Throughout the previous studies, the fact of Penal Substitutionary Atonement has been demonstrated as a central motif of the pre-schism Patristic mind regarding the nature of Christ’s atoning work. The near constant contemporary aversion and consequent denial of the reality of God’s wrath against sin, however, and Christ’s appeasing of this wrath, bids us also look at a more recent writer on this subject, one who predates 20th Century trends, St. Philaret of Moscow, who flourished in the 19th Century. Living in that era, he was also a man of great learning, with proficiency in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and was in an environment and position conducive to awareness of the various theological and ecclesiological tumults which had by this time matured in Western Europe. St. Philaret is also widely known for writing a reliable and faithful catechism. Regarding the issue of the nature of the atonement, Question 208 of Philaret’s catechism asks: “How does the death of Jesus Christ upon the cross deliver us from sin, the curse, and death?” The portion of the answer relevant to present purposes is:
As in Adam we had fallen under sin, the curse, and death, so we are delivered from sin, the curse, and death in Jesus Christ. His voluntary suffering and death on the cross for us, being of infinite value and merit, as the death of one sinless, God and man in one person, is both a perfect satisfaction to the justice of God, which had condemned us for sin to death, and a fund of infinite merit, which has obtained him the right, without prejudice to justice, to give us sinners pardon of our sins, and grace to have victory over sin and death.
The answer’s logic clearly includes that the death of Christ satisfies the divine justice of God. This must be because we were rightly condemned to death for our sin, and so in place of our being condemned to just suffering and death, Christ instead voluntarily took our condemnation upon Himself in order to satisfy the demands of God’s justice for us and give pardon and grace for victory over sin and death.
If that question were the only extant evidence of St. Philaret’s thought on the subject of Christ’s vicarious satisfaction of divine justice, which is to say Penal Substitutionary Atonement, it might be that too much is being seen in such a brief question as posed above from his catechism.
In order to confirm, then, that he did in fact have such a doctrine in mind, it will be helpful to look at his sermon, On the Cross. He states: “Even before the incarnate Son of God had taken up and borne His cross, this same cross already belonged unto man” (Select Sermons, On the Cross, pg 54). In other words, the cross Christ bore was not His own cross, but man’s cross. Christ had no sin, but man did, and so the cross that Christ took up was for man’s sake. Regarding the cross, Philaret continues: “In its origin it was formed of the tree of knowledge of good and evil” (ibid). This is to say that the original sin of Adam was the origin of the cross. The substance of Adam’s transgression was therefore bound up with the cross Christ bore, which is also to say Christ was bearing the sin of Adam, and by extension all of human nature. And what was the substance of this cross? Philaret tells us:
Darkness, sorrow, terror, labour, sickness, death, misery, humiliation, the enmity of all nature, in short, all powers of destruction seemed as it were to burst forth from the fatal tree and to make war against him; … (ibid, 54-55)
The cross Christ bore contained, and in a sense was, all of these consequences, or curses, concentrated into a single point. One is reminded of the curses listed in Deuteronomy 28. The cross was charged, as it were, with the energy of “all powers of destruction,” and so the cross was not merely a finite, physical torment. To demonstrate this, Philaret continues: “... and the child of wrath would inevitably have been plunged for ever into hell” (ibid, 55). Thus the destructive power of the Cross was the boundless destructive power of eternal hell. This would have been man’s lot “had not Mercy, in its eternal wisdom, stretched out its hand to him and sustained him in his fall” (ibid, 55). God’s restraining grace, in other words, protected man from the full consequence of his sin, which is also to say his spiritual death, for the principle of sin is not finite, and so the consequence of sin likewise cannot be finite.
Now, regarding the question of the proportionality of hell as a just judgment against sinners, to deny the foregoing is to deny that Christ atoned for or healed the spiritual death rooted in man’s fallen human nature. Through Adam’s sin, man is now by nature (φύσις) a child of wrath (Ephesians 2:3), and so to deny that Christ died in relation to this problem is to end up with the position that all Christ dealt with was man’s biological mortality. In other words, to deny the foregoing leaves it such that man’s real problem was never dealt with by Christ! If man’s sin was not laid on Christ, which is to say its spiritual consequences, then Christ did not atone for sin. May it never be! Sin is not a mere physical problem or biological handicap. This ought to be so obviously false that the truth should need no defense, but alas it seems to ever need repeating.
