Sacrifice, Ransom, and Propitiation in the Fathers

The Fathers use sacrificial, ransom, and propitiatory language freely and without embarrassment, because Scripture forces it on them. The strength of the Orthodox account of the Cross is not that it avoids this vocabulary but that it can carry all of it without the frame in which the West later set it. This file surveys the language — thysia, lytron, hilastērion, hilasmos — as the Fathers and the liturgical texts actually use it, and identifies the two constraints under which they use it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Language Is Not Optional

Any account of the Cross that begins by quarantining the sacrificial vocabulary has already lost the argument, because the vocabulary is scriptural and liturgical before it is theological.

  • Sacrifice. “Christ our Passover has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7). The Epistle to the Hebrews devotes three chapters to Christ as high priest and victim, “offered once to bear the sins of many” (Hebrews 9:28), and to a self-offering that ends the Levitical system by fulfilling it (Hebrews 9:11–10:18).
  • Ransom. “To give his life a ransom (λύτρον) for many” (Mark 10:45); “a ransom (ἀντίλυτρον) for all” (1 Timothy 2:6); “you were bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:20).
  • Propitiation / expiation. “Whom God set forth as a ἱλαστήριον by his blood” (Romans 3:25); “he is the ἱλασμός for our sins, and not for ours only but for the whole world” (1 John 2:2; cf. 4:10).
  • Curse-bearing. “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13).
  • Substitution language. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21); “he himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24).

The Church prays this language every week. In the Anaphora of St. John Chrysostom the priest thanks God for the Son “who gave himself for the life of the world”; in the Anaphora of St. Basil the Son “gave himself a ransom to death, in which we were held, sold under sin,” and “descended through the Cross into Hades.” The proskomedia calls the bread the Lamb and pierces it with the spear; the words “Sacrificed is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” are spoken at every Liturgy (see The Symbolism of the Prothesis; The Eucharistic Prayer).

To pretend that the Orthodox tradition dislikes sacrificial language is therefore false, and the pretence is also strategically foolish: it stakes the case on a claim an interlocutor can refute by opening a service book. The real position is narrower and stronger. The Church uses every one of these images and refuses to let any one of them become the mechanism of salvation.

How the Fathers Use It

St. Athanasius. On the Incarnation is often cited as the charter of a non-juridical soteriology, and it is; but it does not avoid the language of debt. “Death was necessary, and a death on behalf of all, so that the due of all might be paid… For there was need of death, and death must needs have taken place on behalf of all, that the debt owing from all might be paid” (On the Incarnation 20; trans. NPNF II/4). What Athanasius means by the debt, however, is stated in the same treatise: it is the sentence of corruption and death pronounced in Genesis 3, not an offence against divine dignity requiring compensation (On the Incarnation 3–9; see Athanasius and the Logic of the Exchange). The vocabulary is commercial; the referent is ontological.

St. John Chrysostom. The most vigorous patristic user of substitutionary language in the Greek East, Chrysostom preaches 2 Corinthians 5:21 in terms that are startling: God “allowed his Son to be condemned as a sinner, that we might be made righteous,” and Christ “took upon himself the curse that was ours” (Chrysostom, Homilies on 2 Corinthians 11, on 5:21; trans. NPNF I/12). He develops the sacrificial reading of Hebrews at length in the Homilies on Hebrews, and it is his liturgy in which the Church still prays that Christ “gave himself for the life of the world” (see St. John Chrysostom: Eucharistic Teaching). Chrysostom is the standing refutation of the claim that “the East does not do substitution.” What he does not do is build a theory in which the Father’s justice is the obstacle to be removed.

St. Cyril of Alexandria. In the commentaries on John and on Hebrews, Cyril speaks of Christ’s death as an offering “for us” and as the removal of the curse, and grounds it in the hypostatic union: the offering is efficacious because the one who offers is the Word himself, so that the flesh is life-giving flesh (see St. Cyril of Alexandria).

St. Nicholas Cabasilas. The fourteenth century supplies the strongest juridical register in a canonized Orthodox author, and it is reported here rather than in a footnote: Christ, “who had done no evil, pleaded for us by dying on the cross. By this He paid the penalty for the sins which we had audaciously committed” (The Life in Christ I §7; trans. de Catanzaro). Cabasilas returns to it: “It was necessary that sin should be abolished by some penalty, and that we, by paying a just penalty, should be cleared of the indictment” (Life in Christ I §10). The full extent of this language in Orthodox sources, and how it is to be understood, is the subject of Juridical Language in Orthodox Sources.

The Two Constraints

Across this material, two constraints operate, and they are what distinguishes the patristic use of the language from its later systematization.

First: no image is made the mechanism

The Fathers pile the images up rather than choosing among them. St. Gregory the Theologian, in the same paschal oration that refuses both answers to the ransom question, calls Christ “our God and High priest and Sacrifice” (Oration 45.22). St. Irenaeus works with recapitulation, with the reversal of Adam’s disobedience by obedience on a tree, and with ransom, in adjacent paragraphs (Against Heresies V.16–21). St. Gregory of Nyssa runs the ransom account of Catechetical Oration 22–26 straight into the leaven-and-lump participatory account of chapters 32 and 37 without any sense of changing subjects.

