From the book “The Truth: What Every Roman Catholic Should Know About the Orthodox Church” by Clark Carlton
Chapter 3. Salvation
Person and Nature
The distinction between God's essence and energies guarantees the reality of man's deification. The distinction between person and nature helps us to understand how the salvation of mankind is accomplished. Man was created in the image of God. This means that each person shares a common human nature with all other men. At the same time, however, each person is unique and unrepeatable. Moreover, each and every person sums up the one human nature within himself. Every person is, therefore, "catholic" —a unique individual summation of the whole of human nature.
The devil tempted Eve by promising that the fruit of the earth (the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil) would deify her. Adam and Eve's attempt to become like God—apart from and in direct contradiction of the command of God—is the fall of man. Archimandrite George explains it in this way:
We know that Adam and Eve were misled by the devil and desired to become gods, not in cooperation with God, though, not with humbleness, obedience and love, but relying on their own powers, their own will, egoistically and autonomously. That is to say, the essence of the fall is egotism. By adopting egotism and self-sufficiency, they separated themselves from God and instead of attaining deification, they attained exactly the opposite: spiritual death.
Because human nature is one, the sin of Adam and Eve has affected all of humanity. Human nature has become corrupt, and every person born inherits a corrupt nature, enslaved to the passions and to death. This is why the sin of Adam and Eve is often called the Ancestral Sin. It is important to note here, that what we have inherited from Adam and Eve are the consequences of their sin—the enslavement to sin and death—not the guilt for their sin.
The eternal Son and Word of God—the Second Person of the Trinity—became man so that human nature might be restored and mankind attain the deification for which it was originally created. In becoming man, Christ assumed human nature in its entirety, taking a human body and soul with all of its natural faculties. Thus, the Word of God lived a truly human life, but in a divine way. Christ's human will was united inseparably to His divine will. Living in complete obedience to the Father as a man, Christ restored human nature and its corrupted will.
This is why St. Paul calls Christ the last Adam. He is the root of a new humanity, a humanity freed from the corruption of sin and death. To become a Christian, therefore, is to put on Christ (Gal. 3:27), to become a member of His Body (1 Cor. 6:15).
It was not sufficient, however, for Christ to merely assume human nature. Mankind was enslaved to death and to the devil. To heal humanity, Christ had to meet mankind where it was and assume not only human nature, but all of the consequences of the fall. Thus,
He gave Himself as a ransom to death, in which we were held captive, sold under sin. Descending through the Cross into Hades—that He might fill all things with Himself—He loosed the pangs of death. He arose on the third day, having made for all flesh a path to the resurrection from the dead, since it was not possible for the Author of Life to be a victim of corruption (Liturgy of St. Basil).
After His resurrection, Christ ascended to His Father, placing the human nature that He had assumed and healed at the right hand of the throne of glory. In Christ, therefore, human nature has not only been healed, but deified—united eternally with God in Heaven.
Because of the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, humanity has been definitively and irrevocably saved. Because human nature is one, and because Christ has healed and deified that one nature, all men will rise from the dead and live eternally. However, we know from the Divine Scriptures, that while all will arise, not all will enjoy the resurrection as a state of blessedness. St. Nicholas Cabasilas wrote:
The resurrection is the restoration of our human nature. Such things God gives freely, for just as He forms us without us willing it, so He forms us anew though we contributed nothing to it. On the other hand, the Kingdom and vision of God and union with Christ are privileges which depend on willingness.... One need not therefore marvel that while all will live in immortality, it is not all who will live in blessedness. All equally enjoy God's providence for our nature, but it is only those who are devout towards God who enjoy the gifts which adorn their willingness. This is the reason: God indeed wills all good things for all men and imparts to all alike of all His own gifts/ both those which benefit the will and those which restore our nature. On our part we all receive the gifts of God which pertain to nature even though we do not desire them, since we cannot escape them.... As for the things which depend on human willingness, such as choosing that which is good, the forgiveness of sins, uprightness of character, purity of soul, love of God—their reward is final blessedness. These things we have the power to accept or to shun. Therefore those who are willing are able to enjoy them, but as for the unwilling, how would it be possible? It is impossible for the unwilling to wish for them or to be compelled to be willing.
