Every Wednesday during Lent, I’m going to explore an alternative to the penal substitutionary understanding of the atonement, the dominant theory of the atonement in my part of the (theological and geographical) world.
Orthodox Christians do not suffer under the long, long shadow of Augustine. Now, Augustine was arguably the most brilliant theologian of all time, but that not only means that we get the benefits of where he was right. It also means that the parts he got wrong are particularly difficult to get out from under.
In Orthodoxy, for instance, there is no doctrine of Original Sin — at least not as we Westerners were taught it. And while most of us easily reject Augustine’s argument that sin is passed biologically through the sperm of the man (which is why Jesus was immune), we still generally hold to the doctrine. That’s because Original Sin is a compelling idea, it’s an ontological argument, and it’s the hinge on which our dominant view of the atonement swings.
Orthodox Christians also by a different metaphysic than the one that saddles the Western Church. They are less concerned with the substance-essence debates of the early church. Their starting and ending point is 1 John 4:8 — “God is love.”
Father James Bernstein, an Antiochian Orthodox priest in Washington, writes, [click to continue…]
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