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.

To all my subscribers, thank you for subscribing. To my paid subscribers, thank you for your support. And to any visitors, please consider subscribing and supporting my work. Enjoy!

---

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. What does this centerpiece of the Christian faith actually do?

I suspect many of my listeners and readers are familiar with one particular understanding of the cross, either because they grew up Protestant or have heard it from Protestants. They’ve heard a specific interpretation of the significance of Christ’s crucifixion, what it accomplishes, and have noticed that I don’t speak about the Christian faith in a way that reflects this understanding. I’ve walked through the Christian narrative as discussed by the Eastern Church fathers, and the picture I paint sounds rather different from the Protestant characterization with which most are familiar.

This, I presume, is the reason for the curiosity — whether there is a difference, what that difference is, and where I stand on the question. So, that’s what I’ll address today.

Two Visions of Christianity

Were I to distill down the differences between the Christian East and the Christian West to its simplest form, I would characterize those differences as follows:

In the Latin West, we find 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 will face future judgment, and that fact is a predicament, precisely because we are guilty. The crucifixion of Christ, in this framework, gets us off the legal hook, as it were.

I would contrast this judicial picture with what we might call a more therapeutic vision in the Christian East, where the Christian gospel is much more about life and death. On this view, humanity is made for a certain partaking and participation in the life of God. When we retreat from God, we retreat into an unnatural state of death, dying, and corruption. The Christian religion is about remedying that condition — healing us and restoring us to what we are made to be.

The Protestant Framework: God as Judge

With this in mind, perhaps the best place to begin is with how the average person with exposure to Christianity — within a Western and dominantly Protestant context — thinks about the cross of Christ and the Christian gospel.

The message is primarily set up in terms of a judicial problem: God is a judge; you have violated his laws; and you will inevitably stand before this 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 commonplace presentations of the gospel. All sorts of analogies tend to appear 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 to illustrate the point. For example, the judge condemns you as guilty, but he then takes off his robes and offers to be hauled away to take your punishment himself.

I even heard one story that made me cringe, where the presenter told a story about his two sons. One had done something wrong, and he, the father, had resolved to spank him. The innocent son, having heard the Protestant rendition of the gospel, stepped in and said, “Let me take his spanking.” The father, believing he would not be a good father unless he spanked someone — his words — spanked the innocent son instead of the guilty one, letting the guilty child off scot-free.

Such is how the understanding of the crucifixion is often presented within contemporary Protestant contexts. The idea is that all the sins of humanity — all punishment due for those wrongs — are poured out on Jesus upon the cross. Essentially, God the Father is punished Jesus on behalf of humanity so that he need not punish you and me.

Historical Development in the Latin West

This understanding has several developmental stages in the history of the Latin West. The foundations for this line of thinking emerges largely with Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo (Why the God-Man?).

Anselm builds a case for why Christ must be both God and human, arguing that if Christ is going to take the punishment for humanity, then he must be a man because the punishment is due to our species. Yet, if we were delivered from our condition by, say, an angel, then we would rightly be debtors to that angel. But man is made to be a debtor to God. For this reason, whoever delivers us from our condemnation must also be divine, because it would unsuitable for redeemed humanity to be devoted to any beside God.

The concept is fleshed out in various ways throughout medieval thought. In Catherine of Siena, for example, we find the notion that God poured out his wrath toward humanity upon Christ on the cross. I believe it’s in one of her letters where she talks about Christ offering up his body as an anvil to God the Father, so that the Father can take the hammer of his wrath and beat it out upon Christ’s back.

Later, in Protestantism, this becomes a very popular view of atonement. You see it in figures like Jonathan Edwards, who talks about man being due infinite punishment for sin. Edwards defends the point by arguing that a single sin merits eternal torment because the punishment due is based on the value or goodness of the thing sinned against. Since God is of infinite value, the punishment owed for sinning against him must be equally infinite.

If someone is going to step in and take this punishment, then, that person must not only be a suitable substitute — the Anselmian point about being human — but also have the capacity to absorb infinite punishment. Hence, Edwards suggests that Christ, being both God and man, iis able to take humanity’s punishment, because he is human, while also absorbing the infinite in a finite period of time, because he is God. This is what happens on the Christ: God pours out his infinite wrath upon Christ, the God-man absorbing it on behalf of humanity.

The Role of Merits and Demerits

The centrality of penal substitution to Protestantism is largely due to how the Protestant Reformation was sparked and the subsequent disputes over the nature of the Christian gospel. Allow me to 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 and have a certain love or affection for it. Yet, we cannot have all the goods we desire at once — the good of being a monk, for example, differs from the good of being married, and you must pick.

