Original Sin

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Fr Ambrose:
If the Catholic Church’s teaching is all of the above and NO MORE - no additional teaching of the transmission of sin and guilt - then yes, your teaching is orthodox.
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The Orthodox Catechism I quoted says, “original sin is hereditary. It did not remain only Adam and Eve’s. As life passes from them to all of their descendants, so does original sin.” The Catholic Church agrees with this.

CCC 404 By yielding to the tempter, Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human nature that they would then transmit in a fallen state. It is a sin which will be transmitted by propagation to all mankind, that is, by the transmission of a human nature deprived of original holiness and justice. And that is why original sin is called “sin” only in an analogical sense: it is a sin “contracted” and not “committed” - a state and not an act.
One blessed result of your agreement with all the above would be the elimination of the Catholic teaching of substitutionary Atonement.
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The Catholic Church can’t forsake the scriptures in an effort to be accommodating. Besides, this isn’t an issue, since the Orthodox also believe that Jesus is the atonement for sin, and the scriptures explicily testify that Jesus is the expiation for the sins of the world.

… we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the expiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.
1John 2:1-2

… they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood …
Romans 3:24-25

EXPIATION. Atonement for some wrongdoing. It implies an attempt to undo the wrong that one has done, by suffering a penalty, by performing some penance, or by making reparation or redress. (Etym. Latin ex-, fully + piare, to propitiate: expiare, to atone for fully.)

Pocket Catholic Dictionary - John A. Hardon, S.J.

ORTHODOX CATECHISM

Basic Teachings of the Orthodox Faith
by Metropolitan Archbishop Sotirios

Redemption

As we have stated in previous sections, man has sinned. He has disobeyed God. He has broken His commandment. He was driven out of paradise. He became a slave to sin. He lived far removed from God. He had to be set free from the chains of sin. He had to be redeemed. It is for precisely this reason that the second person of the Trinity, the Son, was made incarnate, was crucified, descended into Hades, was resurrected, ascended into Heaven, and sent us the Comforter. He took upon Himself and bore all the sins of humanity, atoned for man, and reconciled him with God.
 
Fr Ambrose:
One blessed result of your agreement with all the above would be the elimination of the Catholic teaching of substitutionary Atonement. Glory to God!
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Gosh; suffice it to say, I am with Matt when he says that we could not get rid of the idea of substitutionary atonement one way or the other (at least not without getting rid of 1John, Romans, Hebrews and Isaiah). That said, it is not at all obvious to me how a belief in inherited guilt should necessitate a belief about substitutionary atonement or how a disbelief in inherited guilt should obviate the need for substitutionary atonement. Could you, perhaps, flesh this one out a bit more, Fr. Ambrose? What is the connection as you see it that should make these two a package deal?
 
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Matt16_18:
The Orthodox Catechism I quoted says, “original sin is hereditary. It did not remain only Adam and Eve’s. As life passes from them to all of their descendants, so does original sin.”
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Matt you will need rather a lot of discrimination here, the Eastern Orthodox Church has been rather heavily influenced in recent years and Augustine’s doctrines are, it seems to me, being promoted against all ancient Orthodox understanding. If you see the words ‘original sin’ beware, the Orthodox refer to ‘the fall’, the catechism you posted is simply not Orthodox. Phrases like ‘slave to sin’ are unadulterated Augustine and RCC - I have to say it took me a while to find one that reflected more Orthodox thinking, there’s no standardised catechism, but even so you really have to bear in mind that there really is no definition in Orthodoxy:

It mentions Augustine, saying that he thought it was a sin of disobedience while the majority of early fathers thought it was a sin of pride.

Might as well add his contribution to the ‘immortality’ discussion we’ve been having:

“God allows Adam and Eve to taste of all the trees of Paradise, including the tree of life which grants immortality. However, He forbids them to taste of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because ‘to know evil’ is to become party to it and to fall away from bliss and immortality. Adam is given the right to choose between good and evil, even though God makes him aware of the correct choice and warns him of the consequences of falling from grace. In choosing evil, Adam falls away from life and ‘dies a death’; in choosing good, he ascends to perfection and attains the highest goal of his existence.”

