The Hermeneutic Impossibility of Sola Scriptura

One of the key problems with sola Scriptura is its failure to be able to provide, in principle, a sustainably authoritative hermeneutic, for at no point does the fallible reader of Scripture ascend beyond fallibility. Certainty, beyond a mere willfulness, must remain elusive. To attempt to counter this problem, one of the principle supports of sola Scriptura is the doctrine of the clarity or “perspicuity” of Scripture, that, according to the Westminster Confession, states (Chapter 1:7):

All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.

In other words, the essentials of salvation, such as the full divinity and humanity of Christ, the Trinity, the nature and scope of the Atonement, Justification by Faith, the relationship of Faith and Works, of Law and Grace, and all the basic doctrines necessary to salvation, are so abundantly clear from Scripture that no extraordinary means are necessary to understand them (though perhaps not to a “saving understanding,” as the section prior to that which was quoted could be said to imply). A careful look at this doctrine, however, is that it is not merely a claim about the clarity of Scripture, but about the reading and understanding of Scripture; it is about fallen man’s ability to read and understand the sacred truths of Scripture without any extraordinary support.

As will be argued, the problem with Sola Scriptura is thus not centered on the authority of the Scriptures, but the authority of any given interpretation of the Scriptures, for (1:10)

The Supreme Judge, by whom all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.

In other words, all being submitted to Scripture, no decree of council, no Church Father (“ancient writer”), no doctrine formulated by men, can have any authority, intrinsic or bestowed, but only the Holy Spirit “speaking in the Scripture,” which is inexorably to mean: as read, interpreted, and understood by fallible man. Careful observation will note that, since according to Reformed dogma all individual readers are in principle fallible, the assertion of the Bible’s unequaled authority is emptied of its force, and the Holy Spirit’s right guidance unverifiable, for fallible man cannot be removed from the interpretive equation. The question thus remains: Which fallible man is doing the examining and determining, and by what principle should he or his cohorts be trusted to be interpreting truly and on behalf of the Holy Spirit? What principle cause for trust can be given to any one his readings? In other words, by what principle ought someone believe, say, Athanasius or Augustine, Luther or Calvin, Sammy or Johnny? What guarantees their trustworthiness? Or proves their untrustworthiness? Since man is fallible, and even “the purest Churches under heaven are subject both to mixture and error” (25.5), then what guarantees that the Holy Spirit is really guiding any of them aright?

One could argue that Luther and Calvin are Scriptural, but this answer brings one right back to the dilemma of, “Says who?” Who, other than fallible readers, declares that they are Scriptural? Why should one believe the report that they are Scriptural? On what basis is the appeal being made? If fallible readers state that they are Scriptural, and then points at Scripture in order to prove it, then the same holds for Arians and Unitarians, for they also argue for their position by pointing to Scripture. The appeal then collapses back onto the assertion of some fallible individual interpreter, where the individual interpreter is consequently made the arbiter of authority and of orthodoxy, the discerner of the Holy Spirit.

Other than oneself, no one else can be hermeneutically trusted, and even self is considered suspect. According to this view, the hermeneutic authority doesn't rest in the Church, and is in principle denied because Reformed thinking paradigmatically and dogmatically stands upon Scripture Alone. For example, no reference to the Church Fathers could carry any type of binding authority, and the extreme conditional acceptance of any other person's reading of Scripture is always filtered through the “isolated” and individual arbiter of truth: “Do I agree that they are Scriptural? Am I persuaded?” Thus the notion of perspicuity fails, for nothing is finally clear because no one is clearly trustable, and appeals to the Holy Spirit's infallible guiding of fallible readers does not overcome the trust problem. If one cannot trust "the Church," then certainly one cannot trust "a man," so who is left to identify the truth of Scripture with any authority? Persuasion is all that is left, and since the interpreting individual is inextricably bound up with the trust problem at all points, even if hypothetically he were correct, in principle no one could ever be sure. What is more, the historic and complex debates regarding central and essential Christian doctrines have demonstrated amply that core doctrines regarding the essentials of salvation - such as the divinity and humanity of Christ, the three co-equal Persons of the Trinity, to name only two issues - have been anything but easy to resolve.