When we pick, Augustine observes, there’s a certain priority of loves that the choice reflects. Certain goods are elevated above competing goods. Augustine suggests that the order of loves sitting behind an act ultimately determines whether that act is meritorious before God or demeritorious before God. Why?

Augustine recognized that our world contains an objective hierarch of goods, what is sometimes called in classical philosophy The Great Chain of Being. Man, having reason and free will and bearing the image of God, is superior to irrational animals. Animals, being sentient and capable of locomotion, are superior to plants. Plants, having life, are superior to rocks. In a word, our world is comprised of a hierarchy of goods.

According to Augustine, the just man renders to each it’s due — this being the meaning of justitia min Latin. Granting that there is a hierarchy of goods within our world, then the higher goods are due something more than the lower goods. We ought to love man more than beast and regard beast more than plant, and so on.

The just man is one whose affections or loves are properly ordered, reflecting or mirroring the hierarchy of goods in the world. And, of course, this includes displaying a love of God, the Highest, above all else. In this way, the just man’s inner loves or affections render to each their due — loving each good proportianate to its goodness.

If, by contrast, one loves something lower in the chain more than he ought, elevating it above its suitable station — making sex or food or power the pinnacle of human experience — then his loves are unjust.

Augustine’s understanding of merits and demerits presumes that deeds are judged not soly on whether they cohere with the law — did you not commit adultery or not — but on the inner order of loves from which the deed proceeds. We might imagine two people, both approached by someone soliciting an adulterous relationship, and both reject it. But one person does so out of fear and the other out of love for God. The two acts, though externally identical, are internally different. One is driven by love of God, displaying properly ordered loves, which have merit before God. The other has disordered loves, being driven by self-preservation. In this case, while his deed coheres with the law, it has no merit before God.

Prior to the Pelagian dispute, Augustine was of the mind that if one discovers thta he has disordered loves, he can will to fix it. But during the Pelagian dispute — where questions about the role of grace in salvation were central — Augustine’s position shifted.

Augustine eventually argues that due to original sin, we experience disordered loves as part of the human condition, and these disordered loves are not in our power to fix. We can decide to commit adultery or not, steal or not, murder or not — all of that is within our power. But we cannot fix the internal character of the act, which determines whether the deed has merit before God. Being bound by original sin, we are bound by disordered loves, and therefore, all of our deeds are sinful. So, even when we obey the law, that obedience has no merit before God. For it is still sin.

If you’ve ever heard the term “total depravity” — the Calvinist doctrine that we sin of necessity — this is the root of the doctrine. The doctrine does not mean that you necessarily commit murder or necessarily steal or lie; rather, it means that even your good deeds are tainted because you have disordered loves due to original sin.

Augustine suggests that the only remedy to this condition is for God to intervene and provide “prevenient grace.” The Holy Spirit corrects the order of loves, making it possible for the convert to do things out of pure love for God, performing deeds that have merit before God.

The point explains the primary dispute between Catholics and Protestants. Protestants often characterize Catholics as saying you must earn your salvation or that salvation is by good works. Catholics rebut the charge, insisting that salvation is by grace. Why? Because the Catholics position is precisely what Augustine suggests: Yes, you must do good deeds to earn merits before God, but the only reason you’re capable of performing a deed that would have merit is because of grace provided by God in the first place. In other words, the deed is from a state of grace. Or as Augustine puts it, God is merely rewarding what he’s put into you in the first place.

Just as in Augustine, the Catholic position is that you can choose to cast off grace. You can choose to rebel and sin, despite receiving grace that enables you to do deeds pleasing to God. So, free will remains relevant, you having a choice about whether to make a right use of the grace given or not. Such is the dynamic within the Augustinian paradigm: A person is judged by their merits or demerits before God; unjust deeds produce demerits while just deeds, performed from properly ordered loves, produce merits; yet, the prospect of having properly ordered loves depends wholly on God’s choice to provide grace.

Transferred Merits and Indulgences

A concept that develops over time in the medieval period is the notion that certain merits might be transferable. In other words, to the accounting of merits and demerits is added the notion that merits might be transferred from one person to another. This becomes the basis for indulgences.

When hearing the story of the Protestant Reformation, one likely hears mention of indulgence — the selling of merits on behalf of the dead. “Every time a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from Purgatory springs,” as the slogan went. In other words, people were buying indulgences in the hope of delivering loved ones from Purgatory. This practiced sparked Luther’s 95 Theses.

