And Vicarious Punishment is Not Forgiveness

To forgive, according to Merriam-Webster Online, is: to give up resentment of or claim to or requital for, to grant relief from payment of [something].

Forgiveness is synonymous with pardon.  The definition of pardon is: the excusing of an offense without exacting a penalty, a release from the legal penalties of an offense, an official warrant of remission of penalty, excuse or forgiveness for a fault, offense, or discourtesy .

Forgiveness is also synonymous with mercy.  Mercy is compassion or forbearance shown especially to an offender or to one subject to one's power; and it specifically “implies compassion that forbears punishing even when justice demands it."

“But even though God punishes Christ, it is still for the sake of being merciful toward US,” someone may say. Not so. In a penal theory of Atonement, it is specifically US God is punishing in Christ, not the Innocent One Himself. God is not lifting our penalty; He is explicitly inflicting yours and mine upon the only One Who doesn’t deserve it. He is not granting any relief from our debt; but collecting it from the only One who could pay it.

Not only that, but even the infinite debt He is said to have collected (or punishment He is said to have inflicted) upon the Cross is still not enough if you do not believe. He will continue to collect His due from you or inflict punishment upon you for all eternity if you do not believe. There is no mercy.

(No, I do not believe this is overstatement or caricature. But if it is, somebody tell me why it is and how to correct it – but sparing me all the euphemisms in the process.)

“But if you do believe, then what God did to Christ upon the Cross results in your being let off the hook!” someone may try to tell me.

No. It keeps me everlastingly on the hook. It saddles me forever with the guilt of thinking of all the punishment  my Christ endured which ought to have been mine, which I have gratefully but unfairly and unjustly escaped.

"But God wanted you to escape it."

But He didn't want Jesus Christ to escape it, even when He had prayed to be spared?  Sorry.  Forgiveness I can handle, but punishing my Lord instead of me, no.  I know what I deserve.   

Proponents of penal and satisfaction theories of atonement believe it would be immoral for God simply to forgive. For them, that feels tantamount to winking at sin, colluding in evil. Sin, they invariably tell us, must be “dealt with.”

Yes, sin must be dealt with. That's fine, provided it does not mean gratifying what Fr. Stephen Freeman has called our “lust for revenge”,  for getting even is not what justice is all about.  "Dealing with sin" must also not mean indulging that certain, neurotic form of guilt that craves punishment for ourselves.  Either of these ideas of dealing with sin would only be feeding our sickness instead of curing it.

The object of Justice is to make everything as if sin had never happened, to wipe it out and all its damage and all its consequences. Perhaps an analogy is the virus my computer picked up a few days ago. I not only had to delete the malicious files, I then had also to undo all the damage the bug had done, wiping out my security systems and blocking my access to Google (and thereby, my blog and yours). With a computer virus, that takes hours of searching, deleting, and working with a tech support person. With sin, getting rid of it and all its effects and all its consequences involves the one thing so many people consider immoral, and that’s forgiveness. Forgiveness, far from being a way of approving evil, is essential to accomplish the goal of Divine Justice: to make things as if the sin had never happened. That’s what true Justice does. In fact, by transforming deficits into positive good, God makes things even far better than they would have been, had sin never happened. That’s what true forgiveness does. That’s what true Love does.

A penal theory of Atonement, while it is meant to be all about Divine Love and Divine Justice, is at the very least a serious underestimation of them both.  It quite simply has no room for genuine forgiveness, and in fact prohibits it. 

May He, Who is far more wonderful than we can imagine, reveal to us all the heights and breadth and depths of His unfathomable Love, and give us to be able to come to terms with it.

Maybe the Problem is, it Just Sounds Too Good to be True

As often as I’ve said it before, it bears repeating now and then: Orthodox Christianity is the only religion in the whole world that truly preaches a God of pure Love. This I say quite soberly, not trying either to boast or to exaggerate. But if you think this is an exaggeration, show me any other religion that has a god of pure love. I shall be thrilled to be proven wrong, thrilled.

Hinduism? It has many gods, none of them particularly loving, as we understand the term.

Buddhism?  It has no god.

Islam? Allah is frequently termed “the all-compassionate, the all-merciful,” but Allah will send you to hell in a literal heartbeat (your last heartbeat) if you don’t do what he wants. And look what he has his followers do, at the point of the sword. Some love.

Judaism? It teaches that God loves Israel, but how much He loves the other nations is debatable, since (a) they are not the Chosen People and (b) they are all going to serve Israel someday if they don’t already. Jews do not believe God loves us enough to have come among us in person, or to have died and risen for us and thereby have destroyed/transfigured death for us.