For example, if two men, say a Reformed and an Orthodox Christian, both present a reading of Scripture or some theological proposition, then a third man must ask, “Why ought, or how can, I trust either of you?” Since according to his paradigm Tradition carries no real authority, the Reformed Christian will begin pointing to Scripture, and seek to persuade based on his ability to synthesize targeted Scriptural verses, and thus appeal to the third man's feelings and intellect, so as to convince him that his reading is the right one. This situation, however, describes a closed loop between the two men and Scripture. The appeal is founded on that individual Reformed Christian's personal skill with handling Scripture, and in principle no adding to the number of fallible Reformed Christians in this scenario will help because at each point the appeal is to the persuasive skill of the person pointing to the Scripture. Since neither Church nor Tradition can in principle be trusted, nothing beyond individual persuasion and personal conviction can in principle be had. The question, “Why should I believe you?” therefore cannot be answered except by appealing to the limited and admittedly fallible skill of the Reformed expert and the impressibility of the one being persuaded. Considering how many are converted to various heretical movements, whether by intellectual, emotional, or mystical persuasion, the notion of trusting that one is in the true Church is not securely founded beyond the personal persuadedness.

The Orthodox Christian, on the other hand, appeals to something much broader than his own personal skill at reading and synthesizing Scripture. He appeals to the whole Church’s reading together with her unbroken, historic, and living Tradition. In short, the Church has a hermeneutic authority that is impossible to the Reformed Christian. The fallible man is compensated for by the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. It is therefore the collective witness of Christ’s Orthodox Church, the pillar and ground of the truth (1 Timothy 3:15), that is the source of appeal, and so her wisdom is transpersonal and rooted in Christ Himself who founded it and promised that the gates of hell shall not prevail over it (Matthew 16:18).

If one cannot trust the Church, one cannot yet then trust the Reformed Christian, for at no point does his hermeneutic have any authority beyond his personality. If he is outside the Church (however he might conceive of it) then he is of course no Christian, but even if he is in the Church, then it makes no difference for him as regards his hermeneutic, because as a member of a fallible Church he still has no personal hermeneutic authority. His reading can never escape the gravity well of his personality. Between the two, the Reformed and the Orthodox, it is therefore the untrustworthiness of the Reformed position that ultimately defeats him. It is unsustainable to simply keep pointing to the Scripture when the finger doing the pointing appeals only to his own skill at pointing. The pointing finger becomes the elephant in the room. That is why, in order to escape the bounds of the fallible ego, the Church’s hermeneutic authority must be presupposed in all Christian inquiry and persuasion, because the Scriptures themselves demand the presence of the Church as, together, having synergistic authority. In short, the Church is an epistemic precondition of the hermeneutic act, and consequently of authoritative, orthodox theology. Without presupposing the Church as the possessor of hermeneutic authority to bindingly interpret, one inexorably falls into skepticism, for certainly no one member of the Church has that authority nor can he in principle contain an authority greater than or equal to that of the whole Body, or to that of the Scriptures themselves. This is the death knell of sola Scriptura, for if neither the Church as a contiguous whole nor the fallible individual Christian can in principle be trusted to interpret Scripture (or even infallibly identify what Scripture is) with any binding authority, then skepticism results towards all interpretations of Scripture.

It is worth stressing that in the sola Scriptura scenario it also would not matter how authoritative the Scriptures are in themselves, for their delimits and content are inaccessible to the fallibility of fallen man's hermeneutics. Man could not infallibly declare, say, that 3 John, Jude, or 1 Enoch are or are not authentic Scripture. The very removing of the deuterocanon is a perfect example of the genetic failure of sola Scriptura, for their presence or removal are now retained or carried out only on the basis of the fallible authority of fallible man to fallibly identify them as, or as not, Scripture, for certainty of inclusion or disclusion cannot in principle be had. Only an authoritative Church can in principle declare this. Thus according to the internal implications of sola Scriptura, the Scriptures are reduced to an unapproachable chain of islands impenetrably surrounded by the fog and treacherous reefs of man's fallibility. It is as if there is a loosely collected pile of rocks available, but no sure way to identify what is true gold from fake, because regarding the Scriptures no man alone can make that determination authoritatively or with any certainty, and yet sola Scriptura denies this authority also to the Church, and therefore acts as a Trojan Horse of unbelief. Unless one were to cut the very limb one is standing on, all authoritative acts of determination and interpretation of Scripture therefore presuppose and stand inside the authority of the Church, and since sola Scripturists deny this to the Church, denying what they unconsciously presuppose (for they do claim to authoritatively know the Scriptures in an orthodox manner, hence their "borrowed capital"), they self-destructively contradict themselves in laying any claim to the contents or boundaries of Scripture, and also, it might be said, contradict themselves regarding whether or not they can even be labelled "Church."