The basis of indulgences is the idea that the Saints produced more merits than needed for their salvation. Hence, there is a storehouse of merits available, and it’s within the power of the Church — with its binding and loosing capacities, given to her by Christ — to transfer these merits to whomever they wish. An indulgence, therefore, were a means of transferring merits.

Now, even though a Protestant reader might balk at that notion, the concept doesn’t disappear with the Reformation. Quite the contrary, it plays a central role in Protestant theology. This is one reason I often express that Protestants and Catholics are often closer to one another in worldview than they are to the Eastern Orthodox, taking their cues from the Eastern Church fathers. For Eastern Christians, there is not system of merits and demerits or of transferable merits. This type of accounting develops uniquely in the Latin West.

As noted, in the Protestant Reformation, the idea of merits and transferable merits does not disappear. What transpires, instead, is a dispute between the Reformers and Catholics over whose merits and how they are transferred.

Within the Catholic context, demerits accumulate from deeds done in your own power under the bondage of original sin — every deed being unjust, bound by necessity to sin. But with grace, the convert is empowered to operate from properly ordered loves and produce merits. To this is added the prospect of transferable merit, imputed to the believer, and the absolution of demerits.

Within the Protestant context, there is agreement that we are, indeed, bound by original sin with disordered loves, necessitating sin — every deed is tainted by sin and void of merit before God, and our will is bound, incapable of remedying this condition. What is rejected is the idea that even divine grace might enable one to do deeds pleasing to God. So, how is one to be saved? The Protestant answer is by a foreign righteousness. Here, the transference of merits comes into play. Rather than grace fixing the order of loves so that one can produce merits, the work of the Holy Spirit enables the conver to place his faith in God — a faith that saves.

Now, just as in the Catholic context there is a differentiation between outer and inner acts. Calvin, for example, differentiates between historical faith (which does not save) and genuine faith (which does save). It may be possible for a person to be persuaded of the truth of Christianity and arrive at an historical belief, but this belief would not be saving faith. Saving faith requires a work of grace.

Here, we see the ongoing resistance to any Pelagian notion that salvation could come about by one’s own efforts. But because salvation, for the Protestant, is about faith rather than works, the grace that comes to the convert’s aid is a grace that results if a faith that saves.

Now, the question arises: What of this righteousness that comes from God through faith? The Protestant answer involves a 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.

With this we can see why penal substitution becomes the centerpiece of the Christian gospel according to Protestantism. The gospel is a message that declares you are going to stand before your divine Judge and be condemned and punished — and rightly so, because you are a sinner who violates God’s Laws with every breath. The good news, however, is that you can get off the hook. Your sinful deeds — your demerits — can be transferred over to Christ and paid for by his vicarious suffering, and his merits can be transferred to you, making you righteous in the sight of God. So, even though you deserve punishment, you will be absolved, forgiven, and set in good standing with God, receiving Heaven rather than Hell. Such is the Christian gospel according to Protestantism, and such is the reason that penal substitution constitutes the gospel within the Protestant mind.

Eastern Alternatives: Not One View, But Harmony

Now, how does this contrast with what we find in the Christian East? Do we find the gospel of penal substitution or not? And if not, what do we find?

The fact is we do not find in the Eastern Church fathers a single view of the atonement or understanding of what the cross of Christ accomplishes. To be clear, there is a difference between saying there is no singular view and saying there’s no harmony or unity between the various views. As with many things in the Eastern fathers, you do not find strict dichotomies.

Take, for example, 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 should be it.) John had the foresight to write treatises that ask, What is the consensus of the fathers on this topic? His works are incredibly useful, essentially serving as an encyclopedia of patristic terms, concepts, and doctrines written by a Church father.

Now, there are times when John will touch on a topic and admit, “Some fathers say this, and other fathers say that,” noting that there is not a single position on that topic. For example, when asking whether the Tree in Eden is a real tree, he explains that some fathers say yes, while others see it as an allegory for something else, and he admits that he sees no reason it can’t be both.

In other words, the Eastern Church fathers are often fine with things having both a literal meaning and an allegorical or spiritual meaning. You do not find in them strict dichotomies, where things must mean only one thing.

Considering the atonement, I see something similar. When saying that you find a variety things amongst the Eastern fathers, I do not mean competing views. Rather, there is harmony to all these different aspects. The work of Christ is dynamic, and what the cross of Christ accomplishes is as well.

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.

You’ll find part 2 here: Reclaiming the Atonement: Problems with Penal Substitution

And part 3 here: A Philosophical Critique of Penal Substitution

—

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