprived him of the honor due him. In effect, the setting of the atonement moved from a civil to a criminal court. Because of this, justification, the forgiveness or non-reckoning of sins, was understood as the sine qua non of salvation. Man needed to recover the righteousness he had lost to sin to escape the wrath and judgment of God the judge.

In other words, the Reformation understanding of the cross differed from Anselm's in that Christ's death was no longer seen as producing honor which paid off the debt to God on humanity's behalf in order to avert punishment. Rather, it was seen as the actual punishment we deserved, underwent vicariously so that God's justice might be satisfied and we might be counted as righteous and forgiven rather than condemned and destroyed. Through his morally perfect life and innocent death, Christ fulfilled the law on our behalf, ending its accusatory role toward us as a divine demand which we could not fulfill, so that we could be justified and forgiven before God rather than condemned by his law. (One of the songs my old church sings has the lines "He has hushed the law's loud thunder/he has quenched Mount Sinai's flame" in reference to Christ's fulfilling the law on our behalf)

So the satisfaction theory of atonement was firmly enshrined in both Catholicism and Protestantism; it had effectively, if not officially, become a dogma. That Christ died to make satisfaction to God's justice for our guilt was not the subject of controversy in the Reformation, except with Protestant "heretics" like Socinus who questioned it (usually proffering an oversimplified explanation of the atonement in its place). The issue at hand was simply by whom the satisfaction was made, or rather whether any additional satisfaction (in the form of penance) was due from Christians after their justification. Other dimensions to the atonement were by no means out of the picture (Luther also articulated a form of Christus victor), but the satisfaction theory of atonement had become the primary explanation of why Christ suffered on the cross.

Tracing satisfaction

In short, the idea of Christ's death as "satisfaction" was introduced in the patristic era in an orthodox way, but morphed over time from one dimension of atonement theology into the overarching narrative of the cross, with drastic implications for God. Anselm's theology and the Reformation were decisive in developing satisfaction theology and giving western soteriology the distinctly juridical tinge that it still possesses today. Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor is quoted in his book A Secular Age describing the basic narrative of satisfaction theology and the roles played by Anselm and the Reformers:

God's honour and glory is paramount. But the honour of God is attacked by the sin of Adam. God owes it to his justice, and his glory to reject such creatures. But he is merciful. He gets satisfaction he must have for our sin through Christ; he works off the required punishment on him, and this allows us to be imputed just. 

I want to digress a comment to note here the fateful fact that Calvin, like the other Reformers, casts his doctrine of our incapacity and God's remedy for it in the juridicial-penal framework that he takes over from Augustine and later Anselm. There is one enigma which Christians (and perhaps realists of any persuasion) have to recognize, and that is the puzzle of evil; why, in spite of knowing that we are born for the highest, we sometimes not only inexplicably choose against it, but even feel that we cannot do otherwise. The symmetrical mystery (now for Christians alone) is that God can act to overcome this incapacity - the doctrine of grace. 

Anselm expressed this double mystery in terms of crime and punishment. The incapacity is explained as our just desert for our original falling away (which founding act remains shrouded in mystery, of course). Being inveterate sinners, we now deserve damnation. Not only is our punishment now permissible, but some has to be exacted as reparation for our fault, according to the juridical logical of this conception. God is nevertheless merciful, wants to save some of us. But in order to do this he has to have the reparation paid by his son, and then count it as satisfaction for our sins, in an act of gratuitous mercy. 

Needless to say, this wasn't the only way that the double mystery could be articulated. eastern fathers, like Gregory of Nyssa, put things differently. But Augustine and Anselm shaped the theology of Latin Christendom in this regard, and the Reformation, far from correcting this imbalance, aggravated it. The sense that this language, above all others, has got a lock on the mysteries, is an invitation to drive its logic through to the most counter-intuitive, not to say horrifying conclusions, like the doctrine of the damnation of the majority of humans, or double predestination. The confidence - not to say arrogance - with which these conclusions were drawn anticipates and offers a model for the later humanist hostility to mystery.

Statement of the Doctrine

Hopefully that historical tour was helpful, or at least accurate. As I have done in the past, I will now try to state the doctrine of PSA from a contemporary Reformed perspective as best I can, to avoid attacking a strawman. Evangelical descriptions of the doctrine tend to be closely tied in to (even indistinguishable from) statements of "the gospel" as a whole, taking the same basic shape if not having all the details. Among its supporters PSA is generally held to be the central or main theme of the atonement, and is merely filled in by other theories. Perhaps the Protestant sentiment about particular theories of atonement being secondary to the atonement itself is possible only the particular theory of PSA has become almost synonymous with the "mere atonement", making other theories seem optional.

The problem

A basic tenet of PSA is the Reformation doctrine of total depravity: the universal sinfulness of humanity, and the loss of the image and likeness of God with which man was created. This is made abundantly obvious in Romans 1-3, especially 3:9-20.  All our righteous acts are like filthy rags before God (Isa 64:6); "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick" (Jer 17:9). The natural person is conceived and born in sin (Psa 51:5), dead in transgressions (Eph 2:1-5), ignorant of the things of God (1 Cor 2:14), suppressing his truth (Rom 1:18), hostile to God and unable to submit to his law. (Rom 8:7) All of this is summed up in Reformed teaching in the concept of a "sinful nature", which Paul often refers to as "the flesh" (Rom 7:5,18, 8:3-13, 1 Cor 3:3, Gal 5:16) and which we all inherit from Adam (Rom 5:19). So Paul says in summary, "No one is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one," (Rom 3:10-13) and later, "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." (Rom 3:23)

This creates a problem for God. Because he is just, he cannot tolerate sin or let anything sinful into his presence (Hab 1:13); he must punish sin as an offense to his justice. In fact, because the one against whom we sin is infinite, the punishment due our sins is also infinite: death and eternal punishment. Charles Hodge says of God's justice in his systematic theology, "Justice is a form of moral excellence. It belongs to the nature of God. It demands the punishment of sin." (3.7.3) For Hodge, God's justice is "the moral excellence with determines Him to punish sin and reward righteousness". (3.7.4) Because of this justice, "the Scriptures ... assume that if a man sins he must die." John Calvin similarly says of our dire situation,

For seeing no man can descend into himself, and seriously consider what he is, without feeling that God is angry and at enmity with him, and therefore anxiously longing for the means of regaining his favour (this cannot be without satisfaction), the certainty [of salvation] here required is of no ordinary description,—sinners, until freed from guilt, being always liable to the wrath and curse of God, who, as he is a just judge, cannot permit his law to be violated with impunity, but is armed for vengeance. (Institutes II.16.1)

But at the same time, because of his love for us (Eph 2:4-5), God desires for us to be saved and not perish. (1 Tim 2:4) As regards his intentions for us, God's justice and mercy are opposed to each other. Calvin says of God before our justification, "He loved even when he hated us." (II.16.4) Neither of these attributes can simply be set aside. He wants to be reconciled to us, but because of his righteousness this cannot happen when we are still in our sins; to simply forgive us by fiat would be a violation of his justice, of the cosmic moral economy he upholds. In order for God to forgive justly, his justice must be satisfied, but if by the destruction of sinners, there would be no one left to forgive. Hodge says, "That God cannot pardon sin without a satisfaction to justice, and that He cannot have fellowship with the unholy, are the two great truths which are revealed in the constitution of our nature as well as in the Scriptures, and which are recognized in all forms of religion, human or divine." (3.7.4)

So this is the human condition: because of our sins, we are condemned and cursed by the holy law of God because of our inability to obey it (Gal 3:10) and attain to life (Lev 18:5), dead in trespasses and sins and deserving of wrath and death (Eph 2:1-3), alienated from God and hostile to him (Col 1:21). We are in need of justification from God, of a righteousness that will make us acceptable to his justice so that we can be forgiven and reconciled to him in order to enjoy the blessing he has for us in his love. We owe God a debt not so much of honor, but of obedience, or righteousness, which we cannot give him because of our sin, so we justly pay with our lives.

