“The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Our Orthodox Faith commits us to an Apostolic and Patristic form of Christianity. We are committed to Holy Scripture as the ultimate source of our authority for faith and life, and to the catholic consensus of the interpretation of the Scriptures of the Apostles the Fathers and the Bishops of the Church. Part of the Patristic mind has to do with the understanding of sin. For most modern Christians, sin is a matter of doing bad things, which creates a debt to God, and which somebody has to pay off. They believe that Jesus paid the debt for our sins on the Cross – paid the Father, that is, so we would no longer bear the penalty.
The Fathers of the church have a rather different understanding of Christ’s saving work. The view of the early and undivided Church is that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.” Our sins made us captives of Death and corruption of body and soul, and God in Christ took our sins unto Himself and entered into Death to set us free. The penalty of sin is not a debt we owe the Father; it is the death that is the consequence of sin. And even this is seen by the Fathers as a mercy of God, such that man would not live forever in his fallen state. So, what we need is rescue and healing, not someone to step in and square the bill.
The early Christians saw the Father pursuing every sinner in love, doing everything to bring us back; not waiting with arms folded for a debt to be paid. As our friend Frederica Matthews-Green once put it, when the Prodigal Son came home, the Father didn’t say, “I’d love to take you back, but who’s going to pay this Visa bill?” No, he ran to meet him, embraced, clothed him and killed the fatted calf for a homecoming celebration feast.
This was the common view for the first thousand years of Christianity, until Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury , around 1000AD, about the time of the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western Church, offered an alternative view. Anselm believed that God could not merely forgive us, because our sins constituted an infinite objective wrong in the universe. It could not be made right without payment. No human could pay such a huge debt, but Jesus’ blood was more than sufficient to pay it, which gave Jesus a “claim” on God the Father. In Anselm‘s words: “If the Son chose to make over the claim He had on God to man, could the Father justly forbid Him doing so, or refuse to man what the Son willed to give him?” This is in part why medieval Christians in the West tended to fear God the Father.
I believe the Fathers would say that most modern Christians have mixed up two Scriptural concepts: “sacrifice/offering” and “ransom/payment.” Jesus didn’t pay a “ransom” for our sins to the Father; you pay a ransom to a kidnapper, and the Father wasn’t holding us hostage.
It was the Evil One who through subtlety and temptation had seduced us, and our first parents voluntarily entered into sin, cutting off their union with God. The result was death, which passes to all. It cost Jesus his life’s blood to enter Death and set us free. That’s the payment, or ransom, but while it is paid for us, it isn’t paid *to* anyone in particular. It is a sacrifice of love, a self-offering to the Father, as one might offer a dangerous act of courage to his fellow to save his life. The Fathers generally view sin is not as an infraction, but as an infection; sin makes us sick – pathological. Apart from the healing work of Christ, we are, all of us, psychopaths – soul-sick individuals. The Christian life is one of healing and restoration; it is not about paying an infinite debt.
This difference between Patristic and most modern Christianity may help explain something else that the Fathers don’t seem to spend a lot of time worrying about: the problem of evil. The question of why bad things happen is a major one for most people; it seems to refute the assertion that God is good and loves us.
If God is all powerful and loves us completely, why does he let bad things happen? I expect that the lingering image of a God who is reluctant to forgive, waiting to be paid, holding us “hostage” to sin and death, feeds a suspicion that maybe he *doesn’t* really love us.
The Patristic view of sin as illness, rather than rule-breaking, answers this. There is evil in the world because of the pollution of our sins. Our selfishness and cruelty don’t merely hurt those around us, but contribute to setting the whole world off-balance, out of tune. It has a corporate nature. Anyone can observe that life doesn’t seem fair; bad things happen even to apparently “good” people. But even good people contribute some sin to the mix, and we all suffer the consequences of the world’s mutual sin, the wickedness of the unrepentant, and the reprobate minds of those who have rejected God.
We can never forget the presence of the evil one. We know who our true enemy is, and we cling to the Lord Jesus as our deliverer. When we see evil in the world, we know immediately that “an enemy hath done this”. But we can’t blame it all on the devil. We’re not surprised that life is unfair and that “innocent” people suffer; but when we see innocent suffering, we know that our own sins helped cause it, by contributing to the imbalance in the world and making a climate of injustice possible.
The evil one loves to see the innocent suffer, and the fact that such events grieve and trouble us delights him all the more. This is in fact one of the ways we bear the burden of our sins: that we must feel the wrenching pain of seeing innocents suffer, and know that we helped make it happen. Those Christians, on the other hand, who see sin as a private debt between an individual and God, and can’t figure out how God could let an “innocent” person suffer, and are left with the chilling alternative of questioning the goodness of God.
The answer is the same one Jesus gave to the young man: “Why do you call me good? None is good but one, that is, God.” Even a child who suffers does so from the consequences of humanity’s sin – not some punishment meted out by a vengeful God.
“Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” writes St. Paul (Romans 7:24-25). We do not trust in our own strength to get out of this mess, but rely entirely on the power of Jesus Christ, who has “trampled down death by death” and seeks the healing and restoration of our being to the sanity of our souls and the compassion which works good in this world.
While we contribute to the suffering of the world by our sin, it is likewise true that day by day, growing in grace, we can contribute to the world’s healing, by forgiving our enemies, loving those who hate us – overcoming evil with good, seeking to alleviate the suffering in this world. We must ever remember that the first place evil and sin need to be overcome is in our own hearts, and that as we have done it unto the least of our Lord’s brethren, we have done it unto Him – and conversely.