Liberal Protestantism or liberal Catholicism?  They don’t believe these things, either. In fact, if you believe the Jesus Seminar, you have to believe Jesus spent His whole life saying just about nothing! Or at least, nothing noteworthy, nothing much worth handing down to posterity or putting into writing.  I once said this in a liberal Catholic forum, and the people there were furious.  One of them said he was a personal friend of one of the J.S. scholars, and he would write this scholar to get his reply to my dreadful, slanderous remark.  The Jesus Seminar scholar wrote back with a heh-heh, well, yes, what I had said was pretty much the case.  Admirable young fellow, Jesus, in many ways, but not much given to words.

Traditional Catholicism? Conservative/Evangelical Protestantism? They both tell us they certainly believe God is loving, even that God is love, but then they turn right around and ascribe the most atrocious, unloving behaviors to Him, like sending people to hell, or arbitrarily not electing some people to salvation and the non-elect never even have a genuine chance.  Or they tell you God required His own Son, the only good and innocent man who ever lived, to be tortured and killed to pay Him off so He would/could let the rest of us off the hook. In other words, outright, gratuitous forgiveness doesn’t exist. In fact, some people think it would be immoral; sins must be avenged or paid for. 

In Catholicism, your eternal punishment is remitted when you repent and confess, but you still have “temporal punishment” to undergo in Purgatory, unless the Pope grants you a plenary indulgence. Again, true forgiveness doesn’t exist.  Pay up, buddy!   Or get the Pope to take your payment out of his "Treasury of Merits."

Or else, if you're Protestant, count on Jesus to have paid up for you. 

Lutherans talk about “The Terrors of Conscience,” which terrors couldn’t exist if they understood God’s love; it would be sorrow instead of terror.  One Lutheran pastor even has a blog post about how God hates sinners.  (It overlooks Luke 6:35: "He [God] is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.") 

In summary, what all these various denominations say is yes, God is loving, but love is not His only attribute, not the whole story.  There's also this "flip side" of God.   

Only Orthodoxy affirms that love is no mere “attribute” of God at all, existing alongside other attributes.  Rather, “God IS love” (I John 4:8,16) and there’s nothing alongside that love, balancing it or acting as a brake on it or a counterweight to it or tempering it or making it conditional. There is no conflict in God, as in, "Yes, He loves us BUT..."  There's no "but".  There’s no flip side, no dark side, nothing opposing or limiting His love, nothing about Him that needs appeasing or placating or buying off.  His love is eternal, infinite (!) and unconditional.

Really, truly, no exaggeration:  In all the world, the one and only champion of pure,True Love is Orthodox Christianity.  Holy Orthodoxy alone, while still believing in justice, judgment, and hell, understands these in such a way as to be able, truly and consistently, to teach that “God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.”  (I John 1:5)

How Can I Find a Gracious God?

Find the true One.  He is always gracious.

It's just hard to grasp when you've come from other religious backgrounds that have drummed into you the idea that God is so severe.

Fr. Stephen has a wonderful post on why Christ died, and the comments section is very moving as person after person writes about his/her difficulty coming to terms with such incomprehensible graciousness.  Here is one example:

Like many above, the process of overcoming the "ideas" of protestantism has been very slow for me. However, my priest recently gave me some very life giving words after I told him that I had a hard time believing that God loved me. He said, "You don't have to believe it, you just have to experience it." Somehow those words set me free and helped me pay attention to the many ways God shows his love for me. I still struggle with the feeling that I must somehow deserve the love and the despair of knowing that I can never deserve it. I know I've come to the right place though and that God is healing me and revealing himself to me as I am ready to receive Him.

Words like these bring tears to my eyes, break my heart, and heal me, too - because, of course, I also come from that sort of background.  I, too, am one of these spiritually handicapped, struggling people. 

Every reader of this blog knows I take every opportunity I can find to fight publicly against those unloving ideas about God. Yet as this woman writes, ultimately, it is only God Himself Who can break through all our false ideas about Him, as He allows us to experience and know firsthand His infinite, unconditional, incomprehensible, sweet, tender kindness toward us, a love unmitigated, undiluted, not held in tension or balance or polarity with anything else whatsoever; a compassion not based upon anything, nor needing to be, but itself being the basis for all things; a love that holds nothing back; an absolute, undeserved, unearned, gratuitous, miraculous, unwavering, unfailing, untempered, universal love, an abyss of pure goodness, pure LOVE.

When God Meets Us

What happens, do you think, when the all-good, almighty God comes in Person to visit a desperately sin-sick, immoral, mixed-up person? He will zap him, you may say. No, no, no; that’s some fictitious deity! The true and living God will heal him instead, as He healed His prophet, Isaiah by touching his lips with the mystical burning coal, and as Christ healed and saved even the most outcast of sinners.