“After the Fall the human person ‘became deaf, blind, naked, insensitive to the good things from which he had fallen away, and above all became mortal, corruptible and without sense of purpose’ (St Symeon the New Theologian). Disease, suffering and pain entered human life. Humans became mortal for they had lost the opportunity of tasting from the tree of life.”

geocities.com/canonical_orthodox_2000/RussianCatechism.html

Here’s a better Catechism:

ocf.org/OrthodoxPage/reading/catechism.html
 
pelagia.org/htm/b12.en.the_mind_of_the_orthodox_church.06.htm#c1 .

1. The fall and restoration of man

I think that it is well for us to begin the subject by studying the fall of man and his resurrection which took place in Christ. This is very important, because in this way we shall be able to look more broadly at our subject, the catholic way of life. It is important also because the subject of the fall and resurrection is the basis of soteriology. If we do not examine it scientifically, we shall never be able to understand and live the life which the Church has. I ought to mention that the question of what is the fall of man has been analysed in other books of mine, and I do not want to repeat it. I shall merely emphasise a few points. The reader can find an extensive analysis in my book “Orthodox Psychotherapy”, and in “Time to act”, in the chapter “Traditional Catechism”.

We usually think of the fall in juridical terms, in meaning which have been taken from the law courts. We consider that Adam’s sin was simply a transgression of a law, an external one, and that this transgression created great guilt in man, with the result that this guilt has been inherited in Adam’s descendants.

But this view of sin is not orthodox. In Orthodoxy we regard sin as an illness of man. Man fell ill and this illness had an effect on the whole human race. St. Kyril of Alexandria uses the image of the plant. When the root of the plant has become ill, then the branches also fall ill. We can interpret Adam’s sin in this way as well.

St. Maximos, speaking of the fall of man and his restoration, puts them on a theological basis. He says that at the creation of the world and of man there were five divisions. The division between uncreated and created, noetic and tangible, Heaven and earth, Paradise and world, male and female. Adam, by the grace of God, but also by his personal struggle, an expression of his freedom, would have to overcome these divisions and reach communion and unity with the uncreated. To be sure, this last division, that between created and uncreated, could not be abolished, but the created would attain unity with the uncreated. Moreover, in the Church we say that there is no division between physical and metaphysical things, as philosophy claimed, but between created and uncreated. And further, we accept that the uncreated enters into the created, and thus man himself, as St. Maximos the Confessor says, also becomes uncreated by grace. Adam failed to transcend these divisions. And not only did he fail to transcend the division which we mentioned, but he also lost the purity which existed between the two sexes, with the result that decay and mortality entered into nature, that he wore the coats of skin of decay and mortality. Therefore now man’s way of conception, gestation, birth, etc. , is a result of the fall, it is what the Fathers called coats of skin, which he wore after the fall.

The transcending of the five divisions took place in Christ. By His incarnation, by His birth from a Virgin, by the union of divine and human nature, he united the uncreated with the created, the heavenly with the earth, the noetic with the sensible, Paradise with the world, and he even transcended the division between male and female. Thus man’s restoration was successful and every person was given the possibility that in Christ he too could transcend all the divisions and achieve his salvation.

continued
 
1. The fall and restoration of man continued

If we want to look more concretely at the matter of the fall we will say that, as St. John of Damaskos teaches, the fall in reality is darkness of the image, loss of the divine life and putting on the coats of skin. The darkness of the image is nothing else but the darkening of the nous. The nous was darkened and could not have communion and unity with God. Of course it must be said that according to the anthropology of the Fathers, man’s soul is rational and noetic. This means that man has two centres of functioning. One is the reasoning mind, which is connected with his nervous system, and the other his nous, which is connected with his heart. Adam’s fall, then, is the darkening of his nous, the loss of its noetic function, confusion of the nous with the functions of reason and its enslavement to the passions and to the environment. Instead of moving according to nature and above nature, instead of moving towards God and being mindful of God, man’s nous is turned towards the created things and the passions. That is why in the Church we speak of repentance, which is not simply a change in the head, as some theologians say, but a change of the nous. The nous must break away from the created and the passions and turn towards God.

