Few critiques of substitutionary atonement carry as much theological weight as the one that comes from the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Unlike the critiques we examined in Chapters 32 and 33—which tend to arise from modern Western scholarship—the Orthodox critique claims something far more sweeping. It says that the entire Western approach to understanding the cross, from Anselm through the Reformers and down to modern evangelicalism, is fundamentally mistaken. It charges that penal substitutionary atonement (PSA) is a product of Western juridical thinking, alien to the faith of the early Church, and a distortion of the gospel that the Eastern Fathers handed down. The Orthodox critique, in other words, does not merely quibble with details. It challenges the roots.
This makes it a conversation we must take seriously. The Eastern Orthodox tradition is not a fringe movement or a modern protest group. It represents one of the oldest continuous Christian traditions on earth, with deep roots in the Greek-speaking churches that produced many of the most important theologians of the first millennium. When Orthodox theologians say that penal substitution is a Western innovation, they are speaking from a tradition that venerates the very Church Fathers whose writings we all claim to honor. We cannot dismiss this critique with a wave of the hand.
At the same time, I believe the Orthodox critique—for all its genuine insights—ultimately overreaches. It paints with too broad a brush, claiming that penal and substitutionary categories are entirely absent from the Eastern patristic and liturgical tradition when, in fact, the primary sources tell a more complicated story. The historical record reveals that substitutionary themes are woven into Orthodox hymnography, patristic writings, and canonical sources far more deeply than modern Orthodox polemicists typically acknowledge. What some contemporary Orthodox voices present as the timeless teaching of the East is, in important respects, a relatively recent theological development—shaped more by anti-Western polemic than by faithful transmission of the patristic heritage.
In this chapter, I want to do several things. First, I will present the Orthodox critique as fairly and accurately as I can, because it deserves to be heard on its own terms. Second, I will examine the patristic and liturgical evidence that complicates the critique's central claims. Third, I will look at the historical record of early modern Orthodox engagement with Protestantism, which reveals more continuity between East and West on substitutionary themes than many realize. Fourth, I will argue that some of the most vocal modern Orthodox rejection of PSA is itself an innovation—a product of twentieth-century theological movements rather than a faithful echo of the ancient tradition. Finally, I will identify the genuine Orthodox insights that belong in any fully developed theology of the atonement. My goal is not to win an argument but to pursue the truth—and the truth, I believe, is richer and more complex than either side in this debate often admits.
Chapter Thesis: The Eastern Orthodox critique of Western atonement theology—that PSA is a Western innovation alien to the patristic and liturgical tradition of the East—contains some valid insights about the richness of patristic soteriology but ultimately overreaches in its rejection of penal and substitutionary categories, which are in fact present in Orthodox hymnography, patristic writings, and canonical sources.
Before we respond to the Orthodox critique, we need to understand it. And we need to understand it not in its weakest form but in its strongest. What do thoughtful Orthodox theologians actually say about Western atonement theology? The critique has several interlocking components, and I want to lay each one out with care.
The first and most foundational charge is that penal substitutionary atonement is a product of Western legal culture, not of biblical or patristic theology. Orthodox critics argue that the Western Church, deeply shaped by Roman law and Latin cultural assumptions, gradually developed a juridical framework for understanding salvation that was foreign to the Greek-speaking East. In this telling, the seeds were planted by Tertullian—a trained Roman lawyer—who introduced legal categories like "satisfaction" and "merit" into Christian theology. These seeds grew through Augustine, who emphasized guilt and inherited sin in ways that the Greek Fathers did not, and finally flowered in Anselm's Cur Deus Homo, which framed salvation as a matter of legal debt and satisfaction owed to the honor of God.1
Vladimir Lossky, one of the twentieth century's most influential Orthodox theologians, is a representative of this position. In his The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Lossky argued that Western Christianity went astray by reducing salvation to juridical categories—guilt, punishment, satisfaction, and forensic declaration—rather than understanding it as the transformation of human nature through union with God. For Lossky, the entire apparatus of Western soteriology, from Anselm to Calvin, was built on a misunderstanding of what sin is and what salvation means.2
As Fleming Rutledge has helpfully noted, Lossky's position is that everything characteristic of Western soteriology—its legalism, the ruthlessness of the God it depicts, and the mechanical simplicity of its model of atonement—finds its paradigmatic expression in Anselm's Cur Deus Homo. For Lossky, Anselm reduces salvation to a drama enacted between an infinitely offended God and a humanity unable to meet the demands of vindictive wrath.3 This is a powerful and sweeping indictment. If it is correct, then penal substitution is not merely an inadequate theory—it is a fundamental distortion of the Christian gospel that has led the Western churches astray for a thousand years.
The second component of the critique is the claim that the Church Fathers—especially the Eastern Fathers—taught a fundamentally different understanding of salvation from what the Western tradition has offered. In the Orthodox telling, the Fathers taught theosis (θέωσις, "deification" or "divinization"), not forensic justification. They taught recapitulation and Christus Victor, not penal substitution. The heart of salvation in the patristic East was not a courtroom transaction in which guilt is transferred and a legal penalty is paid, but a cosmic transformation in which human nature itself is healed, renewed, and brought into union with God.
The famous formula attributed to Athanasius captures this vision: "God became man so that man might become God"—not in the sense that humans become gods in their own right, but in the sense that through the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ, human nature is restored to its proper communion with God.4 William Hess, writing as a sympathetic Protestant observer, summarizes the Eastern view well: the East focused primarily on the metaphysical and mystical elements of the atonement, dealing with concepts in the spiritual realm rather than the legal realm. Rather than courtroom imagery, the Eastern Fathers focused on how Satan was defeated by Jesus, death was destroyed, and God redeemed humanity by becoming human Himself.5
In the Eastern framework, the incarnation itself is salvific. When the eternal Son of God took on human nature, He united divinity and humanity in His own person, thereby beginning the restoration of what sin had corrupted. His death defeated the powers of sin and death from within, and His resurrection was the decisive victory that opened the way for all humanity to share in divine life. Sin, in this view, is not primarily a legal offense requiring a judicial penalty, but a sickness, a corruption, a bondage from which humanity needs to be healed and liberated. And the cross is not primarily a place where a legal penalty is paid, but the place where God in Christ entered into the very depths of human suffering and death in order to destroy death's power from within.
Gustaf Aulén, the Swedish theologian whose Christus Victor did more than perhaps any other book to popularize this narrative, argued that the "classic" patristic view of the atonement—the view that dominated the first thousand years of the Church in both East and West—was this dramatic model of Christ's victory over the hostile powers. He contended that this dramatic view dominates the whole of Greek patristic theology from Irenaeus to John of Damascus, who has been the standard authority in the Greek Orthodox Church. All the Greek Fathers, amid some diversity of terms and images, share one and the same dramatic view of the meaning of Christ's redemptive work.6
The third prong of the critique charges that Western atonement theology distorts the character of God. By framing the cross primarily as a place where divine punishment is inflicted, the Western tradition—so the critique goes—makes God look like an angry judge who needs to be appeased rather than a loving physician who heals. In the Eastern view, God is always and only the source of life and healing. He does not need to punish in order to forgive. He does not need His anger satisfied in order to show mercy. Sin brings its own natural consequences—death, corruption, bondage—and God in Christ acts to rescue us from those consequences, not to inflict additional punishment upon an innocent victim.