The solution

This is the grim situation to which the cross is the solution. The atonement of Christ has its theological roots in the sacrificial system put in place through the Mosaic law, in which the blood of the sacrifices was used to make atonement for the people. (Lev 17:11) This "atonement", Hodge explains, means the covering or expiation of sin, or a ransom paid (as in Exo 30:12-16, where the two concepts are closely parallel). The phrase "make atonement for sin" or something similar comes up repeatedly in the law (as in Lev 16), and it refers to the vicarious satisfaction/punishment for sin through the sacrificial offering. For example, in Numbers 35:31 satisfaction for the sin of a murderer is posited as a direct alternative to putting the offender to death. Hodge further clarifies, "When, therefore, a sacrifice is said to cover sin it must mean that it expiates it, hides it from the eyes of justice by a satisfaction." (3.7.6) This satisfaction, this expiation of sins, was the purpose of the sacrificial system. Because of the strictness of God's justice, it is just as necessary for us as in Anselm's theology of satisfaction; "If sin be pardoned it can be pardoned in consistency with the divine justice only on the ground of a forensic penal satisfaction." (3.7.3)

In PSA, then, Christ's atoning death acts as the ultimate sacrifice for all of humanity. In doing so, he solves the three major human problems Scripture presents us with (condemnation under the law and liability to punishment, enmity with God, need for righteousness). Through Jesus forgiveness of sins is proclaimed, "and by him everyone who believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses." (Acts 13:38-39) Through Jesus the righteous requirement of the law is fulfilled in us (Rom 8:4) who are not justified by the law but by faith in Christ (Gal 2:21). Christ redeems us from the curse of the law by taking it on himself, becoming a curse for us. (Gal 3:10,13) God makes us alive with Christ, forgiving us of our trespasses "by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands." (Col 2:13-14) Elsewhere Scripture speaks of the atonement as a ransom or payment (Mat 20:28, 1 Cor 6:20, 7:23, 1 Tim 2:5-6, 1 Pet 1:18-19), an atoning or propitiating sacrifice (Eph 5:2, Heb 9:12-14,26, 10:12-14, 1 Jhn 2:2, 4:10). Christ is consistently described as the one who takes away our sins by taking their condemnation on himself (Jhn 1:29, Rom 4:25, 8:3, 2 Cor 5:21, Gal 1:4, 1 Pet 2:24).

Dealing with the second problem, by his atonement Christ reconciles us to God (Rom 5:8-11, 2 Cor 5:18-20, Eph 2:16) by satisfying his justice and calming his wrath for our sins. So in him we have a real (albeit alien) righteousness, by which we can be justly forgiven. (Rom 5:18-9, Col 1:14,19-22, 1 Jhn 1:7). I am presenting these as distinct benefits, but really they are all closely interconnected. The atonement is the ultimate exchange; by imputation, Jesus takes our sins and the penalty due them and we receive his perfect righteousness, by which the requirement of the law can be satisfied, by which we can be forgiven, enjoy fellowship with God. His justice is satisfied, his enmity with us ended, so he can lavish his utterly unmerited favor on us. Calvin describes all the blessings of the atonement through a lengthy rhetorical question:

But again, let him be told, as Scripture teaches, that he was estranged from God by sin, an heir of wrath, exposed to the curse of eternal death, excluded from all hope of salvation, a complete alien from the blessing of God, the slave of Satan, captive under the yoke of sin; in fine, doomed to horrible destruction, and already involved in it; that then Christ interposed, took the punishment upon himself and bore what by the just judgment of God was impending over sinners; with his own blood expiated the sins which rendered them hateful to God, by this expiation satisfied and duly propitiated God the Father, by this intercession appeased his anger, on this basis founded peace between God and men, and by this tie secured the Divine benevolence toward them; will not these considerations move him the more deeply, the more strikingly they represent the greatness of the calamity from which he was delivered? (II.16.2)

And elsewhere, on how Christ merited salvation when we could not:

That Christ, by his obedience, truly purchased and merited grace for us with the Father, is accurately inferred from several passages of Scripture. I take it for granted, that if Christ satisfied for our sins, if he paid the penalty due by us, if he appeased God by his obedience; in fine, if he suffered the just for the unjust, salvation was obtained for us by his righteousness; which is just equivalent to meriting. (II.17.3)

Two more passages will suffice to show the scriptural support commonly marshaled for PSA. The first is the "suffering servant" prophecy in Isaiah 52:13-53:12:

13 Behold, my servant shall act wisely; he shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted. 14 As many were astonished at you-- his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind-- 15 so shall he sprinkle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him; for that which has not been told them they see, and that which they have not heard they understand. 

1 Who has believed what he has heard from us? And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? 2 For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. 3 He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. 4 Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. 5 But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. 6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned--every one--to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. 7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. 8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people? 9 And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. 10 Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the LORD shall prosper in his hand. 11 Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. 12 Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors.

This passage has so many Christological overtones that Hodge says that in it "this doctrine [penal satisfaction] is presented with a clearness and copiousness which have extorted assent from the most unwilling minds." I will list the ones that jump out at me:

• Behold, my servant shall act wisely; he shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted. A reference to the crucifixion, and likely also the resurrection and ascension.
• his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind Describing the physical agony and mutilation Jesus underwent in his passion.
• so shall he sprinkle many nations With his atoning blood, shed on the cross.
• He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. The disgrace of the crucifixion—God in the flesh, condemned to die horribly.
• Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. The imputation of our sin to the sinless savior, and his vicarious punishment on our behalf.
• But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. Another clear statement of the atoning, vicariously justice-satisfying, sacrificial nature of Jesus' death.
• All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned--every one--to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. Again, describing the imputation of our sins and iniquities to Jesus.
• He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. Fulfilled by Jesus' silence and nonresistance in the hours leading up to his passion.
• Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the LORD shall prosper in his hand. Clearly states that the atonement is the will of God in which his wrath is poured out on our substitute as an offering for our guilt; also presages Christ's subsequent glory as risen Lord and the firstborn from the dead. (Col 1:18, Rev 1:5)
• by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Describes both sides of imputation: the accounting of our sin to Christ, and his righteousness to us.
• he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors. One last statement of the exchange that takes place on the cross: his bearing of our sin and the redemption of the transgressors.

But even more than Isaiah 52-53, the passage considered the clearest biblical statement of the doctrine is Romans 3:20-28.

20 For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. 21 But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it-- 22 the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. 26 It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. 27 Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith. 28 For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.

In my own words: In the gospel, the righteousness of God which we could not attain through the law (for because of our sin it only condemn us, and becomes our enemy) has been revealed apart from the law, through the law points to it: the righteousness of God which is imputed to us by faith in Jesus Christ. Though all sin and fall short of the perfection which divine justice requires of us, all are justified freely by grace through the redeeming, atoning work of Jesus Christ, who God presented as a propitiating sacrifice for our sins, allowing him to justly condemn sin and justify sinful people.

How, then, can a doctrine with such abundant scriptural support be wrong? Drastically.

Problems with Penal Substitution

A strong basis for PSA's interpretation of the atonement is its understanding of the sacrificial system in the Old Testament. Christ's atonement is seen as the fulfillment of this system, making "atonement" for sins in a similar (though magnified) way. Well, how sure are we that the purpose of the sacrifices commanded in the Mosaic law was to satisfy God's justice and take on his penalty for sins via the shedding of sacrificial blood? I will explain this more later, but I do not think this is the case; it is a reading into OT texts of what supporters of PSA believe it means. "Atonement" simply does not refer to what they think it does, to the vicarious punishment of a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice and make forgiveness possible, and there is no need to read it into the Pentateuch or anywhere else.

My reason for believing this takes me to my main critique of PSA: that it is based on a seriously distorted concept of God's "justice". Specifically, an understanding of divine justice that virtually equates it with the punishment of sin, that it needs to be "satisfied" in order to make possible grace and forgiveness. This notion of God's justice, which was inherited and solidified by Anselm and the Reformers, is what creates the perceived need for Christ's death as a "satisfaction" or offering to God's justice. And it is dangerously wrong.

First, this understanding of God's justice places a necessity on him. That is, it describes him as being bound by this part of his nature to respond in a certain way to sin, by punishment. Our sin appears to constrain God to act in a specific way, which I consider a violation of divine freedom. When else do we ever apply words like "need" or "must" to God? God doesn't seem similarly bound to love us in any specific way; in fact, in Reformed theology PSA is often held in parallel with an understanding of his sovereignty in which he "justly" predestines some to eternal damnation. It is hard to see how he is loving towards these in any meaningful sense, yet he is apparently constrained by his justice to condemn and penalize sin without exception. Anselm sought to explain how Christ's death is a sacrifice to God without ascribing any need to God himself, but through his ideas of "rightness" and the "moral order of the universe", I think he accomplished just the opposite.

