The Orthodox Assessment

Having reported the Western trajectory accurately and in its own terms, this file states the Church’s judgment on it: that God is not the party to be propitiated, that the Cross is not a transaction internal to the Godhead, that the consequence of sin is death and corruption rather than an infinite debit against divine honour, and that Pascha and not Calvary is the term of the movement. Each objection is directed at the position that actually holds it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What Is Confessed

The Creed says of the Son: “who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became man; and was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried; and rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures.”

That is the dogma: the fact, its purpose (“for us and for our salvation”), and its outcome. The Church has never defined a mechanism by which the death of Christ saves, and the absence is not an oversight. Where she has legislated on the Cross she has legislated negatively and precisely — the councils of 1156 and 1157 on to whom the sacrifice is offered, and the Christological councils on who it is that suffers — leaving the images of Scripture in their plurality (see The Nicene Creed; Sacrifice, Ransom, and Propitiation in the Fathers).

Around that dogma the Church’s teaching on the Cross can be stated in four propositions.

First: God Is Not the Obstacle

The Cross does not remove an impediment in God. It removes an impediment in us.

This is the point at which the Orthodox account and the satisfaction account diverge at the root, and it is not a difference of emphasis. In the Anselmian frame the difficulty to be resolved is that God’s justice cannot fittingly overlook the disorder; in the Reformed frame it is that God’s justice requires the punishment of sin (Heidelberg Catechism Q. 11–12). In both, the Incarnation is the solution to a problem posed by God’s own perfections. In the Orthodox account the problem is human death, corruption, and enslavement, and God is not the one who has to be changed, persuaded, or satisfied — he is the one who acts.

St. Gregory the Theologian’s Oration 45.22 makes exactly this point when it refuses to say the ransom was paid to the Father: “For it was not by Him that we were being oppressed.” The Father “accepts Him, but neither asked for Him nor demanded Him” (trans. NPNF II/7). St. John Chrysostom preaches the same in a different key: it is we who are the enemies, and God who reconciles us to himself, not himself to us (Chrysostom, Homilies on 2 Corinthians 11, on 2 Corinthians 5:18–20; trans. NPNF I/12) — a reading which follows the direction of the Pauline text itself, which never says God was reconciled to us.

The language of divine wrath in Scripture is real and is not to be explained away, but it is read as the Fathers read it: as naming what the love of God is to those who are set against it, not a passion in God that must be discharged before he can forgive. This is the same principle the Church applies to the eschatological fire, and this collection agrees with the sibling treatment there (see The Same Love Experienced Differently). St. Isaac the Syrian states it without qualification: “Do not call God just, for His justice is not manifest in the things concerning you… How can you call God just when you come across the Scriptural passage on the wage given to the workers?” (Isaac the Syrian, Ascetical Homilies 51 in the Holy Transfiguration Monastery numbering; see The Mercy of God).

Second: The Cross Is Not a Transaction Internal to the Godhead

This objection has conciliar backing, and Orthodox writers do not always make use of it.

The synods of Constantinople in 1156 and the council of Blachernae of 12 May 1157 condemned the teaching that the sacrifice of the Body and Blood — of the Cross and of the altar alike — was offered to the Father alone. They defined that Christ in his humanity offers, and that the whole Trinity receives; and against those who “invent and introduce intervals of time into the reconciliation of human nature with the Divine and blessed nature,” they confessed that “the Only-begotten reconciled us to Himself through the entire Mystery of the Economy, of the Incarnation and through Himself and in Himself to God the Father and… to the all-holy and life-creating Spirit.” The chapters were inscribed in the Synodikon of Orthodoxy (see Soterichos and the Councils of 1156–1157, which sets out the acts, the sources, and the limits of what can be reconstructed about the condemned party).

Two consequences follow directly.

No exchange between divine Persons. If Son and Spirit receive the sacrifice equally with the Father, then the Cross cannot be described as the Son discharging an obligation to the Father, or as one Person’s justice being satisfied by another Person’s suffering. The offerer and the recipient are the same God. The Cappadocian axiom that the works of the Trinity toward the world are undivided is here applied to the one work most liable to be divided.

No sequence of reconciliations. The council’s refusal of “intervals of time” is aimed at exactly the structure in which the Incarnation reconciles us to the Word and the Passion then reconciles us to the Father. The whole economy is one act of the one God.

It is worth adding that the strongest Western exponents do not intend to deny either point. Calvin insists that the Father was never “hostile to him or angry with him” (Institutes II.16.11), and the Reformed doctrine of the single divine will is the standing reply to the charge of Trinitarian rupture. The Orthodox objection is not that Western theologians intend to divide God; it is that a doctrine which makes the Passion the satisfaction of the Father’s justice by the Son’s punishment supplies the grammar for that division whatever the author’s intention, and that the Church has already legislated against the grammar.

Third: The Wage of Sin Is Death, Not a Debit

The Orthodox account of what went wrong determines the account of what puts it right.

What Adam’s transgression brought into the world was not a quantity of guilt entered against humanity’s name but mortality and corruption — φθορά — inherited as a condition, with personal guilt remaining personal (see Ancestral Sin vs. Original Sin; Death, Corruption, and the Ancestral Wound). Scripture states the wage in exactly these terms: “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), and “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 all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Hebrews 2:14–15).

