The Modern Christian Way of Looking at the Work of Christ

The modern Christian way of looking at the work of Christ sees God as a creator-designer of the universe. He makes humans as his own special creatures that uniquely bear His Image.  He sets rules for them and our proper role is to obey those rules.

Yet, we as humans broke the rules, so we died.  This is why the Son of God became human and died for our sins.

Yet why didn’t God forgive? Couldn’t He simply forgive without His only Son becoming human and dying for our sins?

This leads us to reflect. We too make rules whether we are parents, managers, or teachers.  I sometimes have students who are of the highest character break rules and it both shocks and grieves me.  Sometimes they serve a punishment that the school sets, and sometimes I have the choice on what I should do.  Depending on the student, sometimes I choose not to punish them like others because I know their character and I am confident that they will never break the rules again.

The Anastasis

Chora Church, Constantinople, 14th Century

So why didn’t God just forgive?

Further in this line of thinking, there is the belief that all humans are born with the guilt of the first humans’ sin.  By necessity then, all of us are destined to punishment since we are guilty.  We are not able to avoid the punishment because we must serve it.

This leads to spiritual death first and also death in the flesh.

As a result of all this, the Son of God became human so he could satisfy the punishment in our place.

But why did it have to be satisfied?  Who made Him serve the sentence?  How is it justice if He served the sentence in our place for something in which He did not share the guilt?  It is a sweet gesture on His part to take our punishment away from us, but who is causing Him to be punished?  Most of the time, in the Western system, it is God the Father.  This makes no sense, and actually should inspire terror in those who revere God.  How can God be so divided?

After all this, if we believe that Christ has done this for us, we are saved, and we can now go to Heaven. The focus is on getting us to Heaven. Heaven is this nice place where there is no more death, nor suffering, nor pain.  Christ does not really have any type of clear role after that other than we should of course be thankful for Him for what He has done.  Certainly, there should be some type of love for Him, but it’s not clear how that should develop much.  Maybe we should strive to imitate His example in suffering for others. But there is not much clarity here.

What is curious about this modern view of the work of Christ is that it does not explain anything about human life.  All it gives us is a glimpse of is a self-absorbed, unmerciful, (and, in the accusations of many atheists, a possibly bloodthirsty God who wants humanity back, which is a nice purpose in the end, but why after all that trouble? It was probably easier to create a new creature bearing His Image or to destroy this one completely).  Why force His only begotten Son to go through all that?

This way of viewing the work of Christ seems to be absorbed in its own categories without really explaining anything at all; it forces a view of all things in the world from the outside, that is, artificially.

Almost every atheist I have ever had a discussion with had some type of Christian background with this way of viewing the work of Christ.  The good news in this is that this way of understanding the work of Christ is not the way that is taught in the Bible when understood as a whole.  This is especially true when understood in the context of what the Bible was trying to explain about humanity in its various books.

The Ancient Christian Way of Looking at the Work of Christ

The way described above is also not how the early Church understood the work of Christ.

The ancient Christian view is expressed throughout most of the writings of the Church Fathers in one way or another but the most focused authors in which you can get the view directly are St. Athanasius in his books Contra Gentes and On the Incarnation; St. Basil’s Homilies on the Psalms; St. Gregory of Nyssa’s sermons “On the Making of Man” which can be found in the book On the Human Condition, and St. Gregory of Nyssa’s On the Soul and the Resurrection.  What follows below summarizes and synthesizes the ideas of these writings.

I also recommend the book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by Rene Girard who reformulates the ancient Christian understanding of sin as a disease and disorder through an anthropological lens.  His ideas are also synthesized with the Church Fathers below.

The ancient Christian view begins with God as a being who has a specific nature.  This nature is an absolute unity which is life itself, goodness itself, understanding itself, righteousness itself, beauty itself, and truth itself.

The ancient Christian way of looking at the work of Christ sees God as the creator of everything and what it means to be the creator is that he has set a purpose and nature for every creature.  He makes humans who are like animals in their bodies to bear His Image and thus they become the mediators of the creatures with the creator because they resemble the creatures in their physical bodies but they resemble the creator in their rational souls, which is the Image of God.

