Sunday, April 26

It may come as news to some readers that the doctrines around “atonement” are fraught with controversy. I say that because thirty years ago, it would have come as news to me, and I was a fairly engaged Calvinist layman. But on atonement, I reflexively took the “penal substitutionary” view (the leading example of what the following table calls “Transactional View”).

As I was becoming Orthodox, supplementing formal catechesis with taped catechesis from a prominent priest (I can still remember listening to a discussion of atonement as I walked laps on the rubberized track at my health club), I learned that my view, shared by many besides Calvinists, presented some thorny problems.

I wish I’d had this table available. I think I’d have immediately felt my heart sing at the “Conciliar View” because it corresponded to what I perceived about my “problem” and about my desire to have my roots sink deep.

A bit of the introduction to the topic, from the source article, if you’re feeling very nerdy:

In the spring of 1157, the Patriarch-elect of Antioch, Soterichos Panteugenos, subjected the Divine Liturgy to Aristotelian scrutiny and found it wanting. The prayer addressed to Christ—”For it is Thou who offerest and art offered, who receivest and art Thyself distributed”—struck him as a logical contradiction. A true sacrifice requires a distinct payer and payee, he reasoned. To preserve the intelligibility of the Cross, Soterichos proposed a correction: the Son offers as High Priest, but the Father alone receives.

Soterichos was not entirely wrong: if the Atonement is a transaction, the Liturgy is incoherent—you cannot pay yourself. But the Council of Blachernae reversed his logic. Rather than correcting the Liturgy to fit the transaction, it denied the transaction to affirm the Liturgy. Guided by Nicholas of Methone, the Council affirmed that Christ is both the Offerer (ho prospheron) and the Receiver (ho prosdechomenos). The tension Soterichos identified was taken as a feature, not a bug—a safeguard against thinking of atonement as a transaction.

In place of transaction, the Council affirmed union: the Incarnation is not a mere precondition for the Cross but the same saving work. The Council’s anathemas speak of a single “mystery of the economy,” condemning those who “divide the indivisible.”

All but one of the autocephalous churches at the time participated in this Council and agreed ....

Thesis: The Council held that Christ is both Offerer and Receiver of the sacrifice—”He who offers and is offered and receives.” This reflexivity precludes transactional models of atonement. A transaction requires a distinction between payer and payee; one cannot pay oneself. Soterichos saw this tension and attempted to resolve it by assigning the offering to the Son and the receiving to the Father alone. The Council reversed his logic: rather than correcting the Liturgy to fit the transaction, it denied the transaction to affirm the Liturgy.

Once atonement is reduced to a transaction, a cascade of theological failures follows.

Although I didn’t have this table available, or the article from which it came, my heart similarly sang at this excerpt from the most characteristic Orthodox prayer:

Lord cleans us from our sins. Master pardon our transgressions. Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for Thy Name’s sake.

My Evangelical/Calvinist milieu seemingly knew nothing of the shadings of sin, transgression, and infirmity. But my heart knew. And that’s why the “conciliar view” of atonement resonates.

Finally, since I’ve been thinking a lot about Iain McGilchrist, I note that the left hemisphere would not like, even a little, “a single mystery of the economy” and would very much want to “divide the indivisible.”

As Wordsworth said, we murder to dissect.

English Reformation

I like it that Paul Kingsnorth matter-of-factly refers to the English Reformers as the “English Taliban.” If you want a more detailed account, I recommend Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars. It almost cured me of Anglophilia.

“A Good Person”

I often hear people say, “I don’t need religion to be a good person,” but rarely does anyone consider the question, “What does it mean to be a good person?” Usually the response to that question is, “I’ve never killed anyone; I don’t steal.” Well, that does not define a good person; it merely describes someone who is not extraordinarily bad. Furthermore, there are saints who have committed those sins, and not only did they not remain wicked, they became holy. So, for Christianity, to be good does not mean never to have done bad things. Rather, it means to come into union with God through repentance.

Vassilios Papavassiliou, Thirty Steps to Heaven

(Side note: When I posted on social media that I had finished Thirty Steps to Heaven, my brother quipped “How’s the view from up there?”).

One can hardly resent such a clean shot.

...the deep structures of modern intellectual life are shaped largely by the works of non- or anti-Christians. Nineteenth-century theorists like Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud established the intellectual conventions of the modern university. Their legacy, for good and for ill, provides the framework in which Christians do their advanced studies. The same is true for the principal theorists of the twentieth century — Milton Friedman, Ferdinand Saussure, Ferdinand Braudel, E. P. Thompson, Thomas Kuhn, Jacques Derrida — none of whom is concerned about the Christian implications of his work; yet they have set the agenda for what goes on throughout the academy.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

Christianity as amusement

I believe that I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.