Divine justice, the goodness of God, the creation of hell

[Iqbal Youssef]

http://www.tuirgin.com/orthodoxy/articles/river_of_fire.html#Main

Ok....i dont know what to say...i read this article at the above link and im just speechless...i must admit that im very new to theology, and that ive just started to attempt a personal indepth study..and that my Biblical knowledge is not that great..but..IS THIS ARTICLE ORTHODOX???? I LITERALLY READ HALF OF IT WITH MY MOUTH OPEN!

How do we interpret the levitical sacrafical system in light of what this guy is saying? Is this guy denying the significance or meaning of Christs sacrafice?? If the Crucifixion of the suffering servant werent to redeem mankind from the sins which we were indebted to the One who is infinite in Holiness and Justice, then for what reason? If God's justice does not necessitate a sacrafice that infinitely atones for the sins of mankind then why did God become man???

What are your thoughts on this article? Do my questions show a lack of understanding of the article? are they reasonable questions to ask? is the article genuinly ORTHODOX?????

[Owen Jones]

I think once one gets beyond some of the polemics of this article, I would say that here you have an excellent Orthodox explication of salvation which is, indeed, in conflict with the general trend in the West. I have found that most "Western" believers that I have met know that they have to believe in free will, but it gets injected kind of as an afterthought, and they don't really have a place for it in their theology.

What I understand the article saying is that God's judgment is His Presence, His Parousia, and not a compelling need to punish evil doers, and certainly not a buying off of God's wrath. When we are in God's presence, we are either transformed, or we flee into our own, man-made darkness. It is, of course, our choice. On the other hand, freedom is a strange thing. It is not so simple. IN a sense, our passions delude us into thinking we are exercising our freedom, when in fact we are not free at all. Which is why there is such a heavy burden on holy people to serve as an example to others of what true freedom is, in a way that is attractive and compelling to others.

I also thought it was an interesting and helpful explication of how Origen got to where he ended up, although he was not alone in that concept. It's true that you do get the strong impression from Origen that God acts out of necessity. But regarding apokotakasis, the Cappadocians thought something similar.

Perhaps one interesting example would serve. The early Church really did not place great emphasis on the Cross, which is quite astonishing to us today, especially those of us raised in the West, where the cross is at the center of the faith. So it is fair to say that in the West, the emphasis has been more on salvation as atonement, than salvation as transfiguration.

Finally, in some cases the polemics get out of hand, since the history of pre-Christian philosophy is a bit more complicated than he would have us believe, and certainly many RC theologians historically who do not teach that salvation is escape from God's wrath. Virtually all of American conservative protestantism is, however, based on this notion, which basically produces neurotics.

On the other hand, one can argue that Orthodoxy, historically, has been plagued by the lack of necessary distinctions between sacred and secular realms. So you have the oddity at best of a faith that insists on human freedom associated with societies that are decidedly unfree. The Church has yet to truly deal with the issue of freedom in its social/cultural/political context. And I would not blame atheism in the East entirely on the West. One gets the impression, for example, that Orthodoxy in Russia has historical been pretty wrathful. Why were Western atheistic/revolutionary ideas so attractive in Russia to begin with? So I think there is plenty of self-examination we can do without blaming the West for all of our problems. But there is a small school of very traditionalistic Orthodox who have decided that everything that is wrong with the world is the result of the Roman Catholic Church.

[Iqbal Youssef]

Then how would u answer my questions in light of this article:

How do we interpret the levitical sacrafical system?

If the Crucifixion of the suffering servant werent to redeem mankind from the debt of our sins (which we naturally owed to the One who is of infinite Holiness and Justice), then for what reason?

If God's justice does not necessitate a sacrafice that infinitely atones for the sins of mankind then why did God become man?

[Owen Jones]

You are mixing several points and leaving out others. The point of the article cited is that God's justice is not a satisfaction of God's wrath. God's justice is the parousia which is a loving, transforming presence. Our suffering and death is not a punishment in satisfaction of God's wrath, but rather the natural consequence of our own turning away from God. Hell is not a satisfaction of God's wrath but a condition of existence that we have created for ourselves of apartness from God. There is nothing more painful, there is no greater suffering, than this feeling of apartness from God. Christ shared in this apartness from God during His suffering on the Cross. That is the true meaning of suffering and death. Now, I do not wish to act, as some Orthodox try to do, as if the Bible does not say that Christ died as a ransome for sins. But the point is that this is not in satisfaction of God's wrath. NOr does this formula exhaust the meaning of the Cross. Not by a long shot. In Orthodox (classical-pre-gnostic Christianity) the Cross transforms the fabric of the cosmos. Also, salvation cannot reduced to the Cross alone. Salvation is more than paying off a debt. If one reduces Christianity to paying off a debt to God, then we are left as criminals living in the darkness of eternal limbo on parole. But nothing has really changed.

