Penal Substitution vs. Eastern Patristic Atonement: A Tale of Two Gospels

Theological Letters

This piece is adapted from a podcast episode for readers who prefer written content over audio. While my typical written work includes extensive citations and footnotes, I have not added formal references to this particular post. In addition, I have largely preserved my manner of speech, which is a bit different than my typical writing style. Perhaps, when time permits, I will rewrite this piece in a more formal tone with proper citations. But in the meantime, the theological positions and historical claims presented here are sound and can be verified through standard patristic sources, particularly the works of the Eastern Church Fathers mentioned throughout.

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Many folks have asked for my thoughts on the atonement. They want to know what the crucifixion of Christ actually accomplishes on behalf of humanity—the centerpiece of the Christian faith. What does it actually do?

I suspect many of you are familiar with one particular understanding that you've heard from Protestants, or perhaps you grew up Protestant yourselves. You've heard a specific interpretation of the significance of Christ's cross and crucifixion, what it does and what it accomplishes. And you've probably noticed that I don't really talk about it that way. I've gone through this Eastern patristic narrative from time to time, discussing the meta-narrative of the Eastern Church Fathers, and the picture I paint doesn't sound like the Protestant characterization you might be familiar with.

So there's probably curiosity about whether there's a difference, what that difference is, and where I stand on these questions. That's what we're going to address today.

Two Visions of Christianity

Perhaps the best place to begin is with how the average person with exposure to Christianity—largely in a Western context, largely in a Western Protestant contemporary context—understands the significance of the crucifixion.

This goes to something I've talked about before: the differences between the Christian East and the Christian West. If I were to boil it down in a very simplified way, here's how I'd characterize it:

In the Latin West, there's a tendency to think of the Christian religion as primarily a legal religion where God is a lawgiver. Our primary problem as human beings, the centerpiece of the human condition, is that we are lawbreakers. At some point, we're going to face future judgment, and that's a predicament. The crucifixion of Christ, in this framework, gets us off the hook.

I've contrasted this with what you could call a more therapeutic view in the Christian East, where the Christian gospel is much more about life and death. The idea is that humanity is made for a certain partaking and participation in the life of God. When we retreat from that, we retreat into an unnatural state of death, dying, and corruption. The Christian religion is entirely about trying to remedy that—to heal it and bring us back to what we are ultimately made to be.

The Protestant Framework: God as Judge

Let's examine how most Protestants think about the cross of Christ and the Christian gospel. It's primarily set up in terms of a judicial problem: God is a judge, you are somebody who has violated his laws, and you will inevitably stand before that judge and be condemned because you've violated his laws.

You see this constantly on a popular level in Protestant tracts—those little booklets that are handed out, or in Protestant presentations of the gospel. All sorts of analogies tend to come up in this popular, colloquial version.

The basic message is that Jesus died for your sins, and what this usually means in the Protestant context is that you are going to be punished, and Jesus steps in to take your punishment instead. You'll hear various metaphors: the judge condemns you as guilty, but then takes off his robes and offers himself to take your punishment instead.

I even heard one story that made me cringe a bit: someone told about having two sons, where one had done something wrong and was going to be spanked. The innocent son said, "Let me take his spanking." The father, believing he couldn't not spank somebody, spanked the innocent son instead of the guilty one, and the guilty one got off scot-free. That's how the understanding of the crucifixion is often presented within contemporary Protestant contexts.

The idea is that all the sins of humanity—all the due punishment for things done wrong—are being poured out on Jesus. Essentially, God the Father is punishing Jesus on behalf of humanity so that he doesn't have to punish you and me.

Historical Development in the Latin West

This understanding has several developmental stages in the history of the Latin West. It emerges largely with Anselm in his Cur Deus Homo (Why the God-Man?). Anselm builds a case for why Christ needs to be both God and human, creating a rationale that suggests if Christ is going to take punishment for man, he has to actually be a man because the punishment is due to the human species.

Yet if humanity were delivered from their condition by someone else—say, an angel—then we would rightly be debtors to that angel. But man is ultimately made to be a debtor to God. For this reason, whoever delivers us from our condemnation must also be divine, because redeemed humanity needs to be ultimately devoted to God.

This gets fleshed out in various ways throughout medieval thought. In Catherine of Siena, for example, there's this insistence that what's happening is the wrath of God toward humanity being poured out on Christ. I believe it's in one of Catherine's writings where she talks about Christ offering up his body like an anvil to God the Father, so that he can take the hammer of his wrath and beat it out on Christ's back.