A result of the darkening of his noetic energy is that man’s relationship with God and his fellow man is upset. Because of his darkened nous, man does not find meaning in life, he turns his attention to the external things, with the result that he comes to blows with men, he has no inner peace. This is analysed in a wonderful way by St. Gregory Palamas. Fallen man uses God to safeguard his individual security and regards his neighbour as an object for predatory exploitation. He cannot have selfless love, because all his expressions and all his love contain the element of self-seeking, which is to say that man is characterised by self-seeking love. So the darkening of the nous has drastic social consequences. Sociology cannot be regarded as independent of theology.

In this sense we can speak of inheritance of sin and of the ancestral sin, which man inherits at birth. In this sense too we can speak of the catholicity of the fall of man.

What Adam failed to do, Christ, who is called the new Adam, succeeded in doing. By His incarnation Christ deified human nature and became the strongest medicine for men, in the sense that He gave every man the possibility of achieving his deification. In this light we can interpret the phrase from the troparion that Christ raised up “Adam with the whole human race”.

pelagia.org/htm/b12.en.the_mind_of_the_orthodox_church.06.htm#c1
 
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GrzeszDeL:
Gosh; suffice it to say, I am with Matt when he says that we could not get rid of the idea of substitutionary atonement one way or the other (at least not without getting rid of 1John, Romans, Hebrews and Isaiah).
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And yet is it not odd that until Anselm produced his “Cur Deus Homo” in the 12th century nobody had ever interpreted the scriptures you mention as teaching substitutionary atonement!

The teaching came as something new.

Here is a piece from someone who could be considered a popular theologian for contemporary Orthodox, Frederica Matthewes-Green who is an American and married to an Orthodox priest.

From Frederice Matthewes-Green:

Many of my correspondents don’t know this history [of the notions of soteriology in the Early Middle Ages and earlier] and insist instead that the Blood Atonement theory is the earliest. It just isn’t so. They believe this because they find evidence for it in the Scriptures, but as I’ve said, this is a matter of your favorite Scriptures lighting up for you, in accord with how you’ve been taught.

The appearance in history of the Blood Atonement, or Substitutionary,theory can actually be located pretty precisely, in the work “Cur Deus Homo?” (“Why Did God Become Man?”) by Anselm, Bishop of Canterbury, in the 11th century. Anselm’s idea is foreshadowed in some earlier writers, like Tertullian, but it was not the general view.

The general view of the early church was not as crisp, as thorough, as Anselm’s. And this is why Catholic and Protestant theologians have seen Anselm’s theory as a great advance. Henry Bettenson, in his anthology “Documents of the Christian Church,” calls “Cur Deus Homo,” “one of the few books that can truly be called epoch-making.”

Catholic and Protestants have never claimed that Anselm’s Blood-Atonement theory is the earliest; they’ve said it is the best. It was a breakthrough. That implies something else came before.

Anselm’s theory, as we know, is that our sins create an overwhelming offense against God’s honor, a debt. God cannot merely excuse this offense and wipe the debt away, because it constitutes an objective wrong in the universe; justice would be knocked out of balance. There must be punishment.

Anselm: “Let us consider whether God could properly remit sin by mercy alone without satisfaction. So to remit sin would be simply to abstain from punishing it. And since the only possible way of correcting sin, for which no satisfaction has been made, is to punish it, not to punish it is to remit it uncorrected. But God cannot properly leave anything uncorrected in his kingdom. Moreover, to remit sin unpunished would be treating the sinful and sinless alike, which would be incongruous to God’s nature. And incongruity is injustice. It is necessary, therefore, that either the honor taken away should be repaid, or punishment should be inflicted.”

