In a recent recording of a lenten retreat, Fr Jonathan Tobias mentions the common misconceptions one hears about the mystery of salvation and the understanding of the Cross.
If you're a Sunday school teacher, the following links might help identify these misconceptions which may arise when reading popular reductionist mainstream, 'Evangelical' or mega-Church literature.
Sometimes these misconceptions can creep into Orthodox parishes so it's also refreshing to hear Priests identify, compare and address these misconceptions. Hope you find the following resources interesting and of benefit:
Also related:
Some Profound Heresies On Atonement by Fr John Peck http://frjohnpeck.com/some-profound-heresies-on-atonement/
and this wonderful post by Fr Stephen Freeman:
Therapeutic Substitutionary Atonement http://glory2godforallthings.com/2013/04/19/therapeutic-substitutionary-atonement/
These two articles and Fr Jonathan's paper are also included after the break...
by Fr John Peck, http://frjohnpeck.com/some-profound-heresies-on-atonement/
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No statement is more central to the Christian faith than St. Paul’s rehearsal of the Apostolic Tradition – for his words “delivered…received…” are specifically the words that describe the handing over of Tradition. His words represent what is already the received teaching of the faith – the Apostolic deposit. The Christian faith is not just that Christ died and was raised from the dead, but that He “died for our sins according to the Scriptures.” The death of Christ is somehow “for our sins.” This is the very heart of the Gospel – the most primitive preaching of the Church.
But it is at this most primitive point that essential questions must be asked: how is it that Christ’s death is “for our sins?” How is it that His death and resurrection is “according to the Scriptures?” For though Christ clearly taught the disciples that He would be crucified and would rise on the third day, this was not understood by them. It was not understood because it was not a part of the received Jewish expectation of the Messiah. That Christ died for our sins and according to the Scriptures is an article of the faith that was made known only after the resurrection: it is not a derived Tradition, but a teaching of the risen Lord Himself.
This is a place where disagreement has begun to manifest itself in recent years. For some, Christ’s death on the Cross represents the payment for a debt owed to God, the debt of Adam’s sin. In another account, Christ’s death on the Cross is a blood sacrifice to appease the wrath of God, incurred through Adam’s sin. For still others, Christ’s death is the destruction of Hades and death itself, the healing of the corruption of sin. There are yet other views, but the disagreement has largely been between advocates of one version or another of these accounts.
The first two accounts generally fall into a category of “forensic” models. In these, there is a debt or a divine consequence (wrath) that must be paid or turned aside. In various ways it is noted that only a perfect Man could pay the debt (or appease the wrath). Since all men sin, only God could meet the requirements. Thus God became man, so that God, as man, could accomplish what man alone could not.
In the second model, sin and death are more or less synonymous. Rather than being forensic (legal) in character, they are ontological (a matter of being and existence). Sin is the disease of corruption, the movement from true existence toward non-being. The destructive chaos that it leaves in its wake is more like “symptoms” than legal problems. God in His mercy becomes man, and as the God/Man enters the depths of death and Hades, the depths of ontological corruption and destroys them. In His resurrection (which is a necessary aspect of this model – unlike the others), our ontological corruption is destroyed or rather “put to death” and we receive new life – the eternal life of the resurrection (which is a quality and not merely longevity). In this model, there is a participation and communion. Christ becomes sin, that we might become righteous. He dies that we might live. He takes on our death, that we might take on His life.
In both models, there is a reality of substitution – Christ assumes the place of man. But the nature of that substitution, and therefore the nature of salvation itself, is quite different. In the forensic models, Christ accepts the punishment that was incurred by man: Christ is punished instead of man. It is certainly a demonstration of the love of God, though the debt owed or the wrath appeased belong to God as well. Christ’s acceptance of man’s due consequences instead of man, goes to the very heart of the forensic model – at least to the heart of what makes it most distinctive from the ontological accounts.
Christ’s substitution in the forensic models removes man from redeeming action. Man is not punished but forgiven. The wrath of God is appeased and man is not condemned to hell. Christ accepts these things on man’s behalf. Justification is extrinsic – it happens outside of man and apart from man. By faith, man acknowledges Christ’s gift on his behalf and accepts the gift of forgiveness that could not have been his in any other way.
The substitution in the second (ontological) model is different in character. Christ steps into the life and situation of man (the human race), but does not remove man from the equation. The Cross is not foreign to man – it is the fullness of the consequence of human sin. The substitution of Christ in the ontological models is not a replacement, but a union. Christ unites Himself with man (the Incarnation) and in so doing takes upon Himself, and into Himself the fullness of our humanity (excepting sin – which is foreign to our nature). Importantly, however, just as Christ takes upon Himself our humanity, so He also unites Himself to us, we take on His divinity. As God and man Christ enters death, Hades, the full consequence of our separation from God. As God and as man, Christ destroys death and unites man victoriously to His resurrection. He is the true mediator, having restored us to the union with God for which we were created.
It would be possible to argue that this second model is not a true substitution. I agree, if the term, substitution, is meant as “replacement.” But the problems within the notion of substitution are found in the idea of Christ as “replacement.” Christ as replacement creates a “theology of absence.” If Christ simply “takes our place,” then salvation is merely forensic (legal) and something which happens outside of us. If God simply declares us to be “just,” “forgiven,” or “made whole,” then the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection become something of an abstraction. Their “necessity,” would only exist within God Himself, who might otherwise have “declared” us to be righteous without all the bother. Indeed, there can be no necessity within God, whether it is predicated of His justice, or anything else. God is free and has no necessity.
However, there is a necessity which exists within us. We are indeed broken, unrighteous, sinful, in need of healing and subject to death and corruption. If our healing required only a word, then why not speak the word long before?
The necessity within salvation lies within us. Christ’s Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection are acts of freedom. It is with complete freedom and cooperation that He is Incarnate of the Virgin. His death is a “voluntary” death: “No one takes my life from me….” (John 10:18). Nor does our salvation violate our freedom. We must freely accept the gift of God given to us in Christ. The synergy of salvation is God’s respect for the freedom which allows us to exist as persons. It is this same freedom that lies at the heart of the mystery of the “fullness of time.” Christ entered history at the critical moment of man’s freedom.