The sinner will be terrified, you may think. No, the soul will greatly rejoice and be comforted! Except, of course, when the soul has no intention of turning away from its own evil, but of retaining it. Then certainly, the sinner will be terrified. That’s where such terror comes from: the intention to keep on sinning! But he who hates his sins will be comforted when God visits him.

The sinner, encountering God, will want to run and hide, you may suppose. To the contrary, the sinner will, so to speak, invite the Deliverer to dinner.

The Gospel is Good News, pure Good News, not like a good news / bad news joke.

Here is what it is like, written by the author of the book I’ve been reading, The Gurus, the Young Man, and Elder Paisios, by Dionysios Farasiotis (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Platina, California, 2008, pp. 84-85). This visitation from God happened to the writer while his worst sins were still ahead of him, and before the time he went seeking out gurus in India, thereby opening his soul to so many demonic influences that Fr. Paisios had to cast the demons out of him when he came back. Before all that, while the soul had nothing that even the most absurd pride could imagine to be a claim upon God, when God knew the young man would, for years, trample upon the gift, this happened:

I was praying alone in my apartment [when] I felt Him approaching me. I came to know the *perfect love* that *casteth out fear* (I john 4:18). He was so present, although He was invisible. He was so immaterial, although he was almighty. He was so unapproachable and intangible, although He was so near. He touched me, but not just on the surface. He touched he innermost depths of my being, filling me and permeating me. He united Himself with me so closely that we became as one. I was intoxicated by God, and I became like fire so that my very body burned. I wanted to be completely open towards Him, without a single corner of my soul remaining hidden, no matter how ugly or filthy it was. I wanted everything to be known to Him, so I confessed to Him and showed Him all my crooked and filthy ways, all of my vices. I longed for every corner of my soul to be visited by Him, by this vast infinite Love coming from all directions and filling all things. As Saint Symeon the New Theologian cried, “O Deifying Love that is God!” This Love holds the universe together, connecting every part of it, giving it the strength to exist, and being the very cause of its continued existence.

At the same time, however, I felt so unworthy and so unfit to be with Him that I fell to the ground with my face to the floor, in order to sink into the very concrete if I could. [Houses is Greece are constructed of steel-reinforced concrete.] I was so full of vice, so unworthy to exist and to be united with Him, that I wished I could stop living. I remained motionless, but this Love drew near to me, this Love that welled forth from the One Whose gaze is directed towards all things and Who pervades all things, the One Who has always existed.

Because He loved me, He allowed me to approach Him, and He purified me and healed me, thoroughly and deeply, of all my pains and sores. He drew me gently, steadily, and safely from darkness to light, from filth to purity, from non-being into being. He granted me a more intense, true, and vital existence, not because He had need of me, but because He is love.

The Paralytic at the Pool

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Today’s Gospel was the healing of the paralytic by the Pool of Bethesda. He had lain there for so many years, waiting for a chance to be healed in its miraculous waters. But only the first person in the water when it became “troubled” was ever healed, and this man never made it into the water in time.

“Do you want to be made well?” Jesus asks him.

Do you? Do you want to be made well? Because Jesus can definitely accomplish that, but He isn’t going to without your permission. Your free choice is not the cause of anything, but it is the precondition.

From The Gurus, the Young Man, and Elder Paisios, by Dionysios Farasiotis (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Platina, California, 2008, pp. 293-294):

Indeed, His power is everywhere present, yet beyond all perception and beyond the reach of arrogant human attempts to discover it, able to be known only when it reveals itself. This power is what brought the trees, the mountains, the stars, and man himself into existence and what sustains them. In a moment, this power could make them all vanish without any uproar, any tumult, or any resistance, as easily as the flick of a light switch can plunge a well-lit room into total darkness.

Simultaneously, I felt in my heart that God’s almighty power is also infinitely noble, with a refinement that could never allow His power of His presence to pressure anyone. Although He is so very near us, He remains unseen, so that we feel neither weighed down nor obligated even by His presence – for He in no way wishes to restrict us, but instead desires us to be completely free to do as we wish. He not only avoids compelling us through fear, power, and might, but He even avoids swaying us with His beauty, His love, and the irresistible sweetness of His presence. He does this out of an unfathomable respect for human freedom. Of course, He loves us with a fiery love and desires to draw us towards Himself, resorting to manifold other ways that reveal His boundless wisdom, personal attention, and tender loving care for each one of us. Indeed the vastness of the universe which He watches over in no way lessens His love and concern for us. In turn, He seeks, but does not demand, our love, which can be found only with complete freedom.

