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Category: Anastasiya Gutnik

Orthodox Christians on Penal Substitutionary Atonement

 

Comments from Two Readers on my article “Evidence for Christ’s Descent into Hell

David Roxas on 10-June-2018 wrote:

“This is not to say that Protestants and Evangelicals should relinquish the penal model of salvation altogether, but that they should incorporate the ancient patristic model of Christus Victor into their theology.”

Scratching my head over this one. What exactly do you mean the penal mode of salvation should not be relinquished? Should the Orthodox then accept it? Forensic justification by faith alone and penal substitution go hand in hand so how do you propose to separate them if at all? How does penal substitution fit with salvation by participation in the uncreated energies of God (theosis)?

“I believe that there is some merit to the penal theory of atonement and that we need a balanced corrective to the dominant Protestant understanding.”

As Ricky said to Lucy “You got some ‘splainin’ to do!” Please tell us more about what you think the merits of penal theory of the atonement.

Anastasia Gutnik on 14-June-2018 wrote:

I had no idea you were a closet protestant! haha! After 6 years of blogging and you cannot get past penal substitution. that is hilarious Robert!

 

My Response

I appreciate David and Anastasia’s questions about a statement I made in the article “Evidence for Christ’s Descent into Hell. (6 April 2018)” I am also somewhat amused by their incredulity at my attempt to maintain a charitable openness towards Protestant soteriology. Becoming Orthodox did not entail my rejecting Protestant theology wholesale, but only that which is incompatible with the historic Christian Faith.

How Christ saves us is a tremendous mystery that cannot be reduced to a simple doctrinal formula as many Protestants seem to assume. While both Protestants and Orthodox Christians see great importance in Christ’s death, they approach it very differently. Whereas the Protestant understanding has been shaped by their reaction against medieval Roman Catholicism, the Orthodox understanding has been shaped by the early Church Fathers and the ancient liturgies. Unlike Protestantism, which has well-defined and clearly-articulated statements on how Christ saved us, the early Church had no clear-cut soteriology (McGrath Vol. 1 p. 23; Kelly p. 375). This means that it is difficult to draw a clear-cut black-and-white distinction between Protestant and Orthodox soteriologies. Whereas the Orthodox Church has rejected Protestant doctrines like justification by faith alone and double predestination, there has yet to be a formal condemnation of the theory of penal substitutionary atonement. While there are Orthodox Christians who are very critical of this theory, there are others who are receptive to it. I hope one day to write a more in-depth article on the differences and similarities between the two theological traditions. However, in light of the importance of David and Anastasia’s questions for Reformed-Orthodox dialogue, I believe that I should attempt a brief sketch in this article.

To answer their questions: Yes, Orthodoxy does believe in Christ’s substitutionary death on the Cross, but not in the same way as Protestants do. Below is a sketch of the paradigmatic differences between Protestantism and Orthodoxy over how Christ saves us through his death on the Cross. Then, further down in the article, I cite several contemporary Orthodox apologists—Kabane the Christian, Frederica Mathewes-Green, and Father Josiah Trenham—on their understanding of Christ’s saving death.

Problem – In Protestant theology, the big problem is the guilt that results from our violating the law and God’s wrath against guilty sinners. In Orthodoxy, the big problem is our alienation from God who is Life, and our captivity to the Devil and Death.

Solution – In Protestant theology, the solution is Jesus being punished on our behalf in order to pay the penalty we richly deserve. In Orthodoxy, the solution is Jesus’ dying on the Cross, his descent into Hades, the realm of Death, and his third-day Resurrection, in which the gates of Hell are shattered, captive humans set free from Death, and joined to Christ the Life of the World.

Emphasis – This explains why the key doctrine of Protestantism is justification by faith alone—the word “justification” puts the focus on the legal imputation of guilt, the requisite punishment for that guilt, and the imputation of Christ’s legal righteousness to those who have faith in Christ. In Orthodoxy, this explains why the emphasis is on our union with Christ who is Life, and on faith in Christ as faithfulness to Christ.

I would encourage readers to listen to the two podcasts linked below and to consider purchasing Father Josiah’s excellent book. I have provided a few transcribed remarks with time marks for their convenience.