Christ’s “substitution” is not a replacement. Christ does not “replace” our humanity, but “assumes” it. In Christ, every man is on the Cross. The Second Adam “recapitulates” the First Adam and the whole of humanity. There is in the Cross (and whole economy of salvation) an exchange, a coinherence, a perichoresis (περιχώρησις). The term “perichoresis” was used by St. Gregory the Theologian to describe the relationship between the Divine and Human natures in Christ. It is this same relationship (or one that can be similarly described) that is manifest in our salvation. Christ dies on the Cross. We die on the Cross.
There are additional weaknesses within the forensic models, but I leave them for now. The Lenten journey is not an annual community remembrance of a legal event. Rather it is the mystical embrace of the true life which coinheres in every believer. Baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ, we journey to the common ground of our Golgotha. There we suffer and die with Christ, having shared in His fast and preparation. Dying with Him, we rejoice in His/our victory over death and Hades and join in the festal shout as death is trampled down by what is now our common death.
This is the great mystery of our faith. Those who eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Crucified and Risen Christ, abide in Him as He abides in them and become partakers (those who have a true share) in all that is His. This is the great exchange, that God became what we are that we might become what He is.
Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.
The Cross: Peace over Violence
by Very. Rev. Jonathan Tobias
http://janotec.typepad.com/terrace/2013/04/the-cross-peace-over-violence.html
If you're a Sunday school teacher, the following links might help identify these misconceptions which may arise when reading popular reductionist mainstream, 'Evangelical' or mega-Church literature.
Sometimes these misconceptions can creep into Orthodox parishes so it's also refreshing to hear Priests identify, compare and address these misconceptions. Hope you find the following resources interesting and of benefit:
Fr Jonathan Tobias on misconceptions concerning the Cross
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sCK-nu9wek
or
http://janotec.typepad.com/terrace/2013/04/the-cross-peace-over-violence.html
or
http://janotec.typepad.com/terrace/2013/04/the-cross-peace-over-violence.html
Also related:
Some Profound Heresies On Atonement by Fr John Peck http://frjohnpeck.com/some-profound-heresies-on-atonement/
and this wonderful post by Fr Stephen Freeman:
Therapeutic Substitutionary Atonement http://glory2godforallthings.com/2013/04/19/therapeutic-substitutionary-atonement/
These two articles and Fr Jonathan's paper are also included after the break...
Profound Heresies On Atonement
by Fr John Peck, http://frjohnpeck.com/some-profound-heresies-on-atonement/
Today, I’m going to teach you some profound heresies.
In today’s Gospel, we have two men. This is a short, but important parable. First, the Pharisee. The Pharisee begins his prayer
“O God, I thank you that I am not like other men…”
We consider this boasting, of course, but I learned something important in seminary about it. My Old Testament professor was Dr. Moshe Zorea, an Orthodox Jew who had become an Orthodox Christian. He really knew the Old Testament very well, and he was a gifted teacher. When we were talking, one day, about the parable of the Publican and the Pharisee, he took out his Jewish prayerbook, opened it to morning prayers and said to one of us, “Read this aloud.”
Here is what was read:
“O God, I thank you that I am not like other men…That I am not an extortioner, unjust, an adulterer…I thank you that I am not a woman.”
Sorry ladies, that’s what it said. I asked him about that, and he explained that theologically, in the Jewish tradition it is understood that men are made of earth – dirt (!), that’s why little boys always run out to get dirty. They’re digging in to familiar territory.
Women, however, are made of a higher substance. Women are made of ‘man.’
The ‘thanks’ to God for this was the opportunity to strive for holiness, and this was laudable, and something worthy of giving thanks for.
This Pharisee is just saying his morning prayers. In another place, the Gospel says that the Pharisees tithed mint, and dill and cumin from their gardens. They tithed from everything they received! They said their prayers in the Temple every morning and evening. They were leading righteous lives!
Us? Not so much.
We all talk about not judging others but we do. We don’t all say our morning and evening prayers. We don’t all tithe (which is an Old Testament prescription anyway – New Testament must cheerfully be more – tithe +1!)
We have an important and humbling lesson from this parable: the Pharisee was better than we are. By his boasting, he did not receive the blessing of God.
But really, he was better that we are.
Now, the Publican was a sinner, like us. He knew he was a sinner. He came to the Temple and did not even lift up his eyes. And when we come to church, are we repenting? Are we really, humbly asking God to forgive us for our sins? This man, who knew his true state, came in hope and faith, but without presumption. He truly repented, and he received God’s mercy.
This is why, during the fast of Great Lent, we make sure to take the time for a holy confession. It is the time of repentance. The Publican said nothing to justify himself at all. Not a single word or self-righteousness.
Us? Not so much.
He was set right with God. This is called being justified, because it is necessary to repent in order to receive salvation.
Salvation. To be set right with God.
There are some false understandings about the work of Christ, and theories of Atonement, and this is the core of our lesson today.
First of all, Salvation is not solutions to problems that don’t exist.
Let me say that again.
Salvation is not solutions to problems that don’t exist.
Remember the movie “The Music Man?” We must not allow Christian theology to act like Robert Preston, running around telling people “There’s trouble in River City!” while having the ‘solution’ right here in my suitcase – for a small investment. If you need to sell something, you need a problem it solves first – and if there is no problem, you create one.
There are many false understanding of Atonement, and let’s check them off.
Most of these came about after the advent of Scholastic Theology in the west. They don’t exist in Hebraic thought, and are not at all Apostolic in their understanding of salvation.
THE RANSOM THEORY OF ATONEMENT
The ransom theory of atonement is based on verses such as Mark 10:45 –
“the Son of Man came … to give his life as a ransom for the many”.
In this metaphor Jesus liberates mankind from slavery to Satan and thus death by giving his own life as a ransom.
Not understanding the metaphor, evidently, some Christians have taken this literally – which then begs the question “To whom did He pay it?”
Did He Pay the Devil? NO! A conqueror does not go to the jailhouse and pay for the prisoners. He puts his foot on the throat of his defeated enemy and takes whatever he wants.
The reason we don’t follow this view is because;
a) We understand what a metaphor is, andb) The idea that Satan could be rewarded by God, by paying for the hostages with Himself (!) for his tyranny is blasphemous!
No. Christ is the Victor. He ‘paid the price’ in the sense that he did what had to be done.
