How many Roman Catholics (and Western Christians in general) honestly recognize in these comments their own Faith in the Risen Lord Jesus, their hope in the Resurrection of the body, and their personal experience of Easter/Pascha, the Queen of Feasts? Please be as honest and as charitable as possible in your answer.
(Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholics, please sit this one out.)
“God in his mercy and love removed them from Paradise into this world lest this physical death be compounded by an eternal spiritual death.”
This is illogical. God could choose to suspend death as a righteous punishment for sin. That would have been more merciful… unless of course God must protect his Divine honour and allow man to choose the way of wickedness. To save anyone he would therefore need a perfect sacrifice to satisfy Divine justice… oh but wait… that is the Roman view!
It is also totally illogical because Paradise is eternal. One cannot be alive and then be dead in Paradise because all times are one. One is either alive or dead. One CANNOT die in Paradise. Hence why the daemons did not die because of their sin.
Plus Eden was on this earth, not in some other place as Scripture attests. Thus this passage is unscriptural.
“Now subject to suffering and death, human alienation from the divine life becomes the raw material for Satan’s attempt to subvert humanity finally from God.”
Don’t you think if God did put us on earth out of mercy he would have made it a whole lot nicer and would not alow Satan to attack us?
“This corrupting influence of the fear of and flight from death makes of sin an ever present reality for the children of Adam and Eve.”
What so we sould all be as good as gold if we knew we were going to live for ever? That seems totaly unreasonable and detached from that fact of life.
“Why does God place Himself under such an exterior necessary constraint?”
Because to leave an injery unpunished is unjust. God is Just and cannot go against his own nature.
“When we consider that in the first account humanity has to carry the burden of Adam and Eve’s guilt as well as their actual sin”
No. Adams guilt is washed away by baptism. The EFFECTS of original sin are, however, not.
As to other matters. In the west we have justification and sanctification. One could easily call justification an “ontological change in our human nature”.
Also, the Resurrection is important to the western tradtion for the following reasons:
* It shows the justice of God who exalted Christ to a life of glory, as Christ had humbled Himself unto death (Phil., ii, 8-9).
* The Resurrection completed the mystery of our salvation and redemption; by His death Christ freed us from sin, and by His Resurrection He restored to us the most important privileges lost by sin (Romans 4:25).
* By His Resurrection we acknowledge Christ as the immortal God, the efficient and exemplary cause of our own resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:21; Philippians 3:20-21), and as the model and the support of our new life of grace (Romans 6:4-6; 9-11).
I recognize certain aspects of my faith in the “Western” description, particularly the emphasis on God as the source of law. However, for the most part, I find it to be a rather one-sided description.
“The life of the redeemed at best bears the hope of fellowship with God or perhaps (for Roman Catholics) the Beatific Vision. Any transforming union with God can only be characterised by spiritual contemplation not an ontological change in our human nature.”
This, though, I find extraordinarily contrary to my experience of Easter and the Eucharist. The Eucharist transforms me. I am a sinner, yet find that in the Eucharist I can participate in Christ’s own divine life.
It is more than I can say.
Actually this is a pretty standard caricature of Catholic views of salvation, similar to others I’ve read by Orthodox polemicists. The stuff about Western Christians not seeing Christ’s resurrection as having anything to do with salvation because it focuses only on his death is new to me, but the general idea is painfully familiar: Western=legalistic=unspiritual=bad/Orthodox=mystical=spiritual=good (or some other similar formulation). I’ve have no problem with Orthodox polemicists believing they are spiritually superior or that Catholics & Protestants are all going to hell, as long as they understand these types of descriptions of Catholic (or Protestant) belief are neither (a) accurate or (b) constitute a very good argument in favor of believing that they are spiritually superior and will go to hell if one doesn’t become Orthodox. But honestly at this point I don’t think much of or about Orthodox arguments anymore, and I am at peace with my decision to adhere to the Bishop of Rome.
It is common for poorly formed Eastern Orthodox priests to mis characterize Catholic soteriology. Most often, they present Reformed ideas and present them as scholastic, Augustinian or both. Of course neither are true.
In the case of Fr. Gregory, unfortunately, he has presented his version of Reformed soteriology and characterized it as “Western.”
He writes: “It doesn’t matter on this score whether you are a Protestant or a Roman Catholic. The story and the meaning are much the same.”
Catholic soteriology shares the same distinctives as Eastern Orthodox. A quick glance at the Catechism of the Catholic Church could have confirmed this.