So in answer to your final question, God became man so that men could become God (Athanasius).

[Iqbal Youssef]

Dear Owen

You affirm the fact Christ died as a ransom for our sins, however u clarify the fact that this was not a result of a divine justice which necessitates the satisfaction of the wrath of God.

What im trying to understand is, then what exactly was this ransom? It seems that the article redefines sin (redefines it to how i originally understood it anyway) from an offense to God to simply a means of separation from God. So if there is no offense in sin, and it doesnt cause us to be indebted to God, then what about sin did Christ save us from exactly?

Secondly, can u please explain that St Athanasius quote if its not too much trouble..

and thirdly http://www.monachos.net/mb/clipart/blush.gif (sorry) can u recommend any books/articles that may complement the article above, maybe a more indepth and scripturally based type article/book? THANKS http://www.monachos.net/mb/clipart/happy.gif

[Owen Jones]

There is a prior thread on this site regarding the ransom. Perhaps you can find it and look through it. But in a general sense, it is clear that Christ did not come to overturn Jewish law but to fulfill Jewish law. But as the article you cite explains, the Jewish concept of law remains to this day a carnal concept. What Christ did was reveal the true or higher meaning of the law. So, yes, Christ died as a satisfaction for Jewish law, but as an innocent person he suffers for transgressions that he does not commit, to reveal that we suffer for the same reason, not as a punishment for our sin. For reference, I would point to a series of sermons by Mathew the Poor published by St. Vladimir's Seminary Press.

The true meaning of the cross is not simply as a legal restitution, but as the transformation of the cosmos, the restoration of creation, or the beginning of that process. So salvation applies to all of creation. And salvation therefore is more than just whiping the slate clean in a legal sense in which a criminal who has done his time is on parole. Salvation is the deification of man. It is the Beauty of the Cross that saves, not legal atonement.

When you say "Scripturally based type article/book," I tend to cringe a bit, because this is an example of a certain type of Protestant sloganeering. All Orthodox theology is Biblical based, if you will, our liturgy is Biblically based, our ascetic discipline is Biblically based, but the Bible itself is based on the Church, the illumination granted to the Church by the Holy Spirit. So in principle one cannot have a "Biblically based" theology without a right understanding of the Church. Without that, it's like the difference between following the medical advice of a physician vs. the medical advice of a quack healer.

[Anastasia Theodoridis]

Yes, it's genuinely Orthodox.

We read the OT in light of the New . This is very, very important, with huge implications. Christ is the Light of the World; He interprets the levitical sacrificial system and not vice-versa. It doesn't interpret Him. Put another way, we see those sacrifices through the lens of His sacrifice, and not Him through levitical eyeglasses. Christ tells us not onced but twice in John 3 why He had come, and why He will die: that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. He compares His death with the brass snake Moses raised up in the wilderness: for healing, for life.

Thus, for a Christian (as distinct from a Jew), the OT sacrifices were meant to teach us. God didn't get anything out of them. (Love seeketh not her own.) As we read in the Epistle to the Hebrews, especially Chapters 9 and 10, God was not pleased with them (!), they did not purify the conscience of whoever offered them, and they did not remove sins. They were but types, foreshadowings, patterns of things to come.

They taught us about the connection between sin and death. Sin always involves death. But a sacrifice wasn't a portrait of God taking an animal's life instead of a human one; it was the other way around: a portrait of God giving life to us who had none of our own, because of sin. In the OT, blood is always seen as the seat and source of life. God ultimately provides the animals; it is God shedding their blood to release the life in it, for us who are the walking dead.

Atonement means making us one with God. This Christ does by giving us His own immortal life, since dead people cannot be one with God.

Of course a levitical sacrfifice is also a picture of us giving our lives to Him in repentance and thanksgiving. But not to appease His justice. In God, unlike in us, justice is perfect. Among other things, that implies it is not hostility-based. (Yes, that's what it is among humans -- our legal system is an *adversarial* one.) But God is Love and Love seeketh not her own. Love always gives. In God, Justice means always to do whatever is for the ultimate best of each of us. It is not anything that opposes or counteracts or balances of mitigates or conditions God's Love, but is a function of it. (Yet, reading Kalomiros, you find that everybody does end up getting exactly what he deserves -- because he inflicts it upon himself!)