Thus, with the foregoing in mind, it is noteworthy that regarding the Orthodox position on Councils, it is not a Council qua Council that is authoritative in the Church, but the Church itself speaking in, or as, a council. There have been false councils, and so the appeal to a Council's decision is not to the Council per se, but to the voice of the Holy Spirit rooted infallibly in the ontology of the Church, within which the Council was made to happen, and through which He spoke. It is therefore the Church considered mystically, since as Bride she is ontologically rooted in Christ Himself and thus cannot be a merely human institution, that must and does have the hermeneutic authority to rightly divide Scripture. Thus the appeal of the Orthodox Christian is to the very Bride of Christ and so to Christ Himself. As His Bride she is the proper identifier and interpreter of Scripture, and speaking as the Body, whether through Councils or approved Fathers of the Church, she defeats the individualistic appeals of the Reformed communities who paradigmatically stand in constant judgment of the Church, Christ's Bride, and so outside of her. Since to stand in judgment of something is to stand outside of it, the Reformed communities are in very principle outside the Church considered as such, placing themselves outside of her, for she is ever put in the dock.

An authoritative text requires an authoritative mechanism of transmission in order to be delivered with any certainty. This step is missing in the doctrine of sola Scriptura. Sola Scriptura simply posits a perfect text, but hermeneutically speaking it is rendered impossible to approach authoritatively, for one can never really trust, in a philosophical sense, that one either has the proper text or that one has the right reading of it. The text becomes isolated behind a wall of untouchable perfection - for everything else is reduced to human opinion. The problem with this is that the claim that it is a perfect and authoritative text ends up becoming mere opinion, for there is no personal or ecclesial authority lending anything to the claim that Scripture is authoritative. Yes, the text is perfect and authoritative, but without the Church one cannot claim its perfection with any certain authority. There might be any number of Christians who share that opinion, but the fact that, according to sola Scriptura, authority is not implicitly granted to the Church therefore renders the claim’s ascendency beyond opinion impossible in very principle, no matter how many people may agree with the opinion that it is perfect and authoritative.

The Church, however, being the pillar and ground of the truth (1Timothy 3:15), is the authoritative delivery mechanism for the Scriptures, bringing them to the people of God. The impossibility of the contrary leaves no real option, for otherwise the text of Scripture is doomed to all manner of division and heresy as there is only vying opinions about a so-called infallible text. But who gives the authoritative text? God, yes. But who does God give it to? The Church. And the Church receives it and passes it down, which is to say “traditions” it. Without the Church’s authority, what comprises the right interpretation of Scripture is constantly and irresolvably open to debate, division, and subdivision. God, however, does not deposit His Scripture in an unworthy vessel. Just as Christ is a “scandal of particularity,” so the Church is a grace-protected extension of this “scandal,” one which extends itself through history via disciplic apostolic succession, which is to say an unbroken organic continuity of Orthodox Christians throughout history. If Christians can affirm that Christ really did die and rise again, that He created the world out of nothing, then it is no stretch to affirm the historical reality of the unbroken and historically contiguous Orthodox Church.

-Fr. Joshua Schooping

Faith in the Unseen: Atheism and Special Pleading

Common among many atheist arguments is the presupposition that the act of “faith” is something that, if done, is done instead of relying on evidence, perhaps even in opposition to relying on evidence. According to this view, faith is something exclusively reserved for religion, and science is proffered as an alternative to faith, relying as it does on empiricism, which is to say reliance on direct, testable observation. Of course, the very notion of relying on evidence implies that one is performing an act of faith in evidence, for faith, coming from the Greek term pistis (πίστις), means to trust in or to rely on, to have conviction of the truth of something, from peithō (πείθω), which means to be persuaded, as in by argument or demonstration, and not only as regards transcendental matters but mundane also.

