Tag: atonement

Sunday October 18

Genus and Species

The central and absolutely essential premise of Ross Douthat’s new book Believe, the point from which the whole argument begins, is this: There is a genus of human belief and practice called “religion,” of which Christianity is one of the species. My problem with regard to Ross’s book is that I have come quite seriously to doubt this premise. My larger problem is that I don’t know quite how to do without this premise, since it is so deeply embedded in almost all discourse on … well, I guess I have to say on religion.

…

Emile Durkheim’s definition is a useful one: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions — beliefs and practices that unite its adherents in single moral community called a church”

…

I am not at all convinced that a move from, say, atheism to Wicca is necessarily “a step in the right direction” — i.e., once you’ve entered the genus-town of “religion,” you’re closer to the species-house of Christianity than you were before. Indeed, I wonder whether many people might be less interested in Christianity as a result of such a move, since they might plausibly think that as long as they’re operating within the genus, does it really matter what species they prefer? (The “We all get to God in our own way” line has had a very long run and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.)

Alan Jacobs, Douthat on Belief, quoting himself.

Thoughts about Greek Festival

Yesterday was the first day of our Greek Festival, and thus begins four straight days of talking with thousands upon thousands of people.

In the past, when people came for a tour of the inside of our Orthodox church, I could be sure that nearly 100% of the questions were related to the painting process regarding our church iconography:

“What kind of paint did they use to make all these pictures?” or “How long did it take the iconographer to finish this church?”

Yet, with this recent surge in Orthodoxy, our Greek Festival now brings in droves of people who are inquiring into the Orthodox Church, and the questions I got yesterday were a kaleidoscope of theological and historical inquiries:

“Does the Orthodox Church believe in penal substitutionary atonement?”

“Does the Orthodox Church believe in assurance of salvation?”

“Is the Orthodox Church Patriarchal?”

“Is the Orthodox Church anti-women?”

“Does the Orthodox Church believe in the Book of Jasher?”

One couple who came to my tour had been raised in a King James Version-only Baptist Church, and somewhere along their spiritual journey, they learned that Protestants had removed books from their Old Testament in the 1820s. He and his wife obtained a copy of the 1611 KJV, which predates the long-kept-quiet changing of the Protestant Bible.

Though the couple hadn’t yet read all of the books in their newly discovered Bible, they were very curious if the Orthodox Church was familiar with these books and what we believed about them.

Kenneth B, The Orthodox Church Is Growing in America. Two Holy Elders Predicted It Decades Ago.

If I may be permitted to quote a reasonably wise Evangelical apologist, that “kaleidoscope of theological and historical inquiries” requires a combination of “answering the question-behind-the-question” (e.g., “penal substitutionary atonement” presumes that the wages of sin is eternal torment) and asking for clarification of terms (e.g., what do you mean by “Patriarchal”?).

Ultimately, the inquirer needs a new frame, an altered paradigm, and I have no idea how to effectuate that with nothing more than words. It happened to me; I’ve never been able to induce it in anyone else.

That is why the all-purpose Orthodox answer is “Come and see.”

A Confessing Church today

Christians who vote for Republicans are called to be salt and light within the Republican Party. That means being a voice calling the Republican Party to obey the rule of law. Yours should be the loudest voice condemning Trump’s pardon for January 6 rioters and pushing against his challenge to the checks and balances that are supposed to constrain the executive . You should speak up in favor of the poor and powerless and against the culture of cruelty, spite, and vengefulness Trump cultivates. It corrodes our public square and demeans our shared citizenship even as it poses more specific dangers to those targeted by Trump’s weaponization of federal law enforcement. If you do not speak up, you are both credulous and culpable, complicit with the party’s sins—including those yet to come.

If you vote for Democrats, you are called to be salt and light within the Democratic Party. That means calling on the Democratic Party to heed “Nature and Nature’s God.” The secular left sometimes gives off an odor of being godless, rootless, power-hungry moral relativists. They deny transcendent truth one day; the next, they announce a new truth, and their online mob will bully and harass us for failing to jump on their latest cause de jour. Their lack of moral foundation is exactly why they turn into moral authoritarians, certain of their own newfound truths—about race, class, and gender—and impatient for their fellow citizens to catch up. Open, tolerant, classically liberal government cannot survive without foundations, and Thomas Jefferson was right to point to nature and nature’s God as the right ones when he penned the Declaration of Independence. Natural law is transcendent, but not sectarian; it is a shared foundation on which believers in any religion or none can stand together.

These are the sorts of lessons a Confessing Church today would preach from its pulpits and podcasts. American Christians need a robust theology of civic engagement that teaches the moral good of republican government, the rule of law, and constitutionalism. It would teach respect for pluralism, anti-utopianism, and the wisdom that comes from learning from the history of totalizing political religions and their fruit. It would teach critical detachment from parties coupled with selective and narrow cooperation with them.⁠⁠

Paul D. Miller: A Confessing Church for America’s Weimar Moment

Just in case you don’t understand that “Confessing Church” alludes to something in history, Wikipedia can help.