THE sacrifice which more than any other prefigures the Christ is of course the Passover Lamb, whose Blood, smeared on the doorposts, fended off the Angel of Death. That Lamb had to be consumed.

Thus also in the Holy Eucharist we consume the Lamb's blood because it is LIFE-giving. It is shed for the life of the world.

We do use metaphors like God's wrath. That describes how the damned will perceive God, as intolerable and a tormenting Presence. But that will be their perverted perception, not God as He really is.

We use metaphors of ransom, which simply means Christ freed us from death, and metaphors of payment or price, not that He literally paid anybody off, but we speak that way as we would, say, of a racer; to say "He won the Boston Marathon, but at what a price!" implies an ordeal rather than a literal bribe or pay-off to anybody.

Hope this helps.

[Iqbal Youssef]

Dear Owen,

You said:


The true meaning of the cross is not simply as a legal restitution, but as the transformation of the cosmos, the restoration of creation, or the beginning of that process. So salvation applies to all of creation. And salvation therefore is more than just whiping the slate clean in a legal sense in which a criminal who has done his time is on parole. Salvation is the deification of man. It is the Beauty of the Cross that saves, not legal atonement.

I think this is the bit, i cant yet quite grasp yet. You see prior to reading this article, the Crucifixion had one simple and easy to understand purpose - paying a debt that needed to be paid in order for us to be worthy of the Kingdom (not that we are ever worthy, but that Christ paid the price that we were never able to pay). So not only did it have a clear and simple purpose, but it also had an aspect of necessity to it - for if there is no necessity in the sacrafice, then this means there is some other means by which God could have fulfilled His purpose thus why all the suffering, blood, and tears in the first place? "Transformation of the cosmos", and "deification of man", is all absolutely new to me...what does this have to do with our sins? Why did Christ need to die in order to accomplish this? What exactly did the Crucifixion accomplish in order to make this possible? Anyways, youve been a great help so far, i think its time i actually started reading into this more, instead of being lazy and getting everyone to do my homework for me lol.

You also said:


When you say "Scripturally based type article/book," I tend to cringe a bit, because this is an example of a certain type of Protestant sloganeering.

oh no no no! That wasnt my implication - its just that my previous understanding of atonement, was founded on a logical deduction using certain premises which i thought were based on certain Biblical verses, so ive obviously misunderstood these verses, thus i need some sort of material that constantly refers to scripture so i know the basis of the concept being talked of.

[Iqbal Youssef]

Dear Anastasia

Your post was brilliant, it did clear alot of things up for me, however there's still many unanswered questions. First, what gives us the right to interpret all these terms such as ransom, wrath etc as metaphorical? How about the term propitiation in 1 John 2:2; 4:10? Propitiation's lexical definition implies that this was a sort of appeasement, to satisfy Gods wrath. So how do we justify this metaphorical interpretation of everything?

Secondly, what meaning now does the term "substitionary atonement" have (see 1 Pet. 2:24; Isaiah 53; Eph. 5:2)? or is this an expression alien to true Orthodoxy also? If so how do we explain 1 Pet. 2:24; Isaiah 53; Eph. 5:2? Because in light of this new interpretation of divine justice and wrath, i dont see how the "substitutionary" aspect fits in..

[Moses Anthony]

Dear Owen & Iqbal,

In reading the question as to whether or not Chirst's death, was to satisfy the wrath of God, the phrase when "...justice and mercy kissed each other..." Ps. 85:10 came to mind. I believe that it wasn't so much the wrath of god that needed satisfying, as it was the holiness of God.

The Incarnatioin would have happened even if Adam & Eve had not sinned, because theosis is man partaking of the divine nature, not by/through his own initiative, but through that which we so constantly implore, the mercy of our Lord God. Sin caused a separation from the holiness of the Creator, of which (if one can think of it this way) the wrath of God is the enforcer. Salvation -the crucifixion, burial resurrection and ascension- therefore was not to satisfy wrath, but holiness, so that justice and mercy kiss each other.

Holy Fathers correct me where I'm wrong!

a sinful and unworthy servant

[Anastasia Theodoridis]

Thanks for your kind words, Iqbal, but it isn't I; it's just that true Christian teaching IS brilliant. It truly is astonishing, isn't it?