A certain problem thus immediately arises for the atheist, a problem which ought to be raised, because to restrict faith to such a narrow, religious range of meaning is to stack the deck against religion in order to isolate acts of faith from acts of reason, and through the fallacy of special pleading exclude the many acts of faith that atheists commit each day. For example, an atheist will say that it is not “true” that God exists, but within that statement is presupposed some notion of truth.

Now, truth is invisible. Truth cannot be seen or heard, but must be abstracted from what is seen and heard. One may see many true things, but the things themselves are not truth. Truth is being claimed about some aspect of those things, but the truth itself is not those things. And yet, atheists typically affirm that they believe in truth.

Likewise, logic is unseen. One can see evidence for it in various types of statements, but logic itself is not empirical, and transcends the instances in which it is discerned. What is more, concepts are not empirical, one may see ink on a page, but the word written there is only mentally perceived, and certainly the concept which is expressed by the word is in itself non-empirical. And yet, atheists purport to rely on logic.

Again, love is concealed from the naked eye. One may observe many acts of love, but love itself remains hidden from view. For example, a mother may provide her child some hot chocolate on a cold winter day, and through this act one might perceive that there is love present. On another cold day, a person could order a hot chocolate from a coffee shop, and perceive in this act no love is present. Of course, the situation could be reversed and the mom be said to have no love, and the barista to be most loving. The point at hand, however, is that love is not an identity with the act of giving hot chocolate. The love itself is invisible, and the mere act of giving a drink is insufficient to determine whether or not love is there. And yet, atheists will often extol the real value of love, basing claims of accusation against religionists on a perceived lack of love.

What is more, peace is invisible. Peace is not simply the visible act of not fighting, or the visible act of sitting still. Even if one were to identify an act of peace, one must yet have an abstract criteria which transcends the act and which enables the act to be described as peaceful. One does not “see” peace, one perceives the invisible peace via empirical percepts.

Yet again, gravity itself is invisible. People see things fall all the time, but seeing something fall is not seeing gravity itself. One can test for the effects gravity may have on an object, but gravity itself is out of empirical view. In fact, many scientific realities are not directly verifiable empirically, only the effects they have on the things that are being measured.

In sum, there are many invisible, non-empirical “things” that most atheists would grant are in some sense real, especially in cases such as gravity. The question remains, how does this relate to faith, especially to “religious” faith?

St. Paul describes the nature of faith: “Now faith is the substance [ὑπόστασις, hypostasis] of things hoped for, the evidence [ἔλεγχος, elegchos] of things not seen. … By faith we understand [νοέω, noeō] that the worlds have been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things which appear [φαίνω, phainō]” (Hebrews 11:1, 3).

In other words, faith is the intellectual substance or substructure of what is not immediately present to the senses. Faith is that act which perceives what is only mediately present through phenomena (φαίνω, phainō). Faith is the organ, so to speak, by which one understands (νοέω, noeō) and interacts with that which undergirds phenomena, what ties together the disparate experiences of the senses into a rational construct or hypostasis. Faith is the mind’s noetic substantiation of invisible, non-empirical realities, including such things as truth, logic, love, and gravity. For example, love produces many effects, but the effects of love cannot be a mere identity with love, otherwise a hateful barista’s giving of a hot chocolate would be indistinguishable from the act of love of the tender mother giving her child the same type of drink on a wintry day. Faith is thus the mind’s transempirical perception of such things as love, and also the means by which one performs empirical acts of love.

Moreover, St. Paul does not describe faith as: “faith is in the substance of things hoped for.” Neither does he define faith as: “faith is… in the evidence of things not seen.” Rather, faith is itself the substance and evidence or proof of things distant and invisible, i.e. that which is not known by the senses but discerned by the mind. Faith is thus something much more substantial and epistemological, for it is that by which we understand (νοέω, noeō) the invisible things or causes in which phenomena are rooted. In other words, an object’s visible falling is rooted in the invisible thing or force called gravity, and faith is the operation of the human mind by which one can perceive or understand that gravitational force which gives rise to the empirical falling.

Since gravity itself is not sensed, only its effects on various objects, faith is the epistemological process by which we connect the effects on those various objects to the source of those effects, i.e. gravity. In short, even though gravity is invisible, we have faith that there is such a thing called gravity because we understand the evidence, i.e. its effects, and perceive these effects as unified in a thing called gravity. Likewise, we have faith that our mother loves us because the various actions she performs visibly can be hypostatically unified in what is understood as love.