This is perhaps the point where the Orthodox critique resonates most deeply with Western concerns as well. As we saw in Chapter 20, the "cosmic child abuse" accusation—though it emerged from within the Western tradition—echoes the same basic worry that many Orthodox theologians have voiced for centuries: that certain formulations of penal substitution make the Father look vindictive and the cross look like an act of violence rather than an act of love. The Orthodox critic would say that this is not merely a problem with certain formulations of PSA but with the logic of the theory itself. If salvation requires that someone bear a legal penalty, then God is fundamentally a punisher, and the cross is fundamentally an act of retributive justice. And that, the Orthodox say, is not the God of the Fathers.
Hess captures this Eastern sensibility well when he notes that in the Orthodox view, the atonement does not act upon God so that He is able to set aside His divine anger. Rather, the atonement acts upon humanity to free them from the bondage of the devil. As Grensted put it, the atonement does not bring about love in God, since it is from God's love that it proceeds. In this view, the only thing "satisfied" in God at the atonement is the completed work of His love for humanity.5 This is a profoundly different starting point from much Western atonement theology. In the Western tradition, the cross is often described primarily as addressing a problem in God—His offended honor (Anselm), His violated justice (the Reformers), His righteous wrath (Reformed orthodoxy). In the Eastern tradition, the cross is described primarily as addressing a problem in humanity—the corruption, bondage, and death that sin has introduced into human nature. God does not need to be reconciled to us; we need to be reconciled to God. The cross is not about changing God's mind but about changing our condition.
This Eastern framing of the problem has real theological power, and I think it captures something important. As Philippe de la Trinité argued from within the Catholic tradition, the atonement must be understood as rooted in divine love and mercy, not in divine anger. Christ is a "victim of love" who acts in union with His Father, not an object of wrath separated from the Father's affection.35 This insight—shared by the Orthodox East and the Thomistic Catholic tradition—represents a genuine corrective to versions of PSA that begin with divine wrath as the primary problem to be solved. As we argued in Chapter 3 and Chapter 20, the starting point for the atonement must always be God's love, not God's anger. The question is whether this corrective requires us to abandon substitutionary categories altogether, or whether it simply requires us to relocate them within a proper Trinitarian framework of love. I believe the latter is the case.
Underneath these debates about atonement models lies a more fundamental disagreement about the nature of sin itself. The Orthodox tradition tends to view sin primarily through the lens of disease and corruption. Sin is a sickness that has infected human nature, a corruption that has distorted the image of God in humanity, a bondage that holds human beings captive to death and the devil. What we need, therefore, is healing, restoration, and liberation—not legal acquittal. The Western tradition, by contrast, tends to view sin primarily through the lens of guilt and legal offense. Sin is a transgression of God's law, an offense against His holy character, a debt that must be paid or a penalty that must be borne. What we need, therefore, is forgiveness, justification, and propitiation.
The Orthodox critic would say that the Western view is reductive. By treating sin primarily as a legal problem, the West has produced a legal solution—penal substitution—that addresses the symptoms rather than the root cause. The real problem is not that God is angry and needs to be appeased, but that humanity is sick and needs to be healed. The real solution is not a courtroom verdict but a hospital cure: the incarnation, in which the divine physician takes on human nature in order to heal it from within.
Again, I think this critique contains a genuine insight. Sin is more than a legal category. It is corruption, bondage, alienation, and death—not merely guilt and liability. Any theology of the atonement that addresses only the legal dimension of sin while ignoring its ontological, relational, and cosmic dimensions is incomplete. But—and this is the crucial point—the Bible itself uses both frameworks. Sin is described as transgression (legal), as corruption (ontological), as enmity (relational), and as bondage (existential). The cross addresses all of these dimensions. It is not either legal or ontological; it is both. The question is whether legal categories have a genuine place in the biblical picture—and I believe the answer is clearly yes, as we demonstrated in Chapters 8 and 9 through detailed exegesis of the Pauline texts.
The fourth dimension of the critique comes from what has been called the "New Soteriology" movement within twentieth-century Orthodoxy. Thinkers like John Romanides, Dumitru Stăniloae, and (to some extent) John Zizioulas argued that the entire Western theological tradition—both Catholic and Protestant—went fundamentally wrong on the atonement. Romanides, in particular, drew a sharp line between the authentic theology of the Greek East and the corrupted theology of the Latin West, tracing the West's errors back to Augustine's influence. In Romanides's telling, Augustine's theology of inherited guilt, his emphasis on divine wrath, and his forensic soteriology were departures from genuine patristic Christianity, and everything that followed in the West—Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin—was built on this rotten foundation.7
Stăniloae, writing from within the Romanian Orthodox tradition, offered a more measured but still pointed critique. He emphasized that salvation in the Eastern Fathers is fundamentally about the transformation and deification of the human person, not about the satisfaction of divine justice. Christ does not die to pay a penalty to God; He dies to destroy death and restore humanity to communion with the divine. The whole legal apparatus of the Western tradition—guilt, satisfaction, imputation, justification—is, for Stăniloae, a secondary and potentially misleading overlay on the primary patristic reality of transformation and union.8
Together, these four dimensions create a powerful and coherent critique. PSA is Western, not patristic. It is juridical, not biblical. It distorts God. And it has led the entire Western Church—Catholic and Protestant alike—away from the authentic Christian understanding of salvation. That is the charge. Now let us examine the evidence.
Key Point: The Orthodox critique of Western atonement theology is not a minor quibble about theological details. It is a sweeping claim that the entire Western tradition—from Anselm through Calvin to modern evangelicalism—has fundamentally misunderstood the cross. This critique deserves serious engagement, not dismissal.
The heart of the Orthodox critique rests on a historical claim: that the Church Fathers—especially the Eastern Fathers—did not teach penal or substitutionary atonement. If this historical claim is wrong, then the entire edifice of the critique is weakened at its foundation. And I believe the historical claim is, at the very least, significantly overstated.
Now, I want to be careful here. As we demonstrated at length in Chapters 14 and 15, the question of what the Church Fathers actually taught about the atonement is complex. No Church Father before Anselm produced a systematic "theory" of the atonement in the way that later theologians did. The Fathers used a rich variety of images, metaphors, and categories to describe what Christ accomplished on the cross—victory over the devil, ransom from bondage, satisfaction of divine justice, sacrificial offering, healing of human nature, recapitulation of the human story, and more. To claim that any one of these themes was the only theme the Fathers cared about is to flatten the evidence.
The question is whether substitutionary and penal categories are genuinely present in the Eastern Fathers, or whether they are a Western importation read back into texts where they do not belong. I believe the evidence clearly supports the former conclusion: substitutionary language is genuinely and pervasively present in the Eastern patristic tradition, even if it was never systematized into a formal "theory" of penal substitution.