Now, spiritual death has an eternal character to it, and this is so because sin has an eternal character to it. When man bound himself to sin, he bound himself to a law or principle of sin and, because man was created with an immortal soul, he consequently bound himself to its consequence: an eternal or infinite law, or principle, of death. In other words, since God’s law emerges from His eternal Being, and has a corresponding positive eternal quality to it, to violate His law is to have a corresponding “negative” infinity. The cross, then, was charged with this negative infinity.
Departing from our examination of Philaret for a few moments in an attempt to make this clearer, it will be helpful to consider a common misunderstanding. Most people mistakenly think of sin as, essentially, “wrong action,” or we might say, “wrong finite action.” Sinful action, however, does not emerge from a vacuum, but from a body (σῶμα) of sin (cf. Romans 6:6). Sinful acts emerge from this body of sin, and it is this body that produces such wrong action, and the wrong action is called sin by implication of its origin in the body of sin. Now, there is also a law (νόμος) of sin and death (cf. Romans 7:23, 25; 8:2), and it is this law which governs the body of sin. The finite sin-act, then, emerging from the body of sin is thus rooted in and governed by such a law or principle of sin. This is where the atemporality of sin is made clearer, for such principles are not temporal in nature. For example, despite being created, mathematics never gets old, never grows weary, for the laws of numbers do not change. The relation between sin as law and sin as act, then, proceeding from sin as body, is shown in this way to have a significant bearing on the question of judgment. This is because the law which motivates the sin is itself atemporal, which is to say timeless or eternal.
Building on and keeping in mind the foregoing, all sin is rooted in a motive, which implicates the will, and this motive is what determines the nature and characteristics of any sinful act. Sin is agreement with the passions, but in this agreement the will, heart, and intellect are committing a fortiori to the given sin’s governing law or principle. God sets before man "two ways," two mutually exclusive infinities: "See, I have set before you today life and good, and death and evil" (Deuteronomy 30:15; cf 30:19). These two principles are at the bottom of every choice. The man who chooses evil, i.e. sins, has in this way bound himself through the faculty of his will to the principle or law of sin, and thus to a timeless death. The "wages of sin," which is to say sin's necessary consequence, is death (Romans 6:23), and in this way man willfully binds himself through sin to an eternal principle of destruction.
Another way to say this is that sin, like ignorance, knows no boundary. If, for example, a person is lustful, that lust is not merely a question of this or that lustful act. The lust is a posture or attitude of the soul that bends it at all times, and that attitude of soul corresponds to state of soul. The intellect, heart, and will are in this way pervaded by this lust such that lustful acts are made possible. Lustful acts emerge from a lustful precondition of the heart. Being prior to any lustful act, the lust produces a response to the environment such that the environment is fundamentally framed and perceived, even transformed, in terms of possible outlets for said lust. This does not mean simplistically that a person is conscientiously looking for such outlets, a person may rather be conscientiously looking to avoid certain environments in order to remain chaste, but in this the underlying sinfulness of human nature is revealed in all its corruption. There is no boundary to this corruption. Subject to the "original condemnation," human nature itself is fallen, corrupt, depraved, and as such the intellect, heart, and will are inclined towards sin at the level of human nature, a "nature defiled by transgression" (St. Gregory Palamas, The Homilies, Homily 16, pg 117). This is the boundlessness of sin. In themselves, lust can never have enough pleasure, anger can never enough destroy, avarice can never possess enough gold, and pride can never have enough affirmation. The soul, then, apart from Christ, is both committed to and committing sin in a correspondingly boundless way, even if on the surface it only erupts as finite sin-acts. Therefore sin cannot be conceived of as being finite. Lust, anger, pride, vanity, as states of soul, are infinite, boundless, and therefore their ultimate consequence, their hell, is infinite and boundless.