Later in Protestantism, this becomes a very popular view of atonement. You see it in Jonathan Edwards, who talks about the idea that humanity is due infinite punishment. Edwards' answer to why a single sin would merit eternal torment is that the punishment due is based on the value or goodness of the thing sinned against. Since God is of infinite value, the punishment needs to be infinite.

So if someone is going to step in and take that punishment, that person not only has to be a suitable substitute (the Anselmian point about humanity) but also has to be capable of absorbing infinite punishment. This is where Edwards suggests that Christ, being both God and man, is important: being human, he's able to take humanity's punishment, but being God, he's able to absorb the infinite in a finite period of time. That's what happens on the cross—he absorbs this infinite punishment of humanity on behalf of humanity.

The Role of Merits and Demerits

This centrality of penal substitution to Protestantism is largely due to how the Protestant Reformation was sparked and the disputes over the Christian gospel. Let me provide some quick background on how the concept of merits and demerits developed in the Latin West, which sets the stage for why this particular theory of atonement became so important to the Protestant mind.

Augustine of Hippo introduced the doctrine of the "order of loves," which became central to Western Latin thinking. Augustine recognized that whenever we engage in some sort of act, we do so out of certain loves or affections. We identify something as good in some way, and we have a certain love or affection for it. Yet we can't have all the goods we desire at one time—the good of being a monk is different from the good of being married, and you have to pick.

When we pick, Augustine suggests, there's a certain priority of loves that the choice reflects. Certain things are elevated above other things; other things are subordinated. Augustine suggests that the order of loves sitting behind an act ultimately determines whether that act is meritorious before God or demeritorious before God.

Augustine recognized that there's actually a hierarchy of goods in the world—what we've called the great chain of being. Man, having reason and free will and being in the image of God, is actually superior to animals. Animals, being sentient and capable of self-propulsion, are superior to plants. There's a hierarchy of perfections or goods in the world.

According to Augustine, the just man would render to each what it's due—that's what justitia means in Latin. If there are certain hierarchies in the world, then there are certain goods you ought to love more than other goods. You ought to love man more than animals, regard animals more than plants, and so on.

The just man is one whose affections or loves are properly ordered, reflecting the hierarchy of goods in the world and reflecting love of God above all other things. That would be just because your inner affections are rendering to each their appropriate due—for each good, you're loving it proportionate to its goodness.

If you start to love something lower in the chain and elevate it more than you should—treating it as a greater good than it deserves, making it into a god (hedonism, for example, where sex or food becomes the pinnacle of human experience)—you've engaged in an unjust activity. That would be unjust.

Augustine's understanding of merits and demerits is that deeds are judged not just based on whether they cohere with the law (did you not commit adultery, did you not steal), but by the inner order of loves. You could have two people both approached by someone soliciting an adulterous relationship, and both reject it. But one person could do that out of fear, another out of love of God. The two acts, though externally identical, are internally different. One is driven by love of God and may reflect properly ordered loves, being meritorious before God. The other might have disordered loves driven by self-preservation and, while it coheres with the law, has no merit.

Before the Pelagian dispute, Augustine was of the mind that if you found disordered loves within yourself, you could will to fix it and start choosing differently. But during the Pelagian dispute—where the real question became what it means that salvation is by grace—Augustine's position shifted.

Augustine ultimately suggested that due to original sin, we experience disordered loves as part of the human condition, and that's not in our power to fix. We can decide to commit adultery or not, steal or not, murder or not—that's within our power. But we can't fix the internal character of the act which determines whether it's meritorious before God. Being bound by original sin, we just have disordered loves. So even when we obey the law, it still has no merit before God. It's still sin.

If you've ever heard the notion of total depravity—the idea that we sin of necessity—this is what it means. It doesn't mean you necessarily commit murder, but whenever you do things that are good, those goods are still tainted because you have disordered loves due to original sin.

Augustine ultimately suggests that the only way to fix this is for God to intervene and provide what the Council of Trent would call prevenient grace. The Holy Spirit, God, ultimately fixes your order of loves, making it possible for you to do things out of pure love for God, making it possible to produce deeds that would actually have merit before God.

This explains the disconnect between Catholics and Protestants. Protestants often characterize Catholics as saying you have to earn your salvation or that salvation is by your own works. Catholics respond that they do think salvation is by grace. The Catholics are suggesting what Augustine suggested: yes, you have to do good deeds that earn merits before God, but the only reason you're capable of doing a deed that would have merit before God is because of grace provided by God in the first place. You're doing it within this condition of grace, and that's the only reason the deed has merit before God. As Augustine puts it, God is just rewarding what he's put back into you in the first place.