Consider just a sampling of the evidence (for the full treatment, see Chapter 15, "Correcting the Record: Substitutionary Language in the Church Fathers"). Cyril of Alexandria, one of the towering figures of Eastern theology and the hero of the Council of Ephesus (431 AD), wrote extensively about Christ's death in substitutionary terms. Cyril spoke of Christ as bearing our sins, suffering the penalty that was due to us, and offering Himself as a sacrifice to God in our place. In his commentary on Isaiah, Cyril described Christ as the one who "endured the punishment due to us" and "was chastised on our behalf." In his commentary on John, Cyril spoke of Christ as dying "for us and in our place" (hyper hēmōn, ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν), bearing in His own body the curse and condemnation that belonged to sinners.9
John Chrysostom, the great preacher of Antioch and Archbishop of Constantinople, used remarkably strong substitutionary language. In his homilies on 2 Corinthians, commenting on the phrase "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us" (2 Cor. 5:21), Chrysostom explained that Christ took upon Himself the punishment and curse that rightfully belonged to sinners. Christ was condemned so that we might be acquitted. He bore the penalty so that we might go free. Chrysostom did not merely describe Christ's death as an example or an inspiration; he described it as a genuine substitution in which Christ stood in our place and bore what was due to us.10
John of Damascus, the eighth-century theologian whom Aulén himself identified as the standard authority in the Greek Orthodox Church, likewise used substitutionary categories. In his Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, John described Christ as offering Himself to the Father as a sacrifice on our behalf, bearing our sins in His body, and dying the death that we deserved. He spoke of Christ as both the offerer and the offering, the priest and the sacrifice, who gave Himself as a ransom and a substitution (antallāgma, ἀντάλλαγμα) for our life.11
Athanasius, the great champion of Nicene orthodoxy, is often claimed by the Orthodox critique as a witness against substitutionary thinking. And it is true that Athanasius emphasized the incarnation and the defeat of death as central to his soteriology. But Athanasius also spoke of Christ's death in terms that are difficult to categorize as anything other than substitutionary. In On the Incarnation, Athanasius described Christ as offering His body as a substitute (antipsychon, ἀντίψυχον) for the life of all, paying the debt of death that humanity owed, and satisfying the sentence that had been passed against us.12 This is worth pausing over. The word antipsychon literally means "in the place of a life" or "as a substitute for the life of." It is explicitly substitutionary in its semantic range. Athanasius did not merely say that Christ died for us in some vague, undefined way. He said that Christ offered His body in exchange for the lives of all—that His death was a genuine substitution that satisfied a genuine sentence.
Hess himself acknowledges the complexity here, noting that Athanasius is sometimes called the "Father of Satisfaction Theories," though Hess argues this is a misnomer.13 Even granting Hess's point that Athanasius viewed sin more as a corrupting force than as mere disobedience, the substitutionary language in Athanasius is undeniable. He explicitly said that Christ died "in our place" and "instead of all." Hess also notes that the Eastern Orthodox Church does not affirm PSA, yet venerates Athanasius as a saint and holds his theology close to their hearts. This creates a real interpretive dilemma: either Athanasius used substitutionary categories that the modern Orthodox tradition has chosen to minimize, or we are systematically misreading him through Western lenses.27 I believe the evidence strongly favors the former interpretation. The substitutionary language in Athanasius is not ambiguous or marginal; it appears in his major works, in key passages, and in language that resists non-substitutionary interpretation.
What makes this especially significant is that Athanasius is not merely one Eastern Father among many. He is the champion of Nicene orthodoxy, the defender of the faith against Arianism, and one of the most venerated figures in the entire Eastern Orthodox tradition. If Athanasius used substitutionary language—and he clearly did—then the claim that substitutionary thinking is "alien" to Eastern Christianity faces a very serious problem at its very foundations.
Maximus the Confessor, one of the most profound and sophisticated theologians of the Byzantine tradition, combined his emphasis on the cosmic transformation of human nature with clear statements about Christ bearing the consequences of human sin. Maximus taught that Christ assumed the full weight of the human condition—including the penalty of death that sin had introduced—and offered it back to the Father in a sacrifice of perfect love and obedience. This is not "penal substitution" in the way a seventeenth-century Reformed scholastic would formulate it, but it is unmistakably substitutionary: Christ stood in humanity's place, bore what humanity could not bear, and offered what humanity could not offer.14
Gregory of Nazianzus, often called "the Theologian" in the Orthodox tradition, famously rejected the idea that a ransom was paid to the devil, but he did not reject the idea that Christ's death involved bearing the consequences of human sin. In his Orations, Gregory spoke of Christ as taking on Himself "my rebellion" and "my disobedience" and offering Himself as a sacrifice that deals with the problem of human guilt before God. Gregory's theology is complex and does not fit neatly into any modern category, but the claim that he had no place for substitutionary thinking is simply not supported by his writings.15
Key Evidence: Substitutionary language appears in Cyril of Alexandria, John Chrysostom, John of Damascus, Athanasius, Maximus the Confessor, and Gregory of Nazianzus—all giants of Eastern theology venerated by the Orthodox Church. This language is not a Western importation; it is indigenous to the Eastern patristic tradition itself.
The evidence from the Church Fathers is important, but there is another body of evidence that is, in some ways, even more striking: the liturgical texts of the Eastern Orthodox Church itself. Orthodox theology has always insisted that the lex orandi (the law of prayer) is the lex credendi (the law of belief)—that the Church's worship expresses and shapes her faith. If substitutionary themes are absent from the Orthodox tradition, we would expect them to be absent from Orthodox worship. But they are not.
The hymnography of the Orthodox Church—the vast body of liturgical poetry sung during the services of Holy Week, Pascha (Easter), and throughout the liturgical year—contains extensive substitutionary language. The hymns of Holy Week speak of Christ bearing our sins, suffering the penalty that was due to us, and offering Himself as a sacrifice in our place. Fr. Joshua Schooping, an Orthodox priest who has documented this evidence from within the tradition itself, has shown that the language of substitution is deeply embedded in the prayers, hymns, and liturgical texts that Orthodox Christians have been singing and praying for centuries.16
Consider the Octoechos—the eight-tone cycle of hymns that forms the backbone of Orthodox weekly worship. Throughout this collection, we find hymns that describe Christ's death in terms of bearing the penalty of sin, paying the debt that humanity owed, and offering Himself as a sacrifice that satisfies divine justice. The Triodion, the liturgical book used during Great Lent and Holy Week, contains similar language. The famous Stichera of Holy Friday include lines about Christ accepting condemnation in our place, bearing the weight of judgment that should have fallen on us, and offering His blood as the price of our redemption.17
The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom—the most commonly celebrated liturgical service in the Orthodox Church—includes prayers that speak of Christ's self-offering to the Father as a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. The anaphora (the great eucharistic prayer) describes Christ as the one who "gave Himself as a ransom to death, in which we were held captive, sold under sin," and who "descended through the cross into Hades" to destroy death's power. Notice the combination: both substitutionary language (ransom, giving Himself for us) and Christus Victor language (descent into Hades, destroying death) appear side by side in the very heart of Orthodox worship. They were never understood as mutually exclusive.18
This liturgical evidence is enormously significant. The hymns and prayers of the Orthodox Church were composed by saints and hymnographers whom the tradition venerates—figures like Romanos the Melodist, John of Damascus, Cosmas of Maiuma, and Andrew of Crete. These are not marginal figures; they are the architects of Orthodox worship. If their liturgical texts are saturated with substitutionary language, then the claim that substitutionary thinking is "alien" to Orthodoxy becomes very difficult to sustain. It is not a Western importation. It is indigenous. It is woven into the fabric of the tradition's own prayer life.
