The Eastern Church looks at human nature differently than does the Western Church. Eastern theology asserts that God created human beings innocent and good, but not complete. So life calls human beings to grow in God-likeness. The Eastern Church makes a distinction between the ideas of the image of God and the likeness of God. Even though humanity is made in the image of God, it still has to grow into the likeness of God.
When Adam and Eve sinned, they did not lose the image of God but, rather, the likeness of God. When the likeness of God was lost, immortality was lost. It is not original sin, according to Eastern theology, that was passed on to us, the descendants of Adam, but mortality. So human beings are not held guilty for original sin. They only become guilty when they sin, as Adam and Eve sinned and they have to learn how to live in order to become beings living in God’s likeness.
Christ came and died to provide us with an understanding of how to live in God’s likeness. He taught us that when we live in God’s likeness, immortality is ours.
John Chrysostom was one of the most eloquent Eastern Church fathers in the fourth and fifth centuries. In fact, his name, Chrysostom, means the “golden mouth,” a reference to the power of his preaching. Chrysostom believed that God’s work of creation was a work of grace and therefore good. Now, there were Greek philosophers who looked at this world as inherently evil, not from God. Our physical bodies are evil, but our souls are good, but unfortunately our souls are imprisoned in this sinful body and cannot find freedom until at death when our souls at last are released from this sinful body. In contrast to such ideas, Chrysostom put it this way: “Many also of the Greeks and heretics affirm that it the body was not even created by God. I for my part, when such things are talked of, would first make this reply: tell me not of fallen man, who is degraded and then condemned. If you would learn what manner of body God formed us with at the first, let us go to Paradise, and survey the Man that was created at the beginning. For that body was not thus corruptible and mortal; but like as some statue of gold just brought from the furnace, that shines splendidly, so that frame was free from all corruption. Labor did not trouble it, nor sweat deface it. Cares did not conspire against it; nor was there any other affection of that kind to distress it.”
As is evident, the Eastern Church has a different understanding of the condition of humankind than the Western Church. Neither are wrong!