Second, this understanding of God's justice as needing something (obedience/righteousness) from us and demanding "satisfaction" from us in some other fashion upon failing to get it is selfish, inward-oriented, and simply unworthy of God. As I have pointed out in what may be my most-referenced post, this is simply not the understanding of "justice" that we see throughout the Bible. We have every reason to believe that like the rest of his moral attributes, God's justice is not infinitely demanding but infinitely generous. As I said then, so I say now: God's justice is not in tension with his mercy, but closely aligned with it. It is not something negative or harmful we are spared from, but something positive we pray for and long to experience. It is his will to set the world right, the way he intended it to become from the start. It is his care for the wronged, the vulnerable, the weak, the needy, the oppressed, his will to show mercy and blessing to them. Yes, this can entail the punishment of those who set themselves in opposition to the agenda of justice, but this is not the essential purpose of justice any more than the ultimate purpose of our judicial system is to prosecute and sentence wrongdoers, but rather to foster a fair, safe, and peaceful society. Retribution is a part of how God's justice operates (perhaps more accurately, it is an instrument of justice), but I believe that vengeance simply for the sake of vengeance is no more becoming of God than it is of us.

An aside: especially within Calvinist theology, there exists an additional teaching on PSA based on combining this misconception of God's justice with divine simplicity (the philosophical idea that God's attributes are non-divisible and inseparable from himself; they are not things he "has" but things he eternally "is"). In this line of thinking, if God's glory is fully, eternally expressed (which it is), then all of his attributes must also be eternally expressed, since they are inseparable from who he is. This includes his "justice"; therefore, it is necessary that there be sin and its eternal punishment so that God's justice (as well as his mercy) may be eternally manifested. This article quotes several of the giants of Reformed theology (including Jonathan Edwards and Augustine) expressing this in their own words, and explores the implications. I hope that this doctrine is self-evidently repugnant to you; it is not drawn from the Bible, but from philosophy. In Augustine's case, suggesting that God requires an antithesis to fully manifest his glory reeks of Manichaean dualism. Again, it is unworthy of God to suggest that he is in any way dependent on sin or suffering, or still worse to suggest (as Calvin does) that he actually "arranged it" for his glory. Additionally, if God requires the punishment of evil to manifest his justice, then how was his justice displayed before the Fall, or even before creation?

Third, this understanding of God's justice subtly confuses the concepts of "consequence" and "penalty". There is hard-to-describe a difference in divine agency between these terms—God willing something in response to a human act vs. permitting the act and the effects it ordinarily has in his usual governance and upholding of the world. PSA is very clear that God's justice threatens us in the form of a penalty, by his treating us differently (and more negatively) than he otherwise would. The implication I tend to draw from this is that in PSA, the problem caused by our sin is primarily what God does to us for our sin, not simply what our sin does to us. This is clearest by far in the role of death. PSA is quite clear that death is a punishment from God—we sin (either individually or in Adam) and God curses us with suffering, toil, and death/mortality. But this makes God the author of death; we die not simply because we sin, but because God kills us for our sin. If this is the case, then what is the meaning of death as the last enemy to be destroyed by Christ (1 Cor 15:26)? God seems to be promising us that he will undo something that he himself did; how is this supposed to be the good news of the gospel? It is not good news; it is simply absurd. This confusion of consequence and penalty means that in PSA, the things God saves us from appear to be his own doing. As Richard Beck correctly emphasizes, it replaces the Devil with God the judge as the one from whom the atonement saves us. The God of PSA is simply too big, suffocatingly so: he has no one left to save us from but himself.

Fourth, this understanding of God's justice conflates sin with sinner. In my previous post on God's justice, I say, "Proponents of PSA easily slip from talking about God as angry at sin to God as angry at us." And I still think there is truth to this. The necessary punishment of sin according to divine justice is automatically equated with punishment of the sinner. Enmity and hostility toward sin become enmity and hostility toward the sinner. So Calvin says, "God, at the very time when he loved us, was hostile to us until reconciled in Christ," (II.17.2) or elsewhere, "in a manner wondrous and divine, he loved even when he hated us." (II.16.4) This is perhaps understandable within the Reformation doctrine of total depravity, according to which our nature is totally corrupted and dominated by sin, the image and likeness of God lost, so that sin and sinner become indistinguishable. But I believe God can see the difference. (An aside: I also consider rhetoric about God's holiness meaning that he is "allergic" to sin inadequate.)

Fifth, this understanding of God's justice makes him unable to actually forgive sins; he is only able to accept just satisfaction for them. As Hodge writes,

If sin be pardoned it can be pardoned in consistency with the divine justice only on the ground of a forensic penal satisfaction. ... That God cannot pardon sin without a satisfaction to justice, and that He cannot have fellowship with the unholy, are the two great truths which are revealed in the constitution of our nature as well as in the Scriptures, and which are recognized in all forms of religion, human or divine. (3.7.3,4)

Yet although we are commanded to forgive as God forgave us (Mat 6:14-15, Eph 4:32, Col 3:13), nowhere are we commanded to seek satisfaction or punishment for wrongs committed against us before forgiving; such a spirit is indeed contrary to authentic forgiveness. It is objected that God has a monopoly on retribution because he is uniquely God (Deu 32:35), but (a) this is still not equivalent to being unable to forgive unconditionally, and (b) which of God's other moral attributes operates differently than it does in us because he is God? Robin Phillips points out that even if we forgive others based on Christ's satisfaction for sins rather than some satisfaction of our own, how then can we forgive non-Christians/non-elect if Jesus didn't die for them? (After all, God apparently cannot) I suspect that this mistake is another consequence of total depravity; if sin is identified with sinner, unconditional forgiveness of the sinner and judgment of the sin appear to be incompatible; there is no difference between unconditionally forgiving a sinner and simply ignoring their sin (which is a leap I often see supporters of PSA make).

Sixth and finally, this understanding of God's justice introduces several other terms and concepts not present in Scripture which further confuse its soteriological conclusions. The characterization of divine justice as the governance of a "divine moral economy" or the need to preserve the "moral fiber of the universe" (to cite two examples from Millard Erickson) is a particularly puzzling imposition, one which I see nowhere in the Scriptures or the writings of the early Church. The whole idea of "merit" as a sort of moral currency which we need to procure in order for God to save us (as in Calvin: "Christ, by his obedience, truly purchased and merited grace for us with the Father ... if he suffered the just for the unjust, salvation was obtained for us by his righteousness; which is just equivalent to meriting") is unbiblical, a medieval innovation that views God as a sort of banker, as Morgan Guyton points out. N.T. Wright says of merit:

Part of the problem with seeing everything in terms of merit (as some medievals did, thereby conditioning the thought-world of the Reformation as well), whether it be the merit we should have and can't produce, the merit which God reckons to us, or whatever, is that even if we get the logic right we are still left with God as a distant bank manager, scrutinizing credit and debit sheets. (Justification, 163)

Additionally, the "biblical" logic of imputation is reliant on treating it like monetary debt through the lens of merit and is contrary to justice, common sense, and passages teaching that each is held responsible for his own sin like Deu 24:16 and Jer 31:30.

In a nutshell, PSA takes a metaphorical depiction of sin as a debt or something we need to be "ransomed" from and makes it into the central theme of the atonement, the way it "really works". It casts the whole atonement in a primarily forensic light and focuses on sin (and its penalty) as the basic problem from which the cross saves us, to the exclusion (or at least marginalization) of the other dimensions of atonement theology. it depicts salvation as a legal pardon or acquittal and a change in God's disposition toward us, in how he wills to act toward us. So Calvin: "And, therefore, if we would indulge the hope of having God placable and propitious to us, we must fix our eyes and minds on Christ alone, as it is to him alone it is owing that our sins, which necessarily provoked the wrath of God, are not imputed to us." (II.16.3) Again, I no longer deny that there is some kind of legal dimension to the gospel, but I am certain that PSA gets it wrong. The atonement does cleanse us of moral guilt, but this is the fulfillment of a necessity in us, not in God. In its telling, the crucial change in our salvation is not something in us or in the world, but in God and his intentions for us. God, it seems, is not unconditionally good to us; he has to be convinced (or rather, convince himself) to show love to us and forgive us. As I found, I could not share the God of PSA with others; now I can't worship him myself.

I ironically consider PSA a "legalistic" theology because of the place it gives to the law in the order of salvation. The law is what accuses and condemns us, revealing our lack of righteousness and the impending wrath of God; the righteousness imputed to us from Christ is acquired by his obeying the law perfectly and thus fulfilling it, freeing us from its curse. By depicting the law as effectively an extension of God's nature, PSA is able to equate condemnation by the law with the wrath of God. The problem with this teaching is that it ignores the fact that the law was given to one particular nation, not to the world at large. The curse of the law Paul mentions in Galatians 3:10 is particular to the Mosaic law, not the kind of universal law of conscience he talks about in Romans 2. The very fact that the creation-fall narrative is situated well before the giving of the law, even before the Abrahamic covenant, should alert us to the fact that the "curse of the law" is simply not sin, death, suffering, toil, the human condition, etc. And if the law is, as Millard Erickson says, "a transcript of the nature of God", then how have some of its provisions become nonbinding on Christians? It simply does not make sense to talk about the law in the way PSA does.