Notice that there is a clear distinction here between person and nature. Christ has restored human nature. Yet, we remain free persons. Christ's resurrection causes all of mankind to rise from the dead, but Christ cannot make us love Him. Love must be the free response of the human heart. For those who love Him, the resurrection will be unto eternal blessedness. For those who hate Him, His appearing will be eternal death.
Notice also that St. Nicholas stated that God bestows His mercy equally upon all. He no doubt had in mind the saying of Christ: for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust (Mat.
According to
The difference between the blessed and the damned, therefore, is not in how God treats them, but in how they each experience the presence and love of God. The blessed respond to God in love and experience His love and providential care precisely as that. The unrighteous, however, do not respond to God's love and therefore experience it as wrath and judgement. The objective reality is one and the same-God is love—but the subjective apprehension of that reality determines the state of one's blessedness or damnation. St. Maximus the Confessor wrote:
God is the sun of justice, as it is written, who shines rays of goodness on simply everyone. The soul develops according to its free will into either wax because of its love for God or into mud because of its love of matter. Thus just as by nature the mud is dried out by the sun and wax is automatically softened, so also every soul which loves matter and the world and has fixed its mind far from God is hardened as mud according to its free will and by itself advances to its perdition, as did Pharaoh. However, every soul which loves God is softened as wax, and receiving divine impressions and characters it becomes 'the dwelling place of God in the Spirit.
Even the fire of hell is, according to the Fathers of the Church, the love of God, which the damned experience in a negative way. For our God is a consuming fire (Heb. 12:29). For the righteous the love of God is a purifying, illumining, and deifying fire. For the unrighteous it is a burning fire.
In order to participate in the life of God — or rather to experience God as a blessing and not a curse—our hearts and souls must be purified. Within the Church this is accomplished through partaking of the holy Mysteries (Sacraments) and ascetical effort. Here the medical imagery used by the Church becomes extremely helpful. If we think of sin as a disease, that which keeps our heart and soul from functioning normally, that is, from turning toward and resting in God, then we can think of the Mysteries as medical procedures and medicines. St. Ignatius of
It would be pointless, however, for someone with lung cancer to undergo chemotherapy or even radical surgery if he were not willing to give up smoking, the cause of his cancer. Good health requires not only that diseases be cured, but that we eat healthily, exercise, and avoid those things that cause disease. This is where asceticism comes in. The Church, which is often described in Orthodox literature as a spiritual hospital, has given us the methods of prayer, fasting, almsgiving, etc. as a means of helping to restore our spiritual health. These are not attempts to earn merit or reward before God, but rather therapeutic exercises.
When a confessor prescribes a penance for someone, it is not a punishment—such a notion is utterly obnoxious to the Orthodox spirit. It is analogous to a cardiologist prescribing exercise for one of his patients. It is not a matter of making up for sins or undergoing due punishment/ but of doing things to prepare the body (in this case, the spiritual body) for the reception of the medicines (the Eucharist) and training it to fight off disease (sin) in the future. This is why, in the prayers before confession, the priest stresses to the penitent the therapeutic nature of what is about to happen: "Take care, therefore, to tell me all things that thou hast done, lest having come to the physician thou depart unhealed."
This understanding of salvation is based upon the living experience of those who have been purified in heart and have had a foretaste of the experience of the uncreated glory of God. The Orthodox speak about salvation, therefore, from the conviction of experience. This explains why the Orthodox react so strongly against the Roman Catholic understanding of salvation.
Salvation According to Rome
At the heart of the Roman Catholic understanding of salvation is the notion of "satisfaction." According to this theory. God's eternal justice and majesty is offended by the sin of man. As with any crime, justice requires that every sin be punished. This understanding is rooted not so much in the Scriptures, but in Roman law. Pelikan explains:
Yet the development of the doctrine of the death of Christ was to be shaped by another term, "satisfaction," which Tertullian seems to have introduced into Christian language but which was to find its normative exposition only in the Middle Ages. Tertullian's doctrine of "satisfaction" may have come from Roman private law, where it referred to the amends one made to another for failing to discharge an obligation, or from Roman public law, which enabled the term to be interpreted as a form of punishment.