PS: The emphasis on the passion was first seen as a major trend in the east. In pre-Constantinian Nicaea to be exact.
Notice how death is not a punishment from an outraged God in Eden, nor is our banishment. Everything is done out of love.
Yeah, because we all know that it’s impossible to punish in love. Hence every parent who gives his/her recalcitrant toddler a timeout must perforce be a sadistic unloving meanie. [rolling eyes]
Where do people get this stuff? Does Frederica give them talking points?
Gil: Is this Father Gregory ex-Reformed?
If so, that would explain a lot.
Nah, it sounds more like the typical “let me tell you what the West *really* believes” stuff that you hear in some Orthodox circles. Some of his statements are flat-out false, but I won’t deal with them directly – they’re pretty easy to identify. I really want to be respectful to Father, but I have a hard time when I see sloppy stuff like this.
There are some fundamental differences between Orthodox and Catholic thought on this subject, but I think Father is harping on dialect more than anything. You will find a range of dialects even within the Catholic Church when it comes to these kinds of issues. From what I’ve observed over the past year, it seems like you hear some more Protestant sounding stuff if you talk theology (dealing with the workings of the matter), and more Orthodox sounding stuff if you talk pastorally (orienting people to the significance of these events). Pope Benedict is an excellent example of using each in their different settings – he’s preached some of the most Orthodox-sounding stuff I’ve ever heard from a Westerner.
(This comes from an ex-Calvinist almost-Orthodox now on the doorstep of the Catholic Church)
I was supposed to stay out of this…
But hear me out! I was raised devout Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and am now in communion with Rome through the Byzantine Rite.
Ya’ll already covered this well. 21 years as a Lutheran taught me that the Resurrection was very important. My Lutheran brothers never explained (or demonstrated) why as well as my Catholic and Orthodox brothers, however.
Not only does the good Father set up a western straw-man, he excludes elements of the “western” narrative which are commonly found in eastern thought; meaning he sets up a nice eastern straw-man for uncharitable westerners.
Put plainly, the two narratives combined reflect Tradition. Would the typical westerner OR easterner be able to elucidate the Tradition that well? nope. Does each tradition tend to have it’s own emphasis? yup. Does this change over time, geography etc? yup. Does this damn either tradition? nope.
It keeps Tradition alive.
Kellen, I like your observation about pastoral v. theological. Not sure it is that simple, but it is a good point. The Holy Father is indeed, and clearly so, affected strongly by Orthodoxy. He understands Luther better than most Lutherans, too.
Fr. Gregory is a former Anglican priest of 12 years. I would guess he was low church evangelical. If his experience is typical, he probably received very little Antiochian seminary formation, if any, prior to becoming an Antiochian priest.
This may explain his unfamiliarity with basic Catholic doctrine.
I’m confused about what the good Father means by “ontological change”.
Also–I know Orthodox commentators are supposed to stay out of this, but I would love to see David Hart’s and/or Father Patrick Henry Reardon’s take on Father’s post. :D
Put plainly, the two narratives combined reflect Tradition.
Exactly!!! Both are absolutely necessary. They complement and complete each other.
Two Lungs, and all that. ;)
I have never found anything better to explicate the Catholica than the grand old Protestant hymn:
In Christ there is no East or West,
In Him no South or North,
But one great fellowship of love
Throughout the whole wide earth.
It is not East VERSUS West, but East AND West. How else can it be Christ’s Church, that “great throng which no man could number, from every nation, tribe, and tongue”?
In fact, Fr Gregory’s characterization of Western theology of the redemption does only represent one current in that vast and diverse tradition. However, it may and should be said that this strand was dominant for a long time and, until the ressourcement of the post-war years, was the only theology many if not most westerners, Catholic or Protestant, were acquainted with. An echo of this can be found in a tract against the liturgical reform published by the lefebvrist FSSPX a few years back, where the reform was deemed tending towards heresy precisely because it enshrined the “paschal mystery” theology which the ressourcement movement did so much to popularize. In criticising the abandonmen of the Anselmian “penal substitution” theory, the FSSPX seemed to ignore the fact that the Anselmian theory is a product of the 2nd millenium and never has been oficially proclaimed as dogma.
To summarize the Anselmian theory without caricaturing it is dificult in a few lines. Basically, it is Anselm’s teaching that God was incarnate and died on the Cross because the infinite offense caused to God by sin could only be repaired by a victim of infinite worth, but that the “price” for sin had to be paid by man since it was he who offended. So God had to become man in order to satisfy the equation. Christ stepped into our shoes and endured our punishment to save us.
