Looking east to understand salvation

Why I look east when we talk about atonement…

I was at a meeting in Glasgow where the first song we sang in the opening worship had a line referring to being washed in the blood of the lamb. I don’t like this language and it is not because I am a vegetarian. This little phrase conveys a whole raft of meaning that goes back a long way. It comes from a particular understanding of the atonement.

On the train home I was reading Karen Armstrong’s book “The case for God” and I was reminded of a more positive understanding of atonement.  Our western ideas of atonement are based too much on the ideas of Anselm and not enough on the fathers of the Eastern Orthodox Church such as Maximus the Confessor.  I had mostly forgotten the patristic lectures we had from Ben Drury in my first year B.D. course a long time ago. Reading those paragraphs by Armstrong encouraged me to look up “theosis” (also known as deification, divinisation or growing into the likeness of God) and the way it influences atonement.  As a Methodist, theosis appeals to me. Protestants are generally less aware of theosis, but Methodists, following John Wesley, have always placed strong emphasis on sanctification or perfection which equates in general terms. 

So what did Anselm of Canterbury say that was so influential? He expressed an idea that has influenced all western theology: that God became man in Jesus to expiate the sin of Adam. The reason for incarnation was judicial, to right a wrong. The idea has become so influential that many fail to attribute this insight to Anselm.

Alternatively the idea of salvation as theosis may be summed up in the phrase, "God became human so that humans might become God." This does not mean that humans can be another god or equal to God, but rather that they can hope to participate in the divine nature. This is based on the perspective that when Christ was incarnate in the man Jesus, he did take on just one human nature, but all of human nature. He thus made it possible for the reverse to occur – for humans to participate in the divine nature.

The orthodox churches of the east start their understanding of atonement and salvation from a different place.  Their tradition has different doctrines regarding man’s created state, the fall, and the Old Testament sacrificial system, which result in an understanding of the atonement as participatory rather than substitutionary, ontological rather than juridical, and cosmic rather than individual.  Maximus the Confessor said that the word would have been made flesh in Jesus even without the sin of Adam. The Word’s plan, even from before the creation of the world, was to “mingle” with human nature in a hypostatic union, becoming a man in order to deify man’s nature within Himself.  Jesus was the first human to be deified (entirely possessed and permeated by the divine) and we can also be like him in this life. The word had become incarnate in order that the whole human being could become God, deified by the grace of God become human, soul and body by nature, and becoming whole God, soul and body, by grace. This divine initiative has made God and humanity inseparable. Jesus the man gives the human race its only hint as to what God is like and has shown that humans can become part of god in some way. When we think human we now have to think God and vice versa. 

In Maximus’ own words : “By his gracious condescension God became man and is called man for the sake of man and by exchanging his condition for ours revealed the power that elevates man to God through his love for God and brings God down to man because of his love for man. By this blessed inversion, man is made God by divinization and God is made man by hominization.”

Maximus, like Athanasius, saw God as absolutely transcendent and thus unknowable. And because God was not an immense being (as the Arian heresy suggested) but being itself, it was possible for Jesus to be both human and divine at the same time.  It is only because God is unknown and unknowable that humans are able to become like him.

So when I look for the reason that God became incarnate in Jesus I look back to the earliest theologians of the church and am inspired by the insights of Maximus the Confessor.

Incidentally, this view of salvation is not only found in Maximus; salvation as theosis occurs in the works of many of the early church fathers as the following quotations show.

We are not made gods from the beginning; first we are mere humans, then we become gods. --St. Irenaeus, Adv Haer III IV:38:4

Let us become the image of the one whole God, bearing nothing earthly in ourselves, so that we may consort with God and become gods, receiving from God our existence as gods --St. Maximus the Confessor On Theology, 7.73

For the Son of God became man, that we might become God. --St. Athanasius, De inc.

He has called men gods that are deified of His Grace, not born of His Substance.--St. Augustine

The Word became flesh and the Son of God became the Son of Man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God --St. Irenaeus, Adv Haer III

Let us applaud and give thanks that we have become not only Christians but Christ himself. Do you understand, my brothers, the grace that God our head has given us? Be filled with wonder and joy--we have become veritable Christs! --St. Augustine of Hippo

The Only-begotten Son of God, wanting us to be partakers of his divinity, assumed our human nature so that, having become man, he might make men gods. --St. Thomas Aquinas

The highest of all things desired is to become God. --St Basil the Great

And for Methodists, the closing lines from the hymn ‘Love divine all loves excelling’ - “Changed from Glory in to Glory, ‘til in heaven we take our place, ‘til we cast our crowns before thee, lost in wonder love and praise.”