According to Roman theology, sin entails both eternal and temporal punishment. By His death on the Cross, Christ satisfied God's anger toward our sin, making possible the justification of man before God. However, even after being justified, the temporal punishment due to sin remains. This too must be satisfied:
The second kind of satisfaction, that namely by which temporal punishment is removed, consists in this, that the penitent after his justification gradually cancels the temporal punishments due to his sins, either ex opere operate, by conscientiously performing the penance imposed on him by his excess merits of the saints are stored up in a treasury and may be applied under certain circumstances to the account of a soul in purgatory. This is known as an indulgence. While the Roman Church no longer sells indulgences, as it did in the Renaissance period leading up to the Reformation, the notion of indulgences remains an important aspect of Roman theology.
The Orthodox Church clearly teaches that prayers for the dead are efficacious. When a man dies, he undergoes an initial period of trial, where the demons both accuse him of his past sins and tempt him with the passions that have dominated his life. Thus, prayers are offered for the departed in this time of trial. There is no notion, however of "making up" for past sins or of repaying some debt. God is not in need of reparation and takes no pleasure in the punishment of men. What is in question is the purity of the soul and its ability to participate in the life of God.
The idea that the soul must undergo temporal punishment is objectionable from several standpoints. First of all, if Christ has died for the forgiveness of sins, then what punishment could possibly remain? Was His sacrifice not sufficient to remit all punishment, not just the eternal? Second, the very idea of a temporal, purgatorial fire is unknown to Orthodoxy. The only fire spoken of in the Scriptures is the fire of Gehenna—the permanent abode of the unrighteous after the universal resurrection and final judgement. Moreover, Orthodoxy teaches that this fire is not temporal, but is, in fact, the love of God, which the unrighteous experience in a negative way. It is the same fire or light that the Saints experience as the blessedness of deification.
The Roman understanding of sin as the transgression of a law, the doctrines of merit, purgatory, and indulgences are all intertwined in a single system, each one logically leading to the other. While this system may make perfect sense to anyone raised within the Roman system—or indeed anyone raised within Western Christianity, Protestant or Roman Catholic—it is bewildering to the Orthodox mind. It is a classic example of what happens when theology is based not upon experience, but upon speculation and logical deduction.
Central to the Roman understanding of salvation is the denial of the distinction between God's essence and energies and the logically necessary deduction that grace is a created phenomenon. If man is not deified by the unmediated divine energies of God, then all that is left for man is an external, moral, and legal relationship with God. Metropolitan Hierotheos is quite explicit about the importance of this point: In fact, if one examines carefully all the differences between the Latins and the Orthodox, one will see clearly that they come down to one, to the truth concerning the essence and energy of God.
In the previous chapter we saw that the doctrine of the Filioque was based on a philosophical approach to God. Likewise, the Roman Catholic Church has reduced the notion of salvation to a legal transaction modeled on Roman law. In both cases, Roman doctrine results from an over reliance on speculative theology.
There are, even in our day, holy men and women who have experienced the divine and deifying energies of God. There are those who have been beheld within the light of the Transfiguration. The Orthodox rejection of the Roman doctrines of satisfaction, merit, and the rest is based not on a love of contentiousness but on a love of the truth—truth discovered through experience. Orthodox and Roman Catholics do not simply use different words for the same reality, we experience different realities. This cannot help but affect the way we view the Christian life and the nature of the Church:
If, however. God were essence, or being alone, without His divine energies, if grace were a created thing—as Western Scholastics tell us—then man would be incapable of knowing Him directly, of seeing Him, of becoming a God himself, for a created thing (grace) cannot deify the creature (man). Neither could God Himself be present within creation, nor could He be personally at work within it. Just as the relentless laws of nature must replace an uncreated joy not present in nature, even so the absence of uncreated grace from the life of the Church and of Christians creates a need for an ethical and legal system whose head is the Pope.
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