In this sense, faith is understood as the normal process of understanding from sensory experience that which is not itself reducible to sensory experience, and as such bears a resemblance to the cognitive process of abstraction, though in the case of faith it also includes that by which one can perform acts of or from that noetically perceived hypostasis, for example acts of love. It is also that by which we can receive these realities through their effects, as in, say, receiving acts of love as acts of love. Faith is, as such, not only that by which we understand these things, but also that by which we connect with, enact, and receive them. In other words, we can measure gravity, share love, live in peace, receive justice, know truth, give mercy, and celebrate beauty, when none of these things are in themselves strictly reducible to the empirical; and the means by which we engage with these invisible realities is embedded in the epistemological process termed faith. Despite being manifest through evidence, they transcend the evidence, and so it is said that we have faith in something, say love, and then point to the visible evidences of it.

Just as a hand is what enables us to grasp a ball, faith is what enables us to noetically “grasp” love, truth, logic, peace, etc. Moreover, just as one sees by means of eyes, it is likewise by means of faith that one perceives love, truth, logic, peace, etc. On the basis of its perception, faith is what opens the possibility of giving and receiving love, having the perception and conviction of truth, using and assessing logic, seeking and pursuing peace, etc. Just as the eye enables the mind to perceive physical forms or objects, so faith enables the mind to "see" or perceive the aforementioned noetic forms or “objects.” Faith is, in this sense, the eye of the mind; it is, as it were, the life or activity of the soul.

And so, when an atheist says they don’t rely on faith, or believe in invisible realities, but only empirical data, we can point out that this is untrue. Simply believing that there is some truth is itself the evidence in their belief in the invisible reality called truth, and their reliance on (i.e. faith in) it in acts of reliance on (i.e. acts of faith in) empirical data. Of course, God is truth, and insofar as an atheist relies on truth, he relies on God. Likewise, God is love, and insofar as an atheist advocates love, he advocates God. God is also pure being, and insofar as an atheist believes things have being, he is pointing to the hypostatic reality of God. God, although He is much more, is also the principle of order, the Logos, and so as much as an atheist declares order in the universe, he declares the principle of order, which is God. The atheist is unable to work out the balance of all these attributes or unify them in the single concept called God, mostly because of an excessive reliance on the empirical and a deep misunderstanding of the God concept, and also because of bad behavior by religionists. Nonetheless, the atheist performs acts of faith in non-empirical realities, and must in order to function as a human being, for faith is among the most typical of human activities. Only through the fallacy of special pleading can he deny this.

A Great and Fearful Mystery: St. Symeon the New Theologian on Penal Substitutionary Atonement

Following up on the previous article’s Patristic teaching on Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA), a closer reading of St. Symeon the New Theologian on PSA appears warranted due to the variety of questions and comments elicited therefrom. Doubts about, and false certainties that deny, how Christ could be said to be punished for the sake of man appears to some unwarranted and unPatristic. This, however, will be shown to be false. It ought to be noted, however, that the Patristic teaching on PSA is in no way beholden to Reformed articulations of the same. It is entirely possible that Patristic PSA offers much-needed corrections to misleading Reformed emphases, but whether or not this is the case, it is key to understand the Fathers' teaching on the subject, of which St. Symeon provides perhaps the longest and clearest exposition of the Scriptural data theologically understood.

To begin, in Homily 1, “The Transgression of Adam and Our Redemption by Jesus Christ” (from The First-Created Man, tr. Seraphim Rose), St. Symeon the New Theologian identifies and defines the two types of death that occurred to Adam: one of body and one of soul, both of which were passed on to all of his progeny by way of inheritance. He states (45):

Thus, in soul Adam died immediately, as soon as he had tasted [from the fruit of that tree from which God had commanded him not to taste, threatening him that if he should only taste of it he should die]; and later, after nine hundred and thirty years, he died also in body. For, as the death of the body is the separation of it of the soul, so the death of the soul is the separation from it of the Holy Spirit… Later, for this reason, the whole human race also became such as our forefather Adam became through the fall - mortal, that is, both in soul and body. Man such as God had created him no longer existed in the World.