He goes on to say that “no sinner can make” complete satisfaction for sin. “None can make this satisfaction except God. And none ought to make it except man…One must make it who is both God and man.”

Because Christ did not deserve to suffer for us, but paid the debt voluntarily, he “ought not to be without reward…If the Son chose to make over the claim he had on God to man, could the Father justly forbid him doing so, or refuse to man what the Son willed to give him?”

I think most of you will recognize this. It is the standard view of traditional Catholics and Protestants.

continued…
 
… continued

During the Enlightenment theologians began to criticize this theory as legalistic, as too rooted in the Old Testament and not enough in the New, as portraying a God who hardly seems to be one of love. They began to develop an alternative theory which was little concerned with punishment of sin; instead, Christ’s sacrifice was meant to move and inspire, so that we voluntarily return to God, and God is moved to reconcile with us. This theory is called “exemplary” because Jesus is the example rather than the sacrifice. It’s proponents claimed to root their view in Abelard, a younger critic of Anselm. The big debate in the 19th century cast these two views as “objective” and “subjective.”

Because of this, conservative Christians in the West are disposed to see any attack on the Substitutionary theory as a move toward liberalism.

That is not so. There is a whole third viewpoint, which prevailed throughout the first millennium, and continues outside Western Christianity today.

frederica.com/
 
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Myhrr:
Father Ambrose, what do you think of this “I believe”

ocf.org/OrthodoxPage/reading/believe.html
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I read a few of its sections and thought it was very good.

I did not know that Saint John Damascene taught that we were created neither mortal not immortal but capable of choosing between the two, so that was interesting and I should go back and read Saint John’s Exposition more attentively.
 
Fr Ambrose:
I read a few of its sections and thought it was very good.

I did not know that Saint John Damascene taught that we were created neither mortal not immortal but capable of choosing between the two, so that was interesting and I should go back and read Saint John’s Exposition more attentively.
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I have to admit I find my mind spinning out of gear thinking about this. The old conundrum, Adam can eat of every tree in the garden of Delight except from that forbidden which is the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the midst of the garden; they can eat from the tree of life which is in the midst of the garden because that hasn’t been forbidden, but they didn’t eat from the tree of life, as God says - they’ve become like us to know good and evil (because they’ve eaten of the tree in the midst of the garden), but phew, they haven’t eaten from the tree of life (which is in the midst of the garden) and sent them out before they could…

:hmmm:
 
Fr Ambrose:
And yet is it not odd that until Anselm produced his “Cur Deus Homo” in the 12th century nobody had ever interpreted the scriptures you mention as teaching substitutionary atonement!
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Dear Fr. A,

I had read the Mathewes-Green piece already, so there was nothing there that I had not heard before. I will happily allow as Anselm did a lot to flesh out the idea, and that it was not emphasized as much in the immediately post-Nicene Church as it is now. None of that, however, really gets us any closer to making clear how this idea connects to the idea of inherited guilt. If you could draw the line that connect the two a little more clearly, I would be obliged.
 
Myhrr
If you see the words ‘original sin’ beware, the Orthodox refer to ‘the fall’, the catechism you posted is simply not Orthodox … there’s no standardised catechism, but even so you really have to bear in mind that there really is no definition in Orthodoxy
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Obviously you believe that speak with more authority in this matter than Metropolitan Archbishop Sotirios of the Greek Orthodox Church.

How can a potential convert to the Orthodox faith ever know whom to believe when people that claim to be Orthodox begin spouting contradictory opinions as authoritative teaching? Why should anyone accept that your opinions have any validity at all, when your opinions are full of contradictions, and you refuse to address those contradictions?
 
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Matt16_18:
Obviously you believe that speak with more authority in this matter than Metropolitan Archbishop Sotirios of the Greek Orthodox Church.