Returning to the concept of judgment, it cannot then be said that sin is finite, for it is governed by a timeless, boundless law of sin and death, as discussed above. Therefore, when God judges for sin, He is not looking at the mere finite act; He is looking at its substance, its law, its governing principle: “For the Lord does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). Thus, when the Lord looks into the heart of fallen man, He sees it willingly dominated by a law of sin and death, a willful agreement with the passions, with the law of sin and death. This necessarily results in death, for death is sin’s internal consequence, the very “wage” of sin. Thus even if it is not his “preference,” it is so that man is not sent to hell against his will; man is willfully racing towards it, throwing himself headlong into the pit. Thus God, in the words of St. Gregory Palamas, "condemns them, dismisses them and consigns them to hell, unquenchable fire and other never-ending punishments" (ibid, Homily 24, pg 198, cf. Homily 16, pg 119).
To understand this aright, the Scriptural principle of judgment must be clearly understood, for it is not a situation of mere divine reaction to sin. Judgment has, rather, a type of genetic connection with the evil act. To shift metaphors, the consequence is woven, as it were, out of the fabric of the evil act. In short, the evil act and its consequence are of a piece. As St. Paul teaches: “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. For he who sows to his flesh will of the flesh reap corruption, but he who sows to the Spirit will of the Spirit reap everlasting life” (Galatians 6:7-8). Scripture thus reveals the methodology of God’s punishment. One comprehensive example can be taken from Psalm 7:
If a man does not repent, He will sharpen His sword; He has bent His bow and made it ready. He has also prepared for Himself deadly weapons; He makes His arrows fiery shafts. Behold, he travails with wickedness, and he conceives mischief and brings forth falsehood. He has dug a pit and hollowed it out, and has fallen into the hole which he made. His mischief will return upon his own head, and his violence will descend upon his own pate. (Psalm 7:12-16)
Notice that the imagery of retribution, the sword, the bow, and the deadly weapons, is immediately portrayed in terms of consequences that are internally coextensive with their cause: i.e. digging a pit and falling into the selfsame pit. It is not that another deeper, darker pit is created in order to punish someone, but the very evil act becomes its own evil consequence. In short, divine punishment is evil returned. Additional Scriptural examples of this divine methodology include:
The nations have sunk down in the pit which they have made; in the net which they hid, their own foot has been caught. The LORD has made Himself known; He has executed judgment. In the work of his own hands the wicked is snared. (Psalm 9:15-16)
They dug a pit before me; they themselves have fallen into the midst of it. (Psalm 57:6)
His own iniquities will capture the wicked, and he will be held with the cords of his sin. (Proverbs 5:22)
He who digs a pit will fall into it, and he who rolls a stone, it will come back on him. (Proverbs 26:27)
The principle here is therefore not that of “an eye for an eye” conceived merely extrinsically (cf. Matthew 5:38; Exodus 21:23-25), for in that sense it would reflect merely an extroverted reciprocity. Divine justice, however, is not merely the external imposition of countering forces, not merely a weighing of scales, although it is objective and preeminently fair and just. Rather, there is something genetic in the seed-cause which flowers, so to speak, as the necessary consequence. In this way the evil consequence is as it were woven out of the evil cause, as one continuous fabric. Keeping in mind the timeless quality of the law of sin and death, to sin is to commune with timeless evil and consequently eternal death. The evil cause being rooted in the will, with the will itself being bound up with the conscious heart, the will therefore sows timeless seeds of evil which flower as timeless evil consequences, i.e. an eternal, conscious, and objective experience of one’s “own” hell. Hell is thus both very objective and very personal. To put it another way, if extrinsic means “not part of the essential nature of something,” then there is nothing extrinsic to one’s experience of hell, not an iota of arbitrary or superadded punishment. There is nothing “out of proportion,” for it is a “perfect,” personalized consequence.