DEBT SATISFACTION THEORY OF ATONEMENT
The Debt Satisfaction Theory of Atonement sees Adam’s sin as infinitely offending God and his honor.
This is a little close to my heart. As a kid, I watched the movie “Becket” where Thomas Becket admits he falls in love with the honor of God, and says that the Kingdom of God is a real kingdom, and that it must defended like any other kingdom.
Under this theory of Atonement, God’s honor has been infinitely offended by us poor mortals, and in order that Divine Justice be fulfilled, he must punish us with death to restore His honor (I don’t know to whom He must restore it, but that’s another point). Here’s the problem. Under this theory, in order that it not be seen that God takes sin lightly, God MUST repay evil with evil. Therefore, God is beholden to a greater law than himself – God is neither free nor merciful.
God demands payment of an infinite debt. Obviously, no mortal is infinite (but evidently can infinitely offend!), but Jesus, as the God-Man, has infinite merits, and therefore can pay this debt.
This sort of thinking led to the invention of indulgences in the Roman Church.
The temporal punishment must be paid by each soul – despite forgiveness of sins by Christ, and this can be alleviated through indulgences from the Church. As the merits of Christ, and his saints, exceeded what was necessary to atone for each one’s sins, they are built up in a ‘treasury of merits’ which the Church has the ability and right to distribute as it sees fit. This is the Roman doctrine to this day.
In the Ransom theory, the debt is paid to the devil.
In the Debt Satisfaction theory, the debt is paid to God Himself, as if we were held in bondage by the Father!
The Debt Satisfaction theory became the dominant theory of Atonement in western Christianity, and remains so to this day, despite its obvious and glaring problems.
PENAL SUBSTITUTION THEORY OF ATONEMENT
After the Debt Satisfaction theory, protestant reformers invented the Penal Substitution theory, based on the (false) understanding of mankind’s total depravity after the fall – stating that Jesus who died for us, was punished in our place (by the Father, of course – it is related to the Debt Satisfaction Theory).
In this theory, all the individual punishments for sin, every sin, fell on Jesus. More sin, more punishment! Only then could God be satisfied that his Divine Justice has been fulfilled. God cannot just forgive sin, and leave it at that.
We believe that God is love and that his love in unconditional.
We do not believe that God’s wrath can only be appeased by killing his own Son. We do not believe that God must himself be healed of his passions and wrath by the blood of His own Son. If so, it appears that God Himself needs healing, and needs the blood of his own Son to heal him! This is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but Zeus! What a bloodthirsty God!
On a popular level, these three theories are combined so that Christ, by his death on the cross, simultaneously paid the price to the Devil, and to the Father, and receives the punishment for our sins. Add this to the idea that if Jesus suffered the punishment for our sins, then we don’t have to suffer at all. Hence, the introduction to this way of thinking of the Prosperity Gospel!
MORAL EXEMPLAR THEORY OF ATONEMENT
There is one other theory that came about as a reaction to these distorted theories of Atonement: the moral exemplar theory of atonement. In this theory, Christ merely shows us the way to be good. There is no really change in us because we can refuse to follow his example. There is no existential change in us because of Christ’s redeeming work.
This de-emphasizes Christ’s redeeming death on the Cross, and indeed, the whole Incarnation. Orthodox reject it out of hand. In other words, Christ didn’t actually accomplish anything. He was just a good example for us.
If all of these are wrong, what is the teaching of the Church?
ATONEMENT IS THERAPEUTIC TO THE SOUL.
We see Atonement as genuine and effectual to us individually.
We don’t perceive that God looks at us, but only ‘sees’ Jesus righteousness, as if he was easy to deceive via a divine ‘peek-a-boo’ game.
We believe atonement heals us. Restores to wholeness the image of God in us.
THE BARRIERS BETWEEN GOD AND MAN
The Orthodox Church sees three barriers between God and man.
Nature, Sin and Death
God is separated from man by His Divine Nature. We have limited mortal nature, and God is existence beyond existence.
By His Incarnation in the flesh, Christ united Divine nature to human nature, in his person. The glorified, resurrected flesh of the God-man Jesus Christ is ‘seated’ at the right hand of the Father to this moment! Christ united the Godhead to humanity in his flesh.
By the cross, Christ destroyed the power of sin – again, in his flesh!
By his Resurrection, Christ destroyed the power of death – again, in his flesh!
OT Sacrificial system: The life is in the blood. The big question about ‘the blood’ of sacrifice was this:
- Is it a propitiary sacrifice – designed to appease an angry deity?
- Or is it an expiatory sacrifice – designed to effect a change in those offering the sacrifice?
The Church’s answer has always been therapeutic – it is an expiatory sacrifice.
The sacrifices of the Old Testament were also expiatory. They were intended to effect a change in those offering the sacrifice. To help heal the interior person.
God himself in many places in Scripture proclaims that he desires no blood of bulls and goats. He neither wants nor needs sacrifices – we need them! For the sacrifice to be complete, especially the Paschal sacrifice, you –with the priest making the sacrifice -had to consume a portion of the sacrifice yourself or you were excluded from the covenant.
THE BLOOD OF THE SACRIFICE: THE BLOOD OF CHRIST.
Here – is where we offer and receive this sacrifice of thanksgiving. Here is where we eat and drink the Body and Blood of the Lord, according to his holy commandment. When we receive the Body and Blood of Christ, we become partakers of Divine nature, like St. Peter writes about in his epistle.
Now, in every sacrifice there are four necessary elements:
- The God to whom the sacrifice is made;
- The Priest who is offering the sacrifice;
- Those on whose behalf the sacrifice is being offered;
- The sacrificial victim – that is, that which is being sacrificed.
Christ fulfills all of these in his flesh.
- He is, in the flesh, God Almighty, Yahweh, the Eternal Word.
- He is the eternal High Priest who offers the only acceptable sacrifice.
- He is one of us, a member of the human race, in his flesh, and therefore can offer on our behalf for all of us.
- And he is the sacrificial victim. He is the paschal lamb. He is the only acceptable sacrifice received by the Father.
Christ unites us all. Christ heals the rift between God and man, because he IS the healing of that rift. His crucifixion destroyed sin. His death destroys death. Uniting ourselves to him heals us of every infirmity and makes up whatever is weak and lacking. Christ heals. That is Atonement. That is Salvation. The healing and re-integration of the human person, body, soul and spirit.