Yes, there are some substitutionary elements in Christ's death, although not in the sense that the Reformers meant by the phrase "penal substitutionary atonement". But it's true Christ did for us what we could not do for ourselves. OUR deaths would have just resulted in our being dead, whereas HIS death destroyed death itself on our behalf.

It cannot have been a legal payment of penalty, because note what Christ says in John, Chapter 3: that He has NOT come to judge the world. If He has not yet judged the world, then nobody has, because, as He says in Chapter 5, all judgment is committed to HIM. He alone, as both God and Man, is the Perfect Judge.

So the world has not even been judged yet. No judgment, no condemnation. No condemnation, no penalty. No penalty, no payment of penalty. So we can KNOW the Crucifixion was not about that.

The "propitiation" verses you mentioned refer to death being "propitiated" by the life-giving, divine Blood. The Greek word is a form of "hilasterion" referring to the Mercy Seat of the Old Testament, which was (if I recall correctly) between the Cherubim above the Ark of the Covenant. It was where the sacrificial blood was sprinkled once a year to show forthe God's *mercy*. (Whenever we read "blood", we think, "mercy".)

As for Isaiah 53, notice how St. Matthew interprets this passage in Chapter 8, verses 16-17:

When the evening was come, they brought to Him many that were possessed with devils: and He cast out the spirits with His word, and healed all that were sick: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying, He Himself took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses.

Christ fulfilled the prophecy with His *word*.

You ask what gives us the right to interpret anything metaphorically and that question seems to come out of a more juridical context than most Orthodox are used to. We don't think of it as a "right." It's the Holy Spirit working in our hearts, opening the Scriptures to us, as He always has throughout the history of the Churchy -- and interpreting it the same way in each generation, too.

Orthodox theology doesn't come from logical deductions drawn from certain premises based upon the text of the Bible. It comes from reflection upon our Life in Christ, our sharing of His Life. It's the attempt, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit and at His prompting, to put that very concrete experience into words.

[Iqbal Youssef]

Dear Anastasia

Thank you for your help thus far, but there are a few things you have said which i am still not very confident of. I hope you can clear them up for me. You say:


But it's true Christ did for us what we could not do for ourselves. OUR deaths would have just resulted in our being dead, whereas HIS death destroyed death itself on our behalf.

How exactly does this classify as substitution? Substitution implies, that someone or something is substituted in place of someone or something else - i.e. it was we who should have died, but Christ took our place - and i can find no other reason for why we "should" have died, other than the fact that the "just" punishment for our sins is indeed death.


It cannot have been a legal payment of penalty, because note what Christ says in John, Chapter 3: that He has NOT come to judge the world. If He has not yet judged the world, then nobody has, because, as He says in Chapter 5, all judgment is committed to HIM. He alone, as both God and Man, is the Perfect Judge.

Couldnt it be simply the fact that Christ was referring to His immediate mission, which was not to judge or condemn, but rather to call people to repentence, and die for their sins?


The "propitiation" verses you mentioned refer to death being "propitiated" by the life-giving, divine Blood. The Greek word is a form of "hilasterion" referring to the Mercy Seat of the Old Testament, which was (if I recall correctly) between the Cherubim above the Ark of the Covenant. It was where the sacrificial blood was sprinkled once a year to show forthe God's *mercy*. (Whenever we read "blood", we think, "mercy".)

I dont understand the correlation between propitiation and this mercy seat u speak of? Forgive me i must admit, that i have not even sat down and properly studied and read a whole book of the Old testemant yet. However, the term propitiation in its lexical definition doesnt seem to have a figurative application, but rather (according to Strongs) refers to appeasement.


Christ fulfilled the prophecy with His *word*.

In what sense?

Also coming back to this wrath; you said:


We do use metaphors like God's wrath. That describes how the damned will perceive God, as intolerable and a tormenting Presence. But that will be their perverted perception, not God as He really is.

Now to be honest, this concept is very very appealing to me, and i really want to be convinced. But when i read the Bible, i just cant in my good conscious see that interpretation fitting into the context of certain verses. Take into account the following:

Numbers 11:1-3
"Now the people complained about their hardships in the hearing of the LORD , and when he heard them his anger was aroused. Then fire from the LORD burned among them and consumed some of the outskirts of the camp. 2 When the people cried out to Moses, he prayed to the LORD and the fire died down. 3 So that place was called Taberah, [1] because fire from the LORD had burned among them."

Psalm 5:5 "The boastful shall not stand in Your sight; You hate all workers of iniquity."