How can a potential convert to the Orthodox faith ever know whom to believe when people that claim to be Orthodox begin spouting contradictory opinions as authoritative teaching? Why should anyone accept that your opinions have any validity at all, when your opinions are full of contradictions, and you refuse to address those contradictions?
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To be very fair here, Matt, are you sure that Sotirios is a bishop of the Greek Orthodox Church? There are a lot of Churches with the words “Greek Orthodox” in the name, but not all of them are recognized as such by the broader mass of Orthodox believers. Of course, I am not sure that this matters much in the case of your response to Myhrr, as I am given to understand that Snowflakes think very little of those Churches which keep communion with the mean, old, Esphigmenou-persecuting Ecumenical Patriarch, but it would not be fair to the rest of the Orthodox faithful to treat Sotirios as any sort of authority if it turns out that he is just a bishop in the Ancient and Mystical Greek Orthodox Church of Southern Thunder Bay, or some such.
 
Come on brothers, raise a frothy mug and join in the chorus…

Ohhhhhhhhh…
Pelagius lived at Kardanoel
And taught a doctrine there
That, whether you went to heaven or to hell
It was your own affair.
Yes whether you went with God up above
Or down with the Devil to burn
Had nothing whatever to do with the Church,
It was your own concern, my boy,
It was your own concern.

No, he didn’t believe
In Adam and Eve
He put no faith therein!
His doubts began
With the Fall of Man
And he laughed at Original Sin.
With my row-ti-tow
Ti-oodly-ow
He laughed at original sin.

Then came the bishop of old Auxerre
Germanus was his name
He tore great handfuls out of his hair
And he called Pelagius shame.
And with his stout Episcopal staff
So thoroughly whacked and banged
The heretics all, both short and tall –
They rather had all been hanged, my boy,
They rather had all been hanged.

Oh he whacked them hard, and he banged them long
Upon each and all occasions
Till they bellowed in chorus, loud and strong
Their orthodox persuasions.
With my row-ti-tow
Ti-oodly-ow
Their orthodox persuasions.

Now the faith is old and the Devil bold
Exceedingly bold indeed.
And the masses of doubt that are floating about
Would smother a mortal creed.
But we that sit in a sturdy youth
And still can drink strong ale
Let us put it away to infallible truth
That always shall prevail, my boy,
The Truth shall e’er prevail.

And thank the Lord
For the temporal sword
And howling heretics too.
And all good things
Our Christendom brings
But especially barley brew!
With my row-ti-tow
Ti-oodly-ow
Especially barley brew!
-- Hillaire Belloc
 
Matt16_18 said:
Myhrr

Obviously you believe that speak with more authority in this matter than Metropolitan Archbishop Sotirios of the Greek Orthodox Church.
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The Church has been complaining of Augustine and the road travelled from there for the last 1700 years, the filioque is his which was later taken up by Charlemagne. Sotirios might knowingly be introducing un-Orthodox doctrine, but it could be that he doesn’t know any different; there is a history to how Augustine got introduced into the Greek calendar.

Augustine sounds quite reasonable and spiritual most of the time except if one knows the context he’s thinking in, inherited guilt etc. which is RCC doctrine because of him and it gets a bit weary having to listen to the two of you question that even though we’ve shown it is still being taught.
How can a potential convert to the Orthodox faith ever know whom to believe when people that claim to be Orthodox begin spouting contradictory opinions as authoritative teaching? Why should anyone accept that your opinions have any validity at all, when your opinions are full of contradictions, and you refuse to address those contradictions?
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Matt - for the last time, please, I have said I am not an apologist for ‘Eastern Orthodoxy’. Personally I think we’ve all been in schism since the violent enforcement of the calendar change around Nicaea 1…😛

I haven’t seen any contradictions in what I’ve posted. I do however see you struggling to make sense of it because you’re taking the last 40 years as normal RCC doctrines, but they’re additions and additions that have to be seen as being superimposed on the norm which is Council of Orange, Trent etc. which base is still dogma, the terms can’t mean the same thing.