Another problem with casting salvation in a primarily forensic light is that it becomes a legal status or declaration, which doesn't actually do anything to you. If Luther's doctrine of simul iustus et peccator is true and we are still just as sinful (and therefore deserving of punishment) after justification as before, in what meaningful sense can we be "counted righteous"? The only way to make a legal declaration actually salvific is to connect it to a change in the divine disposition toward us, which brings about the problems I just described. There is room to speak of justification or salvation metaphorically as a pardon or verdict, but it cannot be how it "really works" at a foundational level. Salvation is deeper than that. As well, it excludes the very biblical (e.g. Rom 8:19-23) concept of cosmic redemption radiating outward from the atonement; forensic language simply doesn't apply to it.

Robin Phillips makes two other points based on the fact that in the system of PSA, our sins are apparently deserving of eternal punishment, and that this is what Jesus saves us from. First, how could Jesus vicariously suffer God's wrath for sins on our behalf without himself suffering eternally? It is strikingly arbitrary to claim that Jesus' relatively brief sufferings somehow "counted" infinitely because he is God. Where is this logic in Scripture? Second, if God's justice is satisfied by the eternal punishment of sinners, then because eternity is never finished, it seems God's justice is never actually fulfilled. This is a rather awkward implication.

But above all, I reject PSA (and its ancestor, satisfaction theology) simply because it is a theological innovation particular to the western churches and unknown to the first millennium of Christian theology. That Anselm was the first to promulgate the satisfaction theory of atonement is uncontroversial; his presentation of it as an implication of Chalcedonian Christology made this conveniently easy to ignore. But as I pointed out in a paper, the Scholastic method with its distinctive and distinct focus on reason (which Anselm was instrumental in establishing) was a distinct development in western theology that involved the abandonment of the earlier apophatic tradition of theology, which lived on in Catholic spiritualism but has been virtually banished from the actual formulation of doctrine; this is reason enough to be suspicious of his teaching. Remember that he was seeking to demonstrate the logical necessity of the incarnation without reference to Scripture or established church teaching; such a methodology does not seem terribly amenable to an orthodox theology of atonement. You can assemble all the proof texts for PSA you like, but without the right rule of faith you will simply misread them. I seek to read Scripture with the rule of the early church, of the apostles, councils, and church fathers, and you will not find PSA anywhere in them. I urge everyone who has accepted this novel and inadequate doctrine to see it for what it is and seek to believe only what has been accepted everywhere, always, and by all.

One final problem with PSA is that, inasmuch as it is made central to the gospel message, it elevates the crucifixion of Jesus over the resurrection and the incarnation at-large as the locus of our salvation. In the system of satisfaction in which the cross is said to partake, there is no distinctively salvific role for the resurrection; it simply confirms or vindicates the verdict delivered at Golgotha, or solves the problem created of God being dead. Why is an atonement theory that so distinctively focuses on the crucifixion allowed such a privileged position in atonement theology? I put this objection last because I am not convinced it is an essential feature of PSA. Calvin, while admittedly spending more time talking about the cross, does turn to the resurrection in his discussion of atonement, saying, "Our salvation may be thus divided between the death and the resurrection of Christ: by the former sin was abolished and death annihilated; by the latter righteousness was restored and life revived, the power and efficacy of the former being still bestowed upon us by means of the latter." (The role played by the incarnation itself is another story...) Nonetheless, this tendency of "crucicentrism" certainly seems to be an example of the theory vs. practice divide I mentioned at the end of a previous post, ubiquitous in modern evangelical expressions of the gospel I have heard.

A Better Atonement: The Orthodox Alternative

As you may have expected me to say, the Orthodox church has a rich theology of atonement, with no need or place for PSA. Again, as I'm not even officially Orthodox yet, my understanding of Orthodox soteriology is far from perfect. I will try to document my sources as best I can so you can turn to them for a better explanation.

Sacrifice

Orthodoxy has a different understanding of the Old Testament sacrificial system than the one presupposed by PSA, as this article explains. The critical difference is this: the sacrifice is not understood as "appeasing" God's wrath or vicariously undergoing punishment  and condemnation for sin so that we can be spared and forgiven. In other words, sacrifices don't fulfill need of God's. The western assumption is that the shedding of the blood of the sacrifice constitutes the justly deserved penalty for our sins, inflicted on a substitute so that we can continue living. In other words, the death of the sacrifice makes satisfaction for sins in our place. But this is not the case.

In the Old Testament itself, blood is not described as a means of satisfaction. Instead, look at Genesis 9:4: "Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood." In the Old Testament understanding, blood is life; in a sacrificial context, the blood of the sacrificial animal is its life, poured out. So Leviticus 17:10-12:

10 "If any man of the house of Israel or of the strangers that sojourn among them eats any blood, I will set my face against that person who eats blood, and will cut him off from among his people. 11 For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it for you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement, by reason of the life. 12 Therefore I have said to the people of Israel, No person among you shall eat blood, neither shall any stranger who sojourns among you eat blood.

Again we see the identification of blood with life; again we see the consequent prohibition against eating blood. In verse 11 the purpose of the blood (in a sacrificial context) is stated: "to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement, by reason of its life." Again, in western Christianity "atonement" is thought of as being roughly synonymous with "satisfaction", the vicarious undergoing and appeasement of God's wrath so that the offerer may be justified. But again, where is this assumption in the text?

Additionally, look at the significance of blood in the first Passover (Exo 12:5-8, 12-14).

5 Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male a year old; you shall take it from the sheep or from the goats; 6 and you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs in the evening. 7 Then they shall take some of the blood, and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat them. 8 They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted; with unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it. ... 12 For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will smite all the first-born in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the LORD. 13 The blood shall be a sign for you, upon the houses where you are; and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt. 14 "This day shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the LORD; throughout your generations you shall observe it as an ordinance for ever.

Each family is to kill a lamb and eat its flesh, but spread its blood on their doorposts so that they will be spared from the final plague of death. In a very real sense, the life of the lamb's blood gives life to those under it, or counteracts death.

The point of this is that, in the Bible read through the strongly typological lens of patristic hermeneutics, Christ is our true sacrifice and passover lamb. Paul says as much in 1 Cor 5:7b: "For Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed." The connection could not be clearer: the sacrificial system and Passover feast find their fulfillment and meaning in the death of Jesus Christ, to which they are revealed to point. The Greek word for Easter, the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, is pascha, which is simply a translation of the Hebrew word for "Passover". Christ is our sacrifice and our Passover. But there is a big difference: far from prohibiting it, Jesus actually commands us to drink his blood in order to have life. (Jhn 6:53-56) This is because unlike the blood of the sacrifices (Heb 10:4) which God seems surprisingly indifferent about receiving sometimes (Psa 40:6, 51:16-17, Hos 6:6, Mat 9:13), Jesus' blood actually, truly conveys life to us.

By partaking in his flesh and blood through the Eucharist, we are freed from sin and death by union with the life of Christ. As it is written: "Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same nature, that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage." (Heb 2:14-15) Just as Jesus shared in our humanity through the Incarnation, through the Eucharist we share in his life and divinity. Paul restates the link between partaking in Christ and the sacrificial system in 1 Cor 10:15-18:

15 I speak as to sensible men; judge for yourselves what I say. 16 The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? 17 Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread. 18 Consider the people of Israel; are not those who eat the sacrifices partners in the altar?

At no point do we get any indication that sacrifices or the Passover lamb somehow "satisfy" God's offended justice and enable him to forgive us rather than punish us. The sacrifices, the Passover, the atonement are all for our sake, not God's. As St. Irenaeus of Lyons wrote, "God had no need of the sacrifices of the Hebrews. He asked for sacrifices simply for the sake of man himself, the offered." The dominant metaphor for understanding sacrificial blood seems to be life, not satisfaction or forgiveness. (This explains all the mentions of "sprinkling" the blood, which makes little sense if the point is shedding the blood to provide satisfaction but falls right into place if the blood has a cleansing/life-giving function) Why, then, does the liturgy state that Jesus' body and blood were broken and shed for us for the forgiveness of sins? This refers not to the divine act of forgiveness itself (for God is always willing and able to forgive all who repent), but to that forgiveness being made real or manifest in us. For forgiveness of sins, more than just a legal pardon, means cleansing or remission of the sin being forgiven ("forgiveness" and "remission" of sins are used almost interchangeably in the liturgy). This is why I have said that Orthodoxy does not distinguish between justification and sanctification as Protestants do; both are indispensable parts of true forgiveness.