Truth vs. Practicality

American evangelicals never doubted that Christianity was the truth. They never doubted that Christian principles should illuminate every part of life. What they did do, however, in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, was to make most questions of truth into questions of practicality. What message would be most effective? What do people most want to hear? What can we say that will both convert the people and draw them to our particular church? The heavy pressure for results meant that very little time or energy was available to think about God and nature, God and society, God and beauty, or God and the shape of the human mind.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

Christian Tradition and Slavery

  • The general course of the Christian church has been against slavery. This was undeniably true in the early history of the church. I know not that it has ever been alleged that any of the prominent defenders of the Christian faith among the “fathers” were advocates of slavery, or that any decree of synods or councils can be adduced in favour of the system.
  • Because abolitionists and antislavery theologians were forced to offer more complicated exegetical arguments, they were necessarily less persuasive. In other words, it appears that an untraditioned approach to theology was at least partially responsible for the failure of otherwise like-minded Christians to resolve the sectional crisis by any means other than war.

Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation

Fundamentalism is not ancient Christianity

… the same historical representatives of the Christian faith that Maher chose to ignore (or has never heard of) are the Church Fathers that evangelical/fundamentalists also ignore for their own ideological reasons. They ignore them (or even denounce them) because the very existence of the early representatives of a more enlightened thread of Christianity undermines the evangelical/fundamentalist claim that somehow only fundamentalism represents the original ancient Christian faith. It does not.

Frank Schaeffer, Patience With God. I don’t consider Frank Schaeffer a reliable source, but I agree with him fully here.

So Walker Percy wrote a dystopia

The parallels to today become even more acute when Percy turns to religion. Political divides in Love in the Ruins have penetrated the churches, mainline Protestants aligning with the left and evangelicals with the right. Meanwhile, orthodox Catholics are but a remnant, most believers having joined either the American Catholic Church––which only prays the Latin Mass and plays the national anthem during the elevation of the Eucharist––or a coalition of Germanic schismatics, who have done away with the vow of celibacy as a prerequisite for priesthood.

Collin Slowey, Walker Percy’s Prescient Dystopia

Insipid and Slightly Insane

At a street corner, I happened to look up and caught sight of an electric sign, on top of a two-storey building. It read: “Clown Cigarettes.” I turned and fled from the alien and lunatic street, and found my way into the nearby cathedral, and knelt, and prayed, and did the Stations of the Cross. Afraid of the spiritual pressure in that monastery? Was that what I had said the other day? How I longed to be back there now: everything here, in the world outside, was insipid and slightly insane. There was only one place I knew of where there was any true order.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Sunday, April 26

Atonement

It may come as news to some readers that the doctrines around “atonement” are fraught with controversy. I say that because thirty years ago, it would have come as news to me, and I was a fairly engaged Calvinist layman. But on atonement, I reflexively took the “penal substitutionary” view (the leading example of what the following table calls “Transactional View”).

As I was becoming Orthodox, supplementing formal catechesis with taped catechesis from a prominent priest (I can still remember listening to a discussion of atonement as I walked laps on the rubberized track at my health club), I learned that my view, shared by many besides Calvinists, presented some thorny problems.

I wish I’d had this table available. I think I’d have immediately felt my heart sing at the “Conciliar View” because it corresponded to what I perceived about my “problem” and about my desire to have my roots sink deep.

DoctrineTransactional ViewConciliar View
The ProblemDebt. A legal claim against us.Disease. A deficit of life within us.
The MechanismExchange. Payment satisfies the claim.Union. Divinity heals humanity.
The RecipientFather alone. The Son pays the Father.The Trinity. The son offers and receives.
The EucharistMemorial. Remembering a closed deal.Entrance. Joining an eternal offering.

Source: Thou Who Offerest and Art Offered—The Council that Rejected Transactional Atonement

A bit of the introduction to the topic, from the source article, if you’re feeling very nerdy:

In the spring of 1157, the Patriarch-elect of Antioch, Soterichos Panteugenos, subjected the Divine Liturgy to Aristotelian scrutiny and found it wanting. The prayer addressed to Christ—”For it is Thou who offerest and art offered, who receivest and art Thyself distributed”—struck him as a logical contradiction. A true sacrifice requires a distinct payer and payee, he reasoned. To preserve the intelligibility of the Cross, Soterichos proposed a correction: the Son offers as High Priest, but the Father alone receives.

