The Eastern Church’s anthropology accepts punishment, death and mortality, not as God’s retribution or revenge for sin as much as pedagogy. The human being’s finitude would make repentance well up within her, the possibility of free love to God, the Creator and the source of all life. And, God’s plan has not changed; He always desires that man should be united with Him and transfigure the whole earth. The whole history of humanity will thus be that of salvation. As microcosm the human being represents and assimilates in herself the whole macrocosm, the creation. What happens to human beings, happens to creation. God is the Savior of all.

It is critical that we understand the real difference between the anthropology of the East and the West. They are both catholic! There is, however, a different emphasis.

The two major results of the Fall, namely physical death and the distortion of the image of God, call for the regaining of immortality and the restoration of the image. Salvation, then, is not primarily viewed as liberation from sin even though that is not a matter of indifference, but rather as a return to life immortal and the reshaping of the human being into the image of her creator. These two elements constitute the two greatest reasons for the incarnation of the Son of God. Consequently, Eastern theology takes the New Testament term soteria (salvation) in its biblical sense, which goes beyond terms such as redemption, reconciliation, justification and the like to encompass the wholeness of new life under God.

God did not “fail” in the creation of human beings. If, like Athanasius and others argued, God is truly the embodiment of truthfulness and goodness, then His incarnation as man means the restoration of human   beings and the creation.

The perfect God-man was the only qualified person to sum up in his own life the corruptibility and distortion of the image and bring about a recapitulation of the whole human race and creation. We have seen, Athanasius states, that to change the corruptible to incorruption was proper to none other than the Savior Himself, Who in the beginning made all things out of nothing. That only the Image of the Father could re-create the likeness of the Image in men, that non save our Lord   Jesus Christ could give to mortals immortality and that only the Word Who orders all things and is alone the Father’s true and sole-begotten Son could teach men about Him and abolish the worship of idols.  In the same act also He showed Himself mightier than death, displaying His own body incorruptible as the first-fruits of the resurrection. Think about the difference between eastern and western anthropology!