Byzantine theology did not produce any significant elaboration of the Pauline doctrine of justification expressed in Romans and Galatians (You will recall that the Protestant Reformation drew heavily upon this notion of justification and advanced an understanding of redemption that requires only faith and not faith coupled with good works). The Greek patristic commentaries on such passages as Galatians 3:13 (Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a cure for us), generally interpret this idea of redemption by substitution in the wider context of victory over death and of sanctification. They never develop the idea in the direction of an Anselmian theory of satisfaction. The voluntary assumption of human mortality by the Logos (Christ) was, in the minds of the Greek Fathers, truly an act of God’s condescension by which He united to Himself the whole of humanity; for, as Gregory of Nazianzus wrote, what is not assumed is not healed, and what is united to God is saved; therefore, we needed a God made flesh and put to death in order that we could live again.

The death of One of the Holy Trinity in the flesh was a voluntary act, a voluntary assumption by God of the entire dimension of human tragedy. There is nothing in Him by compulsion or necessity; everything is free: willingly He was hungry, willingly thirsty, willingly He was frightened, and willingly He died. But – and this is the essential difference between the East and West – this divine freedom of the hypostasis of the Logos did not limit the reality of His human condition: the Lord assumed a mortal humanity at the very moment of the Incarnation, at which time the free divine decision to die had already been made. He takes a body, a body which is not different from ours, writes St. Athanasius; He takes from us a nature similar to ours and, since we all are subject to corruption and death, He delivers His body to death for us.

I don’t know if you sense the difference between the Eastern and Western Church’s understanding of the Incarnation. The idea that the cross was the purpose of the Incarnation itself is vividly suggested by the Byzantine liturgical texts of the Nativity. The hymnology of the pre-feast is structured according to that of Holy Week, and the humility of Bethlehem is viewed as leading toward Golgotha: The kings, first fruits of the Gentiles, bring Three gifts…. By myrrh they point to Your death…. Born now in the flesh, You shall in the flesh undergo burial and death, and You shall rise again on the third day. The cross is not the result of our sins but, rather, our redemption from ignorance.