It is worth noting that the recognition of this complexity is not limited to Protestant scholars looking in from the outside. David Bentley Hart, one of the most brilliant Orthodox theologians of our era, has offered a significant corrective to the simplistic narrative that pits the patristic East against the juridical West. As Rutledge recounts, Hart has faulted his own Eastern Orthodox tradition for oversimplifying and misunderstanding Anselm. Many Orthodox theologians, Hart explains, believe that Western narratives of salvation have reduced the atonement to a mere transaction intended to appease the Father's wrath. But this reading, Hart argues, misrepresents what Anselm actually wrote.19
Hart goes further. He argues that the supposed sharp distinction between a patristic soteriology concerned exclusively with the rescue of humanity from death and a later Western theory concerned exclusively with remission from guilt is, at best, a matter of emphasis and imagery, not of fundamental substance. As Hart puts it, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, and John of Damascus were no less conscious than Anselm that the guilt which places humanity in bondage to death is overcome on the cross, and Anselm is no less concerned than they with Christ's campaign against death's dominion over those who have turned from God in disobedience.20 This is a remarkable admission from within the Orthodox tradition itself: the neat divide between "Eastern theosis" and "Western legal transaction" does not hold up under close examination of the primary sources.
Hart is essentially making the same point that I have been making throughout this book: the Church Fathers—Eastern and Western alike—held together themes that later polemicists tried to pull apart. The Fathers saw no contradiction between affirming Christ's victory over death and the devil (Christus Victor), the transformation of human nature through union with God (theosis), and the bearing of humanity's penalty and guilt by a divine substitute (substitution). These were not competing theories in the patristic mind; they were complementary dimensions of a single, multifaceted reality. The polarization came later.
Key Point: David Bentley Hart, himself an Eastern Orthodox theologian, has acknowledged that the standard Orthodox narrative—which pits an Eastern "rescue from death" soteriology against a Western "remission from guilt" theory—oversimplifies the patristic evidence. The Eastern Fathers were aware of guilt and substitution; the Western Fathers were aware of theosis and victory. The divide is a matter of emphasis, not of fundamental substance.
The Orthodox critique of Western atonement theology assumes a sharp and ancient divide between East and West on these questions. But the historical record of early modern encounters between Orthodoxy and Protestantism complicates this narrative considerably.
When Orthodox theologians first engaged with Protestant theology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their response was far more nuanced than the modern polemical narrative would suggest. They did not reject substitutionary categories wholesale. In fact, several important Orthodox confessional documents from this period affirm language that is recognizably substitutionary.
The Confession of Dositheus (1672), adopted by the Synod of Jerusalem as an authoritative Orthodox statement, speaks of Christ's death in terms that include genuine substitutionary dimensions. Christ died for the sins of the world, offered Himself as a sacrifice to the Father, and bore the consequences of human sin. The confession's soteriology is not identical to Reformed PSA—it places greater emphasis on the transformative and participatory dimensions of salvation—but it does not reject the substitutionary element. It affirms that Christ's death was genuinely "for us" in a way that includes bearing what we deserved.21
Similarly, the Orthodox Confession of Peter Mogila (1640), while sometimes criticized by later Orthodox theologians as too "Latinized," was approved by multiple Orthodox patriarchs and contains clear substitutionary language. Mogila spoke of Christ satisfying divine justice, bearing the punishment due to sinners, and offering Himself as a sacrifice that removes the guilt of sin. Now, modern Orthodox critics often dismiss Mogila's confession as a product of Western influence—as evidence that some Orthodox theologians were temporarily seduced by Latin categories rather than as evidence of authentic Orthodox thought. But this dismissal raises an important question: if substitutionary categories were so obviously foreign to Orthodoxy, why did multiple patriarchs approve a confession that contained them? The more likely explanation is that these categories were not, in fact, felt to be foreign. They were recognized as part of the tradition's own inheritance, even if they were given different emphases and different contexts than they received in the Protestant West.22
The Catechism of Philaret of Moscow (1823), perhaps the most widely used Orthodox catechism of the nineteenth century, likewise includes substitutionary language. Philaret describes Christ as bearing the punishment for our sins, offering Himself as a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice, and dying in our place so that we might be reconciled to God. This is not a minor or marginal text; it is the catechism that shaped the faith formation of millions of Russian Orthodox Christians for over a century. If its language is "Western" and "alien" to Orthodoxy, then a significant portion of the Orthodox Church's own catechetical tradition must be dismissed as inauthentic—a deeply problematic claim.23
When we look at the historical record of Orthodox-Protestant engagement, what we find is not a stark rejection of substitutionary categories but a complex conversation in which both sides found significant points of agreement alongside genuine differences. The areas of agreement included the recognition that Christ died for human sin; that His death was genuinely substitutionary in some sense (He died "for us" and "in our place"); that His death involved bearing the consequences of human sin; and that His sacrificial offering was directed toward God, not merely toward humanity or the devil. The areas of disagreement tended to center on the precise mechanism of how substitution "works," the relationship between forensic justification and ontological transformation, and the degree to which legal categories should dominate the soteriological framework.
This pattern of agreement-with-differentiation is visible in the works of other early modern Orthodox theologians as well. Patriarch Gennadius II Scholarius of Constantinople (fifteenth century), who is often considered the first Orthodox theologian to engage seriously with Western scholasticism, used language about Christ's sacrificial death that includes clearly substitutionary dimensions. He spoke of Christ as the one who bore the penalty that humanity deserved and offered His suffering to the Father as a satisfaction for sin. Gennadius was influenced by Thomas Aquinas, to be sure—but the fact that an Orthodox patriarch found Aquinas's soteriological categories compatible with his own tradition is itself evidence that the supposed East-West divide on substitutionary atonement was not as absolute as modern polemicists claim.37
Even Patriarch Dositheos of Jerusalem, who drafted the Confession of Dositheus partly as a response to Calvinist influence in Orthodox lands, did not reject the substitutionary framework root and branch. He insisted on the genuinely transformative and participatory dimensions of salvation, yes—but he also affirmed that Christ's death was a genuine sacrifice for sin, offered to the Father, that removes the guilt and condemnation that sin had brought upon humanity. The point is not that Dositheos was secretly a Reformed Protestant. Clearly he was not. The point is that he found it possible to affirm substitutionary language within a broader Orthodox soteriological framework that also included theosis, participation, and transformation. This is precisely what the modern polemical narrative says should be impossible.
This is a far more nuanced picture than the modern polemical narrative allows. The Orthodox tradition did not simply reject substitutionary thinking and embrace theosis instead. It held both themes in a creative tension that is actually quite close to the multi-faceted model of the atonement that this book has been developing. The later hardening of the divide—the insistence that East and West represent fundamentally incompatible approaches to salvation—is a product of modern theological politics, not of the historical record.
This brings us to one of the most important—and perhaps most controversial—arguments in this chapter. I want to suggest that the rejection of penal and substitutionary categories in some modern Orthodox circles is itself a relatively recent development. It is not the timeless teaching of the Eastern tradition faithfully transmitted from the Fathers. It is, in significant respects, an innovation—shaped by anti-Western polemic, by the influence of particular twentieth-century theologians, and by a selective reading of the patristic sources.
