flameburns623 said:
“Once God freely decided out of His sovereign electing love to save sinners, there was but one way of bringing about this desired salvation which would be in harmony with God’s character, the law of God, the nature of sin, and the needs of man. This one way was by the substitutionary blood atonement of the incarnate Son of God”
Here is a piece on the theory of substutionary atonement 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.
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 among the Orthodox Christians of the East.
frederica.com/