Psalm 11:5 "The LORD tests the righteous, But the wicked and the one who loves violence His soul hates. 6Upon the wicked He will rain coals; Fire and brimstone and a burning wind
Shall be the portion of their cup."

Luke 12:5 "But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear Him who, after He has killed, has power to cast into hell; yes, I say to you, fear Him!"

The article this thread is concerned with sounds very appealing to me - the concepts it presents. But i am finding it hard to actually see it in the Bible - in all honesty i want to be convinced that the picture of God painted in that article is the Biblical God.

God Bless.

[Anastasia Theodoridis]

Dear Iqbal,

Oh, my, a lot of questions. Do you have a worthy priest you could consult?

Well, meanwhile, let's see...

First let's backgtrack a little and talk about sin and death.

In Orthodox teaching, God did not create Man as an already immortal creature. Rather, Man was in his infancy, meant to grow into a being worthy of immortality, and kept alive in the meanwhile stgrictly and only by his communion with the Only Immortal One. (Have you ever noticed that in many icons of Christ, the halo has words in it? ")Those words are, loosely rendered in English, "The One Who Is." Meaning the only One Who has Life in Himself, God.) Man was meant to advance in this communion with Life Himself ("I am the Way and the Life and the Truth) until immortality should be his permanent possession, because his intimate communion with God, in love, would be permanent.

This, of course, Man failed to do. Instead, he willfully trashed his relationship with God. He didn't trust Him enough to disbelieve the serpent. He wasn't loyal enough to Him to obey. He hid fromhis own Maker after he had sinned, and tghen he even went so far as to blame God Himself: "The woman YOU GAVE ME gave me the fruit..." He did not repent. He just kept more and more estranging himself from the One who has Life. Well, refuse to drink from the Fountain of Life and what is going to happen to you? You are going to die. You will be like a cut flower, living a short while, but already doomed. And this is not by way of punishment (although it would serve that purpose quite well, if God were vindictive) but is the natural consequence of a highly UNnatural state of affairs.

Note, too, that the *whole world* fell with Adam and Eve. Because they were the priests of the world, the reason-endowed part of creation that was supposed to offer the rest of it back to God as eucharistic offering. Bujt now they became the mere exploiters of the world instead. Their relationhships with God, with the world, with each other, with their very selves, were all tragically altered. So when we talk about substitution, it's true what you say, that whereas we did deserve to die yet didn't, Christ did not deserve to die and yet did. Yes, the main thing we mean when we use substitution language . He was innocent yet died, so that we, the guilty, wouldn't. That just happens to be a monstrous INjustice! Such "justice" would hardly befit our God. No, it isn't *that* we mean when we say He died for us. Rather, He died so that death itself would be illumined by His Presence. Now what is death if its darkness is scattered by the unwaning Light, if its isolation is replaced by His loving Presence, if its oblivion is replaced by His immortal life? It simply isn't death at all, as we had known it. Its sting is removed, its victory is undone. Death itself is destroyed, and that is why Christ died for us. That is why the Cross is the sign and the apex of God's unconditional forgiveness; that is why at Pascha we hear that mercy has dawned forth from the Tomb.

In Orthodox teaching, it is always the devil who howls for our destruction, who wants our death and expecially Christ's. It is never our loving Father. Always satan. So God gives it to him, gives Christ's death to satan, not as a debt as if God ever owed the devil anything, but precisely to destroy satan, whose main power over man had been death. God gives the devil the devil's own sort of "justice", enough of it to choke to death on. In other words, the very thing the devil wanted and called "justice" was that by which God defeated him forever--by giving it to him.

That's one thing we mean by propitiation language.

But this has nothing to do with any penalty being paid by Christ, although we do speak of it that way, metaphorically, because He indeed had an unimaginable ordeal to endure in order to defeat death and the devil for us.

You asked whether Christ's statement that He had not come to judge the world might not refer simply to His immediate mission. A person could of course take it that way, but the Church never has. What we confess is, "He shall come again in glory to judge the living and the dead," meaning judgment is still in the future.

I said that God as wrath was a perverted perception of the damned, not the way God really is. I misspoke some. Somebody compared the Presence of God to rubbing alcohol: for intact, healthy skin, rubbing alcohol is refreshing, cooling, soothing. But for broken, unhealthy skin, rubbing alcohol burns and hurts. And it REALLY does, not just in our imagination! So with the damned (supposing there will be any, which remains to be seen): God's all-loving Presence really will burn them. Not because He is angry with them (that's the part that is in their minds only) but because they haven't been made healthy and pure and whole enough to tolerate the Divine Presence, the Divine Love. Unable, in their hatred, to love or even to receive love, in spite of wanting to more than anything, the presence and yet inaccessibility of It will torment them. "He is like a refiner's fire." His presence will purify and refresh and warm and illumine the gold, but burn and melt the ore.