John Romanides (1927–2001) was a Greek Orthodox theologian who exercised enormous influence on modern Orthodox identity, particularly in Greece. Romanides argued that the entire Western theological tradition was corrupted at its root by Augustine's theology, especially his doctrines of original sin and predestination. For Romanides, Augustine was the great villain of church history—the thinker who derailed Western Christianity from the authentic patristic path and set it on a course that would eventually produce Anselm, the Reformers, and penal substitution. The real Christianity, Romanides insisted, was preserved only in the Greek East, where the authentic experience of theosis was maintained against the juridical distortions of the Latin West.24
Romanides's influence was massive, and his anti-Western, anti-Augustinian narrative became something of an orthodoxy in certain Greek Orthodox circles. But there are serious problems with this narrative. First, it requires a wholesale rejection of Augustine that most of the Eastern tradition itself does not support. While it is true that Augustine is not regarded with the same veneration in the East as in the West, he was never condemned as a heretic, and his influence on Eastern theology—while less direct—was not negligible. To blame Augustine for the entire Western tradition's supposed errors is a dramatic oversimplification of a complex historical development.
Second, Romanides's narrative requires a remarkably selective reading of the patristic sources. As we have seen, substitutionary language appears in Cyril, Chrysostom, Athanasius, John of Damascus, and Maximus—all of whom are Eastern Fathers writing long before any "Western influence" could be plausibly invoked. If substitutionary thinking is present in these Eastern sources, then it cannot be blamed entirely on Augustine or Roman law. Something more complicated is going on.
Third, and perhaps most tellingly, Romanides's sharp East-West divide does not reflect the actual theological landscape of the first millennium. As Aulén himself acknowledged, the classic idea of the atonement is the dominant view of the Western as well as the Eastern Fathers. Ambrose, pseudo-Ambrose, Augustine, Leo the Great, and Gregory the Great all operated within essentially the same dramatic framework as their Eastern counterparts.25 The differences between East and West in the patristic period were real but were differences of emphasis within a shared framework, not the fundamental incompatibilities that later polemicists made them out to be.
Vladimir Moss, an Orthodox writer and historian, has documented and critiqued what he calls the "New Soteriology" movement within modern Orthodoxy. Moss argues that certain twentieth-century Orthodox theologians—driven by anti-Western polemic and by the desire to establish a distinctive Orthodox theological identity over against Western Christianity—developed a reading of the patristic tradition that was itself innovative and selective. These "New Soteriologists" minimized or explained away the substitutionary language in the Fathers, elevated theosis and Christus Victor as the only authentic patristic themes, and presented the entire Western tradition as a monolithic distortion. In doing so, Moss argues, they were not faithfully transmitting the tradition but actively reshaping it.26
This is a crucial point. The claim that substitutionary atonement is a "Western innovation" is itself, in important respects, a modern innovation. It was not the standard Orthodox position for most of church history. For centuries, Orthodox theologians held substitutionary and participatory themes together without feeling any contradiction between them. The insistence that these themes are incompatible—that one must choose between theosis and substitution—is a product of twentieth-century theological construction, not of patristic faithfulness.
Hess, writing from a Protestant perspective sympathetic to Orthodox concerns, notes something revealing about this dynamic. He observes that the Eastern Orthodox Church does not affirm PSA, yet venerates Athanasius as a saint and holds his theology close to their hearts. This creates a tension, Hess notes, because Athanasius's actual writings contain language that, at the very least, gestures in a substitutionary direction. The Orthodox must either concede that their saint used substitutionary categories, or argue that we are misunderstanding him through Western lenses.27 Either way, the relationship between Orthodoxy and substitutionary thinking is more complicated than the standard polemical narrative admits.
Important Distinction: The rejection of substitutionary categories in some modern Orthodox circles is itself a relatively recent development, shaped by twentieth-century anti-Western polemic (especially the influence of John Romanides) rather than by faithful transmission of the patristic tradition. For most of church history, Orthodox theology held substitutionary and participatory themes together without contradiction.
Perhaps the most significant evidence that substitutionary atonement is not alien to Orthodoxy comes from within the Orthodox tradition itself. Fr. Joshua Schooping, an Orthodox priest, has produced a remarkable study—An Existential Soteriology—that documents the pervasive presence of substitutionary and even penal themes in Orthodox liturgical texts, patristic writings, and canonical tradition. Schooping's work is especially valuable because it cannot be dismissed as a Protestant projection onto Orthodox sources. He writes as an insider, from within the tradition, using the tradition's own texts and authorities.28
Schooping demonstrates that the claim "Orthodoxy has never taught penal substitution" is a significant overstatement of the historical record. While it is true that Orthodoxy has never adopted a systematic theory of penal substitution in the way that Reformed Protestantism has, the individual components of that theory—Christ as substitute, Christ bearing the penalty of sin, Christ's death as a sacrifice directed toward God to deal with the problem of guilt, Christ's suffering as vicarious—are all present in Orthodox sources. They appear in the Fathers, in the liturgy, in the canonical tradition, and in the theological writings of Orthodox thinkers across the centuries.29
Schooping's work does not argue that Orthodoxy has always been secretly Reformed. That would be a gross distortion. What it does argue is that the Orthodox tradition has always included substitutionary and penal dimensions within its broader, multifaceted understanding of salvation—and that the modern attempt to excise these dimensions represents a departure from the tradition, not a faithful preservation of it. This is precisely the point I have been making throughout this book: the atonement is multifaceted, and the attempt to reduce it to any single model—whether that model is PSA, Christus Victor, or theosis—inevitably distorts the biblical and patristic witness.
Having challenged the overreach of the Orthodox critique, I want to be equally clear about what is right in the Orthodox perspective. The Eastern tradition offers genuine insights that belong in any fully developed theology of the atonement, and the Western tradition has sometimes been poorer for neglecting them. A truly catholic (small-c) theology of the cross must listen to the East as well as the West.
The Eastern emphasis on theosis—the idea that salvation involves the genuine transformation of the human person into the likeness of God—is a biblical insight of the first order. When Peter speaks of believers becoming "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4, ESV), he is using language that the Eastern tradition has taken with profound seriousness. Salvation is not merely a legal transaction that changes our status before God while leaving us essentially unchanged. It is a real transformation—a participation in the divine life that begins now and reaches its completion in the age to come.30
Too often, Western theology—and especially Western evangelical theology—has reduced salvation to the single category of forensic justification. We have rightly emphasized that sinners are declared righteous before God through faith in Christ. But we have sometimes spoken as if this legal declaration is the whole of salvation rather than its beginning. The Eastern tradition reminds us that God's saving purpose is not merely to declare us righteous but to make us righteous—to transform us from the inside out, to heal the corruption that sin has introduced into human nature, and to bring us into genuine communion with God Himself. This is the vision of salvation that animates the great Eastern Fathers, and it is a vision that the Western tradition desperately needs to recover.