We are created in the Image of God, and thus we share in this nature of God.  Because of the Image of God in us, we are able to perceive goodness and evil, and life, and can understand, are capable of righteousness, perceive the beautiful and create beautiful things, and we can determine the truth and live according to it.

When God commands us to do something, it is not arbitrary like the rules we make, but because the rules are necessarily good reflecting both His nature which is eternal and unchangeable and likewise reflecting something in our nature as those created in His Image.  The Tree that he commanded us to not eat from was not bad, but to eat from it at that time was bad.  It is like a parent who commands their little child not to open a certain book or to cross a street by themselves.  It is not because those things are bad, but because it is not the right time for the children to read or to cross the street.  They are not skilled or mature enough for those actions.

By eating of the tree, humanity does not simply break a rule that is arbitrarily commanded, but they break a rule that is against their own nature as those created in the Image of God endowed with moral abilities and understanding.  They fall to their instincts instead of using their reason, that is the rational soul that bears the Image of God, to do what is right.

That going against our own nature as beings endowed with rational souls to rule over our animal aspect causes us to die.

Did God forgive us for this sin?  In a way, yes, because he covered the humans’ shame following this sin.  But something has gone terribly wrong with the humans: they can no longer determine how to do things in the right order.  They have become infected with sin and disordered.

I make rules too, and I can forgive, but if there is something disordered and infected, it requires a physician to heal, not only a wronged party to forgive.  Forgiveness only goes so far.  The deeper problems need to be addressed when there is something disordered in a person.

Through the ages, humans have an inclination to sin that becomes aggravated due to the multiple examples of sinners around them.  Just as living with those who have a disorder can have a negative effect on those who are not disordered, so it is with sin.  Also, just as being around too many infected people leads to an aggressive contagion spreading all around, so it is with sin.  This happens because humans are highly imitative creatures and by being surrounded by those who sin, the infection and disorder spreads rapidly and becomes much more aggressive.  There is no inherited guilt, but there is some type of inclination to sin due to all the modeling of sin around us.

Through the ages, God bestows His grace to alleviate the contagion of sin.  Just like I sometimes have people who are of the highest character break rules, and I do not punish them like the others because I know their character, so He renders his grace in one form or another.  It could be the giving of the Law, or the sending of prophets, or simply watching over and protecting those who have sinned but whom He has given a chance to repent.

All of us go through a spiritual death then a physical death because of the contagion of sin in the human community. We do not know how to get away from it because we as humans are highly imitative creatures.

This leads to death.

In a continuum with His work of creating us, the Son of God becomes human so He can restore humanity to its original purpose.  Creation and Incarnation are not two separate works, but they run along the same line.

He lives a life modeling how we should live ours because He is God the Creator made Human, He is sinless, and thus He provides the right model for us.  And since we as humans are highly imitative creatures, this provides a resolution for the problem of sin.  We need a concrete model to imitate and He is that concrete model.

His death and resurrection expose the powers and processes that were causing the contagion of sin to multiply and dominate humanity.  He has fundamentally disrupted those powers and processes to allow us to see Him and the original plan for human life.

Then, if we believe that He has done this for us and show that real belief by modeling our lives on His, then we are saved by following His model.  He heals the disorder and infection in us.

Following His resurrection, He reveals how deeply the Scriptures speak of Him and so He delivers to the Apostles the way of understanding of the Scriptures that is centered on Him. He is to be found everywhere in a concrete way, so the model for us to imitate becomes deep and clear and soon we see Him everywhere and this begins to cause us to grow into His likeness.

This ancient understanding of God and humanity and the Incarnation of the Son of God infuses so much meaning into humanity.  It explains humanity according to its nature and what we see around us.  It makes sense within the context of human life, and it also explains the most foundational aspects of human life.