Soterichos was not entirely wrong: if the Atonement is a transaction, the Liturgy is incoherent—you cannot pay yourself. But the Council of Blachernae reversed his logic. Rather than correcting the Liturgy to fit the transaction, it denied the transaction to affirm the Liturgy. Guided by Nicholas of Methone, the Council affirmed that Christ is both the Offerer (ho prospheron) and the Receiver (ho prosdechomenos). The tension Soterichos identified was taken as a feature, not a bug—a safeguard against thinking of atonement as a transaction.

In place of transaction, the Council affirmed union: the Incarnation is not a mere precondition for the Cross but the same saving work. The Council’s anathemas speak of a single “mystery of the economy,” condemning those who “divide the indivisible.”

All but one of the autocephalous churches at the time participated in this Council and agreed ….

…

Thesis: The Council held that Christ is both Offerer and Receiver of the sacrifice—”He who offers and is offered and receives.” This reflexivity precludes transactional models of atonement. A transaction requires a distinction between payer and payee; one cannot pay oneself. Soterichos saw this tension and attempted to resolve it by assigning the offering to the Son and the receiving to the Father alone. The Council reversed his logic: rather than correcting the Liturgy to fit the transaction, it denied the transaction to affirm the Liturgy.

…

Once atonement is reduced to a transaction, a cascade of theological failures follows.

Although I didn’t have this table available, or the article from which it came, my heart similarly sang at this excerpt from the most characteristic Orthodox prayer:

Lord cleans us from our sins. Master pardon our transgressions. Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for Thy Name’s sake.

My Evangelical/Calvinist milieu seemingly knew nothing of the shadings of sin, transgression, and infirmity. But my heart knew. And that’s why the “conciliar view” of atonement resonates.

Finally, since I’ve been thinking a lot about Iain McGilchrist, I note that the left hemisphere would not like, even a little, “a single mystery of the economy” and would very much want to “divide the indivisible.”

As Wordsworth said, we murder to dissect.

English Reformation

I like it that Paul Kingsnorth matter-of-factly refers to the English Reformers as the “English Taliban.” If you want a more detailed account, I recommend Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars. It almost cured me of Anglophilia.

“A Good Person”

I often hear people say, “I don’t need religion to be a good person,” but rarely does anyone consider the question, “What does it mean to be a good person?” Usually the response to that question is, “I’ve never killed anyone; I don’t steal.” Well, that does not define a good person; it merely describes someone who is not extraordinarily bad. Furthermore, there are saints who have committed those sins, and not only did they not remain wicked, they became holy. So, for Christianity, to be good does not mean never to have done bad things. Rather, it means to come into union with God through repentance.

Vassilios Papavassiliou, Thirty Steps to Heaven

(Side note: When I posted on social media that I had finished Thirty Steps to Heaven, my brother quipped “How’s the view from up there?”).

One can hardly resent such a clean shot.

…the deep structures of modern intellectual life are shaped largely by the works of non- or anti-Christians. Nineteenth-century theorists like Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud established the intellectual conventions of the modern university. Their legacy, for good and for ill, provides the framework in which Christians do their advanced studies. The same is true for the principal theorists of the twentieth century — Milton Friedman, Ferdinand Saussure, Ferdinand Braudel, E. P. Thompson, Thomas Kuhn, Jacques Derrida — none of whom is concerned about the Christian implications of his work; yet they have set the agenda for what goes on throughout the academy.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

Christianity as amusement

I believe that I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday of the Publican and Pharisee, 2026

Recommendation

Two guys who know what’s going on in Evangelicalism these days sat down for a chat a few months ago: Russell Moore and David French. I only heard it this past week, and it’s really awfully good. It’s available as a podcast as well as the linked YouTube video.

I’m used to David French as a legal and political commentator, but he’s a pretty darned good observer of his religious milieu — as, of course, is Russell Moore whose life work is pervasively religious.

Sizing things up realistically

On the one hand, I trust in God’s providence.

On the other hand, there was a whole lot about the America I grew up in, and worked in, that I’m going to miss now that it’s gone. I’m reminded of the Brit who said of losing the war something like “I should not be able to number all the things I would miss.”

Here comes the acid test of “I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.”

Reading the Riot Act to Social Media “Theologians”

You have to accept that if you only know English and you can only read the Church Fathers and the Bible in translation, you at some point are going to have to … find someone who actually knows the original languages who you trust, and just believe them about what it says.

You don’t have to go learn those languages, but if you’re not going to go and learn those languages, you’re not entitled to an opinion on this … Shut up. Shut up on social media. Stop causing trouble. Stop trying to cause factions in the Church. That’s a sin. That’s a grievous sin … You have to learn before you can teach.

Stole Something? Kill a Goat!.

This blunt quote is directed particularly at Orthodox laymen who argue for substitutionary atonement based on reading the Church Fathers translated, in most instances, by Philip Schaff, a Calvinist Protestant. Substitutionary atonement (Christ in place of me) is not the position of the Orthodox Church (more like Christ on behalf of me — setting aside our different view of “atonement” itself).

