07 — What the Church Confesses
The dogmatic centre of the collection. The first file states the Church’s judgment on the Western trajectory in four propositions; the second reports, without flinching, the juridical and satisfaction language that does appear in Orthodox sources, and gives the standard Orthodox account of it while noting that the account is itself contested.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox
The Church has never defined a mechanism of the atonement, and the absence is not an oversight. Where she has legislated on the Cross she has legislated negatively and precisely: on who it is that suffers, at the Christological councils, and on to whom the sacrifice is offered, at Constantinople in 1156 and Blachernae in 1157. The four propositions of the first file are drawn from that record and from the Church’s prayer — that God is not the obstacle, that the Cross is not a transaction internal to the Godhead, that the wage of sin is death rather than a debit, and that Pascha and not Calvary is the term of the movement.
The second file exists because the repository concedes what tells against a tidy account. Satisfaction language appears in St Nicholas Cabasilas, a canonized fourteenth-century Byzantine; in the Confession of Dositheus and Peter Mogila’s Confession; and in explicit form in St Philaret’s Longer Catechism and Macarius Bulgakov’s dogmatics. That record is set out with the texts quoted, followed by Fr Georges Florovsky’s “pseudomorphosis” account of it, followed in turn by the standing scholarly challenge to that account. Nothing in the concession touches the dogmatic content of the first file, and the case is stronger for having made it.
Navigation
| File | Contents |
|---|---|
| The Orthodox Assessment | What the Creed confesses and what the Church has not defined; the four propositions; what the objection is not; and the register in which it is stated |
| Juridical Language in Orthodox Sources | Cabasilas, Mogila, Dositheus, Philaret Q. 208, Macarius Bulgakov, quoted; the reaction from within (Sergius Stragorodsky; Metropolitan Antony’s contested Dogma of Redemption); Florovsky’s pseudomorphosis thesis; the challenge to it; what follows and what does not |
See Also
- The Sacrificial Language — the patristic vocabulary these judgments presuppose
- The Western Trajectory — the positions assessed here, in their own words
- The Cross and the Christian Life — the open scholarly questions, on which none of this depends
- Soteriology — the hub essay this collection expands
- Pseudomorphosis and the “Western Captivity” — the sibling treatment agreed with here