Paul himself uses language that points in this direction. When he speaks of being "transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another" (2 Cor. 3:18, ESV), or of Christ being "formed in you" (Gal. 4:19), or of "the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Col. 1:27), he is describing something more than forensic justification. He is describing a real, ongoing transformation of the believer into the likeness of Christ—a transformation that the Eastern tradition calls theosis and that the Western tradition has sometimes acknowledged in its doctrine of sanctification but has often left underdeveloped. The Eastern Fathers took this participatory language with a seriousness that many Western theologians would do well to recover. Maximus the Confessor, for example, spoke of humanity's ultimate destiny as full participation in the divine life—not the erasure of our creaturely distinctness, but the genuine interpenetration of the human and the divine in a way that the incarnation makes possible and the atonement secures.14
I should note that this insight is entirely compatible with substitutionary atonement. The substitutionary dimension of the cross provides the basis on which theosis becomes possible. Because Christ bore the consequences of sin, the barrier between God and humanity is removed. Because the penalty is dealt with, the way is opened for genuine transformation and union with God. Substitution and theosis are not competitors; they are partners. The cross makes deification possible (see Chapter 24 for the full integration of these themes). As John Stott argued, the cross is God's self-substitution—the Triune God bearing the cost of our reconciliation—and the fruit of that reconciliation includes not merely a change in legal status but a change in our very nature as we are progressively conformed to the image of Christ.34
The Orthodox tradition has also done a better job than the West of preserving the cosmic scope of salvation. In the Eastern vision, the cross does not merely save individual souls; it renews the entire cosmos. Christ's victory over death and the devil has implications not just for human beings but for all of creation. The resurrection inaugurates a new creation in which the whole material world is being redeemed and transformed. Paul's vision in Romans 8:19–22—where all creation groans, waiting for its liberation from bondage to corruption—receives its full weight in Eastern theology in a way that Western theology has sometimes neglected.31
This cosmic dimension is a genuine biblical theme, and it is one that a substitution-centered atonement theology must incorporate. The multi-faceted model we have been developing throughout this book does exactly this: by integrating Christus Victor alongside substitution (see Chapter 21), we capture both the personal dimension (Christ bore my sins) and the cosmic dimension (Christ defeated the powers) of the cross. The Eastern emphasis on the cosmic scope of salvation reminds us that the cross is not merely about individual forgiveness; it is about the renewal of all things.
The Eastern tradition has also preserved a rich theology of the incarnation as intrinsically salvific. In the West, we have sometimes spoken as if the incarnation was merely a prerequisite for the cross—as if the Son became human solely in order to die. The Eastern Fathers, by contrast, understood the incarnation itself as a saving act. When the eternal Son took on human nature, He began the work of healing and transformation from within. The incarnation united God and humanity in a way that made it possible for human nature to be restored to its original glory.32
This is not an either-or. The incarnation is salvific and the cross is the decisive moment of atonement. The incarnation creates the ontological conditions for the atonement: only a divine-human person could stand in humanity's place and bear the consequences of sin while also having the divine power to overcome them. The cross is where this divine-human person actually accomplishes the work of atonement through self-substitution. But the Eastern tradition is right to insist that we should not collapse the entire saving work of Christ into a single event (the cross) while ignoring the saving significance of the incarnation, the life of Christ, and the resurrection. As we argued in Chapter 24, the atonement is the work of the whole Christ—incarnate, crucified, risen, and ascended.
Finally, the Orthodox critique is right to warn against reducing salvation entirely to forensic categories. Salvation is not merely a legal transaction. It includes forensic justification, but it also includes reconciliation, redemption, adoption, sanctification, and ultimately glorification (see Chapter 36 for the full treatment of these themes). When Western theology speaks only of guilt, punishment, and legal acquittal—as if salvation were nothing more than having a charge sheet wiped clean—it impoverishes the gospel. The cross accomplishes a legal acquittal, yes, but it also heals, transforms, liberates, and restores. The Eastern insistence on holding all these dimensions together is a genuine and needed corrective.
The problem, I believe, is not with the Orthodox emphasis on the richness of salvation. The problem is with the claim that this richness excludes penal and substitutionary categories. The Fathers did not see it that way. The liturgy does not see it that way. The canonical tradition does not see it that way. The richness of the patristic vision of salvation includes substitutionary themes alongside Christus Victor, theosis, recapitulation, and all the rest. The modern attempt to remove substitution from the mix—to declare it foreign and illegitimate—is the innovation. The authentic tradition holds it all together.
Key Insight: The problem with the Orthodox critique is not its positive emphases—theosis, cosmic scope, the role of the incarnation, the richness of salvation beyond mere forensics. These are all genuine biblical and patristic insights. The problem is the false claim that these emphases exclude penal and substitutionary categories. The authentic Eastern tradition holds them all together.
Having examined the evidence, where do we land? I think we can identify several conclusions with reasonable confidence.
First, the differences between Eastern and Western atonement theology are real, but they are differences of emphasis, not of fundamental substance. The East emphasizes theosis, the cosmic scope of salvation, and the defeat of death; the West emphasizes justification, the bearing of guilt, and the satisfaction of divine justice. But both traditions—when we look at the primary sources rather than the polemical summaries—contain elements of both emphases. The sharp divide is a later construction, not an accurate description of the first millennium.
Second, the claim that penal and substitutionary categories are "alien" to the Eastern tradition is not supported by the evidence. Substitutionary language appears pervasively in the Eastern Fathers, in Orthodox hymnography, in the canonical confessions of the Orthodox Church, and in the theological writings of Orthodox thinkers across the centuries. This language may be less systematized, less dominant, and less exclusively focused than in the Western Reformers, but it is genuinely present. Denying its presence requires either ignoring or explaining away a substantial body of evidence.
It is worth noting that this is not merely a Protestant claim. The Catholic Thomistic tradition—represented in our study by Philippe de la Trinité—has also insisted on the substitutionary dimension of the atonement while rejecting the notion that the Father poured out wrath on the Son. Philippe's concept of "vicarious satisfaction" rooted in mercy rather than anger represents a position that has significant overlap with the best of the Orthodox emphasis on divine love as the driving force of the atonement.35 The convergence between the Thomistic Catholic position and the Eastern Orthodox emphasis on divine love suggests that the real debate is not about whether substitutionary categories have any place in atonement theology. The real debate is about the context in which those categories should be understood. Should substitution be framed primarily in terms of an angry God who needs to be appeased? Or should it be framed in terms of a loving God who bears the cost of reconciliation Himself? I have been arguing throughout this book for the latter, and both the Catholic and Orthodox traditions support that framing.
Third, the modern Orthodox rejection of substitutionary categories is, in significant respects, an innovation rather than a tradition. It was driven by the anti-Western polemic of twentieth-century thinkers like Romanides, who created a narrative of East-West difference that is sharper and more antagonistic than the historical record warrants. This narrative has been enormously influential, but it is a narrative that the tradition's own sources complicate and, in important respects, contradict.
Fourth, and finally, the Orthodox tradition offers genuine and important insights that Western theology needs to hear and incorporate. The emphasis on theosis, the cosmic scope of salvation, the intrinsic salvific significance of the incarnation, and the insistence that salvation is more than forensic justification—these are all biblical themes that the Western tradition has sometimes neglected or underemphasized. A fully adequate theology of the atonement must hold these Eastern emphases alongside the Western emphasis on substitution and justification. The multi-faceted model developed in this book—with substitution at the center and other models arranged around it as complementary facets—is, I believe, the most faithful way to honor both traditions.
How does all of this relate to the multi-faceted model of the atonement that we have been developing throughout this book? I believe the Orthodox-Western conversation actually confirms the model's basic structure. The fact that both traditions contain elements of substitution, victory, transformation, and reconciliation—even if in different proportions—suggests that the biblical and patristic witness itself is multifaceted. No single model captures the whole truth. Substitution needs theosis, and theosis needs substitution. Christus Victor needs forensic justification, and forensic justification needs Christus Victor.