Now, as Diane and others have pointed out, there is nothing untrue in this theology. It would be possible moreover – if I had time and space – to use it in a fruitful manner pastorally and homiletically by couching it in a less juridical language than was used in Latin scholasticism. It has valuable, indeed essential things to say. It expresses, I think, basically the theology of sacrifice of the Letter to the Hebrews. The problem is that some time before the protestant Reformation it came to be dominant in the West to the point of pushing out the other “models” (to use Dulles’ term) which had a much older pedigree, both in East and West. Since the mystery is infinite, a variety of complementary models is a better way to approach it than one neat formula whose tidiness may deceive us into thinking that we have “understoood” what is in fact beyond human comprehension.
In older Western texts, both dogmatic and liturgical, we find the much older language of Christ as victor over sin, death and the devil bu His Cross AND resurrection (try reading the hymns Vexilla Regis, the Good Friday Pange lingua to see what I mean. Or the Easter sequence: “Mors et Vita duello conflixere mirando; Dux vitae mortuus regnat vivus). The major problem with the Anselmian theology in fact is that it makes little space for a soteriological significance of the Resurrection. A RC trad once complained to me that these days there was too much talk of the Resurrection. It was never mentioned when he was a kid, he said approvingly. I am not making this up.
The fact is that this distortion has never crept so widely into Eastern theology and homiletics. Doubtlless the latinised Russian theology of the 17th cent. and after did imbibe some of this atmosphere. But the east has the corrective tendancy of its liturgy. No-one who even occasionally goes to Sat evg Vespers in the Byzantine rite could be ignorant of the saving significance of the Resurrection.
Anyone interested in reading up on this should read “Christus Victor” by Gustav Aulen, a lutheran bishop who wrote, I think, in the 1930’s but whose work has remained influential. It is easy to read, short and in print.
Incidentally, Aulen says that Luther is an exception among the Protestant reformers in having understood the older patristic theology and using it in preference to the Anselmian penal teory favoured by Calvin and most reformed theology. He might be accused by some of denominational parti pris but I think he is right. Christian’s experience in his Lutheran days is a point in his favour.
Anyway, I don’t think we should get too hot under the collar with Fr Gregory. He was talking about general tendancies and if we bear in mind this limit he is not wrong. We Catholics need to come clean about the less apealing aspects of our recent past (and our present!). So do Protestants and Orthodox of course, but nothing in Fr Gregory’s writings suggests to me that he is unwilling to do this. He made a provocative point and he got us talking. That’s all to the good as far as I am concerned!
I think that we should beware of characterizing Jansenism, Molinism and Baianism as somehow flowing in the same current as Catholic soteriology. Certainly these theologies found currency within Protestant circles but were immediately and have been consistently rejected by the supreme teaching office of the Catholic Church.
An equal danger would be characterizing Hesychastic soteriology as the whole enchilada of Eastern Orthodox theology as Fr. Gregory seems to have done.
TYhe long and short of it is that the traditional western view is that the Cross absolved us and the Resurrection restored us.
I agree with the previous commentators that the referenced article is implausible in its mischaracterization of the western accounts of the Atonement. From the Catholic side, I was fortunate to be the pupil of Dom Illtyd Trethowan, monk of Downside, whose 1971 book The Absolute and the Atonement, and whose teaching, have convinced me that what has been characterized as the “Eastern” understanding of the Atonement represents the only real way forward in the development of this central, but seemingly neglected, doctrine. My subsequent theological education at Oxford confirmed that in Anglican circles, too, the drawbacks of the penal substitution theory were very well understood. Aulen’s Christus Victor was widely cited.
The impression I have is that while Calvinists, and this apparently includes some low-church Anglicans, doggedly maintain the primacy of the penal substitution theory, they are in this regard extremists who do not represent the mainstream of western theological opinion.
My own view is that at its best, the penal substitution theory is a metaphor for (part of) the reality that is represented by the more holistic view of the Atonement that sees the incarnation, the passion and the resurrection as equally necessary to the mystery; and that its over-emphasis is indeed as dangerous as Fr Gregory suggested. Since it has strong support both in scripture and in the western tradition, there remains a certain amount of unfinished business in the area of reconciling it with the fuller understanding.
For Catholics and Orthodox, it is perhaps a prime example of what develops when people read scripture without the hermeneutical support of the whole of the tradition.