Kabane the Christian’s “Do Orthodox Christians Believe in Penal Atonement?

He states forthrightly: “Yes, Orthodox do believe in penal substitution.” [0:21] He also notes that the Church Fathers taught that Christ took the penalty we deserved. [0:53] He then goes on to explain that the penalty we deserve is death, the tearing of the soul from the body.

Kabane notes that in the West, death, which Orthodoxy views as the primary problem, gets shoved to the side and eternal hell is seen as the real punishment even though hell is not mentioned in Genesis 3. [5:20] For the Orthodox, hell is the eternal realization of death. [5:57]

Frederica Mathewes-Green’s “Orthodoxy and the Atonement

She notes about Orthodoxy: “We just believe that God just forgives us. He doesn’t expect anyone to pay. It isn’t that he gets a third party to pay. He just lets it go.” [5:08] She notes that in the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant (Matthew 18:23-35) the Master forgives; he does not get a third party to pay off the debt owed him. In the Parable of the Prodigal Son the father forgives the son and welcomes him home [5:45]. The father does not demand that the son repay the money squandered (Luke 15:11-32).

Frederica notes that our problem is not so much forgiveness as death. “We have to be rescued. We’ve made ourselves captives of the Evil One. We’ve gotten ourselves enclosed in the prison of death through our sins.” [6:18]

Father Josiah Trenham’s Rock and Sand

Fr. Josiah notes:

The great problem with Protestant teaching on salvation is its thorough-going reductionism. In the Holy Scripture and in the writings of the Holy Fathers salvation is a grand accomplishment with innumerable facets, a great and expansive deliverance of humanity from all its enemies: sin, condemnation, the wrath of God, the devil and his demons, the world, and ultimately death. In Protestant teaching and practice, salvation is essentially a deliverance from the wrath of God. (p. 288; emphasis added)

The traditional Christian teaching expressed in the New Testament and the writings of the Fathers on the subject of the atonement of our Savior is the Cross saved us in three essential ways: on the Cross Jesus conquered death; on the Cross Jesus triumphed over the principalities and power of this evil age; on the Cross Jesus made atonement for human sins by His blood. Because the Protestants were working out of a soteriological framework of a courtroom and declarative justification, they read the teaching about the Cross through these lenses and as a result articulated a reductionistic theology of the atonement, which ignored the traditional emphasis on the conquering of death and the triumph of the demons. Everything for Protestantism becomes satisfaction of God’s justice, and by making one image the whole, even that image became distorted in Protestant articulation. (p. 294)

. . . the greatest reductionism is found in the immense neglect of emphasis upon the heart of the New Testament teaching on salvation as union with Jesus Christ . . . . The theology of the Church bears witness to the fact that the mystery of salvation is accomplished not just on the Cross, but from the very moment of Incarnation when the Only-Begotten and Co-Eternal Son united Himself forever with humanity in the womb of the Virgin Mary, his Most Pure Mother. Salvation as union and communion between God and Man drips from every page of the new Testament and in the writings of Holy fathers. (p. 296; emphasis added)

To be fair, two nineteenth-century Reformed theologians, John Williamson Nevin and Philip Schaff of the Mercersburg Theology school, sought to highlight the more holistic understanding of salvation within the Reformed tradition. (See my assessment of this small but important movement.)  More recently, Anglican bishop N.T. Wright’s writings and some of his Reformed followers in the Federal Vision movement have moved away from this narrow, exclusively legal-forensic view. Sadly, in their attempt to incorporate aspects of patristic theology, they have been charged as heretics by their Reformed brethren for seeking to recover ancient Christianity!  (See the Recommended Reading at the bottom which lists several articles about the alternative soteriologies that recently surfaced within the Reformed tradition.)

Conclusion

Oftentimes, when one experiences a feeling of disbelief and incredulity, they will say: “Pardon me. I don’t think I heard you right?” My response to David Roxas and Anastasia Gutnik is: “No. You did not hear me right. You are trying to understand my statements using the black-and-white theological categories that emerged from Protestantism’s conflict with Roman Catholicism in the 1500s.”

