HP: Sorry I did not have the time earlier to look well at your post. I had other obligations to attend to. It is a lengthy post and I have read it but there is much to absorb.
I understand, I tried to condense weeks of lectures into a few paragraphs and as I said earlier, a post hardly does this topic justice.
I see in the Atonement a definite need to make a satisfaction to the demand and penalty of the law. “The soul that sinneth it shall certainly die.” God could not allow His law and its just penalty to simply be arbitrarily overlooked lest the law become of no effect. He had to make a substitutionary sacrifice to make a satisfaction to the debt owed by the sin of men.
To reiterate, the juridical understanding of the Atonement is a Western theology based upon the model of Anselm, which is based on the idea of sin and evil being primarily something that God punishes us
for. However, the Orthodox view (and the view of the Fathers, BTW) was that sin and evil are primarily something that God rescues us
from. Salvation begins with being released from the bondage of the enemy.
Here’s where the Orthodox view of ‘Original Sin’ differs from the West. We view this not as a kind of genetic inheritance, but as something external, something environmental, not something we are born with, but born into. We are born into a world that has been stolen from God, and has become a prison. We are born into a world that lies in the power of the evil one. We are citizens of the kingdom of Satan by birth.
Again, look at Adam and Eve…God did not tell them that if they ate of the fruit that God would kill them in His anger, but rather simply that they would die. Death was not bestowed upon mankind as a punishment from an offended, angry, vindictive God; it was merely the end result of Adam and Eve’s action.
Look at it this way, God didn’t create “Death” anymore than a light bulb creates darkness. If you were to unscrew the active light bulb, the end result would be darkness and a burned hand, for you have just severed the ties with the light. Likewise when Adam and Eve ate of the fruit, in order to “be like God”, they tried to be deified without Deity, and, in severing themselves from their Life, Death (the burned experience by their nature) was the end result. Now they were no longer fit to eat from the Tree and live forever in a state of death and decay, which is something God would not stand for. So in essence, death is sort of a mercy.
Keep in mind to, that in Orthodoxy, we have no complaint with the mercy of God, nor with Christ’s death as God’s saving act. We do however have an issue of God’s justice as an image of
requiring satisfaction. To speak of God’s wrath (as the Holy Scriptures certainly do) is not to say that God is angry in any way comparable to the anger of man. To speak of God’s wrath is a theological statement about the rupture in our relationship with Him and should not be confused with how God
feels…unfortunately, many conversations I’ve had with atheist and such has been centered on God’s wrath as defined by Protestantism.
Unless, I’m not quite understanding you, I still believe you have yet to let go of Anselm juridical understanding of the atonement, but at least you are still pondering the Orthodox view with an open mind and that I applaud you for, regardless of the outcome of your stance.
In XC
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