Understanding the Economy of salvation in Christ holistically, St. Gregory Nazianzen stated: “What is not assumed is not healed.” What St. Gregory meant is that it is the very act of Incarnation which initiates salvation in that the eternal Son takes on human nature completely, and if it were not so then human nature would not be healed. In other words, righteousness considered as such would not be sufficient for our salvation, which was the soteriological problem of the Arian heresy. They affirmed Christ’s sinlessness, but denied His true and complete divinity by claiming He was merely a creature, and thus denied man’s participation in the very Life of God by reducing it to participation in the life of some mere, albeit special, creature. Since He was, according to the Arians, a perfectly righteous creature, we can see that merely being righteous is not sufficient for man’s total salvation. By being united with Christ God in His very Person, however, His divine attributes become ours through participation (2 Peter 1:4). This is why it is said: What Christ is by nature (divine), we become by grace (divine).
The imputed righteousness of Christ, according to Orthodoxy, has an ontological ground and consequently an existential character. Christ actually imparts the energy of His righteousness into us, enabling us to grow in real sanctification because of His Spirit's working from within us. Yes, the imputed righteousness is an objective and legal fact (centered in the Cross and based on the entire economy of Christ from Incarnation to the sending of the Holy Spirit) that we can take confidence in, but it is not ontologically antinomian. Rather than merely “describing” or “labeling” us as righteous, it is something imparted, something that transforms us from within, from the ground of our being, and which thus extends through the entire activity of our being, influencing thought, word, and deed. Imputation is coextensive with impartation. This is related to the emphasis in Orthodoxy on theosis, for Christ did not merely or only accomplish something in the past whose consequence is felt today as if it were a soteriological tidal wave stretching across two millennia, but instead is right now imparting the Spirit. What happened on the historic Cross is inwardly and presently connected with the living and present Christ such that its effects are given now by the Living Christ who sends the Spirit now.
Faith is the very life of God in the soul such that, to the degree one trusts in and relies on the Lord, to that degree one has God’s life within. It is the energy of this divine Life within us which has a soteriological effect on us. It is the living Christ within us which causes us to live and to have life, and thus salvation is not effected by divinely legal labels as if the Law of God could be reduced in scope to such things. The Life of God must be present in the soul, and His presence cannot help but produce sanctifying effects. This is what faith touches and is the very expression of. Faith is not merely or fundamentally some finite dogmatic content considered as ideational knowledge, that is the faith of demons (James 2:19). Although dogmatic content is necessarily involved in faith, considered in itself faith is a living energy. It is the energy of trusting, relying, and leaning on that which the dogmatic content points to, and which cannot be reduced to the merely ideational (or empirical). And it grows. Faith is something that moves, lives, and breathes with the life of God, the very Life of God in the soul of man. This is the sense in which Paul states that he seeks and is at pains to have Christ formed within a person (Galatians 4:19).
Concerning Christ’s taking on the whole of human nature, it is vital to remember that He is eternal God. Therefore, Christ is sinless intrinsically and by nature. Sin according to Orthodoxy is not merely considered rule-breaking, but is the consequent manifestation of the soul's prior inward alienation from God. God is Life and Light and Goodness, and so sin is what happens as a consequence of the heart, soul, and mind first turning away from Life and Light and Goodness, from God. Without Goodness, the soul is bound to sin as a consequence of a lack of said Goodness. Without Light, the soul is bound to grope in darkness as a consequence of its lack of Light. Without Life, the soul is bound to death, again, as a consequence of the lack of Life. It is not that one sins and as a consequence God removes His Life, Light, and Goodness from the soul; no, one turns from God and therefore foregoes Life, Light, and Goodness and consequently has no option outside of Death, Darkness, and Sin.
The mind is darkened by the passions, by the tumult of inner thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and, as we succumb to the darkening energy of the passions, as we turn from the Light of God, sin is the inexorable result. The Fall in this sense means that we are predisposed at birth towards the darkening engendered by the passions such that our minds are beclouded and fail to respond to God, and so as sinful creatures our soul is finally exhausted and overpowered by death. In other words, our sinful acts are a consequence and expression of our Fallen, sinful being, and thus it is not that our sinful acts corrupt our nature, but that our fallen human nature corrupts our acts.
Christ’s sinlessness, according to the same principle, is thus a consequence of His being, and not of His acts considered as such. Act follows being, act proceeds from being, and, conversely, being precedes act, which is to say being is the ground of action, and so His pure Being produces pure Act, and our Fallen being produces corrupt act, indeed corrupts all of our acts. It is the law of sin bound up with our being that produces our sinful acts (Cf. Rom 7:23, 7:25, 8:2), and which for the sake of Atonement requires the death of our death, and not merely the clearing away of our sin. Christ gave us much more than a clean slate.