The Way of Salvation is the Way of Love, and as this author notes, love is only to be found in complete freedom. That is why God graciously preserves the free will of each and every person, so that even though our pride, greed, lust, envy, and so forth, are lobbying hard for the evil, the will still can still heroically resist these and choose the good. Put another way, God has not permitted us to descend to the level of brute beasts (for that is what we would be, if we had no free will). We are still men and still made in His Image.

If anybody tells you some such thing as that the will is indeed free, but not capable of choosing good, that is a sophistry, a word game, because there is no true choice where there is no ability; and where there is no freedom, there is no Love, and where there is no Love, there can be no salvation. Reject such a doctrine, and answer the Lord’s question; tell Him yes, please make me whole!

And if your cry is sincere, is heartfelt, He will.


P.S. Demetrios bought me this book several days ago, and I gobbled it up! It's the story of young man, Greek, who set out to find Truth, and spent yearts in the world of the New Age, of the occult -- finally, in the end, embracing Holy Orthodoxy by the help of the blessed Fr. Paisios. (The book recounts many of the miracles Fr. Paisios did.) I heartily recommend it to anybody, who like me and like this author, has traveled the New Age path. And I plan to publish several excerpts from it here.

Justice (?)

Bernie Madoff was jailed today. He'll be imprisoned the rest of his life.

The reporters I heard discussing it seemed disappointed that he pleaded guilty, as though they would rather have seen the man torn to shreds in a trial. What if he had been? What if he had even been sentenced to hard labor and then execution? What would have been accomplished? His victims' anger would have been somewhat more indulged. But what kind of recompense is that for his victims - momentary emotional gratification instead of financial reimbursement? Their life savings are still gone. They cannot now retire. They are looking at a lifetime sentence of their own: poverty. There are still charities that now cannot perform their services, because their money is gone.

Is this justice? Well, it's as near to it as human systems can provide, probably. God's justice, though, is orders of magnitude greater than this, and why? Because He is able to do what our justice cannot, and that is to make the victims whole again. He really does, in the end, set everything to rights. He restores everything to the way it ought to be, was created to be. He makes everything perfect.

What if Bernie Madoff's victims had everything made perfect again for them? What if they had all their money back, with all the appropriate interest and dividends? What if, besides that, their lives were made beautiful and perfect in every other way as well, so that they walked in peace, rejoiced in love, and gave incessant thanks to God? Then what would they want done with Bernie Madoff? Then it wouldn't matter nearly so much, would it? Because they would have their justice, true justice, in any case.

God's justice doesn't require punishment (in the sense of getting even) for anybody. In fact, in God's justice, the optimum outcome is, Bernie Madoff repents and everybody forgives him (not necessarily in that order!) and we all live happily together forever after. Christ died for many reasons (which I discussed in a 19-part series of posts last summer) but not among these reasons is that God had some emotional or legal need to retaliate. He doesn't, because as Bernie Madoff clearly shows us, wrong cannot really be corrected by punishing the malefactor; wrong is corrected by being replaced with right.

More on Holiness

If we want to become godly or Godlike, we also need to be sure we aren't confusing holiness with moralism. Imagine how horrible it would be if some people actually became like their god! (In fact, that chilling idea is what's behind Bill Maher's proposition that religion must die for people to live; and he's right vis-a-vis most religions.)

Holiness, for the Christian God, is defined by His Love. Holiness is whatever Love does.

Don't Try to Goozle God's Gizzards

To my attention recently came an expression I had never heard before: thank you for loving us when we had no claim upon you. I found this deeply touching. And it really struck me, because of course, if someone does something for me because I have a claim on him, that isn’t really love, is it? It’s obligation. Love is something we give in freedom; it is an expression of our innermost spirit.

And it has gotten me thinking about the way God loves us: without our having any claim upon His love, “while we were yet sinners.” Some people tell us, in effect, that Jesus Christ established such a claim on our behalf; but to say this not only grossly underestimates God’s love for us, but also tragically misunderstands what love even is. Love is a gift. And giving it is any true lover’s greatest joy. We rob him of that joy as soon as we think to demand or earn or buy his gift. We insult God's magnanimity if we suppose His love to be something we (or Christ for us) need secure. God doesn’t need to be pinned to the ground and made to cry uncle. He doesn't need to be compelled or manoeuvered or outflanked so as to love us. There is no such thing as needing to find a way that will either force or allow God to love us. And we should not need there to be any sort of contract with God before we can trust His Love.

