PSA

[JonC]

Do Orthodox Christians Believe in the Atonement?. Fr. John Whiteford

As is often the case, the proper Orthodox perspective on this question is one of balance. We should proclaim the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27), and not just the parts that we find most appealing. Nor should we overreact to the imbalances of heterodox theologians, and thus fall into a new...

orthochristian.com

You know. I look on these sites and I am finding here if the link works a similar thing that I have found several times with things @JonC asserts. The first article on the site was definitely against penal substitution as an Orthodox doctrine, make no mistake. But the accompanying article below seemed to indeed have elements of PSA and admitted that to be true to scripture some of those elements are necessary. Don't take my word for it. Read it yourselves. I found the same thing looking on Anabaptist websites. Some Anabaptists do believe in PSA. You only have so much time I understand. But if you don't want to continue to be gaslighted then read for yourself and especially get the video up that I posted elsewhere of Dr. Boyd being schooled by William Lane Craig. And take at look at what @Martin Marprelate puts up and really read it. If indeed you really are "questioning everything" then question everything.

Elements of PSA are there.

Think about it.

I have repeated, countless times, that I believe God laid our iniquities on Christ, was pleased to crush Him, to put Him to grief, that He bore our sins, died for our sins, the Just for the unjust, it is by His stripes we are healed. God gave Him as a sacrifice for our sins, He suffered the penalty for our sins, He died in our place.

To you it sounds like PSA, I am sure. But it is not. Those are my words so you have to read my beliefs as a whole - to include what I mean by the penalty, by "in our place", etc.

The words, extracted from my whole belief on the topic, is common Christian Christianity. The words, placed within your position, is PSA.

It is not the elements (which are common to all Christian views) but what they mean in the context of the whole belief.

 

[easternstar]

Where exactly are you getting that? What sources are you using? You are relatively new, have been into it with almost every thread you get involved in and I believe have said that you have come to question everything. So why in this particular area are you completely sure of yourself? Are you well read in the ECF's? I'd be glad to look at some of your references. I have looked at what Jon has shared and find it sadly lacking but share your sources.

I said I have questioned everything and doubted a lot of things. But I am absolutely certain of a few things, and one of those is the atonement. My initial questioning 50 years ago was the catalyst to my extensive, passionate study of church history and theology. My recent doubts are not related to that.

Claiming that the ECF held to a doctrine that neither the Eastern nor Western church held is untenable.

Calvin and Luther took Anselm's Satisfaction theory, revised and expanded it, and worsened it, to create PSA, in a legalist, juridical time period, the cultural context of which saw God as a stern, harsh judge who determined salvation in terms of a legal transaction.

PSA was non-existent for the first 1500 years of church history. That is a fact.

 

[DaveXR650]

I have repeated, countless times, that I believe God laid our iniquities on Christ, was pleased to crush Him, to put Him to grief, that He bore our sins, died for our sins, the Just for the unjust, it is by His stripes we are healed. God gave Him as a sacrifice for our sins, He suffered the penalty for our sins, He died in our place.

It sounds fine to me. I do not see why you need to make these distinctions.

Claiming that the ECF held to a doctrine that neither the Eastern nor Western church held is untenable.

As shown in the article I posted elements of it are there and believed today. No one is saying that PSA was an articulated doctrine in the early church as the explanation of the atonement. But what they wrote is what they wrote. Others who are as qualified as you seem to agree. The fact is, if you get on that website, the orthodox church has other more official explanations of the atonement and to me they are completely unintelligible as a doctrine at all. This makes sense with their overall system in a weird sort of way.

 

[DaveXR650]

Well it had to happen: I just plugged Jon's quote above into my browsers AI and asked it what type of theology of atonement did this describe?

I believe God laid our iniquities on Christ, was pleased to crush Him, to put Him to grief, that He bore our sins, died for our sins, the Just for the unjust, it is by His stripes we are healed. God gave Him as a sacrifice for our sins, He suffered the penalty for our sins, He died in our place.

Here is the answer:
Your quote fits best within Substitutionary Atonement and specifically Penal Substitution, which emphasize the concepts of Christ dying in our place and suffocating the penalties of sin. These ideas are prevalent in Reformed and Evangelical theological traditions. If you have a specific tradition in mind or want to explore other theories of atonement, let me know!
So the Duck Duck Go browser AI is a Calvinist as far as I can tell. (I don't know why it used "suffocating" but that is a copy, not my typing.)

 

[kyredneck]

Getting a fly rod. Gotta learn something new.

It's a blast. Mini jigs tipped with wax or catalpa worm pieces will slay the panfish. Think of it as a long range cane pole with no bobber. Been a fly rodder from an early age.