There are a few key things to note from the above. One is that the soul Adam persisted in a state of separation from the Holy Spirit for over 900 years. Another is that after 900 years his soul finally separated from his body. Moreover, these are the two deaths which are passed on to the whole human race, rendering us corruptible and mortal, for "human nature is sinful from its very conception" (70). Thus the Fall is a condition of persisting in separation from the Holy Spirit, and persisting, one might say, by the natural power implanted in the created soul, for some period of time, as a soul-body or psychosomatic unity. This is the universal condition of man, for as St. Symeon teaches, "We are all born sinners from our forefather Adam who sinned... subject to the curse and death from him who was subject to the curse and death" (115). As he teaches elsewhere (70):

All people also who come from the seed of Adam are participants of the ancestral sin from their very conception and birth. He has been born in this way, even though he has not yet performed any sin, is already sinful through this ancestral sin.

St. Symeon contextualizes the foregoing situation with a discussion of the scope of the divine chastisement on sinners, and the nature of its remedy (44):

The sentence of God remains forever as an eternal chastisement. And all of us men became corruptible and mortal, and there is nothing that might set aside this great and frightful sentence. … For this reason the Almighty Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, came so as to humble Himself in place of Adam. And truly He humbled Himself, even to the death of the Cross. The word of the Cross, as the Scripture says, is this: “Cursed is everyone that hangeth upon a tree” (Deuteronomy 21:23; Galatians 3:13).

What St. Symeon is making clear is that Adam had an unbreakable sentence declared against him and so upon all mankind, a chastisement, a punishment that was eternal in nature, for "the words and decrees of God become a law of nature" (82). What is more, St. Symeon clearly expressed that Christ came to stand in Adam’s place, humbling Himself “in place of Adam,” receiving the curse that was Adam’s, the death of soul and body, "for the abolition of the above-mentioned decree" (83). Since the decree is eternal and unbreakable, "a law of nature eternal and unchanging" (83), Christ came that He might submit Himself to the chastisement, to death, and then to rise again so as to break the unbreakable sentence, to destroy death by death: "Therefore, for the abolition of this decree, the Son God, our Lord Jesus Christ, was crucified and died, offering Himself as... a sacrifice frightful and infinitely great" (83).

St. Symeon asks (45-6):

Why did Christ become such a one? In order to keep the law of God and His commandments… But this was allowed so that there might be performed a certain great and fearful mystery, namely, so that Christ, the Sinless One, should suffer, and through this Adam, who had sinned, might receive forgiveness.

For Christ to keep the commandments also signifies the accepting of Adam’s chastisement, the sentence which was an eternal decree, for only He could dispense the death which was binding for all and yet not be bound by it unto eternity. In short, Christ received punishment in place of Adam, voluntarily undergoing "a death which served as punishment for the worst kind of sinners" (70). Thus, as St. Symeon states, Adam was forgiven through, and on the basis of, Christ's suffering.

It must be kept in mind that Christ did not defeat death by not dying, but by dying. He did not avoid death when He entered into pitch battle with the devil. He accepted the chastisement of Adam, entered into Adam's condition, which is to say his death, and so He fulfilled the commandment, the eternal chastisement and law of nature that bound mankind to death. He received Adam’s punishment, which was death, death meaning the separation of the soul from the Holy Spirit, from God. It is through Christ’s suffering of Adam’s chastisement that Adam is forgiven.

Since Adam had fallen under the curse, and through him all people also who proceed from him, therefore the sentence of God concerning this could in no way be annihilated; and therefore Christ was for us a curse, through being hung upon the tree of the Cross, so as to offer Himself as a sacrifice to His Father, as has been said, and to annihilate the sentence of God by the superabundant worth of the sacrifice.

Christ received the punishment which was due to Adam by God’s will. God willed as an eternal sentence of chastisement that Adam be punished, as St. Symeon explains, and so Christ received the Father’s eternal chastisement upon Himself, the decree of being separated from the Holy Spirit, which is to say death, for only through the Son’s divine nature could the eternality of the decree be defeated. The Cross, according to God’s will and thus His law, was the medium of imputing the curse of separation to the sinless Christ. It is said to be "imputed" in order conceptually preserve the fact of Christ's inherent and necessary sinlessness. To assert otherwise would be to say Christ actually became a sinner and died because of His own sinfulness rather than vicariously accepting Adam's. St. Symeon teaches: "He was hung upon a cross and became a curse... in order to loose the whole curse of Adam" (116). To "become a curse" is to say that He received the ascription of being cursed in order to loose the curse, received the condemnation in order to loose the condemnation, which was death, i.e. soul-separation from the Holy Spirit.