This ancient understanding of God also reveals a God who is fully concerned and watches over humanity, full of love and mercy to the point that He makes our humanity His own.  He shares in the suffering of life from living in tough conditions to being rejected by others to dying even though He did nothing wrong, and by so doing, He makes an end of disorder and infection in humanity.  When He rises from the dead, He restores humanity to its original purpose.

“Christ has risen from the dead,

Trampling down death by death,

And bestowing life to those in the tombs.”

He has trampled upon spiritual and physical death.

He has bestowed on us spiritual life again, and eventually a resurrected physical life to follow.

The goal of our lives is to grow in the likeness of Christ.  Heaven is not quite a place in the ancient Christian understanding.  Rather, Heaven is where Christ is.  It descends to us, and it is not independent of Christ. There is no place that can properly be called Heaven if Christ is not there.  Rather, it is described a unity of the Earth with Christ.  It always descends to us like He descended to us. It begins here.  This is why churches are built with domes.  In the ancient world, the physical heavens, which were symbolic of the dwelling of God, were conceptualized as being a sphere in which the earth is contained.  In church buildings, the earth was symbolized by four corners indicating the directions north, south, east, and west.  When the dome rests on the rectangular shaped building, it symbolizes the descent of Heaven to earth.  Heaven is then not some place we go to live after we have lived our lives here on the Earth, but rather, it is the extension of how we lived our lives here on Earth if we modeled our lives on Christ’s.

So What Does All This Mean? 

Both Orthodox (the ancient Christians) and Protestants (the modern Christians) follow our Lord Jesus Christ; there is no doubt about that.  At the same time, there is a misunderstanding in the modern Christian understanding of Christ.  Both have a relationship with Christ, but just as we can have relationships with many types of people and find out that we did not really know those people, this is a major problem because misunderstanding in a relationship leads to unsoundness and the possibility of that relationship breaking apart.

Christ referenced the Greatest Commandment as “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37).  Yet most Christians are content to not involve their minds in worship at all.  I hear, “I love Christ with all my heart” often. I also hear, “I put my heart and soul into this,” but I never heard “mind.”  Why not?

Whether we know it or not, our minds are involved.  In debates between the Protestant influence (the modern Christian way) into Orthodoxy (the ancient Christian way), we often do an unwise thing which is to compare the differences and similarities between Orthodoxy and Protestantism.  Taking this approach misrepresents the issue. The reality is that these are two “systems,” and the systems have a way of viewing everything from God, to the world, to man, to the Incarnation that are almost always different as seen above.

Sometimes when having these discussions, the conversation devolves into asking whether Orthodox believe Protestants will go to Heaven.  Well, the idea of Heaven is different in both systems as seen above. And only God can judge; I am in no place to judge because then I take the place of God which is then submitting my reason to my instinct (which is the original disordering of sin) to differentiate people when my reason, the rational soul that bears the Image of God, knows that only God will make the final judgment.  As an Orthodox Christian, I take that teaching seriously.

Rather, what we all should focus on is developing a right understanding of the one we rightly follow because if we have an incorrect and incomplete understanding which the modern Christians subscribe to, then it will stunt spiritual development and there will be a point after which not much growth will occur.  It will become nothing but sermon after sermon and it will be repetitive.  But if you take the ancient understanding of Christ, then everything around us will teach us about Christ.  Everything will become a sermon in the words of Psalm 19, “There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard.  Their voice has gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world” (Psalm 19:3-4 LXX).

Protestant-leaning Orthodox need to have an understanding of the systemic difference between ancient Christianity on which Orthodox Christianity is based and modern Christianity on which Protestantism is based. They will find that the Orthodox system has a strong explanatory power that makes sense of the world and in a way that keeps one reflecting and always growing into ever new realizations and expressions of that fundamental explanatory Truth.

Orthodoxy makes sense of things both according to their nature from within and according to the grand scheme of things. In my humble opinion, only when we communicate the idea of the two systems, then will we see progress in these conversations.

To better understand the Orthodox Christian ethos and what we have inherited from the early Church, I have published two other articles which you can read by clicking on the links below:

1. Style and Ethos (click here to read)

3. The Spirituality of Education

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