With the Catholic position, you can cast off that grace. You can choose to rebel and sin even though you have this grace and are capable of doing something pleasing to God. That becomes the dynamic within the Augustinian paradigm—you actually do have merits and demerits, with demerits being unjust deeds you accumulate and merits being produced when you operate from proper loves, which is only possible when grace is provided by God.

Transferred Merits and Indulgences

One thing that develops over time in the medieval period is the notion that certain merits might be transferable. You not only have this accounting taking place with merits and demerits, but you have transference of merits from one person to another. This becomes the basis for indulgences.

If you've ever wondered about indulgences—when we hear the story of the Protestant Reformation, it typically begins with indulgences and the idea that people were selling off merits ("every time a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from Purgatory springs"), somehow buying indulgences to deliver people from Purgatory. This sparked Luther's 95 Theses.

The basis of indulgences is the idea that certain saints have produced more merits than needed for their salvation. There's a storehouse of merits, and it's within the power of the church, with its binding and loosing capacities, to transfer these merits. An indulgence becomes a possibility for transference of merits.

Now, even though you might balk at that notion, the concept doesn't go away within the Protestant context. This is one reason I've talked about how Protestants and Catholics are often closer in worldview than to the Eastern Church Fathers. For Eastern Christians, you don't have these concepts of merits and demerits or transferable merits. This type of accounting develops in the Latin West and sets the stage for the Protestant Reformation.

In the Protestant Reformation, there's not a rejection of the idea of merits and demerits or transferable merits. What's happening is a discussion between the reformers and Catholics over whose merits and how they're transferred.

Within the Catholic context, you have demerits accumulating by virtue of doing things on your own power within original sin, performing unjust deeds. But with grace, you're ultimately able to produce merits. There's also the possibility of transferable merits and absolution of demerits.

Within the Protestant Reformation, there's agreement that we are bound by original sin with disordered loves, necessitating sin and total depravity such that our disordered loves have no merit before God. But there's rejection of the idea that even with divine help, even when we grow and get better, we could have merit. There's rejection of that notion in Roman Catholicism.

The Protestant answer to "How would you be saved?" is that it's a foreign righteousness. Here's where transference of merits comes into play in the Protestant context. Rather than grace fixing your order of loves so you can produce merits pleasing to God, the work of the Holy Spirit and fixing of the inner man allows you to have faith in God that is unto salvation.

Just as in the Catholic context there's differentiation between outer and inner acts, you have the same thing in the Protestant context. Calvin, for example, differentiates between historical faith (which doesn't save) and genuine faith (which does save). It's possible that a person could be persuaded of Christianity's truth using reason and have historical belief, but it wouldn't be saving faith. Saving faith requires grace.

There's still resistance to any Pelagian notion that salvation could come about by one's own effort. But because salvation is now about faith rather than works, the grace that comes in helps you believe unto salvation.

The question becomes: what of this righteousness that comes from God through faith? The Protestant answer involves transference of merits. By putting your faith in Jesus, Christ's merits are transferred to your account, and your demerits are transferred over to Christ on the cross.

This is why this view of the cross becomes the centerpiece of the Christian gospel according to Protestantism. The gospel is a message that says you're going to stand before a future judge and be condemned and punished, rightly so, because you're a sinner who violates God's laws every day. The good news is that you can get off the hook. Your deeds, your demerits, can be transferred over to Christ and taken care of—paid for—and his merits can be transferred to you. Even though you deserve punishment, you will be absolved, forgiven, in good standing with God, and receive heaven rather than hell.

That's the Christian gospel according to the Western Protestant notion, and you can see why, within Protestantism, this would be the theory of atonement—it's the absolute centerpiece.

Eastern Alternatives: Not One View, But Harmony

Now the question becomes: how does this contrast with what we find in the Christian East? Do we find this, or do we not? And if not, what do we find?

The fact is that we don't find just a single view of the atonement or understanding of what the cross of Christ accomplishes within the Eastern fathers. But there's a difference between saying there's no singular view and saying there's no harmony or unity between the various views. As with many things within the Eastern Church Fathers, you don't find strict dichotomies.

Take John of Damascus's On the Orthodox Faith, which is a marvelous work (if you're going to read just one thing from a church father, that would be it). John of Damascus has the foresight to try to do treatises that say, "What is the consensus of the fathers on a certain topic?" So it's incredibly useful—like an encyclopedia of patristic terms by a church father, a church father saying, "When the Church Fathers use this word, this is what they mean."