And to access this grace, we need to access Him. And how do we do that?
Today’s Gospel tells us. Humility. Repentance.
Access to his grace comes about by repentance, humility, contrition.
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Therapeutic Substitutionary Atonement
by Fr. Stephen Freeman, http://glory2godforallthings.com/2013/04/19/therapeutic-substitutionary-atonement/
For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures… (1 Cor. 15:3-4)
No statement is more central to the Christian faith than St. Paul’s rehearsal of the Apostolic Tradition – for his words “delivered…received…” are specifically the words that describe the handing over of Tradition. His words represent what is already the received teaching of the faith – the Apostolic deposit. The Christian faith is not just that Christ died and was raised from the dead, but that He “died for our sins according to the Scriptures.” The death of Christ is somehow “for our sins.” This is the very heart of the Gospel – the most primitive preaching of the Church.
But it is at this most primitive point that essential questions must be asked: how is it that Christ’s death is “for our sins?” How is it that His death and resurrection is “according to the Scriptures?” For though Christ clearly taught the disciples that He would be crucified and would rise on the third day, this was not understood by them. It was not understood because it was not a part of the received Jewish expectation of the Messiah. That Christ died for our sins and according to the Scriptures is an article of the faith that was made known only after the resurrection: it is not a derived Tradition, but a teaching of the risen Lord Himself.
This is a place where disagreement has begun to manifest itself in recent years. For some, Christ’s death on the Cross represents the payment for a debt owed to God, the debt of Adam’s sin. In another account, Christ’s death on the Cross is a blood sacrifice to appease the wrath of God, incurred through Adam’s sin. For still others, Christ’s death is the destruction of Hades and death itself, the healing of the corruption of sin. There are yet other views, but the disagreement has largely been between advocates of one version or another of these accounts.
The first two accounts generally fall into a category of “forensic” models. In these, there is a debt or a divine consequence (wrath) that must be paid or turned aside. In various ways it is noted that only a perfect Man could pay the debt (or appease the wrath). Since all men sin, only God could meet the requirements. Thus God became man, so that God, as man, could accomplish what man alone could not.
In the second model, sin and death are more or less synonymous. Rather than being forensic (legal) in character, they are ontological (a matter of being and existence). Sin is the disease of corruption, the movement from true existence toward non-being. The destructive chaos that it leaves in its wake is more like “symptoms” than legal problems. God in His mercy becomes man, and as the God/Man enters the depths of death and Hades, the depths of ontological corruption and destroys them. In His resurrection (which is a necessary aspect of this model – unlike the others), our ontological corruption is destroyed or rather “put to death” and we receive new life – the eternal life of the resurrection (which is a quality and not merely longevity). In this model, there is a participation and communion. Christ becomes sin, that we might become righteous. He dies that we might live. He takes on our death, that we might take on His life.
In both models, there is a reality of substitution – Christ assumes the place of man. But the nature of that substitution, and therefore the nature of salvation itself, is quite different. In the forensic models, Christ accepts the punishment that was incurred by man: Christ is punished instead of man. It is certainly a demonstration of the love of God, though the debt owed or the wrath appeased belong to God as well. Christ’s acceptance of man’s due consequences instead of man, goes to the very heart of the forensic model – at least to the heart of what makes it most distinctive from the ontological accounts.
Christ’s substitution in the forensic models removes man from redeeming action. Man is not punished but forgiven. The wrath of God is appeased and man is not condemned to hell. Christ accepts these things on man’s behalf. Justification is extrinsic – it happens outside of man and apart from man. By faith, man acknowledges Christ’s gift on his behalf and accepts the gift of forgiveness that could not have been his in any other way.
The substitution in the second (ontological) model is different in character. Christ steps into the life and situation of man (the human race), but does not remove man from the equation. The Cross is not foreign to man – it is the fullness of the consequence of human sin. The substitution of Christ in the ontological models is not a replacement, but a union. Christ unites Himself with man (the Incarnation) and in so doing takes upon Himself, and into Himself the fullness of our humanity (excepting sin – which is foreign to our nature). Importantly, however, just as Christ takes upon Himself our humanity, so He also unites Himself to us, we take on His divinity. As God and man Christ enters death, Hades, the full consequence of our separation from God. As God and as man, Christ destroys death and unites man victoriously to His resurrection. He is the true mediator, having restored us to the union with God for which we were created.
It would be possible to argue that this second model is not a true substitution. I agree, if the term, substitution, is meant as “replacement.” But the problems within the notion of substitution are found in the idea of Christ as “replacement.” Christ as replacement creates a “theology of absence.” If Christ simply “takes our place,” then salvation is merely forensic (legal) and something which happens outside of us. If God simply declares us to be “just,” “forgiven,” or “made whole,” then the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection become something of an abstraction. Their “necessity,” would only exist within God Himself, who might otherwise have “declared” us to be righteous without all the bother. Indeed, there can be no necessity within God, whether it is predicated of His justice, or anything else. God is free and has no necessity.
However, there is a necessity which exists within us. We are indeed broken, unrighteous, sinful, in need of healing and subject to death and corruption. If our healing required only a word, then why not speak the word long before?
The necessity within salvation lies within us. Christ’s Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection are acts of freedom. It is with complete freedom and cooperation that He is Incarnate of the Virgin. His death is a “voluntary” death: “No one takes my life from me….” (John 10:18). Nor does our salvation violate our freedom. We must freely accept the gift of God given to us in Christ. The synergy of salvation is God’s respect for the freedom which allows us to exist as persons. It is this same freedom that lies at the heart of the mystery of the “fullness of time.” Christ entered history at the critical moment of man’s freedom.
Christ’s “substitution” is not a replacement. Christ does not “replace” our humanity, but “assumes” it. In Christ, every man is on the Cross. The Second Adam “recapitulates” the First Adam and the whole of humanity. There is in the Cross (and whole economy of salvation) an exchange, a coinherence, a perichoresis (περιχώρησις). The term “perichoresis” was used by St. Gregory the Theologian to describe the relationship between the Divine and Human natures in Christ. It is this same relationship (or one that can be similarly described) that is manifest in our salvation. Christ dies on the Cross. We die on the Cross.
I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me (Galatians 2:20).St. Paul is not describing an “ethical” or “moral” transaction, but a mystical and true exchange in which the life of Christ and our lives coinhere. His life, death and resurrection become our life, death and resurrection.
Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. For he who has died has been freed from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God (Romans 6:3-10).A substitution which represents our absence on the Cross does violence to passages such as this. We would need to go back and edit St. Paul, inserting the words “would be as if” repeatedly into the text:
Do you not know that our Baptism makes it such that it would be as if we had been crucified with Christ? etc.Such violence disrupts the realism of our salvation and turns the Christian life into a moral abstraction. The sacraments become empty mental exercises.
There are additional weaknesses within the forensic models, but I leave them for now. The Lenten journey is not an annual community remembrance of a legal event. Rather it is the mystical embrace of the true life which coinheres in every believer. Baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ, we journey to the common ground of our Golgotha. There we suffer and die with Christ, having shared in His fast and preparation. Dying with Him, we rejoice in His/our victory over death and Hades and join in the festal shout as death is trampled down by what is now our common death.
This is the great mystery of our faith. Those who eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Crucified and Risen Christ, abide in Him as He abides in them and become partakers (those who have a true share) in all that is His. This is the great exchange, that God became what we are that we might become what He is.
Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.
The Cross: Peace over Violence
by Very. Rev. Jonathan Tobias
http://janotec.typepad.com/terrace/2013/04/the-cross-peace-over-violence.html
the odd expectation
In Great Lent, we are in a season when the faithful seek the Holy Mystery of Confession, and it is this time of year when a special problem emerges. And that is the issue of Penance. What I mean here is not the positive problem of a spiritual father helping the penitent with a penance that will aid him in his theosis -- that is really the subject of another presentation.
No: what I am concerned with is the strange expectation of penance by the penitent. Sometimes, the penitent might even ask for a more severe penance if he thinks the therapy suggested by the priest is too lenient.
Of course, such an expectation and demand for hard penance is completely contrary to Orthodox Tradition, let alone the fact that it indicates a spiritual problem the Latins like to call “over-scrupulosity.”
But we are left with the nagging impression, here, that this is a sign of an even larger problem. In this odd expectation of punishment, there seems to be the trace of a deeper expectation that sin is something that should be paid for and balanced out … that there is Someone Who needs to be appeased, or “propitiated” … that Someone or something needs “satisfied” … that some sort of “payment” needs paid, in order to stave off some sort of impending doom or disorder, or disaster -- in a word, inescapable Wrath.
substitutionary atonement
Today, I would like to talk about about this persistent idea that the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross was such a “satisfaction.”
In Orthodoxy, we have generally blamed Anselm as the one most responsible for this doctrine of “satisfaction” -- namely, the doctrine of “substitutionary atonement.” In his work Cur Deus Homo, this eleventh century Benedictine writing in Canterbury asserted that every single sin is an infinite violation of God’s honor. This violation puts the sinner in infinite debt to God. The debt is too much for a sinner to pay, obviously. The only way that this infinite debt could be paid is by the coming of a Redeemer, Whose absolute purity could discharge the debt of humanity.
Hence, the title of Anselm’s work -- Cur Deus Homo, which means “Why the God-Man?” It could only be the God-Man Who could Redeem and satisfy the debt of human sin.
The Orthodox theologian, Vladimir Lossky, singles out Anselm as the locus where Western theology massively moves away from the patristic understanding of the atonement, and turns toward a more legalistic, juridical view of salvation. It is interesting that David Bentley Hart, in his difficult book The Beauty of the Infinite, takes Lossky to task for taking Anselm out of context, and for failing to acknowledge the fact that Anselm is completely Trinitarian in his argument.
Hart is right, to a degree. Anselm is clear that the sacrifice of the Cross is a gift that exceeds every debt. Nothing remains “unpaid for.” Hart tries too hard, I think, to renovate Anselm’s theory of substitutionary atonement. His attempt to re-read Anselm’s argument is more of a re-interpretation than an explanation.
metaphor mistaken for substance
Contrary to Hart’s best efforts, Anselm’s argument is made in language that is strange to the ears of Eastern theology and remains so. His words are not so much juridical as they are commercial. The terms of “debt” and “redemption” are terms of the marketplace. And one rightly wonders whether these words were used in Scripture mainly as secondary terms, where the Apostles and the Lord Himself were using figures of speech to describe a reality that was, after all, un-describable.
This, I think, was Lossky’s main problem with Anselm. In general, the Eastern Orthodox critique of all western theories of the Cross and Redemption have to do with language. Theologians like Lossky, Staniloae, Romanides -- in his inimitably strident manner -- and even Hart himself have noticed a repeated problem in western theology. What may have been meant as a descriptive term in Scripture is frequently taken, in western discourse, as a reality itself. Thus, when a courtroom setting is used by St Paul in his epistle to the Romans, western theology envisions God as Judge, Jesus as Defense Attorney, and the Devil as the DA (in Perry Mason), the prosecuting attorney who is arguing for the State.
To take an even more telling, and historic, example: when the lake of fire is used to describe perdition in eternity, western theology concludes that this fire is a creation made by God. This error in interpretation became a momentous point of discussion in the tragic Council of Florence in the fifteenth century.
Clearly, Anselm’s argument suffers from not a few difficulties. Chief among them is this error of interpretation. But just as problematic is the simple question: just who is the debt to be paid to? And why does God simply not forgive the debt, just like he did in the Parable of the Unjust Servant? After all, isn’t this parable the source of all these commercial terms in the first place -- terms that were so appealing to Anselm?
Of course, this leads us back to the question which should afflict us all -- even after today’s presentation, you should always wonder about this. I don’t mind in the least that you should be skeptical about my argument: I, for one, think that it is a good exercise to hold answers in abeyance, and allow deep theological questions to lurk in the mental corners.
The particular question at hand is this: “Why couldn’t God just forget about sin and let it go?”
the violence of penal substitution
This is the central question that compelled the attention of not only Anselm, but certainly all the Fathers who thought about Redemption. It also become the critical occasion in which western theology displayed some of its most egregious moments, in which it revealed a closer affinity to the violent narratives of this world rather than to the infinitely peaceful narrative of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
I am thinking here, primarily, of the doctrine that Lossky was reallycomplaining about, as opposed to his beating up on poor Anselm. Instead of the commercial doctrine of substitutionary atonement -- that one can lay at the feet of Augustine just as readily as that of Anselm -- Lossky and the Orthodox critique are really complaining about the Reformed Doctrine of Penal Substitution.