David Roxa’s assertion that justification by faith alone and penal substitution go hand-in-hand is an assumption that needs to be scrutinized in light of Scripture and the early Church Fathers’ reading of Scripture. While there is a penal aspect to Christ’s death, how we understand “penal” needs to be scrutinized for hidden assumptions. What also needs to be scrutinized is the centrality of justification (legal righteousness) to our salvation in Christ. Is justification central to salvation or an aspect of salvation? It seems that for Protestants, forensic justification is equivalent to salvation. But is that the case in light of the rich, diverse Scriptural teachings about how Christ saves us? My impression is that in defending sola fide (justification by faith alone) Protestant theology inadvertently ended up suppressing certain passages from their reading of Scripture. This gave rise to a theological paradigm that many Protestants today accept uncritically. It also gave rise to their ignorance of its novelty and sola fide’s being conditioned by medieval Roman Catholicism. If, on the other hand, it is union with Christ that is central to our salvation, of which justification is one aspect, then the penal substitutionary theory does not necessarily preclude theosis. This would address David Roxas’ concern that penal substitutionary atonement is incompatible with theosis – salvation as participation with the uncreated energies of God. This would help correct some of the overemphasis in Protestant theology and help Protestant inquirers integrate the Church Fathers into their understanding of how we are saved by Christ. Furthermore, it would validate my suggestion that a Protestant who wishes to become Orthodox would not necessarily need to relinquish the penal model of salvation provided that he or she seek to understand it within the context of the patristic consensus.  Therefore, one need not be a “closet Protestant” as Anastasia Gutnik sarcastically alleged in her comment but in fact a solidly Orthodox Christian.

In closing, I urge David Roxas, Anastasia Gutnik, and other Protestants to be more open to the early Church Fathers who had a richer and more holistic understanding of Christ’s death on the Cross. I also urge them to learn from the ancient Eucharistic prayers that contain valuable insights into how the early Christians understood Christ’s saving death. While the Church Fathers affirmed that Christ died on behalf of sinners and that He paid the penalty we deserved, the judicial emphasis is quite subdued, and other motifs such as redemption and union with Christ are given greater emphasis.

Below are some excerpts from the early Church. In them one will encounter a theological paradigm that is strikingly different from that of Protestantism, which should cause thoughtful Protestants to rethink their theology.

Irenaeus of Lyons, one of the earliest Church Fathers, who died circa 200, wrote:

Since the Lord thus has redeemed us through His own blood, giving His soul for our souls, and His flesh for our flesh, and has also poured out the Spirit of the Father for the union and communion of God and man, imparting indeed God to men by means of the Spirit, and, on the other hand, attaching man to God by His own incarnation, and bestowing upon us at His coming immortality durably and truly, by means of communion with God,—all the doctrines of the heretics fall to ruin. (Irenaeus of Lyons Against Heresies Book 5.1.1, ANF p. 526)

Athanasius the Great, a stalwart defender of Christ’s divinity during the Arian controversy of the fourth century, wrote:

. . . Even so was it with Christ. He, the Life of all, our Lord and Savior, did not arrange the manner of his own death lest He should seem to be afraid of some other kind. No. He accepted and bore upon the cross a death inflicted by others, and those others His special enemies, a death which to them was supremely terrible and by no means to be faced; and He did this in order that, by destroying even this death, He might Himself be believed to be the Life, and the power of death be recognized as finally annulled. (Athanasius the Great On the Incarnation §24)

In the fourth century liturgy of Basil the Great we find this statement in the Eucharistic prayer:

He gave Himself as ransom to death in which we were held captive, sold under sin. Descending into Hades through the cross, that He might fill all things with Himself, He loosed the bonds of death. He rose on the third day, having opened a path for all flesh to the resurrection from the dead, since it was not possible that the Author of life would be dominated by corruption. (Eucharistic prayer – Liturgy of Basil the Great, 4th century)

While not Protestant, the early Church Fathers were undeniably Christian in theology. There is much spiritual wisdom in the Church Fathers that both Protestants as well as Orthodox can benefit from.

