Here’s a video of an Eastern Orthodox priest explaining (from his perspective) two views of salvation:
Here are my own thoughts on his words:
- There’s probably something for Protestant theologians of every stripe to disagree with in the depiction of Protestantism here. That said, even though this isn’t really a pure representation of any one Protestant view, it is representative of much of popular soteriology.
- The idea of God pursuing sinful man that he uses as an explanation of Orthodox salvation seems to be true in some sense for Reformed theology wherein God unconditionally elects and saves by grace alone.
- In another sense the same idea doesn’t work if one’s version of Reformed theology also includes limited atonement, then it would seem that some are pursued by God, but others aren’t.
- On the face of it, one of the appealing aspects of the Orthodox view is that it does more to make sense of Jesus’ life and ministry whereas so many Protestants seem to view Jesus life almost exclusively as a preamble to his death. While this is true in both versions, the Orthodox version seems to take a fuller view of that same life.
- This is one of these things where I have trouble with putting theological labels on myself, I have a continued interested Orthodox views of atonement and salvation, but in most other ways I think I’m pretty reliably Protestant.
Thoughts?
What is it in Orthodox soteriology and atonement theory that you find attractive, out of curiosity?
A friend of mine who got into Orthodoxy a few years ago said that recent acolytes frequently and very mistakenly believe that certain things are totally different. He’s found Orthodox prayers that spell out, for instance, penal substitutionary atonement. A lot of cage phase American converts from Protestantism just don’t do enough homework to realize that a difference in emphasis does not always mean certain “Western” concepts don’t exist in the thought and teaching of the Eastern church.
@Andrew: I think the main thing is that it sees the life/death/resurrection of Christ not solely as substitutionary atonement. I know that there are any number of Protestants who also hold that sort of view, so maybe “Orthodox” is the wrong way to describe it, but the dominant mode of popular Protestant thought on it today is penal substitutionary atonement and little else.
@Wenatchee: There’s probably something of the gaze effect there, where people unhappy with Protestantism project on to Orthodoxy their own ideas. Orthodoxy as imagined by Protestants is different from the actually existing Orthodox churches in their own city. Same warning applies to those dipping their toes in the Tiber. (This is probably also true for Orthodoxy or RCs converting to Protestant churches – to be fair.)
A lot of groups within Christianity become so famous for just one or two ideas it’s easy to miss the various other things they have in common. There’s a kind of focusing illusion where if a person just thinks that Protestantism is defined by penal substitutionary atonement a person can forget this explanation predated Protestantism by a few centuries. I’ve read some Orthodox authors who have pointed out that the guilt-by-association game has meant that orthodox writers claim Augustine was bad news and forbidden even though neither Calvin’s nor Luther’s theologies are necessarily the only options to be derived from the whole of Augustine’s thought. I don’t know how much I follow that since I’ve only read Confessions and a comparatively small chunk of City of God but it’s potentially useful to the conversation here.
Warfield’s commonly cited statement would support your point (that significantly different theologies can be derived from Augustine):
“Augustine was both the founder of Roman Catholicism and the author of that doctrine of grace which it has been the constantly pursued effort of Roman Catholicism to neutralize, and which in very fact either must be neutralized by, or will neutralize, Roman Catholicism. Two children were struggling in the womb of his mind. There can be no doubt which was the child of his heart. His doctrine of the Church he had received whole from his predecessors, and he gave it merely the precision and vitality which insured its persistence. His doctrine of grace was all his own:it represented the very core of his being . . . it was inevitable, had time been allowed, that his inherited doctrine of the Church, too, with all its implications, would have gone down before it, and Augustine would have bequeathed to the Church, not “problems,” but a thoroughly worked out system of evangelical religion. . . . The problem which Augustine bequeathed to the Church for solution, the Church required a thousand years to solve. But even so, it is Augustine who gave us the Reformation. For the Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church. (Warfield, Calvin and Augustine, 321-22)”
(http://www.ritchies.net/p4wk1.htm)