Sometimes John will talk about certain areas where he'll say, "Some Fathers say this, and some Fathers say that," and he doesn't give a single view. For example, when he raises the question of whether the tree in Eden is a real tree, he talks about how some people think yes, some think it's an allegory for something else, and then he says, "I don't see why it can't be both."

You start to see that the Eastern Church Fathers are fine with things having both a literal meaning and an allegorical or spiritual meaning, being typological in some way. You don't find strict dichotomies where it just has to be one thing—it can be both allegorical and historical and literal at the same time.

When I look at the atonement, I don't see these Eastern fathers saying, "It's this and not that." When you look at all the different things said by the Eastern fathers, there is harmony to all these different aspects. When I say there's not just one theory of atonement, I mean they see the work of Christ as dynamic, such that there's not just one answer to what it accomplishes.

The Incarnation as Beginning of Salvation

When I was first getting into the Eastern Church Fathers as a wild-eyed heretical philosopher, one thing that stood out to me about Athanasius was that in On the Incarnation, he understands the salvation of humanity—the restoration of humanity—to begin not with the atonement, but with the Incarnation itself. Somehow the Son of God becoming man ends up being therapeutic or healing for humanity.

This stood out because I was familiar with developments of atonement within the Latin West and the centrality of the cross as the crux of this judicial predicament and rescue executed on behalf of humanity. I thought it remarkable that somehow the Annunciation—this moment where Christ is conceived, where the Son of God actually takes on flesh—is, in some ways, the beginning of restoration and healing of humanity.

Let me go back to the distinction I made at the start about differences between East and West. The Latin West has a tendency to see Christianity as a judicial religion: God is a lawgiver, us as lawbreakers, the human condition being ultimately about future judgment and impending condemnation, and the gospel being some sort of judicial remedy—absolution and setting right of our accounts before we reach the dread judgment seat of Christ.

In the Eastern fathers, if I were to simplify the contrast, you see that the human condition and Christian narrative is entirely about life and death. The idea is that we as human beings are created for a certain mode of life that can only come by partaking of God. God himself is the source of life. He is the one who brings forth and articulates himself in all these different goods that are the world. He is the source of life that we are supposed to imbibe and partake of and thrive in.

The life we are made for happens only by communion with God and actual participation or partaking of God himself. For that reason, it's just a principle of physics—not vindictive, not divine anger or spite—that if a creature turns away from the source of life, that creature begins to die.

The human condition is ultimately a condition that says in Eden, our species turns away from God, the source of life, the fount of life we're supposed to imbibe to attain the life we are made to have. By turning away from that, we move into a state of death and dying.

The Incarnation is this point at which he who has life in himself, the very source of life we've cut ourselves off from, enters our species to bring that life back to humanity and begin to heal us and restore us and unite us back to himself in his own person, then open that up to us through his Church, which becomes the hospital by which we begin to experience that healing and restoration ourselves on a personal level.

Christ as Healer of Creation

One thing you see throughout the Eastern understanding of the Incarnation is this notion that Christ, as he enters into things, begins to heal those things. The Incarnation is the start of that. Christ takes on our nature, and taking on our fallen, corrupted, dying, twisted nature, he begins to heal it by taking it on. He heals our will, our mind.

This is one reason why in all the Christological disputes, where people asked whether the Son of God took on a human mind and human will and human energies, heretics wanted to remove something (like Apollinaris trying to remove the human mind to make the divine mind fill that gap). But the councils and Church Fathers always insisted they're like, "No. The entire point of the Incarnation is that he enters our species to heal that species. Unless he takes on the human mind, the human mind isn't healed. Unless he takes on the human will, the human will isn't healed."

The Incarnation is about that healing, that union with us. I've talked about this before—the idea that a mediator in the Greek context is not one who stands between (like "talk to my attorney, don't talk to me") but somebody who brings near or unifies.

I've often used this branding iron analogy: the iron is put in fire until it's inflamed and glowing, and you bring it over to the cow. In this sense, it's a mediator—the branding iron is a mediator of the fire. The cow is really being burned by the fire, because the iron is carrying the fire within it, the energies of the fire within it, bringing it near to the cow.

This is how John Chrysostom understands when Paul says there's one mediator between God and man. He understands this to be what's happening in the Incarnation. In the Incarnation, the Son of God, who is of the same nature as the Father and has the life of God within him, unites himself to our species. In uniting himself to our species, he becomes the mediator between God and man, reunifying that connection and bringing life to our species and healing it from the inside.