This is not confusion; it is a judgment about what kind of thing the images are. Each is a window on an act which none of them exhausts, and the act — God in the flesh dying and rising — is prior to all of them. The systematizing move, in which one image is promoted to the status of the mechanism by which salvation works and the others are re-described as illustrations of it, is not a development of this material but a change of genre.

Second: God is not the party to be placated

The second constraint is more pointed, and it has conciliar backing.

The anaphora of the Byzantine rite contains, before the Great Entrance, a prayer that became the occasion of a dogmatic settlement: “For Thou art He that offers and is offered, that receives and is distributed, O Christ our God.” In the mid-twelfth century Soterichos Panteugenos, patriarch-elect of Antioch, together with the rhetoricians Michael of Thessalonica and Nikephoros Basilakes, argued that the sacrifice — of the Cross and of the altar — was offered to the Father alone, and not to the Son and the Spirit. The synods of Constantinople in 1156 and the council of Blachernae on 12 May 1157 condemned the position and defined that Christ in his humanity offers, and the whole Trinity receives, and that the sacrifice offered daily on the Church’s altars is not a different sacrifice from that of the Cross but the same one. The chapters entered the Synodikon of Orthodoxy (see Soterichos and the Councils of 1156–1157, which treats the acts, the sources, and the disputed reconstruction of what Soterichos actually held).

The dogmatic consequence is direct and it belongs here rather than only in the Synodikon collection. If the recipient of the sacrifice is the Trinity — Son and Spirit no less than Father — then the Cross cannot be an exchange between two parties within the Godhead. There is no transaction in which one divine Person is discharged and another satisfied, because the same undivided God is both the one who offers and the one who receives. Whatever “propitiation” means in Romans 3:25 and 1 John 2:2, it cannot mean that, and the Church said so in council four centuries before the question became a confessional dividing line in the West.

A note on ἱλαστήριον

The Greek word at Romans 3:25 carries the weight of a good deal of modern argument, and honesty requires the state of the question rather than a verdict. [Disputed: the sense of ἱλαστήριον in Romans 3:25. (a) C. H. Dodd argued from Septuagintal usage that the ἱλάσκομαι word-group in biblical Greek denotes the removal of sin — expiation — rather than the appeasement of a deity, and that “propitiation” imports pagan associations foreign to the biblical usage (Dodd, “ΙΛΑΣΚΕΣΘΑΙ, Its Cognates, Derivatives, and Synonyms, in the Septuagint,” Journal of Theological Studies 32 [1931]: 352–360). (b) Leon Morris and others replied that the wrath of God is a real datum of Romans 1–3 and that the term retains a propitiatory sense (Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, 3rd ed., London: Tyndale, 1965). (c) A third line reads ἱλαστήριον as the mercy seat (Hebrew kapporet), the Septuagint’s standard rendering, making the reference cultic and locative rather than transactional. This repository records the dispute and does not settle it; the dogmatic point made above does not depend on its resolution.]

Why This Matters for the Argument

The discipline observed in this section is the one set out for a different controversy in the companion collection on Chalcedon: precision about what the other side actually holds, and about what one’s own sources actually say, strengthens an objection rather than softening it (see Why Precision Strengthens the Case).

An Orthodox who argues that the Fathers avoid sacrificial and substitutionary language has made a claim refutable in five minutes with Chrysostom, Cabasilas, and a service book, and his real objection collapses with the false one. The real objection survives the whole of that material intact, because it is not about vocabulary. It is that the Cross is not a payment discharging a debit against God, that God is not the obstacle to human salvation, and that the death of Christ is not the terminus of the movement but its turning-point. That objection is stated in Section 07, and every text quoted in this file is consistent with it.

See Also

References

  • Athanasius of Alexandria. On the Incarnation 3–9, 20. Translated in NPNF II/4; also trans. John Behr, Popular Patristics Series 44a, Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011.
  • John Chrysostom. Homilies on 2 Corinthians, Homily 11 (on 2 Cor 5:21); Homilies on Hebrews. Translated in NPNF I/12 and I/14.
  • Gregory the Theologian. Oration 45.22. Translated in NPNF II/7.
  • Gregory of Nyssa. Catechetical Oration 22–26, 32, 37. Translated in NPNF II/5.
  • Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies V.16–21. Translated in ANF I.
  • Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ I §§7, 10. Translated by Carmino J. de Catanzaro. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974; critical edition ed. M.-H. Congourdeau, Sources chrétiennes 355 and 361.
  • Synodikon of Orthodoxy, chapters “Against Basilaki, Soterichos, and others” (councils of 1156 and 1157). See the treatment and sources at Soterichos and the Councils of 1156–1157.
  • Dodd, C. H. “ΙΛΑΣΚΕΣΘΑΙ, Its Cognates, Derivatives, and Synonyms, in the Septuagint.” Journal of Theological Studies 32 (1931): 352–360.
  • Morris, Leon. The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross. 3rd ed. London: Tyndale Press, 1965.