Justice

Divine necessity

Through this reading of Jesus' death as atoning sacrifice, Orthodox theology holds a far better understanding of God's justice free from the shortcomings of PSA. For starters, it emphatically asserts that God is perfectly free; there is no necessity of any kind placed on him to respond in a certain way to man's sin. The Greek Orthodox theologian Christos Yannaras says of proponents of satisfaction theology:

But from what do they derive this "must" to which they subordinate even God? Does there exist, then, some necessity that limits the love of God, limits His freedom? If there is, then God is not God or at least He is not the God that the Church knows. A "just" God, a heavenly police constable who oversees the keeping of the laws of an obligatory - even for Him - justice is just a figment of the imagination of fallen humanity, a projection of its need for a supernatural individual security within the reciprocal treachery of collective coexistence...

To the Orthodox, it is inadmissible to claim that God "must" punish sin in order to be just; simply applying this word to God in any capacity diminishes his glory. It is similarly inappropriate to speak of God as being placed under any kind of obligation or need (e.g. a "debt of honor" on which he "must" collect) by the actions of men. God is far more secure than this in his greatness, as St. John Chrysostom says:

For neither by insulting Him can a man cause injury to God nor by praising Him make Him reveal Himself more brightly. He ever abides in His own glory, neither increasing because of praises nor diminishing because of blasphemy. But when people glorify Him worthily ... they reap the benefits of that glorification themselves. And those who blaspheme and malign Him destroy their own salvation. (Homilies on the Incomprehensibility of God 3.1)

John S. Romanides relates this to the Orthodox distinction between the unknowable (and totally free) essence and communicated energies of God. He says, basically, that in the Anselmian heritage love and justice are made into parts of God's essence (or "nature"), which results in God being placed under necessity to act in a certain way in accordance with his essence as we have defined it. But

Man cannot impute anthropomorphic qualities to the divine nature, and indeed qualities of the fallen psychological make up of man, such as are implicit in the heresy that the divine nature was offended and needed to be avenged. ... Even the term 'satisfaction' is itself alien to the Greek Fathers. The divine essence remains incomprehensible. The justice of God and His love, as well, are divine energies and properties encompassing God, but they are not the divine essence itself. (The Ancestral Sin, 96-97)

Origen and St. Gregory of Nazianzus also deny that Christ's sacrificial death was in any way demanded by the Father; I will quote both of them later.

Expiation

Orthodox theology also differs on the aim of God's justice. The distinction here is simple but significant: whereas western Christianity sees God's justice manifested in the punishment of sin, Orthodoxy sees it in (but not quite defined as) the destruction of sin. The point is not to pronounce and enact the appropriately "just" sentence against sin; the point is to get rid of it. God's justice, if it makes sense at all for it to be "satisfied", is "satisfied" not by the juridical condemnation and penalization of sin through death, nor by being "paid back" for offenses committed against it, but by the destruction of sin and the enactment of justice in its positive sense, as the rescue of the oppressed, the end of evil, the restoration of creation to the way God intended it to be (or even better).

This is the understanding of the biblical term "expiation" (hilasterion) that Eric Jobe argues for by way of Isaiah 53 and Romans 3:25, in which he states very clearly: "The wrath of God is not directed towards punishment, but toward the destruction of sin. ... [it] is a part of the whole intention of God to purify his creation and redeem it back to himself. Wrath, if we may speak of it, is directed toward this aim and not toward the aim of “satisfying” passionate anger or some sense of God’s honor being offended by sin, which he must defend through tyrannical punishment." Jobe defines expiation not as the vicarious punishment of sin, but the cleansing or purging of sin, like wiping a countertop with Lysol. He does a great job of setting God's wrath in context within his justice (i.e. not portraying it as the main point of justice); since I don't think I can adequately summarize it, I recommend reading it and the second part. Romanides, again stating the Orthodox consensus, contradicts another doctrine of PSA in relation to the wrath of God:

It is important to note that in the Holy Scriptures and in the writers of the period under examination, divine wrath is never directed generally or indiscriminately against the whole of mankind, although this kind of wrath is clearly the premise of Augustine's theory of original sin. Rather, it is always manifested specifically to the unrepentant, impious, the impious, the unrighteous, and particularly to the devil. (98)

In summary, Orthodox soteriology stands as a corrective to the PSA's equation of God's justice with his wrath (punishment) of sin. Instead, it sets wrath in the larger context of God's justice, whose aim is not so much to punish sin as to remove it, and still more to restore and sanctify the created order in fulfillment of his purposes for it. Of course, if we cling to our sin and persist in hating God, we will experience this wrath against sin as destruction and agony, but this is not the "point" of the wrath.

Punishment vs. consequence

Orthodoxy rejects even more strongly any hint that death may have been created by God, whether as a punishment, curse, or whatever. God is not the author of death, suffering, disease, or any of the other problems that the gospel saves us from. Romanides wisely points out that "[Jesus' acts of healing and exorcism] would be completely irrational if it were assumed that, because of an inherited guilt of mankind, divine justice is the cause of the same evils that the Lord warred against." (98) Alexander Schmemann similarly states that death as a punishment is alien to Orthodox theology. (For the Life of the World, 97) It is much more accurate to say that we are in bondage to Satan than that we are under a divine curse. God does not need to save us from himself.

I think this distinction demonstrates the deeper distinction between penalty/punishment and consequence. In much of western theology, death is a punishment from God; in Orthodox theology, it is a consequence of Adam's ancestral sin. In his amazing work On the Incarnation, in which he sets out to answer exactly the same question Anselm did ("Why did God become man?"), St. Athanasius explains how this is so:

But if they [humans] went astray and became vile, throwing away their birthright of beauty, then they would come under the natural law of death and live no longer in paradise, but, dying outside of it, continue in death and in corruption. ... men, having turned from the contemplation of God to evil of their own devising, had come inevitably under the law of death. Instead of remaining in the state in which God had created them, they were in process of becoming corrupted entirely, and death had them completely under its dominion. For the transgression of the commandment was making them turn back again according to their nature; and as they had at the beginning come into being out of non-existence, so were they now on the way to returning, through corruption, to non-existence again. The presence and love of the Word had called them into being; inevitably, therefore when they lost the knowledge of God, they lost existence with it; for it is God alone Who exists, evil is non-being, the negation and antithesis of good. By nature, of course, man is mortal, since he was made from nothing; but he bears also the Likeness of Him Who is, and if he preserves that Likeness through constant contemplation, then his nature is deprived of its power and he remains incorrupt. (1.3-4)

In the Orthodox understanding, man was not created immortal only to lose his immortality and become subject to death as a punishment for sin. As a fleshly creature, man is mortal by nature, apt to return to the earth from which he was made. Alone among the earthly creatures, man was made in the image and likeness of God, blessed with the ability to know God and, ultimately, to share in his life and attain to immortality. This purpose is the "birthright of beauty" Athanasius mentions; by sinning, Adam threw this calling away and became subject to "the natural law of death". I will come back to Athanasius' theology later; the point for now is that Orthodoxy correctly describes death as a consequence of sin, not a punishment for sin, and thus avoids portraying God as saving us from his own actions.

Sin vs. sinner

As I mentioned last post, in the Orthodox understanding of the fall, human nature remains essentially good, though undeniably corrupted and dominated by sin. But this makes it possible (easy, even) for God to make a distinction between unconditionally forgiving sinners and condemning their sin. Contra Calvin, God unambiguously hates our sin without for a moment ceasing to unambiguously love us. Crucially and unlike in PSA, the love of God and the wrath of God are not directed at the same objects. We are under the wrath of God only insofar as we are identified with our sins. Thus, salvation from sin comes with salvation from wrath "thrown in". The "justice vs. mercy" tension, if it exists, corresponds to saving sinners while cleansing them from sin, not to punishing yet saving guilty sinners. Yet this is clearly not a real tension (certainly not one existing in the nature of God), but only an apparent one.

Miscellany

As I mentioned before, Orthodoxy affirms that God is able to unconditionally forgive sin without demanding satisfaction for it (in other words, in precisely the way he commands us to forgive). The only real "condition" for forgiveness is repentance, willingness and desire to be forgiven. This is the image of forgiveness we see throughout the Bible, and especially and crucially in the gospels. As well, concepts endemic to PSA like the "cosmic moral economy", merit as a sort of currency of salvation within this economy, and imputation of "alien righteousness" are all totally alien to Orthodox theology.