But I’m confident that Orthodox Christians aren’t the only autodidact “theologians” quoting Church Fathers from Schaff. I own Schaff’s translations (as I did before becoming Orthodox, I believe). I honor his monumental work in translating so much. Heck, I even honor, in relative terms, the Mercerburg Theology with which he is associated. But I dare not trust him very far.

The least you can do

The man and woman cannot utterly sink who on every seventh day is obliged to appear in decent apparel, and to join with all the standing and respectability of the community in a united act of worship.

David Hacket Fischer, Albion’s Seed. I don’t recall who, or when, or in what region of America, Fischer was quoting, and it doesn’t seem worth looking up.

How do you measure comfort care?

Gonzalez is troubled to learn that the nuns “consistently fail to provide statistics on the efficacy of their work.” But there is no ready yardstick to measure the success of outreach programs to lepers. And how does one measure the efficacy of programs designed to comfort the dying?

Bill Donohue, Unmasking Mother Teresa’s Critics.

There are swaths of reality that are not susceptible to meaningful metrics and statistics. It’s prudent to ask for statistics on some things, yes, but monstrously reductionist to treat as some kind of scam the inability to produce statistics on other things.

Ecumenical Winter

The foremost divides in Western Christendom for some time fell along Protestant and Roman Catholic dividing lines, from the sixteenth century well through the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But today all Christians with even the most basic (creedal) orthodox theology and shared vision of human sexuality, the sanctity of life, and more find themselves as co-belligerents in a struggle with an inhumane and secularizing Western society and progressivist religion. There is far greater good will towards one another for that reason alone than there was in the past five centuries, culminating in cooperation such as Evangelicals and Catholics Together. Gone with the vanishing Protestant Mainline is the milquetoast ecumenism wherein “doctrine divides, service unites.” Here to stay is an emerging ecumenism where the things held in common run to the core of one’s commitments in life and in death.

Joshua Heavin, Confessional Protestantism in Ecumenical Winter

Ancillary reading

The first time I went to India, it was such a shock for me, the different culture, and everything was a new experience for me. I had so much to learn. The second time it was more like everyday life. The main thing I understood the second time was that I didn’t need as many things as I thought. Not at all. I could live with what I could carry in one backpack. With a family, I had thought I needed all that furniture and tables and kitchen equipment and washing machines and a vacuum cleaner. I realized I really can live simply. After that, I thought, I could live exactly this way anywhere.

Andy Courturier, The Abundance of Less

Highly recommended for seeing how life could be different without being worse. Like the Tao Te Ching (directly and through Christ The Eternal Tao), this book helped me see some things more vividly because of the foreign setting.

As the White House tutors us about the “real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

God’s Justice

Saint Isaac of Syria famously said “We know nothing of God’s justice, only His mercy.” …

God’s justice is inscrutable. We cannot know it or fathom it or understand it. It’s a useless concept when it comes to understanding our obligations to God. God is just because He is not unjust. But what it means to say that God is just is simply beyond our ken.

The results of the distortions caused by faulty theologizing about God’s justice is a God that is not worthy of worship. There are those who not only glibly consign sinners to hell but also postulate that the righteous will rejoice in the torment of sinners because of their delight in the goodness of God’s justice. Those with normal human sensibilities are repulsed by such notions. Those who embrace such heresy have their soul’s perverted desire for infinite justice confirmed. Such theology doesn’t heal the soul; it corrupts it further and feeds its passions.

Father Stephen Freeman, Justice Enough?

* * * * *

“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Metaphors of the Atonement.

Father Stephen Freeman, whose thought and spirit I greatly appreciate, has this evening posted on Metaphors of the Atonement. I commend it to Orthodox readers especially, but it may be of interest to western Christians (Roman Catholics and Protestants) to see how their characteristic “forensic” understanding differs from the unfamiliar Orthodox view – which I have come to cherish.

This is not some arcane theological backwater, by the way. The differing views of Christ’s atonement and “descent into hades” are quite fundamental differences that ramify extensively through the churches – and individual Christians – who hold them — not just in express doctrinal propositions, but in how the two sides of the Great Schism have come to perceive the world and the place of people in it.

A second difference, not touched on by Father Stephen in this post, is what Wikipedia not unreasonably calls Experience of God (Theoria) vs Scholasticism. Theoria is the Orthodox emphasis; Scholasticism (a term of art, not to be confused with intelligence or intellectual bent) was a post-schism development largely of Thomas Aquinas and his fellow schoolmen in the pre-Reformation Roman Catholic Church, and which influence Protestant thought as well.

Both are deep differences, which make Orthodoxy worth a look by folks burnt out on the western Church(es) they’ve known, but haunted by Christ.