The more we are in communion with Christ, we in Him and He in us, the more purified we become. And vice-versa: the more purified we become, the greater is our communion with Christ. "Blessed are the pure in heart..." And then we will not burn, God's Presence will not appear to us as wrath. That's what we mean when we speak of propitiation.

Also, in connection with God's wrath, do remember that the New Testament is a fuller revelation of God than the Old. God only reveals Himself as Mankind is ready to receive the revelation. In the fulness of time, Christ came as the definitive Revealer of the Light, Who Himself IS that Revelation, is Alpha and Omega. So the OT is always to be interpreted (and often re-interpreted!) in His Light. Psalm 22 is a good example of something that has been interpreted very differently after Christ's coming than it ever could have been before, or still is today by Jews.

Im not sure what more to say about St. Matthew's interpretation if Isaiah, except what's striking is that there is in this interpretation no hint of punishment or penalty. There is no legal context. It's as though Christ were taking away our infirmities by simply absorbing them, without Himself becoming infirm or unclean as a result. He just commands the sickness and demons to be gone; His Word alone accomplishes it.

Not sure I've addressed your questions very wellbut you're welcome to keep asking them, and also, again I'd recommend you sit down with some good and holy priest. It sounds like you've perhaps been subjected to a good deal of Protestant influence.

[W. Lindsay Wheeler]

Never before have I read such a hit piece against the Roman Catholic church. There is so much blatant untruths and delibrate lies in this piece is unreal.


Deep inside the Western soul, God was felt to be the wicked Judge, Who never forgot even the smallest offense done to Him in our transgressions of His laws.

Notice the word "wicked judge". Never in any Catholic literature is God said to be a "wicked Judge". This is pure and unadulterated pure fiction to denegrate and assinate the Christian character of the Roman Catholic Church.


God’s justice for Westerners operated like a vendetta.

Again more slander.

That I don't see this conducive to ecumenism when Orthodoxy's only reason to theologize is bouncing of Roman Catholicism.

And to the real meaning of the word dikaisyne righteousness. The author takes a great leap to say it is the Jewish meaning and not the Greek meaning of the word. Many Christians had no understanding of the Jewish language much less the context of Jewish words. To say the Greek word has the meaning of the Jewish word and not the Greek context of the meaning is far fetched. Many early Christians were Greeks with absolutely no knowledge of Hebrew. On top of this many Jewish communities in the diaspora, Alexandria, Rome and elsewhere spoke Greek, READ in GREEK and WROTE in Greek. Hebrew was actually a dead language by the Hellenistic period. It is supposed that Jesus spoke Aramaic, not Hebrew!

To say Jewish thought is Christian thought is also a leap that does not bode well.

[Owen Jones]

There is an interesting passage in Origen (he wasn't wrong about EVERYTHING!) in which he argues that in the liturgical reference to Christ as our passover, it does not refer to the blood of the sacrificial lamb, it refers to passage of the Hebrews from bondage into freedom. Hence, the true spirit of Christ as passover is that He is our Exodus. I think this more gets to the heart of the discussion.

[W. Lindsay Wheeler]

Yes, everbody gets that. Every Protestant and Catholic preacher I Have met and heard describe Christ as the passover and a perfect example is Exodus. Christ is the passover.

[George]

Wheeler said: "Hebrew was actually a dead language by the Hellenistic period. It is supposed that Jesus spoke Aramaic, not Hebrew!"

Actually, there is much evidence that Hebrew was the primary native tongue at the time of Jesus. We know that Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew, and Mark and Luke are full of Hebraisms - idioms that make little sense until translated into Hebrew, almost as if you back-translated and recovered an original.

And I think the Talmudists of the Hellenistic and even Byzantine periods would take issue with the "dead language" statement.

The strong Hebrew subtexts within Orthodoxy are what drew me to leave Protestantism (where I could find very few such roots) and convert to Orthdoxy.

[Moses Anthony]

Two questions:

1. Where was Classicism when by faith and practice the Christians of the Early Church turned the Roman Empire upside down?