If the problem is death, then a payment does not solve it. What solves it is the entry of the Author of life into death. This is why St. Athanasius, who is perfectly willing to speak of a debt, immediately identifies the debt as the sentence of corruption and the payment as the destruction of corruption from within a body that could not be held (On the Incarnation 8–9, 20; see Athanasius and the Logic of the Exchange).

The difference is not that one account is warm and the other cold. It is that the two accounts identify different diseases, and therefore different medicines. A model in which the human problem is legal standing will produce a salvation which is a change of legal standing; a model in which the problem is death will produce a salvation which is resurrection. The Church confesses the second.

Fourth: Pascha Is the Term of the Movement

The single most consequential difference is structural rather than doctrinal, and it is visible in the Church’s calendar before it is visible in her books.

In the satisfaction and penal models the decisive event is the death; the resurrection is its vindication and its proof. In the Church’s confession the death is decisive because it issues in the resurrection, and the resurrection is not the receipt for a completed transaction but the content of salvation itself. “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17) — not “you have no evidence,” but “you are still in your sins.”

The Church’s own liturgical arrangement makes the point without argument. Good Friday’s services are not the summit; the Paschal night is, and it is toward the Paschal night that the whole year is oriented. The troparion that carries the Orthodox doctrine of the atonement in a single sentence is a resurrection hymn — “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life” — and its middle clause is the mechanism, so far as the Church names one: death is destroyed by being entered. The Cross of Great Friday is already sung with resurrection: “We venerate Thy Passion, O Christ: show us also Thy glorious Resurrection” (see Pascha, the Feast of Feasts; The Descent into Hades).

A closely related structural point: the Incarnation is not merely the precondition of the atoning act but part of it. “That which he has not assumed he has not healed” (Gregory the Theologian, Epistle 101; trans. NPNF II/7) makes the assumption of human nature itself salvific, and therefore makes the whole life — nativity, baptism, transfiguration, passion, descent, resurrection, ascension — a single saving economy rather than a preparation for one saving moment (see The Unassumed Is the Unhealed).

What the Objection Is Not

Four disclaimers, so that the position above is not misread and cannot be dismissed by a correction.

It is not that Western Christianity denies the resurrection. It does not, and no serious Orthodox account claims otherwise. The objection concerns what work the resurrection is doing in the structure of the doctrine.

It is not that Anselm taught penal substitution. He did not, and this collection says so at length (see Anselm and Cur Deus Homo). The two are treated separately and objected to separately.

It is not that sacrificial, ransom, or substitutionary language is un-Orthodox. It is scriptural, patristic, and liturgical, and the Church prays it weekly.

It is not that Orthodox sources have never used satisfaction language. They have, in canonized authors and in symbolic books, and that record is set out without flinching in the companion file (see Juridical Language in Orthodox Sources).

What is objected to is the systematization: the promotion of one image to the status of the mechanism of salvation, and the frame in which God’s justice becomes the difficulty that the Incarnation exists to solve. That objection stands against Anselm’s frame and against the Reformed doctrine built on it, and it is not weakened by any of the four concessions above. It is strengthened by them, because it is now aimed at something that is actually there.

The Register

One further thing belongs in a statement of the Church’s judgment, and it concerns tone.

The doctrine of the Cross is not a field in which triumph is appropriate. The polemical Orthodox literature of the last century has sometimes treated Western atonement theology as a moral scandal to be denounced rather than an error to be corrected, and the result has been caricature — the “angry Father” who appears in no Western symbolic book, the Anselm who taught what Anselm explicitly denied. That literature has done the Orthodox case more harm than any Western argument. The Church’s confession is stated soberly, or it is not stated at all (METHODOLOGY §4.2; and cf. the reception debate at The River of Fire and Its Reception).

See Also

• Juridical Language in Orthodox Sources — the record that tells against a tidy account, reported in full
• Anselm and Cur Deus Homo — the position objected to, in its own words
• The Reformers and Penal Substitution — the other position objected to, in its own words
• To Whom Was the Ransom Paid? — the patristic refusal on which the first objection rests
• Soterichos and the Councils of 1156–1157 — the conciliar ground of the second
• Soteriology — the hub essay this collection expands
• Theosis — the goal toward which the Cross opens the way

References

• Gregory the Theologian. Oration 45.22; Epistle 101 (First Letter to Cledonius). Translated in NPNF II/7.
• Athanasius of Alexandria. On the Incarnation 8–9, 20. Translated in NPNF II/4.
• John Chrysostom. Homilies on 2 Corinthians, Homily 11. Translated in NPNF I/12.
• Isaac the Syrian. The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian. Translated by the Holy Transfiguration Monastery. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1984. (Homily numbering follows that edition; see the treatment of the numbering problem at Text and Translation.)
• Synodikon of Orthodoxy, chapters “Against Basilaki, Soterichos, and others” (councils of 1156 and 1157).
• Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion II.16.11. Trans. Beveridge.
• The Heidelberg Catechism (1563), QQ. 11–12. In Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3.
• Pomazansky, Michael. Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, Part II, “The Dogma of Redemption.” Trans. Seraphim Rose. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1984.