Sin & Theodicy
by:
Frederica Mathewes-Green
Often in conversations with Christians of other traditions I find myself
explaining the Orthodox view of sin. For most Western Christians, sin is
a matter of doing bad things, which create a debt to God, and which
somebody has to pay off. They believe that Jesus paid the debt for our
sins on the Cross-paid the Father, that is, so we would not longer bear
the penalty. The central argument between Protestants and Catholics has
to do with whether "Jesus paid it all" (as Protestants would say) or
whether, even though the Cross is sufficient, humans are still obligated
(as Catholics would say) to add their own sacrifices as well.
Orthodox, of course, have a completely different understanding of
Christ's saving work. We hold to the view of the early church, that "God
was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself." Our sins made us
captives of Death, and God in Christ went into Hades to set us free. The
penalty of sin is not a debt we owe the Father; it is the soul-death
that is the immediate and inevitable consequence of sin. We need healing
and rescue, not someone to step in and square the bill. The early
Christians always saw the Father pursuing and loving every sinner, doing
everything to bring us back, not waiting with arms folded for a debt to
be paid. When the Prodigal Son came home, the Father didn't say, "I'd
love to take you back, but who's going to pay this Visa bill?"
This was the common view for the first thousand years of Christianity,
until Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury at the time of the Great Schism,
offered an alternative view. Anselm believed that God could not merely
forgive us, because our sins constituted an objective wrong in the
universe. It could not be made right without payment. No human could pay
such a huge debt, but Jesus' blood was more than sufficient to pay it,
which gave Jesus a "claim" on God the Father. "If the Son chose to make
over the claim He had on God to man, could the Father justly forbid Him
doing so, or refuse to man what the Son willed to give him?"
We would say that Western Christians, Protestant and Catholic, have
mixed up two Scriptural concepts: "sacrifice/offering" and
"ransom/payment." Jesus couldn't have paid the "ransom" for our sins to
the Father; you pay a ransom to a kidnapper, and the Father wasn't
holding us hostage. No, it was the Evil One who had captured us, due to
our voluntary involvement in sin. It cost Jesus his blood to enter Hades
and set us free. That's the payment, or ransom, but it obviously isn't
paid *to* the Father. Yet it is a sacrifice or offering to the Father,
as a brave soldier might offer a dangerous act of courage to his beloved
General.
If I haven't lost you yet, I'd like to take this one step further. As I
said, I often have this conversation with other Christians, and make the
point that sin is not infraction, but infection; sin makes us sick. The
Christian life is one of healing and restoration; its not merely about
paying a debt.
It recently occurred to me that this difference between Western and
Eastern Christianity explains something else I hadn't noticed till now:
that Orthodoxy doesn't spend a lot of time worrying about the problem of
evil. The question of why bad things happen is a major one in the West;
it seems to refute the assertion that God is good and loves us. If he's
all powerful and loves us completely, why does he let bad things happen?
I expect that this lingering image of a God who is reluctant to forgive,
waiting to be paid, feeds a suspicion that maybe he *doesn't* really
love us.
I think the Orthodox view of sin as illness, rather than rule-breaking,
answers this. There is evil in the world because of the pollution of our
sins. Our selfishness and cruelty don't merely hurt those around us, but
contribute to setting the world off-balance, out of tune. It has a
corporate nature. Anyone can observe that life isn't fair; bad things
happen to "good" people. But even good people contribute some sin to the
mix, and we all suffer the consequences of the world's mutual sin.
The radio humorist Garrison Keillor used an image for this that has
always remained in my mind. He told a story about a man considering
adultery, who contemplated how one act of betrayal can unbalance an
entire community: "I saw that we all depend on each other. I saw that
although I thought my sins could be secret, that they would be no more
secret than an earthquake. All these houses and all these families, my
infidelity will somehow shake them. It will pollute the drinking water.
It will make noxious gases come out of the ventilators in the elementary
school. When we scream in senseless anger, blocks away a little girl we
do not know spills a bowl of gravy all over a white tablecloth."
What we Orthodox keep in mind, and Western Christians often forget, is
the presence of the Evil One. In Anselm's theory of the Atonement,
there's no Devil. The whole transaction is between us, the Father, and
Jesus (and when the Devil is ignored, he has a field day). But Orthodox
know who our true enemy is, and we cling to the Lord Jesus as our
deliverer. When we see evil in the world, we know immediately that "an
enemy has done this" (Matthew 13:28). We're not surprised that life is
unfair and that "good" people suffer; when we see innocent suffering, we
know that our own sins helped cause it, by helping to unbalance the
world and make a climate of injustice possible. The Evil One loves to
see the innocent suffer, and the fact that such events grieve and
trouble us delights him all the more. This is in fact one of the ways we
bear the burden of our sins: that we must feel the wrenching pain of
seeing innocence suffer, and know that we helped make it happen. Western
Christians, on the other hand, who see sin as a private debt between an
individual and God, and who forget the presence of the Evil One, can't
figure out how God could let an innocent person suffer, and are left
with the chilly thought of questioning the goodness of God.
"Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through
Jesus Christ our Lord!" (Romans 7:24-25). We do not trust in our own
strength to get out of this mess, but rely entirely on the power of
Jesus Christ, who has "trampled down death by death." Day by day growing
in grace, we can contribute to the world's healing, by forgiving our
enemies, loving those who hate us, and overcoming evil with good. The
first place it needs to be overcome, we know, is in our hearts.
This article was first published by
Again magazine, which is put out by the Orthodox publishing house,
Conciliar Press
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