This is the theory that Christ was punished (or penalized) in the place of sinners. He was “substituted” in their place, thus “satisfying” the demands of justice so that God can justly forgive their sins.
Let us be fair to Anselm here and not blame him for this argument. To be sure, this doctrine is a derivative of “substitutionary atonement,” but it is really the work of the Protestant Reformation, especially from the lawyerly pen of John Calvin.
It is not hard to understand. It emerges quite readily out of the common human experience of a hard, darksome world. One example ought to confirm the ubiquitous expectation of “penal substitution.” One need look no further, surprisingly, than the pen of Mark Twain.
In his engaging tale of “The Prince and the Pauper,” there is a minor character who assists the hero, Tom, in his task of posing as Prince Edward. The character is a “whipping boy.” The job of the “whipping boy” was to take the place of the Prince whenever corporal punishment was doled out by the tutor.
In effect, the “whipping boy” was an innocent substitute who took the penalty instead of the one who deserved it. Hence, “penal substitution.”
In this theory there is a suggested answer to the question “Why couldn’t God just forget about it?” The answer would be, intriguingly, that God cannot neglect the demands of justice, without contravening His nature of perfect justice.
It is not difficult to critique this view, and one certainly must do so if he is faithful to the apostolic and Orthodox tradition. While later on, in the more positive second half of this presentation, we will meditate upon the narrative of the Sacrifice of Christ in Holy Tradition, permit me to briefly note a few of the problems that emerge from this theory of Penal Substitution.
Let us consider, right off the bat, that this doctrine is the default belief of heterodox American Christianity. Just a few weeks ago, in the Western observance of Easter, it is this argument that lay as the basis for almost every sermon about what happened on Good Friday.
First: there is the notion that Divine Wrath is a passion that is provoked by human sin, and that “necessitates” a response by God. Human sin makes “necessary” God’s anger, and that anger must be completely expressed.
This notion obviously puts God under necessity of provocation -- a thing that cannot be done if God is God: the divine nature is always, completelyfree. This notion also imposes a very human -- indeed, a fallen human -- character of anger upon divine nature.
Second: there is the notion that punishment actually is able to satisfy the demands of justice. Who said, after all, that the punishment of a criminal can adequately repair the damage of the crime? This, I know, resonates with the very contemporary discussion of the penal system in jurisprudence -- but that is precisely my point. If there remains some skepticism about the effectiveness of the penitentiary in secular law, how much more should we question the place of penal punishment in the realm of theology?
Third: there is the notion that somehow, the Son puts Himself in opposition to the Father, as the One who “becomes sin” as a substitute, and thus places Himself at the locus of punishment that must come. On the other hand, the Father directs His “just” wrath against His Son. He unleashes a tempest of infinite pain upon the crucified victim, who falls under the aggregate weight of all the penalty of all the sin of the ages.
And finally, at the extremity of His dereliction, Jesus cries out “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”
And in this theory of penal substitution, the interpretation is that, indeed, God the Father had forsaken His Son.
not forsaken
St Athanasios is quick to lay this notion to rest. In his work, the Discourse Against the Arians, Athanasios asserts the divinity of the Son to his opponents and emphasizes the unity between the Father and the Son.
Here is what he said about those terrible, heartbreaking words of Jesus on the Cross:
“Neither can the Lord be forsaken by the Father, [the Lord] Who is ever in the Father.”
It is interesting that Athanasios wrote this in the context of an argument against the Arians. I say it is interesting because it seems to me that there is at least a latent Arianism running through this notion of the Father and the Son being placed on opposite sides of a penal exchange of justice.
In Orthodox Holy Tradition, the peaceful, beautiful fellowship of the Holy Trinity remains unbounded, unchecked and uninterrupted -- even at the extremity of the Cross.
And, I might add, especially at the extremity of the Cross.
Knowledge of the Trinity as peace and beauty is established at that horrible singularity of sin and death -- at the Cross, and all the way down to the extreme dereliction of Hades, where Jesus in His human soul proclaims the lightning, dawning truth in the darkness that He has completed assumed and transfigured sin and death.
When Scripture says, as it does, that Jesus became sin for us, it did not do so in the sense that Jesus became the criminal and the sufferer of penalty. In 2 Corinthians 5.21, a favorite reference of John Calvin and Charles Hodge, St Paul writes "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." In this sense, Jesus did not become sin essentially. Instead, the sense here is that he completely assumed the full measure of the aggregate consequence of sin -- the terrible, horrifying aspect of all the cost, all the pain of all sin for all time.
And Jesus did not do so so that He might become the single “convict,” Who alone would go to the gallows.
Jesus assumed the burden of sin for all time so that, by His death, it would be loosed for all time.
In the western narratives, Jesus was envisioned as the substitute “whipping boy” for humanity.
But in Orthodox Holy Tradition, there is no doubt that there was a whipping and a hanging tree.
But it wasn’t God doing the whipping.
It was sin.
Sin carries its own grief, suffering, pain and degeneration. Every sin is a cloud of hell that accumulates into an entire atmosphere of darkness.
It was sin.
the persistent myth of propitiation
St Gregory the Theologian thought deeply about the Sacrifice of the Cross, and about how, even in his day, opinions fractured and devolved about the Cross and gravitated toward violence, and away from the primordial peace of the Holy Trinity.
Here are his famous words that anticipate, rather spookily, the likes of Anselm and even Calvin:
We must now examine the question and the dogma so often passed over in silence, but which (I think) demands no less deep study. To whom was that blood offered that was shed for us, and why was it shed? I mean the precious and glorious blood of God, the blood of the High Priest and of the Sacrifice. We were in bondage to the devil and sold under sin, having become corrupt through our concupiscence. Now, since a ransom is paid to him who holds us in his power, I ask to whom such a price was offered and why? If to the devil it is outrageous! The robber receives the ransom, not only from God, but a ransom consisting of God Himself. He demands so exorbitant a payment for his tyranny that it would have been right for him to have freed us altogether. But if the price is offered to the Father, I ask first of all, how? For it was not the Father who held us captive. Why then should the blood of His only begotten Son please the Father, who would not even receive Isaac when he was offered as a whole burnt offering by Abraham, but replaced the human sacrifice with a ram? It is not evident that the Father accepts the sacrifice not because He demanded it or because He felt any need for it, but on account of economy: because man must be sanctified by the humanity of God, and God Himself must deliver us by overcoming the tyrant through His own power, and drawing us to Himself by the mediation of the Son who effects this all for the honour of God, to whom He was obedient in everything … What remains to be said shall be covered with reverent silence …
-- St Gregory of Nazianzen, Holy Pascha, oration XLV, cited in Lossky,Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p153; also cited in Pomazansky,Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, p204
the persistence of violent exchange
Unfortunately, these words could not hold back the tide of opinion that sought, all too eager, the ancient ways of violent sacrifice as opposed to the self-sacrifice that brought forth sanctification.