What our model adds—and what I believe is the key insight that resolves the East-West tension—is a principle of organization. These various facets are not randomly arranged; they have a structure. Substitution stands at the center because it is the mechanism by which the other facets become effective. Christ's victory over the devil (Christus Victor) is accomplished through His substitutionary death: He enters into the domain of death by dying in our place and defeats death from within. Theosis becomes possible because Christ bore the barrier-creating consequences of sin, opening the way for genuine union between God and humanity. Reconciliation is achieved because the objective problem of human guilt has been addressed. Each facet presupposes and depends on substitution at the center.
Notice that this model does not privilege Western categories over Eastern ones. It does not say that forensic justification is more important than theosis, or that legal categories are more biblical than participatory ones. It says, rather, that the substitutionary heart of the cross—Christ standing in our place and bearing what we could not bear—is the foundation on which all the other dimensions of salvation rest, whether those dimensions are described in Western forensic language (justification, propitiation) or in Eastern participatory language (theosis, recapitulation, union with God). The multi-faceted model honors both traditions by showing how their distinctive emphases fit together within a coherent whole.
This is, I believe, what the best theologians on both sides have always intuited. When Chrysostom described Christ as bearing our condemnation while simultaneously defeating death, he was holding together substitution and Christus Victor. When Cyril of Alexandria spoke of Christ enduring the punishment due to us while also uniting divinity and humanity in His person, he was holding together substitution and theosis. When the Holy Week hymns of the Orthodox Church celebrate Christ's descent into Hades (Christus Victor) while also praising Him for bearing the penalty of sin in our place (substitution), they are holding the same themes together that modern polemicists have tried to pull apart. The liturgy, I believe, is wiser than the polemicists. It always has been.
The Orthodox tradition is right that theosis, victory, and cosmic renewal are essential and irreducible dimensions of the atonement. But these dimensions are grounded in and made possible by the substitutionary heart of the cross. The multi-faceted model does not suppress Eastern insights; it incorporates them within a coherent structure that gives each facet its proper place. And it does so in a way that is more faithful to the full breadth of the patristic witness than either a purely Western "legal transaction" model or a purely Eastern "ontological transformation" model can be on its own (see Chapter 24 for the full integration argument).
Before concluding, I want to say something about how we should approach these conversations between East and West. As someone who deeply respects the Eastern Orthodox tradition—its worship, its theology, its faithfulness through centuries of persecution, its preservation of patristic wisdom—I am saddened when these conversations become polemical and adversarial. The East has much to teach the West, and the West has much to teach the East. We share the same Scriptures, the same creeds, the same Fathers, and the same Lord. Our differences on the atonement are real, but they are differences within a shared faith, not differences between alien religions.
I believe that the most productive path forward is one of mutual learning rather than mutual accusation. The West needs to listen to the East's emphasis on theosis, cosmic renewal, and the intrinsic value of the incarnation. The East needs to acknowledge that substitutionary and penal categories are part of its own heritage, not Western impositions. Both traditions need to read the Fathers in their full complexity rather than selectively, looking for ammunition for a predetermined position. And both traditions need to submit their readings of the Fathers to the authority of Scripture itself, which is the ultimate source and norm for all Christian theology.
We are, all of us, trying to understand the inexhaustible mystery of what God accomplished on the cross. That mystery is bigger than any single tradition, any single theory, any single set of categories. If the cross is truly the place where God's love and justice meet perfectly—where the Creator enters into the deepest depths of creaturely suffering and death in order to rescue, redeem, transform, and glorify—then we should expect that it will take the entire Church, in all its diversity, to begin to comprehend its fullness.
The Eastern Orthodox critique of Western atonement theology is serious, sophisticated, and deserving of careful engagement. Its positive contributions—the emphasis on theosis, the cosmic scope of salvation, the salvific significance of the incarnation, and the refusal to reduce the gospel to forensic categories—are genuine insights that belong in any adequate theology of the atonement. Western Christians, and evangelicals in particular, have much to learn from the Eastern tradition on these points.
But the critique overreaches when it claims that penal and substitutionary categories are alien to the Eastern tradition. The evidence—from the Eastern Fathers, from Orthodox hymnography, from the canonical confessions, and from theologians like David Bentley Hart and Fr. Joshua Schooping writing from within the tradition—tells a more complex story. Substitutionary language is indigenous to the Orthodox tradition. It has been part of the East's theological and liturgical heritage for centuries. The modern attempt to excise it is driven more by anti-Western polemic than by faithful adherence to the patristic sources.
We should also be honest about the limitations on both sides. The Western tradition has sometimes been guilty of exactly what the Orthodox critique charges: reducing the atonement to a courtroom transaction, depicting God as an angry judge rather than a loving Father, and neglecting the transformative and participatory dimensions of salvation. When popular Western preaching presents the cross as nothing more than God punishing an innocent person so He can let guilty people off the hook, the Orthodox critic is right to object. That is a distortion. The solution, however, is not to abandon substitutionary categories but to understand them within their proper Trinitarian context—the context that this book has been developing throughout. God is not an angry judge imposing punishment on an unwilling victim. God is a loving Father who, in the person of His Son, bears the cost of our reconciliation Himself. That is the true meaning of substitutionary atonement, and it is a meaning that the best Eastern and Western theologians have always grasped.
The resolution, I believe, is not to choose between East and West but to recognize that both traditions, at their best, are pointing to different facets of the same multifaceted reality. Substitution and theosis. Justification and deification. Legal acquittal and ontological transformation. Victory over the powers and bearing of human guilt. These are not competing alternatives; they are complementary dimensions of the one great work that God accomplished in Christ on the cross. When we hold them together—with substitution at the center, providing the foundation on which all the other dimensions rest—we come closer to the full, rich, inexhaustible truth of the atonement than any single tradition can reach on its own.
The cross is wider and deeper than any of our categories can contain. But it is not wider or deeper than the love that put Christ there. And that love—the self-giving, substitutionary, transforming, victorious, world-renewing love of the Triune God—is the common inheritance of every Christian tradition. East and West alike stand before it in wonder.