Thus it is not the finite act which constitutes the eternality of punishment, but the infinite dimension of one’s decision and commitments. The acts are inseparable from that eternity in the heart which is above and not subject to time, and so the evil act is produced by a will that is made to be in communion with a timeless evil. The act of, say, stealing, then, is not simply reducible to the wrongness of the act considered merely as a series of discrete physical motions, but is the product of a decision-making process which is built of universals, concepts, principles, laws, and as such each act of sin is participating in and enacting a timeless or eternal principle of evil. The will is actually willing according to infinite, universal evil, even if the intentions and actions within time are limited in scope and effect, and so the consequence is an equally timeless or “eternal” punishment. Eternal punishment is therefore the timeless dimension of our own disobedience returning upon us as a timeless, which is to say eternal, consequence, i.e. hell.
So, if someone wonders how there can be said to be a proportion between God’s just judgment against sin as regards its resulting in an eternal hell, it is clear that God is not adding anything to the equation. If He did, it would be de facto unjust. God is therefore not artificially or extrinsically supplying the timeless or eternal dimension to it. The eternality of one’s experience of hell is rooted in man’s immortal soul. Man is an immortal being by created nature and, as made in the image of God, his mind, heart, and will are by nature bound up with eternity (Ecclesiastes 3:11). But as is clear, there is risk in this, for man in his freedom plays with eternal verities in all of his desiring and choosing, and man cannot but desire and choose.
Therefore, when man rejects the light, God does not punish him with darkness; the man sought it out. When man rejects truth, God does not punish him with deception; the man deceives himself. When man rejects life, God does not punish him with death; man chooses death. When man rejects freedom, God does not punish him with chains; the man binds himself. When man rejects righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit, which is to say the kingdom of God (Romans 14:17), God does not punish him with hell; man, in this sense, damns himself. God declares the infallible sentence of judgment, certainly, but man digs the hole that he falls into, he falls into his own net, his own sword falls on his own head. God does not add to or contrive anything along with His just judgment. Judges are insightful, but not inventive. When a man breaks a law, the judge can therefore say together with the just sentence, “You did this to yourself.” This is eternal damnation: man abandoned unto the eternal sum of his own sin.
Returning to the examination of St. Philaret, he teaches: “The Son of God took upon Himself the burden which crushed mankind” (On the Cross, 55). What was it that was crushing man? As quoted above, these were darkness, sorrow, terror, labour, sickness, death, misery, humiliation, the enmity of all nature, in short, all powers of destruction seemed as it were to burst forth from the fatal tree and to make war against him. He even states that “the whole weight of the forbidden tree, with all its boughs and branches, fell on the neck of the transgressor of the law of God” (ibid, 54). What a weight this must be! Man cannot conceive of it, and yet having taken “upon Himself our nature” (ibid, 55), Christ bore it. Not only did He bear it, “the cross of wrath has been transformed into a cross of love; the cross which has barred the way into Paradise, becomes a ladder into heaven” (ibid, 55). The wood of the tree, “washed in divine Blood” (ibid, 55), is now the instrument of salvation, and so to deny the infinite weight and gravity of sin is to deny the infinite magnitude and merit of Christ’s saving work. St. Philaret asks: “Who shall measure this universal cross borne by the Captain of our Salvation? Who shall tell its weight?” (ibid, 55) Indeed, who? St. Philaret continues, on the mystery of the cross:
Divinity unites with humanity, eternity with time, perfection with that which is limited, the uncreated with its own creation, the self-existing with nothingness; what an immeasurable, what an incomprehensible cross is formed of this union! (ibid, 56)
Notice in the foregoing that the contrast of the infinite and the finite is being used not only to describe the Incarnate One, but also His cross. The cross is fitted precisely for the incarnate Son of God. Only Christ can carry such a cross and discharge such a burden, transforming it to accord with His holy glory. Only in this light can the meaning of the Cross be gleaned, but this does not exclude bearing the agony of God’s divine justice against sin, for speaking of the cross, “this agony was not the result of human impatience, but of divine justice” (ibid, 60). All the weight of divine justice was borne on the Cross, for as was revealed in the Garden of Gethsemane:
even the prayerful converse with His consubstantial Father does not free Him from the burden of His agony, but keeps Him under its weight (ibid, 60).