For 1700 hundred years or so the RCC’s idea of God’s grace has been solely as defined by the term “sanctifying grace” which is something apart from God, something supernatural created especially for man to be able to live as an inferior with a God and over the centuries whenever the Orthodox have heard about your doctrines they’ve rejected them. All I can say is try to bear that in mind when reading anything coming from ‘Orthodox’ sources, and beware of Greeks bearing Western doctrines…

All this divinization and uncreated grace you’re talking about doesn’t make sense to me because of what I know of your basic dogma about Original Sin which rejects that as the Orthodox understand it. How can you not see contradictions in what I’ve been saying since you choose to deny this exists?

You might not like Augustine’s doctrines, welcome to the club, but they are your Church’s and you have bought into them, or some of them, and they colour your perception; the CCC has had to adjust Orthodox meanings to make them fit and quoting ancient fathers in support only confuses because much of the time they’re talking about something else. But I’m nowhere near being an expert on how every father thought about every aspect of this.

I would suggest, if you allow me, that you keep in mind Genesis I, that God created male and female in his own image and likeness etc. and not worry too much about anything else you read from others, RCC or Orthodox, that contradicts that - stay with it.

So, how does the doctrine, that Adam and Eve were immortal before eating the fruit, stack up now?
 
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GrzeszDeL:
Come on brothers, raise a frothy mug and join in the chorus…

Ohhhhhhhhh…

Pelagius lived at Kardanoel
And taught a doctrine there
That, whether you went to heaven or to hell
It was your own affair.
Yes whether you went with God up above
Or down with the Devil to burn
Had nothing whatever to do with the Church,
It was your own concern, my boy,
It was your own concern.

No, he didn’t believe
In Adam and Eve
He put no faith therein!
His doubts began
With the Fall of Man
And he laughed at Original Sin.
With my row-ti-tow
Ti-oodly-ow
He laughed at original sin.

Then came the bishop of old Auxerre
Germanus was his name
He tore great handfuls out of his hair
And he called Pelagius shame.
And with his stout Episcopal staff
So thoroughly whacked and banged
The heretics all, both short and tall –
They rather had all been hanged, my boy,
They rather had all been hanged.

Oh he whacked them hard, and he banged them long
Upon each and all occasions
Till they bellowed in chorus, loud and strong
Their orthodox persuasions.
With my row-ti-tow
Ti-oodly-ow
Their orthodox persuasions.

Now the faith is old and the Devil bold
Exceedingly bold indeed.
And the masses of doubt that are floating about
Would smother a mortal creed.
But we that sit in a sturdy youth
And still can drink strong ale
Let us put it away to infallible truth
That always shall prevail, my boy,
The Truth shall e’er prevail.

And thank the Lord
For the temporal sword
And howling heretics too.
And all good things
Our Christendom brings
But especially barley brew!
With my row-ti-tow
Ti-oodly-ow
Especially barley brew!
Code: 
-- Hillaire Belloc
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Yeah, let’s decide with Augustine that physical violence is acceptable to get people to return to ‘the Church’ and heck, while we’re about it let’s agree with Aquinas that it’s perfectly Christian to kill heretics… No wonder you still approve of Unam Sanctam.

What happens when men disregard the Creator of all? Isaiah says they become absurd, as if a clay pot were to say, “the potter did not make me.” Such a person “has no understanding” (Is. 29:16), and when the attitude is transferred into the worship of God, as the Lord reveals, they become people who “draw near with their mouth and honor Me with their lips, while their hearts are far from Me” (vs. 13). It is possible to mouth the right words at prayer but to debase worship inwardly and transform it into cliche, “a commandment of men learned by rote” (vs. 13). Consider the Lord’s view of the Publican and the Pharisee who went up to the Temple to pray (Lk. 18:9-14), or His thoughts on the widow who made an offering of her last two mites (Lk. 21:2-4).

trisagion.com/dynamis/040403.html
 
E-catholic

If you want to understand the differences I think you need to look at the Augustine Pelagius was arguing with, if you’ve got any other examples please post them, Pelagius isn’t easy to come by as his works were banned. Also, some of what has been attributed to him isn’t his, but if we collect whatever we find it’ll all be useful for discussion.