And yet, some will cavil and with a Nestorianizing eisegesis state that to claim Christ received separation from God implies a division, either in the Trinity or within Christ Himself. The rest of the article will argue how this is not at all the case.

To begin, it must be emphasized that Hades, the place of the death, which is to say separation, the place of those whose souls have been separated from both their bodies and from the Holy Spirit, is not without God. God is present, as the Prophet and King David sings (Psalm 139:7-12):

Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend to heaven, thou art there! If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, “Let only darkness cover me, and the light about me be night,”even the darkness is not dark to thee, the night is bright as the day; for darkness is as light with thee.

In other words, God is present everywhere, including Sheol, or Hades. Thus it is that in Hades God’s presence is experienced as separation. Since God is “everywhere present and fillest all things,” as the prayer “O Heavenly King” teaches, and thus also in Hades, the idea that God is absent or separated from (or out of communion with) those in Hades, and that they require His intervention (as in the descent of Christ to Hades) to effect at-one-ment or comm-union, we understand that this separation is not annihilation. It is separation, as in dislocation, as when a joint is separated or dislocated. Hades is the state of dislocation; Hades is the “place of dislocation,” the place or state of separation, and so this is not to say that the limb has been removed from the body, for in terms of the analogy Hades cannot mean that God is absent to the extent that the souls cease to exist. The souls still exist, and therefore God must be present to the degree that they are maintained in existence, but they are “separated” in a manner like a separated or dislocated joint. The limb is still present, but due to separation it is totally weakened and futile (cf. Romans 1:21; Ephesians 2:1, 5), and its dislocated mode of existence is naught but a source of pain, weakness, and futility. It is unable to restore itself to being re-jointed or “at-one-ed.” Returning from the analogy of the separated joint to the separated soul, the pain and futility therefore come from the dislocation and separation that is death, the state of separation or dislocation from at-one-ment with the Holy Spirit, though not in an absolute annihilating sense.

In the case of separation from the Holy Spirit, Adam did not immediately die in body, but persisted in his natural, psychosomatic life. Now, because his soul was separated from the Holy Spirit, Hades is the consequent “location of dislocation.” Although God is present in Hades, Hades is yet not a place of communion with God. Separation from the Holy Spirit is therefore an existential condition, not an annihilated condition. Separation or alienation is a mode of being rather than of non-being, something a person can experience or undergo and thus it does not indicate a radical departure from existence, but existence according to a certain mode. Just as hunger is a mode of relation between stomach and food, that of absence, so is death a mode relation between soul and Spirit, again that of absence. Now, if Christ was positively declared to have experienced hunger, weakness, and grief, all of which are relations of absence, it is no difficulty to understand death in the same sense, as relational absence, which is to say presence experienced as absence, as in hunger in the presence of food, loneliness in the presence of people, or a joint dislocation, rather than as pure non-existence or denial of presence.

Thus when it is said that Christ bore the chastisement or punishment for sin, and went via the Cross to the “location of dislocation,” it is absolutely not signifying a division within either the Trinity or within Christ, and could not be. To be separated does not mean God is absent in an absolute sense, but relatively and in a relational sense, and so Christ is not said to be divided off, but to experience dislocation, weakness, futility, forsakenness, i.e. death. It is a relational separation, not absolute, and so it in principle denies any ascription of division to the Godhead or between the natures of Christ, but presupposes their unbreakable unity. Hades functionally signifies “the place of separation,” and, since Orthodoxy affirms that Christ entered Hades, this does not introduce a division in the Trinity any more than stating that Christ died, for death is separation. Christ is never divided in His Personhood, nor divided from the Trinity, and so in His single Subjectivity He experienced through the medium of His created soul what separation from God is, which is just another way of saying He bore the curse of the Cross and so went to Hades.