And it is precisely in the Garden where Christ prays specifically as regards the passing of the cup. What was this cup? According to St. Philaret:
The cup which His Father tenders unto Him is the cup of all the iniquities wrought by us, and of all the punishments prepared unto us, which would have overwhelmed the whole world, if He alone had not taken, held, and drained it. (ibid, 61; cf. Isaiah 51:17; Jeremiah 25:15; et al.)
The infinity of sin was held in that cup, and Christ drank it all for love of Man. St. Philaret teaches that the iniquities in the cup were made up of all sins, from Adam’s Fall through the corruption of the antediluvian world to Babylon, Egypt, and so on to the end of the world (ibid, 61-2). Christ took upon Himself the iniquities of us all. Yet he continues: “Let us add thereunto all that we find in us and around us deserving of the abomination and wrath of God” (ibid, 62). In sum:
All these streams of iniquity flowed into one cup of woe and suffering for Jesus: all hell was precipitated upon that heavenly soul. (ibid, 62)
Christ, in other words, bore the weight of hell. This is the death Christ spoke of when He declares: “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death” (Matthew 26:38). Christ was not sorrowful in the face of mere biological mortality; He saw clearly the nature of the infinite sin that He was about to drink.
One can only wonder at such love for, as St. Philaret expressed, “Words fail” (ibid, 62)! Man was not worthy of such an act; it was purely grace. God decided how much value man had, despite man’s squandering of his existence in sin, and so God determined to restore that value. And so it was our sin that He carried, our very own, and we are “the very authors of that suffering” (ibid, 63). And yet, St. Philaret is bolder still, for Christ, in giving glory to the Father, even endured according to the limits of His human nature “to be forsaken of God” (ibid, 63). Without breaking the unity of divine substance of the one God in Trinity, and implicitly maintaining the unity of His divine Personhood, Christ yet experienced in His human nature what “forsakenness” is in order to atone for that fundamental consequence of our sin, which is forsakenness. This is what St. Gregory of Palamas describes as man's being "justly abandoned by God in the beginning as he had first abandoned God" (Homily 16, pg 115). Thus atoning for man's "original condemnation," his ancestral curse, his original sin, Christ fulfills Psalm 22:1, which points prophetically to Him and which Christ applies to Himself in the parallel passages from Matthew’s and Mark’s gospels: “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? Why are You so far from helping Me, and from the words of My groaning?” (Psalm 22:1; cf. Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34) Truly this is a profound Mystery.
Elsewhere, St. Philaret defines sin as separation from God, stating, “separation from God and a state of sin are one and the same thing” (Select Sermons, On the Prophecy of Isaiah and the Names Emmanuel and Jesus, pg 7). In order, then, to atone for sin and its consequence, He must undergo a punishment that is proportioned to that type of “separation” from God which is the consequence of sin, which Philaret calls “forsakenness.” This is thus a vicarious atonement where “by His suffering He has made atonement for the sin which we had committed” (ibid, 8). Since we had separated ourselves from God through sin, and sin and death operate according to a timeless law comprising a negative infinity, the consequence of that separation, i.e. forsakenness, was experienced by Christ in His death. Without confronting this aspect of the Atonement, Christ’s sufferings on the Cross are reduced to being of a merely biological and not of a spiritual nature, again leaving man’s real problem unatoned for.
Lest this be misunderstood as positing a cleavage in the Trinity, let it be understood that Christ was not in any way divided from His Father, nor was He divided in Himself between His natures. Orthodoxy must be presupposed in all reasoning, especially regarding the Atonement, for only according to His divine nature could the divine Person of the Word according to His human nature have sustained such a punishment. This is the function of the concept of forensic imputation: Christ can Personally bear the consequence of sin without a change in His underlying metaphysical natures. He bears the consequence, really bears it, but in a way that preserves the integrity of His Person and His natures, without division or confusion.