God has no other agenda with respect to us than to love and save and glorify us. The very idea is absurd; for if love is free and unconditional and sacrificial self-giving, then any other agenda by definition would have to be self-serving. There just is not a whiff of self-serving about our all-good, man-loving God. There simply is not anything else whatsoever that God has to juggle with His Love. He is pure, undiluted, unmixed, full-strength Love. And nothing else.


Amazingly enough, to love us was always what He both wanted to do, and always, unfailingly, did. If you haven’t done so already, check out Matthew Gallatin’s latest two podcasts on how even those superficially appalling Old Testament stories of violence and death are properly to be interpreted as God’s love at work. It's a question most of us have wondered about. The podcast before those latest two presents us a similar way of interpreting some of God's tough words (as distinct from acts) in the Old Testament.

See what a righteous and holy and glorious God we have, Who invariably deals with every one of His creatures with infinite, pro-active, mightiest, tenderest love!

One Cause of "Atheism"

Please read this by Fr. Stephen Freeman. The comments are also edifying.

His Mercy Endureth For Ever

This phase occurs at least 41 times (or more, depending on how you count) in Holy Scripture.

Matthew Gallatin's latest podcast discusses how the penal substitution theory of atonement depicts a changing God (and how ironic that is, given that this theory also relies upon the Platonic God of Perfect Order). This alone, he points out, is enough to refute that theory.

But what interested me most about this talk was a different point I've never heard anyone mention before. It has to do with the Platonic belief that the soul is naturally immortal.

Orthodoxy insists this is not the case. St. Paul writes that Christ alone has immortality. (I Timothy 6:16) Immortality is a divine attribute, like being eternal. "I am the way and the truth and the life," says Christ, and, "I am the resurrection and the life." Christ, by His resurrection, has shared His immortality with the whole human race, conferring it upon one and all. Nevertheless, it is still in God alone we live and move and have our being. (Acts 17:28) God's gift of life is ongoing; He sustains us in life at every moment, and if He should stop for an instant, we would all perish.

Some of us may turn this gift of immortality to our own everlasting regret, which is entirely and in every sense our own doing.

Here's the point: if it were God's doing (as a reaction to sin), this would mean God was every moment keeping the damned alive in hell specifically for the purpose of everlastingly tormenting them. He wouldn't even be merciful enough to let them just die.

The Entirely Loveable God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ

So maybe I'm on a rant or a rampage or something, but now that I've finally grasped the Augustinian error of supposing God to be, above all else, a God of perfect order, especially moral order, it seems I'm seeing it crop up everywhere. Here is another instructive example of where you end up if you go by that assumption, and then I promise to quit already. Or at least I plan to; I'd better not promise.

There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. An umbrella of grace and forgiveness covers you; you are clothed with Christ, shielded from the law, sin and its stain cannot harm you as you are in Christ.

Did you catch that? God’s Law is something from which you need to be shielded! In other words, God's Law becomes the enemy, indirectly making God, as the Giver and Enforcer of the Law, into the Ultimate Enemy.

In fact, the Law of God is not our enemy, but our friend. As St. Paul says, it was our nanny, keeping us for God until Christ should come. (Galatians 3:24-25) The Law showed us how to approximate love until Love Himself should appear to teach us the more excellent way. The Law prepared us to recognize Love when He appeared.

Sin is our enemy. The Law is purely benevolent, beneficial to us; it is only our own sin, without any aid from God, that not only does harm us but can indeed still kill us, if we persist in it, rejecting Love until the end. (See Romans 7:7-13)

In the flesh of Christ, the demands of God’s law are met. The sinner deserves to die. Christ became the Sinner and died our death, fulfilling ever aspect of the Law, every little mark and tick of the commandment. Not only is there no condemnation for you who are in Christ Jesus, but the just requirements of the Law, the perfect obedience that the Law demands are fulfilled in Christ and given to you as His gift so that also in you, a sinner from birth, the just demands of the Law are met. No longer do we live according to the flesh, that is, our sinful nature inherited from Adam, but now we live according to the Spirit, that is, our new nature given to us by Christ.

And here we have God, demanding from Christ, in our stead, both perfection and punishment, which duel demand is in fact not lawful (only blessings are decreed for those who keep the Law). Let alone is it moral, just, or loving. But the assumption that God is above all else the God of perfect moral order can’t do without the punishment. Punishment is thought to restore that moral order. Suffering is thought to balance out sin. (In fact, only faithful obedience remedies disobedience.) But then, after the punishment is exacted, we're only back to zero, neutral. What we need is positive righteousness. Hence the requirement in this thinking for BOTH punishment and perfection.

And now we come to the invariable, inescapable, tragic result of this kind of teaching. The blog I quoted yesterday went on to say, "We live in the uncomfortable juxtaposition of loving, delighting, and doing; while at the same time despising, abhorring, and rebelling against the law of God." And the blog I'm looking at today says a similar thing.