This becomes a pattern not only in the life of Christ but also in the crucifixion itself. Throughout the Old Testament, you see patterns where when something clean comes into contact with something unclean, the clean thing becomes unclean and needs to be purified. But what happens in the life of Christ is all that is inverted. He is the one who is clean, and he makes the unclean clean.

When touching a leper, rather than being made unclean, the leper is made clean and healed. In his baptism—this is the understanding of holy water—you and I enter waters to be purified, but Christ enters those waters to purify them. The waters were often associated with demonic powers, and he enters the waters and crushes the head of Leviathan (these are the sorts of things said in baptismal liturgies). He purifies them; he makes them holy. Rather than the waters making him holy, he's making the waters holy.

You see this again and again throughout the life of Christ: whenever he approaches things or enters these things, he makes them clean.

The Cross and Cosmic Restoration

One thing you start to see, for example in Athanasius, is talk about casting down or "clearing the air." Athanasius uses this in a theological context (I've always wondered if our phrase "let's clear the air" is traceable to that). What Athanasius means is that we are within this demonic dominion, and this is a critical feature of how the Eastern Church Fathers understand our condition.

We have subjugated ourselves to the demonic powers of this world. We live in a world that consists of hierarchies, and part of these hierarchies within the cosmos include angelic hierarchies, celestial hierarchies. Those celestial hierarchies have been entrusted with care of various aspects of the cosmos—the elements, nations, individuals, the care of animals and animal birth.

If you're familiar with the Christian narrative, many of those powers rebelled. This is where St. Paul talks about the devil as the god of this world. You have these demonic powers reigning within this world. Adam and Eve, were they actually to unite themselves to God and become what they were made to become, could actually begin the healing of the cosmos from within. They would be that point to begin to undo the corruption that had entered the world.

But instead, those same demonic powers end up corrupting humanity, and in successfully corrupting humanity, we get dragged into that corruption that's already there and become part of the sick and dying cosmos. For that reason, we ultimately subjugate ourselves to the demonic powers rather than elevating above them.

When you have Christ—this second Adam who actually is going through and undoing the corruption of the world and retaking dominion of it through humanity—what you begin to see is exactly what I talked about. As he enters our corrupt and dying species, he brings life to it. As he touches the unclean, he makes them clean. When he enters things like the chaotic waters, he purifies them and makes them holy.

This notion also appears in Athanasius regarding the air: when Christ is lifted up into the air, the demons who dwell in the air are cast down. The purification happening by Christ—where he enters into humanity, enters into the waters, enters into the air, ultimately enters into death—rather than being held captive by death, he brings life to the dead.

This happens again and again within this aspect of the Eastern patristic narrative. Christ has life in himself. He is incorruptible, immortal, has the life of God within him. As he enters into the things of the cosmos that are broken and twisted and dying and demonic, he dispels that darkness and brings life to those dead and dying organs within the cosmos. This includes, in the cross, him being lifted up into the air and casting down the demonic powers.

The Ransom Theory

Another thing you find is the ransom theory, probably the one most people know about regarding Eastern views of atonement, popularized largely because of C.S. Lewis. In the Narnia Chronicles, Lewis offers a picture of a ransom theory with Aslan giving himself up to the White Witch to get Edmund off the hook. By being killed, this undoes the power of the White Witch. A lot of people have recognized that's like the ransom theory within the Church Fathers, where humanity is held captive by the devil and Christ ransoms us from the devil.

This appears not just in the Christian East—it's in people like Gregory of Nyssa—but also in people like Augustine. Augustine's formulation is different than Gregory's. Augustine talks about the devil being the one who has the power of death (hearkening to Hebrews). Augustine suggests the devil occupies this place of being a mediator of death to the world, and because we've subjugated ourselves to the devil and his dominion, the devil can justly and rightly, within his sphere of sovereignty, minister death to humanity.

Yet because Christ is righteous and is not due death, when the devil ultimately tries to administer death to Christ, he oversteps his boundary line in terms of his appropriate dominion. For this reason, his authority to administer death is rightly taken from him, and now God can administer life to humanity, having dethroned the devil who exercised that power unjustly and is rightly stripped of it.

In the Christian East, in someone like Gregory of Nyssa, it has a very different tone and character, much more in keeping with the patterns I talked about having to do with life and death. Gregory talks about Christ being "veiled"—the Son of God, his divinity, ends up being veiled in flesh.

