Orthodox View of Salvation

[Josh]

10/06:

I heard somewhere that Eastern Orthodox remain agnostic about their own salvation-- sort of a Muslim-like, no one knows if they are saved until the judgment. Surely this isn't true! It was second hand information.

[hume]

10/05:

I actually don't have a direct answer for you; perhaps Brian does. I can toss you a few unsourcable quotes that might help:
"Orthodoxy does not talk of 'salvation' as a destination as some Protestants do, but as a journey. It is not an event, it is a process. When we use the word, we say 'I was saved', 'I am being saved', 'I will be saved'. In short, the idea of 'once saved' contradicts God's gift of free will. If we cannot freely reject God's gift of Salvation at any time, it is not really a gift ... [Christ saves us], but this is not something that happens once, as the Holy Apostle Paul writes, it is something we 'work out in fear and trembling.'"


"Because of Man's fall he was condemned, when he died, to go to Hell; it is believed that from Adam to St. John the Baptist, all men went to a place of separation from God. But when Jesus came into the world he himself was Perfect Man and Perfect God united. Through his participation in humanity, human nature was changed, allowing human beings to participate in the divine nature. This process of changing human nature worked retroactively back to the beginning of time, saving all of those who came before, back to Adam. Salvation, or 'being saved,' therefore, refers to this process of being saved from the fate of separation from God. It is a distinct concept separate from the concept of 'going to heaven.'"


"In the Western churches, both Catholic and Protestant, sin, grace, and salvation are seen primarily in legal terms. God gave humans freedom, they misused it and broke God's commandments, and now deserve punishment. God's grace results in forgiveness for this transgression and freedom from bondage and punishment.

For Orthodox theologians, humans were created in the image of God and made to participate fully in the divine life. The full communion with God that Adam and Eve enjoyed meant complete freedom and true humanity, for humans are most human when they are completely united with God.

The result of sin, then, was a blurring of the image of God and a barrier between God and man. The situation in which mankind has been ever since is an unnatural, less human state, which ends in the most unnatural aspect: death. Salvation, then, is a process not of justification or legal pardon, but of reestablishing man's communion with God. This process of repairing the unity of human and divine is sometimes called 'deification.' This term does not mean that humans become gods but that humans join fully with God's divine life."


Note here that the Orthodox view of salvation is more dynamic than static -- a process more than a sudden, final state. Perhaps the second-hand impression you mention was derived from an encounter with this fact -- it may have seemed to this person that Orthodox believers were not satisfied about their salvation, when really they just weren't thinking about it in those terms.

[hume]

10/05:

A footnote:
Incidentally, in regards to your mention of Islam, it's interesting to note that in a sense, the Orthodox understanding of God is, of any Christian tradition, the furthest removed from the Islamic vision of God. The Orthodox have an unusually robust theology of the Trinity -- they are the most intensely "trinitarian" church I've ever encountered.

Samples:

"In its Christology, Orthodoxy tends to emphasize the divine, preexistent nature of Christ, whereas the West focuses more on his human nature;" (not that they ignore his human nature -- on the contrary, their emphasis on Christ's divinity is what gives the Orthodox understanding of the Incarnation such force; they view it as utterly astounding that true God should become true man).

"The Spirit plays a central role in Orthodox worship: the liturgy usually begins with a prayer to the Spirit and invocations made prior to sacraments are addressed directly to the Spirit."

However, on the other hand, Orthodox theology might be rather close to a muslim view in its emphasis on apophatic descriptions -- that is, God is so far beyond us that the most accurate statements we can make about Him are statements about what He is not (e.g., God does not change, is not movable, is not finite, is not corporeal, etc.)

"A perfect mind is one which, by true faith, in supreme ignorance knows the supremely unknowable one."
-- Maximus the Confessor

[Josh]

10/05:

I believe that Mohammed's aversion to the Trinity can be traced to his encounters with Christian heretics, who either confused the doctrine of the Trinity (God, Mary, and Jesus seems to be in view in one part of the Koran, which was the belief of a heretical sect in contact with early Islam), or denied it in some way. In short- these 'christians' were cast offs of the Orthodox church, roaming the desert regions. Perhaps if an Orthodox theologian had described the Trinity to Mohammed, the outcome would have been quite different.

[b]

"only God knows who God will save"
- some Orthodox guy I talked with once

In a nutshell, I got the impression that Orthodox Christians I encountered beleived that the key was in trusting God - really having faith that God wants communion with us because of his Goodness and not because of what we have or have not done on earth.

That kind of trust, rather than any kind of understanding or reasoning, seemed to be central

[krhagan19]

I have a dear friend in Spokane who I communicate with on a regular basis who is a Deacon in an Antioch Orthodox Christian Church (yes that Eastern Orthodox Church really traces its roots back to the original church in Antioch! Eastern Orthodox Christian work out their salvation with fear and trembling. They serve God and they believe in salvation by both faith and acts, not faith alone. As a result a person can never truly know the status of their own salvation. However, they do not live their life in fear because they know that it is God's nature to forgive the sins of the faithful, so even though they do not share the assurity of salvation that their Protestant brethren do, they are "reasonably certain" that they are saved. This gentlemen in Spokane is a Deacon at his Orthodox Church and in addition has a Doctoral Degree in Theology from a Seminary in St Petersburg Russia.