I ended the last issue of this article by sharing the fact that St. Augustine, the originator of the idea of Original Sin, greatly influenced Anselm. By the way I would hasten to remind my readers that the idea of Original Sin is not found in the Bible and was the conclusion of St. Augustine as he thought about the story of Adam and Eve and their rejection from the Garden of Eden. In truth, the Eastern Church never really embraced that idea.

After Anselm’s and subsequently Peter Abelard’s “revolution” in Atonement theology, most of the West became further estranged from the Eastern Church’s experience. Thus arose a host of new supposed “developments” in theology from Catholic and Protestant scholars: Vicarious Atonement, which placates God’s anger (talk about making God in man’s image); Don Scotus’ “merits” for the predestined; and indulgences, which apparently can “pay” the Church the fee for the offenders’ sins (this one caused Luther to mount his great PROTEST).

Four hundred years after Anselm, the Roman Catholic Council of Trent, which was largely called in reaction to the Protestant Reformation, was compelled to define the exact nature of Atonement in agreement with Anselm’s new understanding. This Council established that at the core of Anselmian Atonement was St. Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin.

The Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin, which entails all of Adam’s posterity inheriting guilt, sets certain parameters for the Anselmian doctrine that do not exist in the Eastern Church’s biblical-patristic mindset. Due to a faulty translation of Romans 5:12 in St. Jerome’s Vulgate (the Latin translation of the Bible), St. Augustine formulates the doctrine that not only do all men inherit mortality and the inclination to sin, but they are guilty and legally liable before God for Adam’s sin. This doctrine profoundly affects the perspective of how one is saved and from what he is saved.

I wonder whether any of my readers ever asked themselves about what they needed to be saved from. I suspect that since our Church has been so influenced by the Roman Catholic Church, which looks to Anselm and Augustine, many have never even dared to ask the question: How and from What has Christ saved me?