2. I'm sorry this may not seem appropriate for this thread, but every since someone posted that Mr. Wheeler has been kicked off two other Orthodox forums, I've wanted to know what they were, and why he was summarily dismissed.

the sinful and unworthy servant

[David Watkins]

I said that God as wrath was a perverted perception of the damned, not the way God really is. I misspoke some. Somebody compared the Presence of God to rubbing alcohol: for intact, healthy skin, rubbing alcohol is refreshing, cooling, soothing. But for broken, unhealthy skin, rubbing alcohol burns and hurts. And it REALLY does, not just in our imagination! So with the damned (supposing there will be any, which remains to be seen): God's all-loving Presence really will burn them. Not because He is angry with them (that's the part that is in their minds only) but because they haven't been made healthy and pure and whole enough to tolerate the Divine Presence, the Divine Love. Unable, in their hatred, to love or even to receive love, in spite of wanting to more than anything, the presence and yet inaccessibility of It will torment them. "He is like a refiner's fire." His presence will purify and refresh and warm and illumine the gold, but burn and melt the ore.


Also, in connection with God's wrath, do remember that the New Testament is a fuller revelation of God than the Old.

I have never been able to understand this view of God's wrath. Romans 1:18 says the wrath of God is revealed from heaven. You are saying God's wrath is only a figment of the sinner's imagination?

[Anastasia Theodoridis]

No, it's real. The phrase expresses the sinner's (very real) experience of God, but not (literally) God's experience of the sinner. The impentitent sinner, unable to tolerate God's Love or God's Truth, will really and truly be tormented by them. God Himself, however, will always "feel" only love and tenderness toward each and every human being. Not that this will do the damned any good; it will only heap the more coals upon their heads (so to speak). Still, it's an important point, that our God is pure Love.

Also, something I didn't say but would like to add now is that "the wrath of God" expresses God's constant, uncompromising, full-blown, total and absolute opposition to evil -- as distinct from the evildoer, however.

God's work is to destroy evil altogether. He does this in every way imaginable and many ways beyond our imagining. As we overcome cold by its opposite, warmth, and dark by light; God likewise conquers evil by His goodness; by re-creating human nature; by making death into a doorway of Life, destroying the root of sin; by bringing His own righteousness to the world, with which to replace our sin as we are incorporated into Him and share His righteous life and being and grow into His goodness; by overwhelming wicked hearts with His kindness and converting them; by mending what is broken, making straight what is crooked, levelling the obstacles, watering the dry places, digging 'round the barren trees, pulling out the weeds in His vineyard, pruning the branches; laboring ceaselessly and uncompromisingly against evil; making a new heaven and a new earth. All of that is what His perfect justice is about: destroying evil.

Thanks for the chance to clarify.

[Owen Jones]

Yes, but...

There is room here for different perspectives and different experiences, and, different traditions within Orthodoxy. There is no pure, definitive conciliar statement on this issue, that I am aware of. So we have to make allowances for the fact that some say this, some say that. For example, there is a strong Greek tradition that says that God is impassable. That is foreign to the Semitic Christian tradition which personalizes God in things and asserts that God literally has strong feelings and emotions. It is best I think to remember that all theological language is analogical, and so God reveals himself as Father, and we all know the potential wrath of a Father when we disobey. But the wrath is for our benefit, not His. I think that there is a danger in asserting that God is just love, to reduce all of Christianity to God's love. That is just as much a distortion, leading to heresy, as it is to reduce salvation to forensic atonement to appease God's wrath. If we say that God is nothing but love, that there is no wrath in God, then certain practical problems arise. First, we pretty much have to take a purely natural view of the destructive forces of nature. When a hurrican kills thousands of people, is that a purely natural event? If I lose a child to some early childhood disease, is that purely a natural phenomenon that has nothing to do with God? If God does have something to do with it, it's difficult to argue that it's pure love at work. The opposite extreme being just as dangerous, that it proves that somebody sinned and that God needed to even up the scales of justice by taking that innocent life. Human beings have a difficult time living with paradox, and so we want to eliminate one or the other poles of the paradox in order to satisfy our intellectual demand for a clear definition and explanation for why bad things happen to good people and evil is rewarded.

[M.C. Steenberg]

Dear Owen and Anastasia,

You both may be interested to read a new book by Paul Gavrilyuk, called The Suffering of the Impassible God (Oxford University Press, 2004), which is the newest treatment of the classical patristic concept of God's impassibility, or non-submission to suffering. It is a new text in the discussion on impassibility -- the first major study on the theme since Thomas Weinandy's Does God Suffer?, though Gavrilyuk addresses the question from a different methodology. His attempt is not so much to prove the point of God's impassibility (as Weinandy's book aims to do), rather to show how the notion was employed by the fathers, and what it meant in their theology.