Justification

Through all of this, Orthodox soteriology gives a much better account of justification. Echoing the New Perspective on Paul, it does not see justification as virtually synonymous with salvation, but as one dimension of a much richer reality. The point of justification is not to make it possible for God to forgive us while maintaining his justice, but for us to be forgiven, to receive pardon and remission of sins from a God who is eager to grant it. Justification does not entail a change in the "divine disposition" by which God wills to bless rather than curse us; the enmity that the cross removes is on our part. As Romanides says, "Nowhere does the New Testament say that either Christ or the Father were at enmity with the world." (97) Additionally, justification is conceptualized not simply as a one-time event, but as something ongoing, maintenance of and growth within a right relationship with God and therefore the creation in us of actual righteousness. Eric Jobe concludes his second article by saying, "Justification is not a one-time event as many Protestant Christians are wont to believe, but it is instead a life of faith, a life begun at baptism, a life of confession, and a life of Eucharistic communion, as we live in a justified, righteous relationship with God in the covenant community of the faithful."

The result of all this is a distinctly less legalistic picture of the atonement than the one offered by PSA. Christ did not die simply so that we could be pardoned or so that God's verdict of condemnation against sin could be enacted; he died to cleanse us from sin and make us alive in him. Sin is not so much a legal problem as it is an ontological problem, separation from the source of being and consequent return to non-being; that is, death. As C.S. Lewis said (honestly, Lewis is a great gateway from western to eastern theology; he represents one of the closer points of contact between Anglicanism and Orthodoxy), salvation is not simply a matter of God treating us differently than he would otherwise, but of our becoming able to endure his image and, eventually, to bear it. There is no question of when the legal verdict of justification becomes "real" and starts having affecting us rather than simply our legal status. According to Orthodoxy, atonement theology is "real" from start to finish.

Atonement

In the remainder of this post I will be impossibly attempting to summarize the ineffable richness of Orthodox soteriology. Anything I say can only be a fragment of the two-thousand-year thought of the Church on this crucial subject. But it should suffice to show why I have come to favor it.

Orthodox atonement theology is much more balanced with little to no tendency toward making the crucifixion the single point of salvation. There is instead more of a risk of doing this with the resurrection, but it is still comparatively slight. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware says in his wonderful book The Orthodox Church, "The west, so it seems to [Orthodox], tends to think of the Crucifixion in isolation, separating it too sharply from the Resurrection." (228) And on the cross, where western Christianity tends to see Christ on the cross primarily as sufferer (on our behalf, to satisfy divine justice), Orthodoxy sees even the death of Christ as part of his victory over the powers of evil. "But," he wisely reminds us, "there contrasts must not be pressed too far."

Orthodoxy has, in my view, a much more balanced picture of how Jesus fits into and defines the gospel, one in which the crucifixion and resurrection are on level ground and often taken as a single victory. The incarnation itself, the mystery of God becoming man, is made much of and is considered salvific in its own right; God took on human nature in order to redeem it. As St. John of Damascus wrote in his treatise An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, "since He gave us to share in the better part [the divine nature], and we did not keep it secure, He shares in the inferior part, I mean our own nature, in order that through Himself and in Himself He might renew that which was made after His image and likeness". (4.4) The incarnation, passion, and resurrection are all considered essential to our salvation; nothing is stressed in isolation from the whole picture. Additionally, Orthodox soteriology is strongly Trinitarian, with no tendency to focus on Jesus to the exclusion of the Father and Holy Spirit. It is said that "no member of the Trinity ever acts alone", not because of weakness but because of the indivisibility of the three-person unity.

Perhaps surprisingly, the Orthodox Church has never dogmatized (authoritatively declared essential) a statement of atonement theology. Yes, it is enshrined in the creed that Christ was made man, suffered for us, and rose again, but there is no dogma about precisely how the cross saves us. Orthodox theologians are, however, perfectly willing to apply Christological dogma (about the person and natures of Christ and how they fit together) to shape atonement theology and debunk inadequate theories. Pelikan writes that Orthodoxy sees a "theological congruence" between the person of Christ and the work of Christ, between Christology and soteriology. Again, neither of these things exactly gets primacy over the other. Though not dogmatic, much rich atonement theology is enshrined in the liturgy of the church (I will give an example later).

Atonement theology is an example of the Orthodox Church's reluctance to make dogmatic statements relative to the Catholic Church (or to form de facto dogmas like conservative Protestant denominations). Ultimately, the atonement is a divine mystery; for this reason, no positive statement about it is totally precise (though some are closer to literally true than others), and we should not expect an account that precisely explains the necessity of the atonement by neatly fitting it into a logical scheme, as satisfaction theology and PSA purport to do. (Which I think is a large reason for their appeal) Historically and especially since Anselm and the rise of scholasticism, Orthodox theology has been relatively more tolerant of mystery and cautious about the powers of human reason in theology; its approach has been apophatic (describing divine mysteries negatively, by what they are not) as well as kataphatic (positively describing theology, of the kind familiar in the west). Vladimir Lossky relates the apophatic approach to Orthodox atonement theology:

The apophatic or negative outlook characteristic of Eastern theology is expressed in the great variety of images given us by the Greek Fathers so that our minds may be lifted up to contemplate the work of Christ, a work which, according to St. Paul, the angels do not understand. This work is more usually called the work of redemption, a term which implies the idea of a debt, or the payment of a ransom for the release of captives, and is borrowed from legal practice. All the Fathers use this figure of speech which originated from St. Paul. St. Paul also uses another legal term, that of the 'Mediator' who reconciles men to God by the cross on which He abolished enmity. Other figures have rather a warlike ring—such as struggle, victory, destruction of the opposing power. St. Gregory of Nyssa represents the economy of salvation as a divine ruse to baffle the evil spirit's cunning and so to free humanity. Figures of the physical order are also very frequent, such as fire destroying the impurity of nature, the incorruptibility which causes corruptibility to disappear, a medicine which cures weak nature, etc. ... the desire to use any one of these images as an adequate expression of the mystery of our salvation involves the risk of substituting purely human and inappropriate conceptions for 'the mystery hidden in God before all ages'. (The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 151-152)

His last sentence wisely warns against making any of our images of salvation into (in my words) how it "really works", of reducing the divine mystery to human conceptions.

Images of Orthodox atonement theology

That said, theologians have articulated quite a few images to describe the atonement which, incomplete as they are, are still true and valuable.

Passover

I have already described much of the textual basis for this in the section on sacrifice above. Christ is viewed as the fulfillment of the Jewish Passover feast, which (meaningfully) celebrates God's delivery of his people from their oppressors and enemies, even death. Just as the lamb's blood saved the Israelites from death and delivered them from the hands of the Egyptians, so the blood of Christ our lamb saves us from death and delivers us from all the enemies of humanity. Together with the next two images, the Passover image suffices to account for much of the biblical support claimed by PSA.

Sacrifice

Again, as I described above, Christ fulfills the Jewish sacrificial system, whose purpose was not to appease divine wrath or divert punishment to a substitute, but to atone for (cleanse, expiate) the peoples' sins and allow them to continue living in right relationship to God. This understanding of the atonement probably grew organically from the place of the sacrifice in Jewish liturgy during the transition to distinctively Christian worship. The difference is, of course, that Jesus' sacrifice of himself once for all suffices for all people, not just the Jews, and it suffices eternally. This understanding of the atonement is abundantly supported not just in the early church, but also in Hebrews, among other places in the NT, which describes Jesus both as the sacrifice and the high priest offering it.