 

[JonC]

It sounds fine to me. I do not see why you need to make these distinctions.

As shown in the article I posted elements of it are there and believed today. No one is saying that PSA was an articulated doctrine in the early church as the explanation of the atonement. But what they wrote is what they wrote. Others who are as qualified as you seem to agree. The fact is, if you get on that website, the orthodox church has other more official explanations of the atonement and to me they are completely unintelligible as a doctrine at all. This makes sense with their overall system in a weird sort of way.

Orthodox Church doctrine is not unintelligible, but it is different as it does not originated from a Western culture.

Think of it this way, to them the idea of God punishing Jesus instead of punishing us to pay a debt is unintelligible and the idea the atonement appeased God's wrath is pagan.

Different worldview. Different understanding.

 

[JonC]

It's a blast. Mini jigs tipped with wax or catalpa worm pieces will slay the panfish. Think of it as a long range cane pole with no bobber. Been a fly rodder from an early age.

I am looking forward to learning.

 

[easternstar]

Orthodox Church doctrine is not unintelligible, but it is different as it does not originated from a Western culture.

Think of it this way, to them the idea of God punishing Jesus instead of punishing us to pay a debt is unintelligible and the idea the atonement appeased God's wrath is pagan.

Different worldview. Different understanding.

Exactly.
And Christianity itself is basically an Eastern religion. Much of the theology that developed in the Latin, Western church is completely foreign to Eastern Christian thought and culture.
Roman Catholicism and Magisterial Protestantism have theology that the Eastern Church rejects.

 

[kyredneck]

I am looking forward to learning.

A good rod is important, cheap reel is all that's needed, it just holds the line. It's helpful to understand that you're casting the line, NOT the bait at the end of the line. Have fun.

 

[JonC]

Well it had to happen: I just plugged Jon's quote above into my browsers AI and asked it what type of theology of atonement did this describe?

Here is the answer:
Your quote fits best within Substitutionary Atonement and specifically Penal Substitution, which emphasize the concepts of Christ dying in our place and suffocating the penalties of sin. These ideas are prevalent in Reformed and Evangelical theological traditions. If you have a specific tradition in mind or want to explore other theories of atonement, let me know!
So the Duck Duck Go browser AI is a Calvinist as far as I can tell. (I don't know why it used "suffocating" but that is a copy, not my typing.)

Lol...gotta love AI.

Here is another way of looking at it:

You believe -

God laid our sins on Jesus. Jesus experienced God's just punishment against our sins.

Jesus bore our sins, endured the penalty for our sins so that in Him we would escape the wrath to come.

I can (by your own logic) say:

Dave said that Jesus bore our sins, endured the penalty for our sins so that in Him we would escape the wrath to come.

Dave, therefore, holds the Classic view - thst Jesus endured the penalty for our sins - Satan's wrath.

But that would not be correct.

Yet, those like me who hold the Clasdic view believe
Jesus bore our sins, endured the penalty for our sins so that in Him we would escape the wrath to come. So it has to be correct.

It isn't because I ignored part of your belief.

That is what you are doing with the writings of other men because you are depending on excerpts.

I studied the ECF's for 6 years (formally) and more than that on my own. You cannot depend on excerpts.

 

[DaveXR650]

@JonC. Where I think you are wrong is that some of those excerpts indicate they also believed, like I think you do also, that the justice of our suffering comes from what we have done in offense to God. So while I do believe that Satan is completely and always and always will be nurturing an attitude of what could be called "wrath" against us - whatever happened to Jesus, to be effective in our redemption, needed to be the result of a just legal pronouncement from God concerning our sinfulness.

So when I use excerpts I am looking for the concept of Jesus suffering at the hand of God's justice what we owed because of our sin. And that I think you do indeed see in their writings, along with a lot of other stuff which actually is refuted very well even by some of the Roman Catholic theologians.

I think the main difference is that I believe our problem as men is that we have offended a Holy God, not that we are in trouble with Satan. And the atonement was about that primarily. And while there are a lot of aspects and I appreciate them being brought out PSA brings out that central aspect as nothing else does and I think it was always there if you look, but not systematized as a stated doctrine.

 

[easternstar]

Two of the best documents I have ever read that refute the idea that the ECF believed in PSA. Some people here might be familiar with these, but I doubt it, although they are readily available to anyone who would search:

Atonement Father Seq | PDF

The document examines claims made in the book "Pierced for Our Transgressions" that early Church Fathers such as Justin Martyr, Athanasius, and Augustine taught the doctrine of penal substitution. It argues that while the Church Fathers taught substitutionary atonement, they did so within a...

www.scribd.com

https://files.therebelgod.com/FathersAbolishRetribution.pdf

 

[easternstar]

Orthodox Church doctrine is not unintelligible, but it is different as it does not originated from a Western culture.