Within the Eastern Church Fathers, it's pretty consistent that one of the things about the virgin birth is that it was, at least in part, a ruse to hide the Incarnation from the devil. The presumption is that the devil is watching the virgins, the maidens of Israel. He's aware of the prophecies and looking to see if there's going to be a virgin that conceives. For that reason, he's monitoring the maidens of Israel.

That's why Mary is entrusted to Joseph in the first place. Within tradition, Joseph is already a widower, much older. She's very young. They understand this as part of the protection of the Incarnate Son of God from the devil, just like you see within the Gospel accounts where they're warned in dreams that someone's going to come and try to kill this infant.

In keeping with that, it's no surprise that Gregory of Nyssa, when he talks about the ransom theory, talks in a way where the devil slowly starts to realize who this really is. As Christ begins to show forth his divinity—as it begins to manifest in these operations, these operative powers of healing people, casting out demons, restoring the unclean and purifying the waters—these glimmers of divinity are breaking forth, and the devil is putting together the pieces.

The way Gregory tells it, this unveiling, this slow flickering of divinity coming out, is much like the way a fish is drawn to a hook. What Gregory suggests is that what the devil doesn't know is that if he actually does kill Christ and bring him into Hades, this will be his undoing. But he just can't resist because he's being enticed.

The slow unveiling of the divinity is meant to entice the devil. The devil looks at this and goes, "This is my chance to actually try to kill God, to kill the Son of God." He can't resist, and ultimately, this is why he begins to orchestrate the crucifixion of Christ.

How does this ransom humanity from the devil? This comes through in passages like where Christ talks about binding the strong man and ransacking his house. Christ talks about how you can't ransack a guy's house unless you first bind the strong man.

The way this is understood is that the strong man is the devil, and Hades—where humanity is held captive by death because of him and the demonic powers that dragged us into corruption—is his house. We are held captive by the devil, by death and the devil, within the house that is the realm of the dead. The devil has dominion over us; we've subjected ourselves to him.

By Christ dying and entering into the realm of the dead, rather than death being ministered to Christ, the inverse happens. He who is incorruptible, immortal, who has life in himself, cannot experience death. He cannot be made to die, because it would be a privation, an absence, an undoing of something essential to him. When he enters the realm of the dead, he actually brings life and light to it, just like when he enters the waters, he makes them holy; just like when he touches the unclean, he makes them clean.

When he enters the realm of the dead, he brings life even there. That's one reason why, when entering that place, life spreads to all of the human species, and he ransacks the devil's house. By embracing his impending death (which is the will of the Father but is going to be mediated to him by the devil and his orchestration, entering Judas), what happens is Christ brings life even to things like death, into the realm of the dead, ministering life and restoring those things back to health and wholeness, bringing them back to God, and undoing the cancer within the cosmos even there.

The Defeat of the Passions

There's another aspect that's tied in with this narrative of healing and restoration of humanity that you see in Maximus the Confessor. This is rather dicey because I don't know how many people really talk about this aspect of East-West divide.

Within the Latin West, one thing you see is Christ as almost a complete reset. This comes through in things like the Immaculate Conception, which actually isn't Catholic dogma until the 19th century (before that, you have significant Catholic thinkers like Thomas Aquinas who don't hold to it). This is the concept that Mary is preserved from original sin, and being preserved from original sin, we have this clean vessel into which the Son of God enters.

With original sin, you have both the stain of Adam's sin (some sort of transference) and the distorted order of loves that creates that necessity of sin. That becomes the baseline human condition. When it comes to Christ, if you're going to suggest that Christ is going to offer up some sort of sacrifice along the lines of the Latin view of atonement, you're inevitably going to need him to be without spot and blemish, insulated from original sin.

Whether it's because he doesn't inherit it through Mary (as Aquinas says, the formal properties are transferred through the father, and since Christ doesn't have a human father, all is well) or through the Immaculate Conception—one way or another, you need to preserve Christ from the stain of original sin. You get this sort of reset.

From what I can tell looking at the Eastern Church Fathers, this is definitely not their view. Metaphysically, there's an insistence that you and I share a common nature. You can see this in Gregory of Nyssa's letter to Ablabious. He's talking about the Trinity, but one thing that becomes clear is that he thinks you and I have one nature—our nature is truly common.

He uses this metaphor for the Trinity, this analogy where he talks about three human persons: Paul, Timothy, and Silvanus. Those are three hypostases (three subjects) who share a common nature, human. In using that analogy, he asks, "Does that mean we have three gods?"