The mind held captive by the flesh is hostile to God. Have you ever met someone who was hostile to God? I don’t mean simply irked at Christians, which is often justifiable. I don’t even mean upset with the Church, which is often just as justifiable. I’m talking about outright hostility to toward God. Hatred toward the holy. Hostility toward what is pure and just and true.

Well and truly said! The mind held captive by the flesh wants to go its own way, seek its own well-being, comfort, and pleasure and too bad about everybody else. But the converted mind, in Orthodoxy anyway, doesn't experience this ambivalence toward God we so often hear described by others. If you do, maybe you weren't taught that God's Law is a function of His perfect, selfless, unfailing, unbounded Love. We quite naturally rebel against any Law not defined by Love. As well we should; truly, it isn't holy or true or pure or just.

If you want an inkling of what God is like, call to your mind whoever or whatever is most beautiful to you, so tenderly, achingly, wondrously beautiful the very thought moves you to tears. God is the Author of that! Meaning He is infinitely more beautiful, wonderful, loveable, than that. He is more beautiful, wonderful, loveable than anybody can even imagine. There is no "dark side" to God, nothing about Him whatsoever that is not thoroughly, utterly delightful, precious, appealing, and dear. "In Him is no darkness at all."


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God as Law vs. God as Love

Here is a perfect example of the error I've been pondering and writing about for several days now, in which the most fundamental characterization of God is thought to be Law, when in reality, the Law proceeds from, and is a function of, Love. Love is the most basic truth about God.

Here is an excerpt from the opening paragraph of the blog post I've just found:

In the beginning, when all was formless and void, God created all things giving it substance and form, establishing order out of chaos. He did so through the Law. By the Law is meant the eternal, unchangeable Law of God, which is the revelation of His will, the standard of perfection, and the mold and fashion out of which all creatures were formed and conformed, so as they would be happy. God is holy, and His Law is holy. His Law is the image of Himself; it is the word of Life and Truth declaring that of which He is the perfect pattern. ‘Be ye holy,’ He says, ‘for I am holy.’ ‘Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.’

Can you see how unbiblical this actually is? What does the Scripture say? That God created everything not through the Law, but by His Word. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...and without Him was nothing made that was made." And that Word was Christ, Who took flesh and came among us.

In what image were we made? The image of the Law? No, the image of the Holy Trinity, the God who is Love. He Himself, not His Law, is "the mold and fashion out of which all creatures were formed and conformed."

Is the Law our standard of perfection? No, for Christians that Standard is a Person, Jesus Christ.

Christ is also the perfect "image of Himself"; Christ "is the word of Life and Truth declaring that of which He is the perfect pattern." He is the revelation of God.

And so forth. Read the whole blog entry to see further implications of this error.

It makes all the difference in the world.

God of Perfect Love = God of Perfect Justice

God's absolutely perfect morality stems from and is the expression of His perfect love.

Listening again to Matthew Gallatin's podcasts, I thought this one in particular (#6 in the series, "Sola Scriptura and the Philosophical Church") was so important that I took the time this morning to transcribe the whole podcast for you.

Last time, I characterized the fundamental difference between Eastern Christianity and Western Christianity like this:

For the Christian East, God is most essentially a God of absolute, self-denying love. For the Christian West, God is most essentially a God of absolute order, most especially absolute moral order. This understanding of God in the West is a legacy it inherits from Augustine of Hippo, who began to develop this picture of God as he began to marry platonic philosophy with Christian theology. That legacy has been carried on by men who stand as his successors, like St. Anselm or even St. Thomas Aquinas. Even the Reformers carry on this same, platonically influenced view of God in their various theologies. When I closed, I said that Christians in the various Western traditions are by and large very unaware of how this view of God impacts their faith. They don’t know how significantly this view alters the apostolic understanding of who God is and what He is like and the role that we human beings play in His life. As I say, this goes back to Augustine, and let’s investigate that a little bit.

First of all, Augustine’s God is not one who is by nature selfless and other-directed. Instead, he is very much like the “Ultimate Reality” of the Greeks, like the already- mentioned ”Good” of Plato or Plotinus’ “One” or even Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover”. The God the Christian West inherits from Augustine is one who ultimately is focused upon Himself, upon His own perfection. And everything He does is motivated by His need to preserve the absolute order that His perfect nature demands. This understanding of God permeates Western Christian life. I found it exemplified on an Evangelical Christian website that I visited just earlier today. In his teaching about the nature of God, this particular minister proclaimed, “Above all things, God is jealous of his own holiness.” Now if you’re paying attention here, you’ll notice that I’m equating holiness with perfect order here. But in truth, that is exactly how the West has come to understand God's holiness. What makes God holy is the impeccable moral order of His being, his absolute moral perfection.