1 Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1976), 151–53. See also William L. Hess, Crushing the Great Serpent: Did God Punish Jesus? (2024), chap. 3, "The East and the West." ↩
2 Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 97–100. ↩
3 Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 159–60. Rutledge is here summarizing Hart's account of Lossky's position. ↩
4 Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 54.3. This formula is widely attributed to Athanasius, though similar language appears in Irenaeus and other Fathers. ↩
5 Hess, Crushing the Great Serpent, chap. 3, "The East and the West." ↩
6 Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement, trans. A. G. Hebert (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003), 37–38. ↩
7 John Romanides, The Ancestral Sin, trans. George S. Gabriel (Ridgewood, NJ: Zephyr, 2002), 25–42. Romanides's influence on modern Greek Orthodox identity is difficult to overstate. His anti-Augustinian, anti-Western narrative shaped a generation of Orthodox theologians. ↩
8 Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God: Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, vol. 3, The Person of Jesus Christ as God and Savior, trans. Ioan Ionita (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2011), 182–210. ↩
9 Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on Isaiah 53, in P. E. Pusey, ed., Sancti Patris Nostri Cyrilli Archiepiscopi Alexandrini in XII Prophetas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1868), vol. 1. See also Cyril's Commentary on the Gospel of John, 12.27–33. Cyril's substitutionary language is extensively documented in Steven Jeffery, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sach, Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007), 173–78. ↩
10 John Chrysostom, Homilies on 2 Corinthians, Homily 11, on 2 Cor. 5:21 (NPNF 1.12:334–36). See also Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans, Homily 10, on Rom. 5:12–21. ↩
11 John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 3.27, 4.11 (NPNF 2.9). John's use of substitutionary categories is significant precisely because he is, as Aulén notes, the standard authority in the Greek Orthodox Church. ↩
12 Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 9–10, 20. The term antipsychon (ἀντίψυχον, "in the place of a life" or "as a substitute for the life of") is explicitly substitutionary in force. See also John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 143–44, who discusses the patristic evidence for substitutionary language. ↩
13 Hess, Crushing the Great Serpent, chap. 13, "Historical Case for a More Classical View." ↩
14 Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua, 41–42; and Questions to Thalassius, 42, 61. On Maximus's integration of substitutionary and transformative themes, see Adam G. Cooper, The Body in St Maximus the Confessor: Holy Flesh, Wholly Deified (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 177–98. ↩
15 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 45.22 (Second Oration on Easter). Gregory's famous discussion of to whom the ransom is paid (rejecting the devil but exploring the idea of a self-offering to the Father) shows that he was working with categories that include genuine substitutionary dimensions. See also Oration 30.5. ↩
16 Fr. Joshua Schooping, An Existential Soteriology: The Patristic, Liturgical, and Canonical Evidence for Substitutionary and Penal Themes in Eastern Orthodox Tradition (Independently published, 2022). Schooping's work is especially valuable because it comes from within the Orthodox tradition itself. ↩
17 Schooping, An Existential Soteriology, 87–115. The Holy Week hymns are a particularly rich source of substitutionary language, as they focus directly on the meaning of Christ's suffering and death. ↩
18 The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Anaphora. The full text is widely available in Orthodox liturgical resources. See also Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1988), 210–28. ↩
19 Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 159. Hart's essay is David Bentley Hart, "A Gift Exceeding Every Debt: An Eastern Orthodox Appreciation of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo," Pro Ecclesia 7, no. 3 (1998): 333–49. ↩
20 Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 160. Hart's point is devastating to the standard polemical narrative: the supposed sharp distinction between Eastern and Western soteriology is supportable only in regard to emphasis and imagery, not in regard to fundamental substance. ↩
21 The Acts and Decrees of the Synod of Jerusalem (1672), Decree 6. See also Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way, rev. ed. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1995), 82–84, for a discussion of the various Orthodox confessional documents and their soteriological language. ↩
22 Peter Mogila, The Orthodox Confession of the Catholic and Apostolic Eastern Church (1640), Question 49. The confession was approved by the Synod of Jassy (1642) and subsequently recognized by all four Eastern patriarchates. ↩
23 Philaret of Moscow, The Longer Catechism of the Orthodox, Catholic, Eastern Church (1823), Questions 208–17. The catechism's language about Christ bearing punishment and satisfying divine justice is unmistakably substitutionary. ↩
24 Romanides, The Ancestral Sin, 35–50. See also Andrew Louth, "The Orthodox Dogmatic Theology of Dumitru Stăniloae," Modern Theology 13, no. 2 (1997): 253–67, for a more balanced assessment of the relationship between Eastern and Western soteriology. ↩
25 Aulén, Christus Victor, 39. Even Aulén, whose thesis explicitly favored the Christus Victor model, acknowledged that the classic dramatic idea is dominant in the Western as well as the Eastern Fathers during the patristic period. ↩
26 Vladimir Moss, "Against the New Soteriologists," unpublished manuscript, 2009. Available at www.orthodoxchristianbooks.com. See also the discussion in Schooping, An Existential Soteriology, 15–32. ↩
27 Hess, Crushing the Great Serpent, chap. 13, "Historical Case for a More Classical View." Hess notes that the Orthodox Church's relationship to the patristic evidence on substitution is more complex than simple rejection. ↩
28 Schooping, An Existential Soteriology, 1–14. Schooping writes explicitly as an Orthodox priest who is concerned that the modern Orthodox rejection of substitutionary themes does not reflect the tradition's own sources faithfully. ↩
29 Schooping, An Existential Soteriology, 120–45. ↩
30 On the biblical basis for theosis, see Michael J. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul's Narrative Soteriology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 40–64. Gorman argues persuasively that the concept of participation in the divine nature is not a Greek philosophical imposition on the Bible but a genuinely Pauline theme. ↩
31 On the cosmic scope of salvation in Orthodox theology, see Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1973), 11–32. See also Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 507–14, for a discussion of the cosmic dimensions of the cross. ↩
32 Hess, Crushing the Great Serpent, chap. 3, "The East and the West." Hess's summary of the Eastern understanding of the incarnation as intrinsically salvific is helpful and largely accurate. See also Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 1–10. ↩
33 David L. Allen, The Atonement: A Biblical, Theological, and Historical Study of the Cross of Christ (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2019), 349–52. Allen discusses the East-West dynamics in atonement theology and notes the presence of substitutionary themes in the Eastern Fathers. ↩
34 Stott, The Cross of Christ, 159–63. Stott discusses the patristic evidence for substitutionary atonement and argues that the claim of its being a Western invention is not supported by the primary sources. ↩
35 Philippe de la Trinité, What Is Redemption? How Christ's Suffering Saves Us (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Road, 2021), 87–92. Philippe de la Trinité's insistence that Christ is a "victim of love" acting in union with the Father is a Catholic formulation that bridges the supposed East-West divide, affirming both the substitutionary dimension and the primacy of divine love. ↩
36 Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way, rev. ed. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1995), 78–82. Ware, while critical of some Western formulations, acknowledges that the cross involves Christ bearing the consequences of human sin—a recognition that contains substitutionary elements. ↩
37 John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (New York: Fordham University Press, 1974), 160–64. Meyendorff provides a balanced account of Byzantine atonement theology that acknowledges both its distinctive emphases and its areas of overlap with Western categories. ↩
38 Simon Gathercole, Defending Substitution: An Essay on Atonement in Paul (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015), 15–20. Gathercole's defense of substitution as a central Pauline category reinforces the point that this is not merely a Western systematic-theological construct but a biblical reality that the Eastern tradition also recognizes. ↩
39 Aulén, Christus Victor, 38. Aulén lists Origen, Athanasius, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, Cyril of Alexandria, Cyril of Jerusalem, and Chrysostom as representing the "classic" dramatic view, but acknowledges that their views contain diversity within a deep-lying agreement. ↩
40 Joshua McNall, The Mosaic of Atonement: An Integrated Approach to Christ's Work (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2019), 220–35. McNall's "mosaic" approach to the atonement is similar in structure to the multi-faceted model developed in this book and likewise seeks to integrate Eastern and Western insights. ↩
41 I. Howard Marshall, Aspects of the Atonement: Cross and Resurrection in the Reconciling of God and Humanity (Colorado Springs: Paternoster, 2007), 44–51. Marshall argues that the variety of atonement motifs in the New Testament itself—including substitutionary, participatory, and victory themes—means that no single tradition can claim exclusive ownership of "the biblical view." ↩
42 Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 108–26. Boersma's treatment of the relationship between hospitality and justice in the atonement offers a framework that can bridge Eastern and Western perspectives. ↩
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Boersma, Hans. Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004.
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