**Of human bondage
**
Augustine’s notions of original sin, grace and free will, and predestination are inextricably bound together, and they were shaped by his debates with the Pelagians.

Augustine believed that humankind suffers from original sin, meaning that since the fall of Adam, we are depraved—incapable of doing good without supernatural help. The commands of God to do good were given, Augustine concluded, simply to point out our inability and throw us on the mercy of God.

Pelagius, however, believed that if God commands us to live good and even morally perfect lives, he must give us the ability to obey without any special, supernatural assistance. Thus Pelagians denied there was any “original sin” or “depravity.” Instead of being “depraved,” the only disadvantage we currently have is that, living in a sinful world, we are more likely to develop sinful habits. Sin is a social disease, not an inherited spiritual-genetic defect.

Thus, Pelagius concluded, we are capable of living sinless lives simply by exercising our wills for the good. “A man can be without sin and keep the commandments of God, if he wishes,” he wrote, “for this ability has been given to him by God.”

Augustine was more outraged by Pelagius than by any other rival, and in response, he argued even more forcefully that we are born condemned for Adam’s sin and incapable of not sinning.

“A man’s free will,” he wrote against Pelagius, “avails for nothing except to sin.” Only the supernatural power of God’s grace, imparted through baptism, could heal the deadly wound of sin upon the human soul. (Hence the need for infant baptism—to heal that wound immediately.)

Furthermore, only the power of God’s grace could restore in some measure the free will lost in the fall of Adam’s race. Grace cannot be received by an act of human will or even cooperated with (synergism)—it must be given as a gift.

“The Spirit of grace therefore causes us to have faith,” he wrote, “in order that through faith we may, upon praying for it, obtain the ability to do what we are commanded.”

christianitytoday.com/ch/2000/003/7.28.html
 
Given that the Orthodox condemned Pelagius and the Pelagians at the Council of Ephesus, I am hard pressed to imagine how it might prove profitable (if our aim is to elucidate the differences between the Catholic and the Orthodox teachings on original sin) to concentrate on Pelagianism. Whatever either communion believes, apparently we are both agreed that Pelagius was wrong.
 
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Matt16_18:
How can a potential convert to the Orthodox faith ever know whom to believe when people that claim to be Orthodox begin spouting contradictory opinions as authoritative teaching? Why should anyone accept that your opinions have any validity at all, when your opinions are full of contradictions, and you refuse to address those contradictions?
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We are divided by a common language - and in the case of Metr Soterios, by two languages since I believe that Greek is his mother tongue.

When a Western person hears “atone” or “atonement” in such a context an entire schema of theological propositions jump into his mind. Nothing like that happens for the Orthodox, and I am sure that it doesn’t for the Metropolitan.

In the same way the Orthodox refer to the Mother of God as “immaculate” time and again in their services and prayers - and the word simply does not link in their minds to the Immaculate Conception and the doctrines which support it in the Latin Church.

And the Orthodox will use the term “transubstantiation” without any intention to reference the complicated substance/accident theory articulated by Thomas Aquinas.

I am sure that any convert from, say, Calvinism and its developed Atonement theology, when he queries the Metropolitan as to what he meant by “atone” will find that it is not related to any Calvinist or to any Anselmian doctrines.

Btw, did you know that the word “atonement” is one word which the English language contributed to theology in the 12th century. The word “atonement” is NOT a word from Scripture. It comes from no Greek word.* It is in fact the ONLY theological term which has an English origin!!! Before Anselm started to use it, it was unknown. It’s an English neologism.

" *Yes, there are two words in Scipture which can be used for “atone” but they are better translated as something like “propitate” and there is no way that they can be spun out to create the doctrine of the Atonement.
 
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