Though of course Christ was and is sinless, some Orthodox theologians may shy away from emphasizing this, in a certain manner of speaking, for fear of giving the impression that His sinlessness was obtained by some virtue other than His intrinsically holy Being. Jesus is sinless because He is an intrinsically holy, divine Person, and thus, even considered as Incarnate, He is not sinless simply because He managed to avoid sinning. We, however, are sinners, though not because we sin, and even if we avoid sinning. We sin because we are sinners, Fallen and in need of a Savior. Sin is, as said above, not merely rule-breaking; sin, considered as an act, is the result of alienation from God, and not something that causes a rupture with God as if consequent to the sin. We come into the world Fallen, which is to say in the condition of being sinners, prior to any act of sin. Our sins are a result of our inward alienation from the Life of God, and so the principle of sin, which is to say death, working in us therefore “predates” any particular instance of sin.
Concerning the Protestant emphasis on the forensic aspect of Christ’s imputation of righteousness, it is true to say that Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us in a legal manner, but it is likewise necessary to stress that it is not “merely” legal. Biblically, the Law is not anything like our contemporary sense of secular law, centered in the courthouse with teams of lawyers seeking arbitrary loopholes to often arbitrary laws. The Law of God is not centered in the courthouse, but in the Temple; the Tablets of the Law were in the Ark of the Covenant, in the Holy of Holies. In other words, the Law of God understood Biblically is an expression of God’s will, which is an expression of His simple nature, and thus speaks to the nature of the whole reality of His Person and the manner of relation both with Him and the humans who are made in His image, and also with the world He created. As St. John of Damascus states in his work On the Orthodox Faith: "The Divinity is simple and uncompounded."
The foregoing is why the Orthodox tend not to stress the merely legal imputation, though it would be improper to reject the legal aspect as long as it is understood in its fuller, theological sense. Christ therefore gives more than merely some righteousness which He possesses; He gives us Himself and thus everything which is His becomes ours. It is He who lives in us, and thus His righteousness lives in us by virtue of Him being present in us, and not as though righteousness were a detachable object or impersonal imputable substance which He places in us as if from afar. Rather, He comes to indwell us and to make His imputed righteousness operate within us organically as it were from within Him who is within us.
What is more, God is not Omnipotent Judge only, for He is also Life, Light, Love, and Wisdom, and since God is “simple,” which is to say that He is not inwardly divided in Himself according to His Attributes but is a unity, God’s Law is thus not merely an expression of absolute Authority, but also of Life, Light, Love, and Wisdom. Therefore, to stray from the Law is to stray from Life, Light, Love, and Wisdom. As man fails to keep the Law, he also fails to attain Life, Light, Love, and Wisdom. These are divine Attributes, and they are also existential realities. It is thus not merely an issue of obedience, but of actually touching Life, Light, etc. Therefore, Christ’s fulfilling of the righteousness of the Law on our behalf is not merely a legal correction, but a much deeper and more comprehensive Atonement that is bound up with transmitting Life to those who are dead, Light to those in darkness, Love to those who are lost, Forgiveness to those under wrath, and Wisdom to those bound by ignorance. This is all a single action of Christ viewed under several different headings; we distinguish them in our mind, but in reality they are one.
In light of the foregoing, it is finally worth stressing that it is not so much that humans have a sin problem, but that, as Father Seraphim Rose once stated, we have a death problem. The consequence, which is to say the penalty, of sin is death, and so the reason sin is such a problem is because it inexorably ends in death; it is the very principle of death working itself out in our souls. And since the sin in us is the power of death working itself out in us, sinful acts are the expression of this principle of sin and death at work in the soul. Christ, being God in the flesh, goes down into death, takes on the consequence and penalty of sin which is none other than death and, since He is Life, defeats death by His death, His intrinsic Life exploding death from within. Thus He, the Living One, emerges from the Tomb in Resurrection, Ascends to heaven, Sits at the Right Hand of the Father, and then Sends the Holy Spirit to us to feed us this His eternal life via the Eucharistic life of the Church. He took on our death so that His Life can become our life, for "what is not assumed is not healed." Thus it is vital to remember that Christ’s sinlessness is a necessary consequence of Who He Is, the Living One, and thus, because of Who He Is, what is by nature His, i.e. Eternal Life, becomes ours through our faithful participation in Him.
-Fr. Joshua Schooping
This series on Penal Substitutionary Atonement continues here, here, here, and here.
-Fr. Joshua Schooping
This series on Penal Substitutionary Atonement continues here, here, here, and here.