As we shall see shortly, this view of holiness has powerful implications for the Christian West’s basic understanding of salvation and of the believer’s relationship with God. And I think that again our investigation here of these implications may be helped by first having a look at the contrasting Eastern Christian understanding of divine holiness.

Now certainly, Eastern Christians know that God is absolutely morally perfect. That is an aspect of His being not just that we understand, but it is an aspect of His being that we experience in our ascetic and sacramental embracing of God. We often literally tremble in the presence of His perfection. But our experience also teaches us that His moral perfection flows from His self-denying, self-forgetting, other-directed love. It is this love which is the Source of His perfect moral virtue, of His truth, His absolute goodness, His ultimate righteousness.

Jesus makes it clear in the Gospels that perfect morality flows from perfect selfless love. As He says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart all your soul and all your mind This is the first and great commandment, and the second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commands hang all the law and the prophets.” (Mt. 22:37-40) You see, the Lord tells us plainly here that one who loves fulfills all of God’s moral commandments. Why? Because such a person is like God – completely selfless. I mean, if I love God with all of my heart and all of my soul, and with my entire mind, there is not a smidgeon of me left to focus on myself. I become wholly other-directed, just like my morally perfect Creator. The selfish desires of my own will, which are the source of all my moral imperfections, disappear. The fulfillment of the second command, to love my neighbor as myself, naturally follows.

When I became Orthodox, I discovered that I had spent much of my life misinterpreting this commandment of Christ. Like so many others, I’d taken Jesus to mean that I should love my neighbor with the same fervor and to the same degree that I loved myself — and I love myself a lot. But what Jesus is really saying is that I should be so selfless that I live only for my neighbor. In my neighbor’s presence, I recognize only one existence: his or hers. All my concerns are for him. I keep none for myself. When I empty myself of me, I become my neighbor. God commands us to love Him and our neighbor like this because this is the way He loves us. We are everything to Him.

Certainly, we are creatures who have dishonored Him by our sinfulness. We have willfully chosen separation from Him and willfully embraced the death that comes as a result and we can never measure up to God’s flawless morality. But that doesn’t make God stand aloof from us in disdain. He does not retreat from us, hotly displeased by the way we have marred His perfect universe. Instead, he responds just like the Good Samaritan, who brings healing love to a wounded Jew, a Jew, who just like the rest of his people, hates Samaritans, as we can read in Luke 10:25-37. By the life, death, and resurrection of the Son of God, the Holy Trinity selflessly reaches out to heal us of our great disease of death and sin, restoring us to intimate communion with the godhead and with each other.

I’ve heard Western critics of Orthodoxy say that Orthodox Christians do not recognize the holiness of God. They say that in our Orthodox focus on God’s love we forget about God’s justice. But that’s not the case. It’s just that, for us, God’s holiness IS His selfless love – which is ultimately concerned with healing and redeeming us. As for justice, well, justice is a devotion to setting matters right, restoring things to their proper state and their proper relationship. In our Eastern perspective when God unselfishly empties Himself for our salvation, that’s just what He is doing: He makes it possible for us to be right again, to return to the mystical union with God that we were created to experience. Of course, the reason Western critics accuse the Orthodox of not paying enough attention to God’s holiness and justice is that they have a much different view of both, holiness and justice, an outlook that comes from Augustine and his successors. The West interprets God’s holiness as his unapproachable moral perfection, and what’s more, God is first and foremost concerned about preserving His moral perfection and protecting it from all infringements. As for justice, well, the Western understanding of that also comes from the Greek philosophers. To the Western mind, God's chief goal is not the healing of broken human creatures. Instead, it is the re-establishment of the moral order which He conferred upon the creation in the beginning, an order which Adam and Eve messed up.

Let me once again make the contrast plain and clear before we continue. In the Christian East we find a God of perfectly selfless love whose supreme objective is to heal humankind and restore it to intimacy with him. In the West, we discover a self-concerned God who is above all things protective of His own righteousness. When it comes to humanity, His main concern is righting the wrong human beings have done to Him. True, even in this Western view, God’s saving of His own honor results in the salvation of at least some human beings. But their salvation is secondary to healing the wound they have given God. This understanding of God and the nature of salvation is evident in the teaching of Augustine, and we’ll begin to examine that next time.