Based on my 23 years as a western Catholic, I believe Fr. Gregory’s characterization of western soteriology is believed by a substantial percentage of western Catholics; whether the majority, I can’t say. It pretty much reflected my soteriology as a western Catholic for many years. It is true that the Catechism and more academic theology is a lot deeper, fuller and more patristic, but my experience is that there is a huge dichotomy between these latter and the popular theology of the average Catholic in the pews.
In my experience, there has been a general neglect of the theme (not just the word, but the theme) of theosis in the western church. I can’t estimate how many sermons out of the thousands I have heard have dealt with this theme, but they were relatively few. Joe
Well joe,
Perhaps you belonged to a peculiar parish or you never bothered to really listen closely.
My experience was that the basic theme running through most sermons etc; was of God’s Love and forgiveness of human beings and their sins. I rarely heard anything regarding “penal substitution”, if at all. Nothing about hell or purgatory etc;. Nothing about guilt either.
As for theosis, well, I suppose talking about the possibility of being a saint isn’t close enough for you?
The differences between “East” and “West” aren’t all that great nor as irreconcilable as some think.
Personally, I think there’s far more difference in psychological/ personality types than there is in theology,
that is, I think some aspects of Christianity attract certain types of people more than others.
I seem to remember one strand of Russian Orthodoxy that was fairly “Calvinist” in personality type; to smile or laugh was forbidden since it was of the devil and one had to constantly be in remorse and repentance for one’s sins.
A rather dour, Puritan Orthodoxy.
On the other hand, St. Seraphim of Sarov greeted everyone by calling them “My joy”. A rather cheerful type.
Perhaps there should be a study comparing personality types and their theological preferences.
Joe: I am a Cradle Catholic, teethed on 1950s-vintage Catholicism, then brought back to the Faith via the charismatic renewal.
Never, ever, ever did I hear anything remotely approximating “penal substitution.” Never. Not even from those benighted nuns back in the Fifties!
Never.
I have lived all up and down the East Coast, from Vermont to Louisiana and Florida. Never, in any of those places, did I encounter “penal substitution” in a Catholic parish. Never.
Why you feel you must tear a page from Frederica’s playbook is beyond me. But suffice it to say it is more polemics than reality. The vast majority of Catholics would not have Clue One what you are talking about.
Diane
As one who was raised Catholic, I tend to agree with Joe that
the model is a pretty fair description of the popular understanding of the cross. As a child, I was taught that the Christ’s took my punishment on himself so that I might be freed from condemnation for my sin. Regarding original sin, I learned that my tendency to sin was a consequence of Adam’s fall, but that I was morally responsible for my choices. I was never made aware of multiple theological “models” of salvation.
Dale: I was also raised Catholic, and I was never taught that. I was taught that Jesus offered an atoning sacrifice on the Cross–the emphasis was on sacrifice, not punishment. This is a completely Biblical emphasis (“He is the propitiation for our sines”). It also ties in with the whole idea of the Sacrifice of the Mass (which re-presents Calvary). And, of course, it ties in with the whole OT sacrificial system thing.
We have the old Baltimore Catechism at home, which is what we all learned our doctrine from when we were kids. Can you show me where this Catechism (or any other widely used Catholic Catechism) states that the Father punished Jesus for our sins upon the Cross (penal substitution)?
If this is not in any Catholic Catechism, then I find it difficult to believe that it’s what you learned. All I can say is that your Catholic education must have been rather singular!
Diane
I think people have confused memories.
This is from the Baltimore Catechism circa 1954;
“Question 90- What is meant by the Redemption? By the Redemption is meant that Jesus Christ, as the Redeemer of the whole human race, offered His sufferings and death to God as a fitting sacrifice in satisfaction for the sins of men, and regained for them the right to be children of God and heirs of heaven.
Satisfaction is compensation for an offense or injury against another. A redeemer is one who pays a price to regain something that has been lost or given up.
No creature could, of himself, make adequate satisfaction for sin, which offends the infinite majesty of God. Every creature is finite and, as such, is unable to make infinite satisfaction.
Although God wished all to be saved, and although Christ died for all, yet only those whom the merits of His Passion are applied will benefit by His death. The death of Christ was a sacrifice of infinite merit and satisfaction, by which man was redeemed. Christ was both priest and victim in the sacrifice whereby He redeemed us. As priest He offered His Passion and death to God for us, and as victim He suffered and died.”
I suppose one could derive the penal substitution theory from this but at some streching of its points.