If the created body and created soul of Christ can experience death at all, then He can experience alienation, or separation, because death is alienation/separation, as St. Symeon the New Theologian defines: "the death of the soul is the separation from it of the Holy Spirit." It would be trivial if Christ had underwent merely the condition of the death of the body, for this would not have dealt with the principle condition of fallen Adam, which is separation from the Holy Spirit. Hades is the place of separation, not merely of dead bodies, but of souls, and so for Christ to go to Hades is imply that His created soul experienced separation. It is a mystery. The soul in the state of death is what Hades is, that place of alienation from Life. Now, when we affirm that Christ died, do we mean only death of the physical body? Does He trample down physical death only? Physical death according to St. Symeon is the separation of the soul from the body, but if Christ did not heal the deeper separation, then what type of death did He defeat? We affirm that He trampled down death by death, that He went to Hades even, and so it would be contradictory to assert that His created soul did not experience alienation/separation.

To deny that Christ bore our punishment means the same thing as denying that He died, for death/separation is the punishment, death is what "punishment" means in this context. There is not some "other," super-added punishment being considered, for alienation from the Holy Spirit is the painful condition called death, Hades being the "place" of this condition, the location of dislocation. Christ didn't go to the lake of fire of the second judgment, as when He comes again to judge the living and the dead, rather He went to Hades, the location of presence experienced as relational absence, not annihilational vacuity.

The punishment of separation is a mode of relation, and therefore it asserts no radical division of Christ from either Himself or the Trinity, rather denies it, for it presupposes that Christ must be in constant relation to the Trinity at all points in order to experience separation/alienation/dislocation. To experience the forsakenness of God is, then, to experience His presence as agony, as separation and alienation, not annihilation. Otherwise, forsakenness would mean the cessation of existence. To say, then, that Christ was punished by the Father is simply to state that Christ received and bore the separated condition of Adam, what St. Symeon calls the "penance of death" (98). It does not mean there was some lightning-bolt-bearing, angry, supernatural being with a blood lust. Rather, "through the fulfillment of all justice" (96) Christ received the alienated mode of relation in order to restore communion between man and God, and this is transposed into legal terms as receiving the punishment or the chastisement.

Now, what does it mean that Christ offered the sacrifice to the Father, as St. Symeon the New Theologian teaches? It means that it was the Father’s will that Christ be chastised. Now, many balk at this, but it is perhaps the most obvious teaching from the Garden of Gethsemane, when Christ prays, “Not my will, but Thy will be done” (Matthew 26:42; Mark 14:36; Luke 22:42; John 12:27). Especially is this clear in John, when Christ asks Peter: “shall I not drink the cup which the Father has given me?” (John 18:11) In other words, it is the Father’s will that Jesus receive the curse of the Cross; He gave it to Christ. This is why St. Symeon stresses that it is God's eternal decree that must be dealt with, and why Christ came to fulfill the commandments. He did not come to sidestep the Father's judgment, but to fulfill its demands for the sake of Adam's salvation. The Father gives the Cross to Christ, it is His will that it be done, which imputes to Christ the entire curse of the law, the consequence that belongs to Adam, so that Christ can offer the sacrifice back to the Father.

The Father wills that man be saved, and the Trinity, having a single will, in the dread mystery of the divine dispensation, ordained that Christ God fulfill His Father's eternal will to restore, in the context of the created soul of Christ, the broken communion which He took upon Himself via the Cross in order to heal the rupture with the Holy Spirit, which is poured out in the heart of man (Romans 5:5). Since God willed to restore man, to heal Him through relation, Christ God entered into this condition of alienation, and so it is entirely appropriate to state that God willed that Christ bear the punishment. Misunderstandings and distortions of this doctrine which seek to portray it as portraying a despotic, arbitrary, emotional Deity in no way addresses the doctrine itself. In short, a doctrine is not evaluated according to the permutations produced by its being misunderstood.

St. Symeon teaches: “All our sinfulness is mortified by the death of Christ on the Cross” (48). In other words, Christ bears the sin and death of man by bearing man’s just punishment, having it imputed to Him via the curse of the Cross, the chastisement of separation from the Holy Spirit, which is to say, soul-death. This was willed by God upon the created soul of Christ, and yet rejects any intimation of division in the Triune Godhead, or within the two natures of Christ. Broken but not divided, the Person of the Word was able, in the context of His created soul, to undergo forsakenness, alienation, and separation, which is to say death, the chastisement of Adam, for what forsakenness means is fundamentally relational, thus preserving unbroken the Triunity of the Godhead and duality of Christ’s natures.

-Fr. Joshua Schooping
This series on Penal Substitutionary Atonement began here and here, and continues here and here.