God, East and West

Matthew Gallatin has an outstanding series of podcasts with the not always applicable title of "Sola Scriptura And Philosophical Christianity." Part Six of this series is especially excellent. In it, Gallatin, as an Orthodox believer and a philospher, gives his own "diagnosis" of how the Western view of God diverged from the Eastern one. He says it goes back to St. Augustine's thinking about God in overly Platonic terms. For Plato, the "One" (God) was "the Good". What was this ultimate, perfect Good? It was perfect order, specifically perfect moral order. In St. Augustine's marriage of Plato to Christ, God creates mankind because man, like rocks or rivers, is needed to fill a specific niche in His perfect order of things. When man sins, he upsets the perfect moral order which Plato conceives as the ultimate Good. God's concern, in response, is to restore the perfection of His creation. That indeed involves saving some men, but their salvation is secondary to the main objective of healing the wound inflicted upon God by our having messed up His creation.

All this, of course, is very different from the Orthodox understanding, in which the ultimate Good, the perfect holiness, is perfect love. For us, the God of perfect, selfless, self-denying, self-forgetting Love created us because of this overflowing love, so that we could participate in the very life of the Holy Trinity. In Orthodoxy, when man sins, God's immediate objective becomes to restore man. He never turns away from us; never seeks anything for Himself.

Matthew Gallatin fleshes all this out very clearly and succintly, far better than I am describing it, supplying the appropriate Scriptural quotations, too.

Please, please, take 10-12 minutes to listen to it. It's terribly important!

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St. Cyril of Alexandria on the Parable of the Prodigal Son

What then is the object of the parable? Let us examine the occasion which led to it; for so we shall learn the truth. The blessed Luke therefore had himself said a little before of Christ the Saviour of us all, "And all the publicans and sinners drew near unto Him to hear Him. And the Pharisees and Scribes murmured saying, This man receives sinners and eats " with them." As therefore the Pharisees and Scribes made this outcry at His gentleness and love to man, and wickedly and impiously blamed Him for receiving and teaching men whose lives were impure, Christ very necessarily set before them the present parable, to show them clearly this very thing, that the God of all requires even him who is thoroughly steadfast, and firm, and who knows how to live holily, and has attained to the highest praise for sobriety of conduct, to be earnest in following His will, so that when any are called unto repentance, even if they be men highly blameable, he must rejoice rather, and not give way to an unloving vexation on their account.

For we also sometimes experience something of this sort. For some there are who live a perfectly honourable and consistent life, practising every kind of virtuous action, and abstaining from every thing disapproved by the law of God, and crowning themselves with perfect praises in the sight of God and of men: while another is perhaps weak and trodden down, and humbled unto every kind of wickedness, guilty of base deeds, loving impurity, given to covetousness, and stained with all evil. And yet such a one often in old age turns unto God, and asks the forgiveness of his former offences: he prays for mercy, and putting away from him his readiness to fall into sin, sets his affection on virtuous deeds. Or even perhaps when about to close his mortal life, he is admitted to divine baptism, and puts away his offences, God being merciful unto him. And perhaps sometimes persons are indignant at this, and even say, 'This man, who has been guilty of such and such actions, and has spoken such and such words, has not paid unto the judge the retribution of his conduct, but has been counted worthy of a grace thus noble and admirable: he has been inscribed among the sons of God, and honoured with the glory of the saints.' Such complaints men sometimes give utterance too from an empty narrowness of mind, not conforming to the purpose of the universal Father. For He greatly rejoices when He sees those who were lost obtaining salvation, and raises them up again to that which they were in the beginning, giving them the dress of freedom, and adorning them with the chief robe, and putting a ring upon their hand, even the orderly behaviour which is pleasing to God and suitable to the free.

It is our duty, therefore, to conform ourselves to that which God wills: for He heals those who are sick; He raises those who are fallen; He gives a helping hand to those who have stumbled; He brings back him who has wandered; He forms anew unto a praiseworthy and blameless life those who were wallowing in the mire of sin; He seeks those who were lost; He raises as from the dead those who had suffered the spiritual death. Let us also rejoice: let us, in company with the holy angels, praise Him as being good, and loving unto men; as gentle, and not remembering evil. For if such is our state of mind, Christ will receive us, by Whom and with Whom, to God the Father be praise and dominion with the Holy Spirit, for ever and ever, Amen.

St. Cyril of Alexander, Commentary on the Gospel of St. Luke, Sermon CVII.

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Some people still cannot accept the thought of God not punishing all sinners, even repentant ones, at least vicariously in Christ (and again, directly, in hell, if they do not repent; apparently the torment and death Christ bore are still not sufficient in those cases). They are the ones who will tell you, "But this parable isn't the whole story." No, but the Father's disposition toward sinners is the main point of the story.

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