18 On the one hand, a former commandment is set aside because of its weakness and uselessness 19 (for the law made nothing perfect); on the other hand, a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God. 20 And it was not without an oath. 21 Those who formerly became priests took their office without an oath, but this one was addressed with an oath, "The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind, 'Thou art a priest for ever.'" 22 This makes Jesus the surety of a better covenant. 23 The former priests were many in number, because they were prevented by death from continuing in office; 24 but he holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues for ever. 25 Consequently he is able for all time to save those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them. 26 For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, blameless, unstained, separated from sinners, exalted above the heavens. 27 He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people; he did this once for all when he offered up himself. 28 Indeed, the law appoints men in their weakness as high priests, but the word of the oath, which came later than the law, appoints a Son who has been made perfect for ever. (Heb 7:18-28)

11 But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) 12 he entered once for all into the Holy Place, taking not the blood of goats and calves but his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. 13 For if the sprinkling of defiled persons with the blood of goats and bulls and with the ashes of a heifer sanctifies for the purification of the flesh, 14 how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify your conscience from dead works to serve the living God. 15 Therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred which redeems them from the transgressions under the first covenant. (Heb 9:11-15)

24 For Christ has entered, not into a sanctuary made with hands, a copy of the true one, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. 25 Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the Holy Place yearly with blood not his own; 26 for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. 27 And just as it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgment, 28 so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him. (Heb 9:24-28)

11 And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. 12 But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, 13 then to wait until his enemies should be made a stool for his feet. 14 For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. (Heb 10:11-14)

Ransom

"the Son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." (Mat 20:28) That Christ's life serves as a ransom is uncontroversial. But what is the nature of this ransom, and to whom is it offered? Early theologians tended to assume that the ransom was offered to the devil. Origen, dismissing out of hand the possibility that it was offered to God, wrote: "To whom did he give his soul as a ransom for many? Certainly not to God! Then why not the devil? For he had possession of us until there should be given to him the ransom for us, the soul of Jesus." However, like Anselm and using similar reasoning, later eastern theologians began to question this possibility. St. Gregory of Nazianzus, in the fourth century, wrote on the subject:

Now we are to examine another fact and dogma, neglected by most people, but in my judgment well worth enquiring into. To Whom was that Blood offered that was shed for us, and why was It shed? I mean the precious and famous Blood of our God and High priest and Sacrifice. We were detained in bondage by the Evil One, sold under sin, and receiving pleasure in exchange for wickedness. Now, since a ransom belongs only to him who holds in bondage, I ask to whom was this offered, and for what cause? 

If to the Evil One, fie upon the outrage! If the robber receives ransom, not only from God, but a ransom which consists of God Himself, and has such an illustrious payment for his tyranny, a payment for whose sake it would have been right for him to have left us alone altogether. 

But if to the Father, I ask first, how? For it was not by Him that we were being oppressed; and next, On what principle did the Blood of His Only begotten Son delight the Father, Who would not receive even Isaac, when he was being offered by his Father, but changed the sacrifice, putting a ram in the place of the human victim? Is it not evident that the Father accepts Him, but neither asked for Him nor demanded Him; but on account of the Incarnation, and because Humanity must be sanctified by the Humanity of God, that He might deliver us Himself, and overcome the tyrant, and draw us to Himself by the mediation of His Son, Who also arranged this to the honour of the Father, Whom it is manifest that He obeys in all things? So much we have said of Christ; the greater part of what we might say shall be reverenced with silence. (Second Easter Oration, XXII)

The Orthodox consensus seems to be that insofar as it is a ransom, Jesus' death is a ransom to death itself, as the liturgy of St. Basil beautifully says (emphasis added):

For, since through man sin came into the world and through sin death, it pleased Your only begotten Son, who is in Your bosom, God and Father, born of a woman, the holy Theotokos and ever virgin Mary; born under the law, to condemn sin in His flesh, so that those who died in Adam may be brought to life in Him, Your Christ. He lived in this world, and gave us precepts of salvation. Releasing us from the delusions of idolatry, He guided us to the sure knowledge of You, the true God and Father. He acquired us for Himself, as His chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. Having cleansed us by water and sanctified us with the Holy Spirit, He gave Himself as ransom to death in which we were held captive, sold under sin. Descending into Hades through the cross, that He might fill all things with Himself, He loosed the bonds of death. He rose on the third day, having opened a path for all flesh to the resurrection from  the dead, since it was not possible that the Author of life would be dominated by corruption. So He became the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep, the first born of the dead, that He might be Himself the first in all things.

Obviously it doesn't make sense to speak of Christ paying a ransom to death in any kind of legal sense; as an impersonal force, the return of man to non-being, death cannot have any kind of legal claim on mankind. Yet we are undeniably under its power, in its dominion; it has a sort of "authority" over us, in a metaphorical sense. For Christ to give himself as a ransom to death is for him to do everything necessary, to "pay the price", to overthrow it and free us from its clutches. In this way, I think both Origen and Gregory have valid points. As Origen says, since the devil is the one who wields the power and fear of death against us (Heb 2:14-15), Christ's death can also be seen as a ransom of sorts to the devil, but as Gregory points out, this does not mean the devil had any sort of legal claim over us that God was obligated to honor. Athanasius writes of Christ's redemption from death in quasi-legal terminology:

But beyond all this, there was a debt owing which must needs be paid; for, as I said before, all men were due to die. Here, then, is the second reason why the Word dwelt among us, namely that having proved His Godhead by His works, He might offer the sacrifice on behalf of all, surrendering His own temple to death in place of all, to settle man's account with death and free him from the primal transgression. In the same act also He showed Himself mightier than death, displaying His own body incorruptible as the first-fruits of the resurrection. (4.20)

Satisfaction

You may have been wondering when I would deal with the significance of Hilary of Poitiers introducing satisfaction language to atonement theology in the fourth century. You could just scroll up, but to recap, the second-century father Tertullian introduced the legal language of "satisfaction" (making reparations or amends for harm done) to Christian theology in discussing penance, and Hilary was the first to adapt it to the atonement, interpreting Christ's death on the cross as an act of satisfaction to God on our behalf. You may be asking: doesn't this seal the patristic case for satisfaction theology and PSA, albeit as one theme of the atonement among many? Sort of.

This orthodox understanding of the atonement as satisfaction differs from Anselm's in that it does not distort God's justice or place him under a logical necessity. Yes, Christ's death is an act of satisfaction to the Father, but this is yet a long way from claiming that God demands satisfaction for every violation of his justice, that he is sworn to avenge sin and must enact his wrath on a substitute if we are to be saved, or even that Christ's satisfying death was an act of divine punishment at all. It sets in sharp relief the mistakes of PSA by showing what satisfaction theology can look like without them.

Recapitulation

This image of the atonement, closely linked to the next two, was largely the brainchild of St. Irenaeus of Lyons, who arrived at it by expounding at length on the significance of the biblical image of Christ as our "head" (Eph 4:18, Col 1:18) and the second Adam (Rom 5:12-21). I am still learning more about it and it is hard for me to describe, so I will quote Pelikan's account at length:

For Irenaeus, the imitation of Christ by the Christian was part of God's cosmic plan of salvation which began with Christ's imitation of the Christian or, more precisely, with Christ's imitation of Adam. The Logos 'assimilated himself to man and man to himself' in his life and in his passion. After his incarnation he passed through every stage of human growth, hallowing each and redeeming each by 'being made for them an example of piety, righteousness, and submission.' The disobedience of the first Adam was undone through the disobedience of the second Adam, so that many should be justified and attain salvation. He summed up in himself the entire continuity of the human race and provided man with salvation in a concise summary. (The Christian Tradition, 1.144-145)

In Irenaeus' own words:

So then He united man with God, and established a community of union between God and man; since we could not in any other way participate in incorruption, save by His coming among us. For so long as incorruption was invisible and unrevealed, it helped us not at all therefore it became visible, that in all respects we might participate in the reception of incorruption. And, because in the original formation of Adam all of us were tied and bound up with death through his disobedience, it was right that through the obedience of Him who was made man for us we should be released from death: and because death reigned over the flesh, it was right that through the flesh it should lose its force and let man go free from its oppression. So the Word was made flesh, that, through that very flesh which sin had ruled and dominated, it should lose its force and be no longer in us. And therefore our Lord took that same original formation as (His) entry into flesh, so that He might draw near and contend on behalf of the fathers, and conquer by Adam that which by Adam had stricken us down. (Dem. 31)

The closest familiar analogue to recapitulation in the west is probably the idea of "substitutionary atonement", only here it is understood not as Christ undergoing something (the wrath of God for sins) so we don't have to, but Christ undergoing something we cannot of ourselves (freedom from death and corruption and ascension into a new order of life) as our head, representative, or summary, so that we can do the same through union with (assimilation to) him.

Moral influence

The image of Christ as example is closely tied into recapitulation. The imitation of Christ as example and obedience to Christ as teacher are closely tied into the overall gospel, for they are inseparable from being united to Christ. Pelikan interestingly writes about how "imitation" here was understood not simply as a masquerade but in a deeper Platonic sense that leads to actually becoming the thing imitated (much as C.S. Lewis wrote about in the last part of Mere Christianity). As is commonly pointed out, of course, the image of Christ as moral example (or maybe prototype) should not be understood as a complete atonement theology in isolation from the rest of what the church believes. But then, that is true of all these images.

Deification

We come close to the heart of Orthodox atonement theology with this image. If recapitulation is Jesus summing up the human race in himself, deification (or the Greek term theosis) is the inevitable result of this act as it applies to us. Orthodox understand salvation not simply as a rescue from sin, death, the devil, etc. (it is a tendency of street-level presentations of the evangelical gospel to overemphasize this), but also as having a definite telos, or goal, namely sharing in the uncreated, eternal life of the Trinity, of becoming oneself an expression of the divine life. As Peter writes (emphasis added), "His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature." (1 Pet 1:3-4) Applying Christological dogma to the matter, our union with Christ is supposed to become as close and vital and mysterious as his union with the Father.

