This paragraph gave me full body chills and a mental connection that I hadn't made before. Appreciate your work! "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."
This paints a beautiful picture of what Christ does; I've always struggled with the penal substitutionary view of the atonement. Emotionally, it makes far more sense that we need healing and saving from our broken nature, rather than punishment for actively breaking the law. I think this reframing tells a much more compelling narrative of what the gospel is, so thank you for this.
I wonder if this Eastern meta-narrative can speak to some of the difficult passages in the Bible, like the laws that seem to condone slavery in the Old Testament? The Bible's seemingly implicit condoning of slavery is the most common objection to Christianity. I hear from atheists, and it has been popularised by Alex O'Connor (see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFE_qz47zjY).
The Christian responses to slavery are typically quite bad and involve trying to distinguish the slavery in Israel from the racial trans-Atlantic slave trade and arguing that God does not endorse it but places limitations on it, as he knew his people wouldn't listen if he outright banned it (this is hard to square with some of the 10 commandments that seem equally likely to be broken but are banned anyway). I think some Christians struggle with these answers and the cognitive dissonance they bring about (at least I do!).
If you see this, Dr Jacobs, I'd be very interested if the East has a way of reframing these difficult passages on slavery, as, from my experience, they are one of the most popular arguments against Christianity out there now. God bless, and thank you for your terrific work!
This is an extraordinarily helpful explanation. On behalf of the Catholics, I’d say that while there are still many manifestations in parish life of the underlying theology described in the article, there are also manifestations of the healing/ participatory model. For example Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraph 1 states that God created man to enable man to partake of God’s own blessed life. Fr Hopko recommended the recent CCC to Orthodox priests and said that he disagreed with only maybe five sentences in it.
This paragraph gave me full body chills and a mental connection that I hadn't made before. Appreciate your work! "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."
This paints a beautiful picture of what Christ does; I've always struggled with the penal substitutionary view of the atonement. Emotionally, it makes far more sense that we need healing and saving from our broken nature, rather than punishment for actively breaking the law. I think this reframing tells a much more compelling narrative of what the gospel is, so thank you for this.
I wonder if this Eastern meta-narrative can speak to some of the difficult passages in the Bible, like the laws that seem to condone slavery in the Old Testament? The Bible's seemingly implicit condoning of slavery is the most common objection to Christianity. I hear from atheists, and it has been popularised by Alex O'Connor (see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFE_qz47zjY).
The Christian responses to slavery are typically quite bad and involve trying to distinguish the slavery in Israel from the racial trans-Atlantic slave trade and arguing that God does not endorse it but places limitations on it, as he knew his people wouldn't listen if he outright banned it (this is hard to square with some of the 10 commandments that seem equally likely to be broken but are banned anyway). I think some Christians struggle with these answers and the cognitive dissonance they bring about (at least I do!).
If you see this, Dr Jacobs, I'd be very interested if the East has a way of reframing these difficult passages on slavery, as, from my experience, they are one of the most popular arguments against Christianity out there now. God bless, and thank you for your terrific work!
This is an extraordinarily helpful explanation. On behalf of the Catholics, I’d say that while there are still many manifestations in parish life of the underlying theology described in the article, there are also manifestations of the healing/ participatory model. For example Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraph 1 states that God created man to enable man to partake of God’s own blessed life. Fr Hopko recommended the recent CCC to Orthodox priests and said that he disagreed with only maybe five sentences in it.