Let us look more deeply at this persistent belief in this mythical necessity to appease. Let us see if we can discern its genealogy, to see if we can figure out from when it comes.
Just a while ago, I mentioned that this theory seems to emerge out of the common human experience in a dark, hardened world. Usually, when we think of ideas that are the stuff of “common sense” and common experience, we usually confer validity just for that reason.
If everyone thinks it, because everyone has felt it, then it must be true, right?
Everyone has experienced the world in such a way that there seems to be an inescapable, necessary sequence of events. First you do something bad. Then, if you don’t do something to ward off the bad karma, then something equally bad will happen to you.
Every action provokes an equal (or more than equal) reaction.
Your bad act has introduced an imbalance into the cosmos, and if you don’t perform some act of appeasing propitiation, then you are going to get paid back.
So depending on what culture you hail from, there are a lot of various ways to accomplish this. If you are an Aztec ruler and wish to keep your city safe from plague and fire, then you need to offer up a certain number of human sacrifices. If you are the Theban King Creon, then the cost of your hubris is the death of your noble daughter Antigone: this is the price of the gods for balance to be restored. If you are an average Christian, then each sin has a bill to be paid -- a penalty, or “penance,” to be determined by the relative severity of the sin.
This is all predicated on a deep, deep bedrock myth that lies at the foundation of western culture -- and that is the myth that the city, the center of human culture, must be founded upon the cult of sacrificial violence.
And that, in turn, is because -- according to the narratives of the world in general, not just in the West -- literally all narratives are based on violence, upon the succession of one domineering power waging violence upon the less powerful.
A fragile balance must be sustained, warily, between the human city and the dark, chaotic environs outside the city. Culture has its price. The weak are the common, everyday sacrifice to appease the angry gods -- whether these gods are believed in or not, whether or not they have religious names or, as they are nowadays, given scientific and political names.
But once in a while, when the imbalance demands it, a princess like Antigone, or a celebrity, or a politician, is demanded. And occasionally, even entire populations, indeed, millions of people, are offered up in holocaust on the altar of sheer domination and violent pride.
the violent city of totality
You should be skeptical about this line of thinking, because it is not self-evident. Nevertheless, according to Nietzsche and many of the post-moderns, this theme of the violent interplay between Apollo, the god of order, and Dionysios, the god of disorder and the ecstatic darkness is inescapable. It is the “meta-narrative.” It is the single story of the world in its totality.
Sacrifice exists, they say, and so, indeed, does Attic tragedy in classical Greece and the whole world’s pre-Christian heroic literature: sacrifice exists because power must be appeased, and it must be appeased violently.
I think we might be able to detect this sort of sacrifice in the Bible itself. Not at the Cross, nor at the offering of Isaac by Abraham, nor even in any of Israel’s long history of cultic sacrifice, especially at Yom Kippur.
No, I’m thinking of the very first recorded sacrifice in Genesis. I’m thinking of Cain, of course, the elder brother. We read, in the Septuagint, that “on Cain and on his offerings God was not intent” (Genesis 4.5 LXX). His sacrifice was not accepted. It remained a meaningless offering. It was a sacrifice that was of the order of “vain repetition,” as Someone would say centuries later.
What was wrong with the sacrifice of Cain? What was wrong with his religion? He had the right God, after all -- or did he? Is it not the case that your religion is determinative of your belief, and your belief directs your prayer either to the true God, or an idol?
In any case, God did not accept the sacrifice of Cain, St Cyprian of Carthage suggests, simply because Cain did not offer it in peace and innocence. Even though the sacrifice was agricultural, which was viewed later on in Israel as secondary, still, the main problem was that the sacrifice was not offered as agift. It was offered as commerce, ultimately as an appeasement, or propitiation.
It was offered as the first of a long, tragic tradition of violent sacrifices, offered to a God of omnipotence, perhaps, but a God whose nature was not good, whose beauty was not wedded to peace. A terrifying, majestic God to be sure, replete with themes of power and violence, fates and furies, determinisms and deterministic pre-destinations and a complete effacement of human liberty and responsibility. It would be an aristocratic theology that would be at the beck and call of the movers and shakers of all the world’s kingdoms. It would provide the necessary myth and narrative to rationalize power and wealth, privilege and libertinism for the fortunate few who lived in the suburbs of Olympus.
Later on, we’re told, Cain moved to the land east of Eden, where he built a city -- a tragic consequence of fratricide, the murder of his brother Abel. It is always interesting to call to mind the haunting fact that Rome, too, was built not in a day, but on the blood of violent sacrifice. Romulus slew his brother Remus, simply because the latter had the bad sense to step over a border, a line written in the sand.
History has not changed this simple, tragic and ironic script. And it won’t in the future, either. “There will be wars and rumors of wars,” Someone said, centuries later, “These things must come to pass.”
And that, in a hard, simplistic generalization, is the very “unOrthodox” history of the world.
the One Story
Orthodoxy is opposed to this terrible meta-narrative. This hard generalization, this meta-narrative is the cosmology of the “totality,” as our post-modern friends might say.
Our job in Traditional Orthodoxy is to remember and speak clearly the one Story that can bring the gates of totality crashing down.
And that One Story is obviously the Gospel.
“Totality,” if you remember, is the city that is built on violent sacrifice -- a city that Cain first established.
Remember, too, the fact that along with Cain’s sacrifice, there was another.
Abel offered a lamb, the firstfruit of his flock. Yes, indeed, this lamb anticipated, like all the other sacrificial lambs of the Old Testament religion, the one perfect sacrifice of the Cross.