In other words, salvation is never simply about restoring what was lost in the fall; there has always been more to it. Our final goal is to become even more than Adam was in the garden. Salvation involves a new creation by the same Word who created all things in the beginning, as Athanasius writes:

He has been manifested in a human body for this reason only, out of the love and goodness of His Father, for the salvation of us men. We will begin, then, with the creation of the world and with God its Maker, for the first fact that you must grasp is this: the renewal of creation has been wrought by the Self-same Word Who made it in the beginning. (1.1)

The purpose of the Church and of salvation is to lead people into, and to partake in, the eternal life of the divine. Theosis is where salvation theology extends off into the distance and becomes indistinguishable from mysticism. In describing this mystery, Athanasius is often quoted (and this must be understood in the right way): "God became man that man might become god."

Victory

If there can be said to be a primary image of the atonement in Orthodox theology, it is the one to which all the others refer back in some capacity, which in turn acts as a summary and combination of the other images. This image is that of Christ as victor. Especially in the development of Orthodox liturgy, this image was the most common and the most appropriate for speaking of the work of Christ. As Pelikan writes:

The thought of the liturgical theologians developed the themes of the liturgy. They did speak of the crucifixion as a sacrifice and describe Christ as simultaneously the priest of the sacrifice and the victim. But when they came to speak in more detail about the cross, it was the imagery of battle and victory that seemed to serve them best. ... Nothing was further from their minds than any disjunction between the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ as means of atonement, but the language of the liturgy made the themes of battle and victory a natural way of describing the way of salvation. (2.138-139)

What is Christ the victor over? Death, mortality, sin, corruptibility, suffering, the devil—every enemy of man that has held him captive and opposed God's righteous intentions for the creation. As in the liturgy, Christ "trampled down death by dying"; death could not hold him who has life in himself, and so by tasting death he broke its bonds on us. Athanasius writes:

Thus it happened that two opposite marvels took place at once: the death of all was consummated in the Lord's body; yet, because the Word was in it, death and corruption were in the same act utterly abolished. Death there had to be, and death for all, so that the due of all might be paid. Wherefore, the Word, as I said, being Himself incapable of death, assumed a mortal body, that He might offer it as His own in place of all, (4.20)

Jesus assumed human nature and everything that comes with it, even death, in order to transform even death into the means of our salvation. Alexander Schmemann writes in his book For the Life of the World: "In Christ everything in this world, and this means health and disease, joy and suffering, has become an ascension to, and entrance into this new life, its expectation and anticipation." (103) According to Origen, the atonement is how Christ overthrows the devil and his dominion over this world (Jhn 16:11). Irenaeus typologically applied Genesis 3:15 to Christ; he is the seed of the woman who who will strike the serpent's (Satan's) head (that is, triumph over him). He also understood the devil as the strong man of Matthew 12:29, and Christ as the one who binds him up and plunders his house (the world). Summarizing this, Pelikan writes:

He [Christ] fought and was victorious; for he was man doing battle for the fathers, and by his obedience utterly abolishing disobedience. For he bound the strong man, liberated the weak, and by destroying sin endowed his creation with salvation. (1.150)

Important as the passion is, the resurrection is equally indispensible in the victory of the Savior, for without it death would still be operative, even over the Lord. But instead the resurrection is the completion of death's defeat. Athanasius asks, rhetorically, "Death having been slain by Him, then, what other issue could there be than the resurrection of His body and its open demonstration as the monument of His victory? How could the destruction of death have been manifested at all, had not the Lord's body been raised?" (5.30) But instead, "Death has become like a tyrant who has been completely conquered by the legitimate monarch; bound hand and foot the passers-by sneer at him, hitting him and abusing him, no longer afraid of his cruelty and rage, because of the king who has conquered him." (5.27) What is particularly interesting (and convicting) is that as evidence of the resurrection and the defeat of death, Athanasius cites the church itself and the Christians' scorn for death (possibly in the face of Arian persecution). How much does the church today witness to the resurrection in this way?

It bears repeating that this fundamental, central image of Jesus as victor over the enemies and oppressors of man is incompatible with PSA, which makes God himself (or his just wrath) into the enemy and oppressor of man from whom the atonement saves us. To PSA, the atonement is part of a legal proceeding to satisfy the demands of divine justice. In Orthodox theology, it is a cosmic and ontological victory over the forces of evil and a second act of creation, making manifest God's purposes for the world.

See the difference?

More Orthodox quotes

I'll conclude this extensive post with some more fantastic quotes showing Orthodoxy's vision of the gospel which I found during my readings but didn't work into my line of argument.

But when he disobeyed You, the true God who had created him, and was led astray by the deception of the serpent becoming subject to death through his own transgressions, You, O God, in Your righteous judgment, expelled him from paradise into this world, returning him to the earth from which he was taken, yet providing for him the salvation of regeneration in Your Christ. (Anaphora of St. Basil)

This, then, was the plight of men. God had not only made them out of nothing, but had also graciously bestowed on them His own life by the grace of the Word. Then, turning from eternal things to things corruptible, by counsel of the devil, they had become the cause of their own corruption in death; for, as I said before, though they were by nature subject to corruption, the grace of their union with the Word made them capable of escaping from the natural law, provided that they retained the beauty of innocence with which they were created. That is to say, the presence of the Word with them shielded them even from natural corruption. (Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word of God, 1.5)

His part it was, and His alone, both to bring again the corruptible to incorruption and to maintain for the Father His consistency of character with all. For He alone, being Word of the Father and above all, was in consequence both able to recreate all, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be an ambassador for all with the Father. (Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word of God, 2.7)

For by the sacrifice of His own body He did two things: He put an end to the law of death which barred our way; and He made a new beginning of life for us, by giving us the hope of resurrection. By man death has gained its power over men; by the Word made Man death has been destroyed and life raised up anew.  (Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word of God, 2.10)

Both from the confession of the evil spirits and from the daily witness of His works, it is manifest, then, and let none presume to doubt it, that the Savior has raised His own body, and that He is very Son of God, having His being from God as from a Father, Whose Word and Wisdom and Whose Power He is. He it is Who in these latter days assumed a body for the salvation of us all, and taught the world concerning the Father. He it is Who has destroyed death and freely graced us all with incorruption through the promise of the resurrection, having raised His own body as its first-fruits, and displayed it by the sign of the cross as the monument to His victory over death and its corruption. (Athanasius, On the  Incarnation of the Word, 5.32)

What man ought to have achieved by raising himself up to God, God achieved by descending to man. (Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 136)

The strong juridical character of Latin theology which led the West to the satisfaction theory of Anselm is absent from the Greek patristic tradition. In the East, the fall is understood to be a consequence of man's own withdrawal from divine life and the resulting weakness and disease of human nature. This, man himself is seen as the cause through his cooperation with the devil. In the West, all the evils in the world originate in the punitive divine will, and the devil himself is especially seen as God's instrument of punishment. The Greek Fathers look upon salvation from a biblical perspective and see it as redemption from death and corruptibility and as the healing of human nature which was assaulted by Satan. Therefore, they established the following principle as the touchstone of their christological teaching: 'That which is not assumed is not healed, but that which is united to God is also saved.' It is which the opposite in the West where salvation does not mean, first and foremost, salvation from death and corruptibility but from divine wrath. And the termination of the penalty of death and illnesses simply follows as a result of the satisfaction of divine justice. For the West, this is quite natural since, on the one hand, God is believed to punish all men with death while, on the other hand, it is man who provokes the punishment because he bears inherited guilt. Thus, according to the Western viewpoint, God did not become man in order 'to abolish him who has the power of death,' since it is God Who is death's causative power, but to satisfy Himself to such a degree that He could look upon men with a somewhat more benevolent attitude and, at the Second Coming, lift the old death sentence from them. (John S. Romanides, The Ancestral Sin, 34-35)

Further Reading

Penal Substitution and the Problem of Justice

The Scope of Passover and Penal Substitution Theory

What's at Stake in the Atonement?

Orthodox Problems with Penal Substitution, excerpt from Reconsidering TULIP

The Death of Jesus as Sacrifice: An Orthodox Reading of Isaiah 53 and Romans 3:25

The Death of Jesus as Sacrifice, Part 2: The Atonement and Justification

The Blood Sacrifice and Forgiveness

Saint Athanasius and the ‘Penal Substitutionary’ Atonement Doctrine
On the Incarnation of the Word