In addition to forensic imputation, it also is so that the natural, passible experiences of Christ according to His human nature do not imply division from His Godhead. For example, just as the omnipotent and impassible Word of God really experienced weakness and suffering according to His human nature, also hunger and thirst, despite having no Personal need for food or water, He likewise in a manner beyond understanding experienced the judgment upon sin, the wrath of God, “oh, what an unfathomable abyss of sufferings” (ibid, On the Cross, 63)! Forsakenness therefore does not entail, and positively discludes, the metaphysical division or rupture of Christ's natures. In sum, it must be affirmed that Christ, although without sin, can yet suffer that which a human soul is by nature able to suffer. Anything less than this is a violation of the orthodox faith regarding the full humanity of the Incarnation of the Word of God.
There being no division from the Father, His full knowledge and willingness to give up His life in this way precludes any possibility of division from the Father. Having, then, quoted the opening of Psalm 22, St. Philaret continues: “Yea, O Lord! Thou hast forsaken Him, for a little while, that Thou shouldest not forsake us for eternity” (ibid, 63). The forsakenness of God, then, cannot mean the separation of division, for this is impossible, but a relation of alienation, a mode of being that experiences the extremities of agony. Since, as was discussed above, Christ atoned for infinite sin, it is thus that the consequence He endured was of an infinite, spiritual nature. Thus “He has, of His sacred Blood and Cross, wrought the purification from sin and the redemption of the whole world from the curse, and opened unto us the entrance into the Holy of Holies” (ibid, 63).
People erroneously accuse PSA of saying that Christ was somehow, or in some sense, metaphysically cut off from the Father, which is, of course, absurd and unrelated to PSA. No one is ever metaphysically cut off from the Father. God eternally remains sovereign and omnipresent, and so there is no logical possibility that abandonment amounts to metaphysical separation. What is entailed in spiritual death is therefore not the patently absurd idea of an existence independent of God. People falsely accuse PSA of saying that spiritual death means absolute, metaphysical separation, but what PSA is pointing to is a change in the mode of relation, from blessing to curse, from love to wrath, from beatitude to torment, from intimacy to forsakenness, from peace to agony, from life to death. God does not change, for God is simple, unchanging, and impassible.
Man is cursed, and the punishment is spiritual death, which is to say alienation from God, and not only physical death. What Christ suffered is therefore not mere biological death, i.e. the cessation of biological activity, but the relation of alienation, the agony of sin’s separation. Although He died bodily, this is not to suggest in any way that He Himself also died spiritually; this is a blasphemous impossibility. Man's spiritual death was forensically imputed to Him, thus preserving His intrinsic holiness, and as such He suffered in His human nature, preserving the real experience of human passibility unto the agony of sin’s consequence. In this way Christ suffered the torments of the ungodly. The spiritual death imputed to and so borne by Him is just this alienation, this torment, and implies no division between the Father and Son, or between the two natures of the Son.
In conclusion, regarding the question posed at the opening of the present study, regarding Question 208 of his Catechism, St. Philaret has shown that his understanding there is that of Penal Substitutionary Atonement. It is thuswise understood as affirming PSA when he states that Christ’s “voluntary suffering and death on the cross for us, being of infinite value and merit, as the death of one sinless, God and man in one person, is both a perfect satisfaction to the justice of God, which had condemned us for sin to death, and a fund of infinite merit, which has obtained him the right, without prejudice to justice, to give us sinners pardon of our sins, and grace to have victory over sin and death.” For, “as Divinity is holy and just, how could man, who is a sinner, approach that fulness without being annihilated by the all-consuming fire of God’s righteous wrath?” (ibid, On Touching Christ by Faith, 183). He answers, “It is thus that the infinity of God dwelleth in Christ and [through the Blood of His Cross] becometh accessible to finite beings” (ibid, 183). And so, “the God of justice and retribution to the just, becomes a God of mercy and grace to the sinner” (ibid, Death the Wages of Sin, 176). We can now “seek refuge from the strokes which threaten us, in the wounds of our Saviour” (ibid, 179).
-Fr. Joshua Schooping
This series has run through several unique studies, beginning here, and most recently on St. Cyril of Alexandria here.