Think of it this way, to them the idea of God punishing Jesus instead of punishing us to pay a debt is unintelligible and the idea the atonement appeased God's wrath is pagan.

Different worldview. Different understanding.

I just want to re-emphasize this post of JonC. It is concise and entirely accurate.

Western Christians are just ignorant -- not stupid, but ignorant. They try to squeeze an Eastern religion into a Western paradigm, and it doesn't work. The concept of PSA would have been, and is today, completely foreign and morally repugnant to Eastern Christianity. As JonC said, it is pagan to them. It presents God's nature as completely different from the view of His nature held in the East. Thus, PSA was not and could not have been held by the ECF nor the early church, and it was not even held in the Roman branch of the church. The Classic view was the view taught and believed for the first millennium of church history. Anselm came up with Satisfaction, Aquinas with the superabundance of merit, and then Calvin and Luther invented PSA as a revision and expansion of Anselm's Satisfaction. All of these Western theories departed completely from the Classic view held by the earliest churches and still held by the EOC today.
To understand the early view of the atonement, it cannot be seen through the lens of Western Christianity. It must be seen and understood the way the earliest Christians did -- through an Eastern worldview concerning the nature of God and salvation, which differs radically from the way the West sees God and salvation.

 

[easternstar]

Reading all these posts on PSA and Western views of God has me wondering if I should go over to the church that some of my ancestors belonged to in Eastern Europe -- the EOC. But I can't accept infant baptism, nor especially their doctrine of apostolic succession, which is a clear fable.

 

[JonC]

@JonC. Where I think you are wrong is that some of those excerpts indicate they also believed, like I think you do also, that the justice of our suffering comes from what we have done in offense to God. So while I do believe that Satan is completely and always and always will be nurturing an attitude of what could be called "wrath" against us - whatever happened to Jesus, to be effective in our redemption, needed to be the result of a just legal pronouncement from God concerning our sinfulness.

So when I use excerpts I am looking for the concept of Jesus suffering at the hand of God's justice what we owed because of our sin. And that I think you do indeed see in their writings, along with a lot of other stuff which actually is refuted very well even by some of the Roman Catholic theologians.

I think the main difference is that I believe our problem as men is that we have offended a Holy God, not that we are in trouble with Satan. And the atonement was about that primarily. And while there are a lot of aspects and I appreciate them being brought out PSA brings out that central aspect as nothing else does and I think it was always there if you look, but not systematized as a stated doctrine.

I would have to see those instances and read the full text to hold sn opinion. I have not seen anything this far that would lead me to that conclusion.

I would be surprised to read a ECF write that Jesus suffered God's judgment. I see that we escape the wrath to come (the wrath of God) but I missed the excerpt you mention in our threads. If you would point it out I would appreciate it.

Many of our views, although different, are also very similar.

Jesus bore our penalty.

1. If penalty is a sin produced punishment it is the classic view.

2. If it is a satisfactory punishment it is Aquinas's view (the Lutheran view)

3. If it is punishment due our sins it is PSA.

In either case the gospel itself remains the same. But the understanding of the gospel is different.

 

[JonC]

Reading all these posts on PSA and Western views of God has me wondering if I should go over to the church that some of my ancestors belonged to in Eastern Europe -- the EOC. But I can't accept infant baptism, nor especially their doctrine of apostolic succession, which is a clear fable.

Well....at least they baptized those infants by immersion. And three times to make sure it takes.

 

[easternstar]

Well....at least they baptized those infants by immersion. And three times to make sure it takes.

Yes.

 

[easternstar]

The ECF would not recognize what the Western church has done to God over the centuries. It has turned him into a pagan god who punished and killed his son in a pagan sacrifice to appease his wrath.

 

[JonC]

The ECF would not recognize what the Western church has done to God over the centuries. It has turned him into a pagan god who punished and killed his son in a pagan sacrifice to appease his wrath.

I agree. But to be fair they would not recognize the Orthodox Church as well.

The Jewish sacrifice system was not based on the idea of pagan sacrifices (killing an animal to appease their gods) but on obedience and the blood (life) purifying or cleansing.

The Catholic Church (prior to the schism...both RCC and Orthodox) introduced paganism into our faith.

 

[easternstar]

I agree. But to be fair they would not recognize the Orthodox Church as well.

The Jewish sacrifice system was not based on the idea of pagan sacrifices (killing an animal to appease their gods) but on obedience and the blood (life) purifying or cleansing.

The Catholic Church (prior to the schism...both RCC and Orthodox) introduced paganism into our faith.

I don't see paganism in the EOC, but I do in the RCC, and some of Protestantism. Where do you see paganism in the EOC?