Robert Arakaki

 

References and Recommended Readings

Robert Arakaki. “An Eastern Orthodox Critique of Mercersburg Theology.” OrthodoxBridge (2012)

Athanasius the Great. On the Incarnation.

Basil the Great. Divine Liturgy. Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.

Jordan Cooper.  “Thoughts on Mercersburg Theology.”  Just & Sinner (2014)

Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies 5.1.1. Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. 1

J.N.D. Kelly. Early Christian Doctrines. 1978 edition.

Alister McGrath. Iustitia Dei: A history of the Christian doctrine of Justification. Vol. 1 The Beginnings to the Reformation.

Matt Powell.  “Mercersburg and the Federal Vision.Aquila Report (2016)

Alastair Roberts.  “Approaches to Justification within the Federal Vision.”  Alistair’s Adversaria (2006)

Father Josiah Trenham.  Rock and Sand. (2015)

 

 

Protestant Reformation in the Old Testament?

King-Josiah-and-Gods-book

A response to Anastasiya Gutnik’s comment 24 June 2016:

From Anastasiya:

What do you think of Josiah?  In his time the worship of God was corrupt.  So much so that the law was literally a musty, dusty old book found hidden away in the temple.  Upon rediscovering the law Josiah launched a reformation destroying the idols and the altars upon which idolatry was practiced. Does this mean there were none of God’s people left?  But as Paul writes about the time of Elijah “I have reserved 7000 who have not bowed to Baal. So there is a remnant according to election of grace.” How is his any different than the Protestant Reformation?  What are your thoughts on the Apostle Paul warning that wolves would come and tear up the flock and that apostasy would happen after his departure? And what are you thoughts on his statement regarding the times of Elijah?

The church is composed of individuals “one of a city, two of a family” as Jeremiah writes. So what do you have against individual believers receiving the Holy Spirit? In the Acts we see individuals corporately receiving the Spirit (such as Cornelius and his house).  And what Protestant ever said this is done apart from the Church?  Article 28 of the Belgic Confession explicitly says of the Church that “out of it is no salvation.” Even today in the apostate and corrupt churches like Hillsong they still recognize the importance of corporate worship and belonging to a community of believers.

See also Anastasiya Gutnik’s comment 26 June 2016

 

MyResponse

Whoa!  All these questions!  I feel like I’m being interrogated by a prosecuting attorney.  What say you that we have a friendly dialogue between the two of us?

I appreciate your vigorous interaction with the OrthodoxBridge.  We may not see eye-to-eye on some issues, but we share common ground in our respect for Scripture.  I will explain my positions using the Bible.

 

Protestantism in the Old Testament?

Your listing of Old Testament passages seems to rest on the premise that the Protestant Reformation has parallels in the Old Testament, thereby providing biblical justification for the Reformation.  This entails the hermeneutical strategy of reading the history of Christianity, especially the Protestant Reformation, onto the Old Testament text.  Getting the types and parallels of Christ and Israel right is what the Jews of Jesus’ time were so poor and weak at.  They were often dead wrong. This means that using the hermeneutics of history approach calls for caution.  Orthodoxy approaches church history through the lens of the unique promise of Pentecost — Christ’s Upper Room promise that he would send the Holy Spirit to guide the Church (John 14-16), and Christ’s promise that powers of hell would never prevail over the Church (Matthew 16:17-18).  Orthodoxy sees church history as one continuous, unbroken narrative from the book of Acts to the present day.  We view world history as the history of the one Church through which God’s power and wisdom unfold bringing about the salvation of the cosmos (Ephesians 1:18-22).

The Apostle Paul’s prediction of the coming of “savage wolves” attacking the flock (Acts 20:29-30) parallels Apostle John’s counsel about heretics who denied that Jesus had come in the flesh (1 John 2:18-23).  The early Church had to deal with early heresies like Gnosticism, Arianism, and Manichaeism.  It survived these heresies, and in time Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.  It is difficult to see there being a universal apostasy as you seem to have implied.

If one wants to find a possible parallel for Protestantism, I suggest it would be the northern tribes’ revolt against Rehoboam (1 Kings 12:12-17).  What made that schism so tragic was not so much the rejection of the Jerusalem monarchy but Jeroboam’s creation of rival worship centers in Bethel and Dan, and the installation of a new rival priesthood (1 Kings 12:26-33).  These innovations made the schismatic Israelites susceptible to syncretistic borrowing of religious practices from their neighbors.