And like the Cross, Abel’s sacrifice became the symbol of the gift of himself. It was not a mere representation of himself, but a symbolic sacrifice that became an offering of his ego, the limitations and the boundaries that could possibly demarcate himself from the divine energies of grace.
And as the lamb anticipated the ultimate lamb that takes away the sin of the world, so also did Abel’s sacrifice of self as a free gift anticipate the free gift of the Son of God.
Fr Dumitru Staniloae is emphatic here: for theosis, or communion with God, to occur, the entrance is by way of the free surrender of self.
… the Father, too, needed our sacrifice for the restoration of our communion with Him; this sacrifice was not to satisfy His honor [cv Anselm, Cur Deus Homo], but to open us to the communion with Him by denying ourselves and seeing Him in all His glory. That is why He offered His Son as sacrifice, because we were not able to bring this sacrifice.
-- Fr Dumitru Staniloae, The Person of Jesus Christ as God and Savior, p110
This is not at all violence, but the establishment of peace -- even though that peace had to be looked for far beyond the contemporary horizons, and far into the prophetic promise of the Messiah.
Every sacrifice in Israel was an expectation not of appeasement, but of eschatological promise. Every sacrifice reached out across the distance of Time to the one moment, at the Cross, when the glory of God would be revealed more brightly than it was ever revealed in the Ark of the Covenant, or in the shekinah glory of the Temple -- so writes St Isaac of Syria.
The glory of the Cross was the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the Son of God Who was also the Son of Man. At the Cross, He is the Second Adam Who repaired and retold the human story according to its original, natural beauty.
His entire Gospel, incarnate life was a self-sacrifice that we are fond of calling “kenosis,” the “pouring out of self.”
It is interesting -- and supremely important -- to remember that this kenosis is the same design and movement as the “perichoresis” of each Person of the Trinity.
At the Cross, the prophetic sacrifice of Abel is completely and overwhelmingly fulfilled. At the Cross, the sacrifice of Christ is of a nature that is completely different from the man-made traditions of violent sacrifice: this One Sacrifice is the new history -- really a new creation -- of peace and beauty. At the Cross the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ is a free, victorious gift of peace and theosis: it is the Trinitarian gift of the Body and Blood of Christ, and the beautiful, heartbreaking call of the Shepherd to His sheep, to walk the paths of righteousness.
Please permit me to read a particularly rhapsodic passage of David Bentley Hart. He writes so well of the continual, indivisible work of the Trinity in the particularities of history -- and at no time does history become more particular than at the horrible singularity of the Crucifixion -- a singularity that the infinite beauty of the Trinity, in its inimitable mystery of grace, completely overwhelms and turns the Cross from an ugly imperial symbol of torture into the only sign that unites power with grace, meekness with majesty, sovereignty with servanthood.
All this is united in the Gospel inversion of the Cross. And here is David Bentley Hart on how the Cross is the inauguration of the “peace that passes understanding”:
And this is our salvation: for when the infinite outpouring of the Father in the Son, in the joy of the Spirit, enters our reality, the apatheia of God's eternally dynamic and replete life of love consumes every pathos in its ardor; even the ultimate extreme of the kenosis of the Son in time -- crucifixion -- is embraced within and overcome by the everlasting kenosis of the divine life. Because divine apatheia is the infinite interval of the going forth of the Son from the Father in the light of the Spirit, every interval of estrangement we fabricate between ourselves and God -- sin, ignorance, death itself -- is always already exceeded in him: God has always gone infinitely further in his own being as the God of self-outpouring charity than we can venture in our attempts to escape him, and our most abysmal sin is as nothing to the abyss of divine love. And as the Word possesses this trinitarian impassibility in his eternal nature, and so as God cannot change or suffer, as a man he can suffer all things, bear any wound -- indeed, bear it more fully than any other could, in absolute depth -- not as wrath or defeat but as an act of saving love: as Easter.
-- David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, p359
whipping boy or sin-eater
There is another story, too, that anticipates the Cross. It is more than a little different from the Whipping Boy of The Prince and the Pauper. This one comes from 18th century England, in some of the out-of-the-way rural districts. It is a quite horrible superstitious tradition: at the death of a loved one, the family would prepare the body and lay the departed upon the table in the house. They would cut a piece of bread and lay the bread upon the chest of the departed. They would then leave the house and put this superstitious tradition into action.
There would be an individual in the village who lived on the “outskirts” -- literally, and more importantly, figuratively. (It is interesting that in uncivilized districts, the literal and figurative are usually a lot closer together in meaning than the more ironic speech of the “one city” of modernity.) Figuratively -- because this individual was “exiled” because of his disorderly behavior, or because of his criminality or disease or all of these reasons combined.
This individual is the one who would be called for to come into the house of the recently dead. He would enter the house, possibly say a few prayers, then eat the piece of bread that was left on the chest of the departed.
That is why this individual was called the “sin-eater” -- it was believed that he would assume and take away the sins of the departed, through the bread.
I suggest to you that the two understandings of the Cross that I have laid out to you today can be summarized by the two stories I have told: of the whipping-boy, and of the sin-eater.
I suggest to you, also, that the latter story is the one much more akin to the Orthodox narrative of the Cross as the Trinity’s rhetoric of divine peace triumphing over violence.
But the analogy between the sin-eater and Christ only goes so far. It stops at two places. First, when Christ “eats” or assumes all the sin of humanity, only He is able to completely eradicate the sin by the infinity of His divinity -- the tidal wave of divine kenosis, even at the lowest point of hell.
And second: the bread of the sin-eater is an obvious symbol of evil death. Bread, in the Gospel narration of Christ, is life-giving and is the sacrament of eternal fellowship with the Holy Trinity. Instead of the sin-eater becoming sin by eating the bread, the bread of the Gospel becomes Christ Himself.
* * * * * * *
In a simple way, if one were to ask you why Jesus died on the Cross, you could say that it wasn't to calm down the mad Father, or to pay off the Devil.
Rather, you could say that He died to pour out His life in infinite kenosis, so that His theosis would be infinitely available. The grain of wheat falls into the soil, dies, so that it might rise into the sunlight in infinite harvest. The Cross is transmuted into Eucharist. The Holy Trinity, in peace, meets the violence of the devilish world untroubled, and overwhelms hell with Resurrection.
Where you and I belong.
But that's another story, next week.