Gregory's answer is no, because what you just said there is a common abuse of language. When you're using a species term, that's actually singular—there is only one human nature. He suggests that even though we talk this way and say there are three humans, that's imprecise and a common abuse of language, because there are not multiple species, multiple essences, multiple forms. It's only one nature, human.

What Gregory believes is that you and I share one nature, human. The reason that's important is because if Christ is going to take on humanity and heal humanity, he has to take on our nature. There's only one of them. If he takes on a different nature, then he's something other than human—he's human asterisk, a different species.

If he's going to take on humanity, he has to take on our species. What you see is rather than this reboot where we get a new human, the language is that Christ enters our fallen species, our fallen nature, and he takes it on and he heals it.

The entering is the healing. If you look at John of Damascus's homilies on Mary, it's clear that this language means Christ takes on our humanity, and there seems to be instantaneous healing of the will. There's no point at which Christ's will is in any way subject to the corruptions of sin. But there is this talk of him taking on what are called the "blameless passions."

There's a distinction between those passions for which we are blameworthy and those passions that are natural and are not blameworthy. The insistence is that even though Christ takes on humanity and heals and restores it, restored and healed humanity still has to undergo this development toward deification or theosis.

If you think back to the Eastern patristic meta-narrative, Eden is not the picture of what humanity is made to become. Adam and Eve are created in a state where, yes, they are free of sin and not corrupt, but they clearly haven't yet become incorruptible or immortal—evident in the fact that they become corrupted and die. So clearly they haven't yet attained what they are made to be.

They're in a better state than we are because we're corrupt and they are not corrupt, but they are not yet incorrupt, immortal partakers of the divine nature the way humanity is made to be. This goes to the distinction in the Eastern Church Fathers between the image and likeness of God.

In Genesis, God says, "Let us make man in our own image according to our own likeness." He makes man in his own image, and likeness is not repeated. The Eastern Church Fathers—people like Basil of Caesarea and Irenaeus—talk about this. The image is that baseline nature: the fact that we are rational, that we have free will, that we have this capacity to behold and partake of God and participate in God. That nature is there—that's the image part.

But the likeness actually requires free will, requires active participation. It is that by which we move toward God and actively begin to imitate God. In imitating God, we partake of the divine nature. Certain things like justice, virtue, love—those are active operations. That's why there's a need for man to participate in his own creation. We are created at this baseline capacity to become something more, but we actually have to enter into that freely and actively, cooperating with that in order to become something more, to partake of the divine nature.

Adam and Eve didn't—they retreated from that and dragged our species down into corruption. What you see is that in the Incarnation, yes, by entering into humanity, humanity is set right and healed. But you also see within the Eastern Church Fathers this idea of still a progression beyond that, just as Adam was in an uncorrupted state but needed to progress toward deification.

What happens with the Son of God is that even though in entering our species he heals it and restores it, there is still a carrying forth of making humanity into what we were made to be. You see this in a couple of ways.

There's a real sense in which resurrection itself—and we don't even need to appeal to the Eastern Church Fathers here, we could appeal to Saint Paul—resurrection is not just reanimation. This was something that struck me as odd when I was studying the New Testament alongside pagan philosophers on death and reincarnation.

I noticed this strange thing where you had statements in Paul about Christ being raised from the dead and can't die again. At the same time, I was like, "Well, that doesn't make any sense, because surely Lazarus died again." So what is Paul talking about? This seems obviously fallacious—the claim that having been raised from the dead, you can't die again. We reanimate people all the time, and they still die again.

As I studied the New Testament, I started to realize there was a distinction in Saint Paul between reanimation (or the raising of someone like Lazarus) and resurrection. When Paul talks about resurrection, like in First Corinthians 15, he's clearly talking about something that is a metamorphosis. This is not just that your heart stopped and we restarted it. This is not just that you died and were brought back in the same condition you were before. This is a transformation of some kind.

When Paul talks about this, he talks about putting off corruption for incorruption, being buried one way and raised another way. He's talking about different types of glory. Paul is clearly talking about some sort of metamorphosis. If we cross-reference that with what St. Peter has to say, Peter says we escape corruption (which is what Paul's talking about—putting off corruption for incorruption) by partaking in the divine nature.

What I started to realize is that resurrection is something categorically different than just reanimation. That's why Paul can say he hopes to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Why? Because not all raising is the resurrection from the dead. That's a very specific transformation that takes place, not just any reanimation.