In your first paragraph you cited the example of King Josiah (2 Kings 23) reading the Book of the Covenant and cleansing the Temple of pagan idols suggesting it has parallels with the Reformation. What he did was to follow the covenant obligations imposed on the king in Deuteronomy 17:14-20.  In no way did King Josiah introduce new doctrines or worship practices.  This has been one of my primary critiques of the Protestant Reformers.  They rightly reacted against many of the abuses and innovations of Medieval Catholicism.  They sought to return to the original Church, not through the Pentecost paradigm — the Holy Spirit working without break through the Church for the past 1500 years, but rather through the novel method of sola scriptura.  This gave rise to novel doctrines not taught by the early Church Fathers or were condemned by early Councils.  Furthermore, it gave rise to a plethora of Protestant denominations with conflicting interpretations of the Bible.  The Protestant rejection of the episcopacy (priestly leadership) and their rejection of the Real Presence in the Eucharist (right worship) as understood by the early Church bears an uncanny parallel with Jehoboam’s innovations.  This is something that should give thoughtful Protestants pause.

You mentioned the Apostle Paul’s quoting 1 Kings 18 about the faithful remnant of 7000 who refused to bow down to Baal (Romans 11:4).  The important point to keep in mind is that Romans 11 is not about the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s, but about the perplexing situation in Paul’s time.  The Messiah had come and instead of welcoming Jesus as the promised Messiah, Israel chose to reject and murder God’s Chosen One.  This created a conundrum: Either Jesus was not the promised Messiah or the Jews were no longer God’s people.  These questions were likely on the minds of Paul and his fellow Jewish Christians.  This question quite possibly contributed to the tensions between Jews and Gentiles which seem to lurk in the background of Paul’s letter to the Romans.  Did Paul’s conversion to Christ require the renunciation of his ethnic heritage and religious roots?  Was Israel no longer Israel?  Romans 11 is Paul’s solution to the conundrum.  In it he explains the relationship between the Israel of the Old Testament and the New Israel, the Church.   In this context it becomes clear that when Paul alludes to the faithful remnant of the 7,000, he has in mind himself, his fellow Apostles, and Jewish Christians.

To claim the Protestant Reformers comprise the faithful remnant of 7,000 mentioned by Paul involves reading Protestant church history into the Bible, a very dubious proposition.  This reading of Scripture cannot be asserted; it must be proven.  For several decades now, Anglican Bishop and bible scholar, NT Wright, has been pointing out this common Protestant flaw of reading the Reformation back into Scripture.  Lowell Handy’s “The Good, Bad, Insignificant, Indispensable King Josiah” (2005) traces the place of King Josiah in church history.  Among the early Church Fathers and into the Middle Ages, Josiah occupied a minor role in biblical studies (Handy 2005:41).  He acquired prominence in the 1500s among the Protestant Reformers who saw in Josiah a model of a reforming king and in the 1800s among Protestant bible scholars who saw the “Book of the Covenant” read by Josiah as evidence for a revised understanding of Old Testament formation.  In other words, the prominence given to Josiah is peculiar to Protestantism and does not reflect the broader Christian exegetical tradition. This retroactive approach of reading Protestant history into the Bible is highly speculative and self-serving.

 

Coptic Icon of Pentecost

Coptic Icon of Pentecost

 

The Church — Individuals versus Corporate Body

In your second paragraph you cited Jeremiah 3:14 — one from a city and two from a family — to justify the idea of the church as an aggregate of individuals.  This is a bit of a stretch.  Where is this interpretation found in church history?  Some of the more extreme Protestant groups believe that all one needs to comprise a church is a group of like-minded believers who gather to hear sermons about the Bible. But that is like saying gathering a group of kids and giving them a ball makes them a team! They need to agree that they are a team, playing the same sport by the same rule, and under a team leader.  A more pertinent passage for explaining the individual Christian’s relation to the corporate body, the Church, would be 1 Corinthians 12:12-13:

The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body.  So it is with Christ.  For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.

