As I shared in the last issue of this article, there is a great difference between the East and West with regards to the “Fall” of mankind that is recorded in Genesis. Indeed, according to one Eastern Christian author, the view in the East differs from the West in several crucial respects. In opposition to the Western anthropology, influence by Augustine’s sharp polemics against Pelagius, the Eastern view of human beings and the Fall is critical of the understanding of original sin and its influences: (1) as inherited guilt; (2) as total destruction of God’s image in the human being; (3) as a sin of nature and not a personal sin of Adam and Eve; and (4) as legalistic relations of human beings with God and salvation based on Christ’s death as satisfaction of divine justice.

In the East, the cross of Christ is envisaged not so much as the punishment of the just one, which satisfies transcendent Justice requiring a retribution for the sins of human beings. Rather, the death of the Cross was effective, not as the death of an Innocent One, but as the death of the Incarnate Lord. The point was not to satisfy a legal requirement, but to vanquish death. God alone is able to vanquish death, because he alone has immortality. It is truly noteworthy that Eastern theology never produced any significant elaboration of the Pauline doctrine of justification. Even the commentaries on Romans and Galatians by the Fathers generally interpreted passages such as Galatians 3:13 (take time to look this up – to do this helps with becoming a vibrant Christian – another Bulletin article) as victory over death and sanctification of life. Understandably, the Eastern Fathers also never developed the theory of  satisfaction along the lines of Anselm’s theory.

You will recall, hopefully, that in the West the two great theories that developed were justification and satisfaction, especially among those who broke from the Roman Church – known as Protestants. Of course the West does not seem to have grasped the idea of Theosis which, I believe, is the foundation of taking this different approach to the work of God through Jesus Christ (the Cross).

   St Gregory of Nazianzus taught that God’s voluntary assumption, in the Person of Jesus, of human mortality was an act of God’s condescension by which he united to himself the whole of  humanity. He also taught that 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. One of the preferred images of the effects of Christ’s death in the Christian East has been medical: the cross is an antidote to the poison of corruptibility and sin.