Dear brother Don,
I think it is fair to ask why, if the language of sacrifice is ubiquitous in the Eastern DL, and “lex orandi, lex credendi,” why does one encounter so much Eastern (not from EC really, but from EO) opposition and aversion to the Latin Church’s concept of sacrifice, both in theology and spirituality.
I should note, of course, that the Oriental Tradition has no problem with the Latin concept, both in theology and spirituality, but actually shares it.
Blessings,
Marduk
We have no problem with the idea of sacrifice itself. Sacrifice is found throughout the Holy Scriptures with the offerings of Cain and Abel, Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac, the sacrifices for sin given by Moses to Israel, etc. It also features prominently in the works of all the fathers of the Church.
We are critical however of the
Anselmian interpretation of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross as given in his work “Cur Deus Homo”. Anselm attempts to explain why the salvation of the world could only be accomplished by one that is both God and man, and he explains this through God’s justice. God, who cannot change, is just, and his justice demands righteousness from his creation. When man fell into sin, he merited the condemnation of God which his justice demanded. Since God’s justice is in his nature, and he cannot change, he cannot simply forgive us without a propitiation for our sin being offered. This propitiation could not be offered by an ordinary man for all men, since his sacrifice would only avail for himself. God is also infinite, and therefore his justice is infinite, and requires an infinite sacrifice. Since man is finite he could not provide an infinite sacrifice, and so is unable even to offer propitiation for himself. Further, God’s justice demands that he could not sacrifice someone else for man such as angel, since that being was not guilty, and his condemnation on our behalf would be unjust. Our salvation therefore required that the sacrifice be offered by man, since he was the one guilty of sin, and by God, since only he could offer an infinite sacrifice. Only Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who became man, could fulfill these requirements, and therefore only he could be our savior.
The Anselmian theory is admirable in that it combines incarnational and soteriological theology, but we have some criticisms of it. One, it seems to make the essential problem of our salvation God’s justice, not our sin. God loves us and desires to forgive us, but his justice constrains him to also be wrathful toward us and punish us. It’s almost as though God is schizophrenic (of a split mind) and unable to reconcile his conflicting nature except through the incarnation. Two, it understands the fall of mankind exclusively in legal terms of a breach of the law and the punishment that justice demands. While it can be understood in those terms, it’s a reduction of the witness of scripture and tradition to only one aspect. We would emphasize that sin is a breach in our
relationship with God which divorces us from the source of goodness and life, and allows us to be dominated by our passions and the Devil until we eventually die. The problem is the corruption of our nature which requires healing which only God can provide. Three, it’s a philosophical approach based on the characteristics of God and his immutability, not the witness of Holy Scripture or the catholic tradition. We prefer to follow the reasoning of St. Athanasius in his work “On the Incarnation”, where he argues that God became man so that he could assume our nature and heal it, uniting it to God, so that we would become like him. He writes:
“The Word perceived that corruption could not be got rid of otherwise than through death; yet He Himself, as the Word, being immortal and the Father’s Son, was such as could not die. For this reason, therefore, He assumed a body capable of death, in order that it, through belonging to the Word Who is above all, might become in dying a sufficient exchange for all, and, itself remaining incorruptible through His indwelling, might thereafter put an end to corruption for all others as well, by the grace of the resurrection.”
spurgeon.org/~phil/history/ath-inc.htm#ch_2
Again, it isn’t so much that we say that there is no truth to Anselm’s approach, only that it focuses too narrowly on one aspect of our salvation.
It should also be pointed out, however, that Anselm’s theory is by
no means the only way in which the Catholic Church understands salvation. This is more true of Lutheran and Reformed theology than Catholic theology, which maintains the broader patristic tradition. This is something I had to point out to a member of my parish who was writing a paper on this subject that talked about the Anselmian theory as the “western” approach without any distinction between Catholic and Protestant traditions. Eastern Orthodox apologists are sometimes guilty of not making this distinction.