A very good book.

INXC, Matthew

[M.C. Steenberg]

Dear all,

A few thoughts on the matter of God's love and his wrath, as recent posts in this thread have been discussing. Owen's caution against reducing the paradox of God as both love-and-wrath, mercy-and-judgement (etc) is important, but itself needs some qualification. The immense problem with 'reducing' God to love and love alone, lies not so much in that notion or that theological activity (for the apostle John does as much), but in the improper understanding of what the 'love' is that we talk about in such a discussion. Similarly, claiming that God is or has 'wrath' is not incorrect -- scripture repeats this time and again. Problems arise, and they have throughout the whole of Christian history, when we take 'wrath' to mean something specific, something humanistic and worldly, which ultimately falls short of or distorts the reality of God's being. God is neither 'love' nor 'wrath' according to the prevalent conceptions of those terms; but when love is known more deeply, more theologically, it becomes entirely appropriate to equate God fully with it: 'God is love', as St John says. It is this same John, we might remember, who also talks about God's wrath (cf. Jn 3.36; and the Apocalypse throughout).

The first to make an attempt at radically dividing the 'love' and the 'wrath' in God was Marcion, who saw no room for them to coexist in the divine life. He was rebutted by many, but Irenaeus is among the most potent in his refutation, noting that a love without justice (which includes 'wrath', as he makes clear) is no real love, nor is loveless justice truly just (cf. the closing chapters of Adversus haereses 3). Love and justice are co-inherent 'properties' of God, precisely because God exists always as the energetic manifestation of the fullness of his power. This is the power which John sums up in and as 'love', but it is love in the fully transcendent and omnipotent sense as issued forth by the creator and redeemer. Because God's life is communicated to the world, these emotions (if we call them that) are always his offerings to the world -- they are never emotions acting upon him. God is love because his activity in the world is love, and this is the love of the creator redeeming his creation -- a love which at times refreshes, at other times burns. It is only love if it is, when love so requires, the full fire of wrath. And the fire of God's wrath is not just wrath if it is not the wrath of love, which burns in order to purify as others have already noted.

The great explanation to come out of early patristic reflections on all this, was the understanding that if God truly is love, and if we are rightly able to 'define' him by that vision alone, then we are forced in this one word to recognise the dynamic reality of the love that God is. A static love which merely emotionally adores another, is not expressive of the just power and righteousness which must be claimed of God, inasmuch as it has been revealed so clearly in scripture. For love to be love within this context of God's power, his righteousness and 'lovingcare for humankind', it must be a love which acts as the needs of such love demand and as the power of such love makes possible: softly and quietly in face of the need for gentle assurance and affirmation; firmly in the need of guidance; ferociously and powerfully in the need of chastisement and correction. Only if love is this dynamic realisation of God's power and being, does St John's statement make sense.

The real insight of the fathers, especially some of those in the early Eastern tradition (e.g. Irenaeus, then Athanasius, and Maximus a while later) is in identifying all of God's economic activity with his love. When God fashions Adam and Eve from the dust, he does so of his love. When he casts Adam and Eve out of paradise, this is not a separate emotional entity which is God's wrath, but precisely his love, moving in wrath to the good of the ones loved.

INXC, Matthew

[Fr Raphael Vereshack]

Dear Matthew,

Thank you for the explanation. When I read your comments yesterday I was thinking of asking you to explain more what the Holy Frs said about God's love & wrath.

This explanation is also of great help since I assume it also applies to human behaviour, especially for those who have a responsibility for others, which is just about everybody. In fact the nature of Christian responsibility & how it is expressed is one of those burning issues of today.

In Christ- Fr Raphael

[Anastasia Theodoridis]

This is a beautiful post, Matthew; thank you!

It's good for me to be reminded that not only "wrath" but also "love" needs to be understood spiritually, and not in a fleshly manner, not as something squishy or fluffy or always "sweet". Not as a marshmallow!

I found and read the wonderful Irenaeus chapters.

Re-thinking some, I might hesitate now call a lot of Orthodox language "metaphorical" (except that which everybody immediately recognizes as such), because that's misleading. "Metaphorical" is too often understood as "not real", which is definitely not what I ever meant. I think it is better to say, as you have, that there are spiritual ways of putting things and human ways. That's more pauline: "I speak as a man..." (Rom. 3:5); "I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh:" (Rom. 6:19) See also I Cor. 3:2 and Heb. 5:12.