That's also why, if you look at ancient icons of Lazarus, those which have writing on them that label what the icon is, it's always "the raising of Lazarus." It's not "the resurrection of Lazarus" because Lazarus wasn't resurrected. Christ is the first fruits of the resurrection from the dead.

That metamorphosis—that is what man is made for. The full putting off of corruption for incorruption, the attaining of immortality, is something that happens at the resurrection from the dead. Christ reaches that pinnacle—he transforms humanity into what we are made to be at the resurrection from the dead, not before.

You see that there is a healing of humanity that takes place in the Incarnation itself, but there's still an ushering toward what ultimately we're made to be, which doesn't happen until the resurrection itself. That's where we first see Christ successfully making man into what we were made to be.

This provides context for something Maximus the Confessor talks about that wouldn't otherwise make sense. Maximus talks about the crucifixion as the final defeat of the passions. This is weird if you don't think of Christology and the Incarnation the way the Eastern Church Fathers do.

One thing Maximus talks about is the fact that Christ is really human—he does take on humanity. Because the passions—the passions are not a product of sin. The disordered state where the passions have an unnatural sway over reason and will (the sort of thing Paul talks about in Romans 7) is a product of the fall. But the existence of the passions is not—that is part of our nature. That's why they talk about the "blameless passions."

The passions are just animal responses to external stimuli. You encounter something and it strikes you as good, or it strikes you as contrary to the good. If it strikes you as good, it has a certain pull that is before your will—reflexively, it pulls you in. You smell pizza, and that's good, and you want it. You see someone very attractive, and you're pulled in. There's also the reflexive recoiling when it seems to be to your detriment, when it seems to threaten your life. You see something out of the corner of your eye that looks threatening, and your body recoils.

The passions have to do with this leaning toward or pulling away, this inclining toward or recoiling in response to external stimuli, this perception. That's not a sinful thing—that's there. But what is unnatural in our experience is that the passions have an unnatural sway over us. This is what St. Paul talks about: rather than those being governed and set in order by the higher rational nature, they have the ability to intoxicate us and pull us toward actions that later, when we're sober, we're like, "What was I thinking?" We do things we don't want to do, and we don't do things we do want to do, and we're wretched people. That's the distorted state in which we find ourselves.

What you see in Christ is that even though Christ heals human nature by taking it on, he still has the blameless passions. Eastern Fathers say that explicitly. Yet there is this need to put the passions back in order. This explains how Christ could feel temptation—there is nothing sinful about the idea of the passions responding to things.

This is how Cyril of Alexandria, for example, talks about Christ being grieved about his impending death. He knows his martyrdom is coming. Those are the passions that recoil away from death. When Christ is sweating blood in Gethsemane, those are the blameless passions—the passions appropriately don't want to die, so he feels those sorts of things.

But ultimately, in engaging in a definitive act that orders the person rightly toward God, no matter what, free from the passions, this is where the crucifixion plays that pivotal role. What you see in Maximus the Confessor is he talks about crucifixion being that definitive act of the final defeat of the passions and the rightly ordering of man.

Why? Because every passion at its root is basically saying, "Give me that or I'll die" or "Take that away from me or I'll die." The ultimate thing is really death. By embracing death and martyrdom in keeping with the will of God, in service to God, in obedience to God, this becomes the definitive defeat of the passions. They have no more sway at that point.

This is how Maximus the Confessor talks about the crucifixion and the embrace of martyrdom being the definitive defeat of the passions in the ordering of man. This makes sense if you understand Christology in this way, where Christ heals our humanity by entering it and setting it right, but there's still that road toward progress and ultimately deification that is culminated in his martyrdom and the resurrection from the dead, where humanity as we are made to be is finally manifest on the earth for the first time ever.

It wasn't Adam. It is Christ—the resurrected Christ is the first time you see the picture of humanity as we are made to be, having put off corruption for incorruption.

When you look at this, I don't see any conflict between what you find in people like Athanasius and people like Gregory of Nyssa, and even this aspect of Maximus the Confessor. All of it fits into this consistent narrative having to do with the healing of the cosmos, the healing of humanity, the setting of things right back to the way they are made to be, and ushering humanity forth to become the thing we were originally created to be.

Those are some of the themes you see when you look at the Eastern Church Fathers as contrasted with the penal substitution or substitutionary atonement of the Latin West.

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Nathan A. Jacobs, Ph.D.
Scholar in Residence of Philosophy and Religion in the Religion in the Arts and Contemporary Culture Program (RACC)
Vanderbilt University, Divinity School
http://nathanajacobs.com
https://vanderbilt.academia.edu/NathanAJacobs