And then, there’s 1 Corinthians 12:17:

Now you are the body of Christ and each of you is a part of it.

The Amplified Bible translates 1 Corinthians 12:27 it this way:

Now you [collectively] are Christ’s body, and individually [you are] members of it [each with his own special purpose and function].

The key point here is that we become part of the Church through the sacrament of baptism.  One does not join the Church as one is received by the Church.  Furthermore, Paul understood the Church to possess an internal structure, an ordering of ranks.  In 1 Corinthians 12:27-28, Paul lists the orders of church ministries: apostles, prophets, teachers, and workers of miracles.  In Ephesians 4:11, he gives a slightly different ordering: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers.  From these passages we learn that the Church is not an aggregate of independent individuals, but rather a corporate body of interrelated members.  There is no need to grasp at obscure or dubious Old Testament passages for our doctrine of the Church when there are New Testament passages that give us greater clarity on the question before us.  As a matter of fact, the Reformed tradition’s teaching about the Church as a covenant community speaks against the individualistic approach that you seem to favor.

In no way am I opposed to the idea of individuals receiving the Holy Spirit.  The real issue is whether one can receive the Holy Spirit independently of the visible Church.  The main difference is that Protestants deny that we receive the Holy Spirit through the sacrament of the Church (chrismation).  However, they need to take into account the fact that the sacrament of chrismation was very much a part of early Christian initiation.  Cyril, the patriarch of Jerusalem in the 300s, described the sacrament of chrismation in which the newly baptized is anointed on the forehead, the ears, the nostrils, and the breast. (Catechetical Lecture 21.4)  This remains the practice of the Orthodox Church to the present.  The point here is that just as baptism is a sacrament administered by the Church through its ordained clergy, so the reception of the Holy Spirit takes place via the sacrament of chrismation which immediately follows baptism.

The issue of the “baptism in the Holy Spirit” has been an especially divisive one for Protestants. Baptists and many Evangelicals equate the baptism in the Holy Spirit with the “born again” experience. Pentecostals and many charismatics identify the baptism in the Holy Spirit as an experience distinct from the born again experience and signified by the gift of tongues.  It’s not clear to me what the Reformed tradition’s position of the reception of the Holy Spirit is.  I searched through the Belgic Confession, which you cited, and while there were numerous references to the Holy Spirit, there seem to be no specific teaching about the point in time when the Christian receives the Holy Spirit.  I then searched through the Heidelberg Catechism, the Westminster Larger Catechism, and the Westminster Confession and was not able to find anything with respect to the reception of the Holy Spirit. Please help me on this.  Where does the Reformed tradition stand on the baptism in the Holy Spirit?  When does this take place for the Christian?  Does it takes place at the time of baptism, the born again experience, or is it an individual experience distinct from baptism?

You cited article 28 of the Belgic Confession.  The Belgic Confession‘s affirmation that there is no salvation outside the Church is a reflection of the historic understanding of the Church. The novelty of Protestantism is that it denies that claim to Roman Catholicism.  It justifies this denial on the grounds that Roman Catholicism under the papacy has become corrupt, unbiblical, and even apostate. Furthermore, Protestantism lays claim to belonging to the true Church on the grounds that it has the true interpretation of Scripture. This despite the numerous conflicting interpretations of Scripture held by the myriad of denominations!  My point is that you can cite Article 28 of the Belgic Confession all you want, but how do you know your church is part of the true Church?  Which makes me wonder: “What is your church affiliation?  And what leads you to think that your local congregation is part of the true Church?”

In closing, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy are two quite different religious traditions.  They once shared in a common Faith, however, tragically the Bishop of Rome (the Pope) following the Schism of 1054 has moved more and more from the patristic consensus.  What Martin Luther and John Calvin were protesting against was a medieval Catholicism quite different from the Church of the first millennium.  In that light, I view Protestants as unwitting victims of Rome’s deviation from the early Church Fathers.

I have done my best to respond to your questions.  I trust that I have answered them satisfactorily.  I look forward to hearing your responses to my questions and to the interesting conversation you and I will have in the near future.

Robert Arakaki