BEYOND JUSTIFICATION:
AN ORTHODOX PERSPECTIVE*

Valerie A. Karras

Introduction

A search on the ATLA Religion Index for articles on the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification by Faith from an Orthodox perspective comes up empty.  This is not surprising, and it is not due primarily to the recent date of the declaration.  You see, while of course everyone rejoices to see two Western churches overcome the mutual condemnations of several centuries, Orthodox in general have never quite understood what all the fuss was about to begin with.

Orthodox religious formation is similar, strangely enough, to Pentecostalism in its experiential and synergistic approach to salvation – there isn’t much talk about justification.  Moreover, this isn’t something new to Orthodoxy.  Eastern Christianity from its origins shows a singular lack of interest in discussing its soteriology in terms of justification.  (I should note here that ressourcement – retrieving early theology and tradition – is a constitutive part of an Orthodox theologian’s makeup.)

Robert Eno has pointed out the second generation of Christians, the Apostolic Fathers, “have been seen as presenting an almost total disappearance of the Pauline point of view.”[1]  A search of Greek patristic literature on the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae shows that, over a period of a couple of centuries that includes the theologically-rich fourth century, most Greek Fathers don’t talk much about dikaiosuvnh (“justification” or “righteousness”) except when exegeting a passage using that term.  The striking exception is Gregory of Nyssa, the late fourth-century bishop who was younger brother to Basil of Caesarea, but, interestingly, when Gregory uses the term, it is almost always in the context of the true, Christian way of life, in other words, works of righteousness; neither Nyssa nor any other Eastern Father ever writes in terms of what Lutheranism calls “forensic justification” (some would claim that the mid-fourth century Alexandrian bishop Athanasius did, but we will return to this issue later).

The absence in Eastern Christianity of a soteriology in terms of forensic justification is serious because Orthodoxy believes not only in ecumenism across geographical space, but especially “ecumenism in time”, i.e., the need to be consistent with the theological tradition of the Church from the earliest centuries.[2]  Thus, the traditional Orthodox mind is immediately suspicious of biblical interpretations that have little or no root in the early life and theology of the Church; this is true in spades of particularly the forensic notion of justification, and of its consequent bifurcation of faith and works.  Sola scriptura means little to the Orthodox, who as opposed to placing Scripture over the Church, have a full sense of Scripture’s crucial but interrelated place within the Church’s continuing life:  the apostolic church communities which produced many of the books of the New Testament, the communities of the catholic Church which over a period of centuries determined which books circulating through various communities truly encapsulated the elements of the apostolic faith; the dogmas and Creed declared by the whole Church in response to the frequent controversies over the nature of the Trinity and of the theanthropos Jesus Christ, controversies which frequently arose precisely from dueling perspectives of which biblical texts were normative and of how those texts should be interpreted.

This of course does not mean that the Orthodox do not believe that each generation of Christians may receive new insights into Scripture, especially insights relevant in a given cultural context.  However, it does mean that the new insights must remain consistent with earlier ones, and that one or two Pauline passages (and one specific interpretation of those passages) are not considered theologically normative – particularly as a foundation for a soteriological dogma – unless the early and continuing tradition of the Church show them consistently to have been viewed as such.[3]

History is important in a second way.  Because of its less juridical exegesis of Pauline soteriological statements, Eastern Christianity has never had anything approaching the kind of faith v. works controversies that have enveloped and (for both good and ill) theologically shaped the Christian West, whether one considers the late fourth-/early fifth-century Pelagian controversy or the 16th-century Protestant Reformation begun by Martin Luther.[4]  Rather, the East has maintained a somewhat distant and even puzzled attitude toward the theological polemics which have raged over justification in terms of faith or works.

For example, in Jerusalem around the year 415, neither Jerome nor a Spanish priest named Orosius was able to persuade the holy city’s bishop, John, and his synod to condemn Pelagius, who was also living in Jerusalem at the time.[5]  John saw the controversy as a concern of the Latin Church solely and, quite frankly, appeared not to understand what the hullabaloo was all about.  Equally revealing of the East’s attitude toward the controversy is the fact that Caelestius, one of Pelagius’ chief advocates (and perhaps more Pelagian than Pelagius himself), went to Ephesus to be ordained when his rejection of the doctrine of original guilt made his candidacy in Carthage unacceptable.

A millennium later, in the exchange of theological correspondence between Ecumenical Patriarch Jeremias II and the Lutheran theologians of the University of Tübingen in the 1570’s,[6] Jeremias agreed with certain Lutheran theological views but disagreed on crucial issues concerning human free will and the place of works in justification, seemingly mystified by the disjuncture between faith and works expressed by the Augsburg Confession and the reformers’ letters.  Modern bilateral dialogues between Orthodox and Lutheran churches have often focused on these same two issues.

To the Orthodox, the Western Church’s convulsions over the nature of justification, and particularly the relationship between faith and works, are largely incomprehensible because the presuppositions underlying the debates are often alien to the Eastern Christian mind.  The Christian East espouses a different theological anthropology from most of Western Christianity – both Catholic and Protestant – especially with respect to two elements of fallen human nature: original guilt and free will.  The differences in these two anthropological concepts, in turn, contribute to differing soteriological understandings of, respectively, how Jesus Christ saves us (that is, what salvation means) and how we appropriate the salvation offered in Christ.

Therefore, we must examine these key concepts in Orthodox anthropology and soteriology, and their nexus in Christology, vis-à-vis their counterparts in traditional Western Christian theology.  This will necessarily involve comparing different traditions’ definitions and understandings of some key theological terms:  sin, faith, salvation.  Two contrasts recur:  1) the juridical approach of much of the West regarding sin and redemption, or restoration, versus the more existential and ontological approach of the East; and 2) the Western tendency to define, differentiate, and compartmentalize, as opposed to the Eastern tendency to theologize apophatically and, when cataphatically, primarily in a holistic and organic fashion.  At the same time, some current trends are bringing the Catholic and especially the Lutheran communions closer to an Eastern Christian approach in these important areas.

Theological Anthropology:  The Fall

1.          Original Guilt

The Western Church tended to be more pessimistic about humankind’s plight than was the Eastern Church; it taught a doctrine of original sin that included the conception of humankind’s physical solidarity with Adam and its participation in Adam’s sinful act.  This was largely absent in Eastern thinking.[7]

[A]ll men who are born according to the course of nature are conceived and born in sin.  That is, all men are full of evil lust and inclinations from their mothers’ wombs and are unable by nature to have true fear of God and true faith in God.  Moreover, this inborn sickness and hereditary sin is truly sin … .[8]

In order to discuss justification, one must first examine theological anthropology, specifically postlapsarian[9] theological anthropology; i.e., one cannot speak about how we are justified or saved in Christ without understanding what is wrong with us in our current state.  The Joint Declaration does this as well, at the beginning of its explication of the common understanding (section 4).  A comparison between the Joint Declaration and traditional Orthodox theology reveals immediate differences, in two distinct areas:  1) implicitly, the concept of inherited original guilt, and 2) explicitly, the understanding of free will, or human freedom.

All three traditions – Lutheran, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic – share a common general answer to the question of “What is wrong with humanity?”; all share an instinctive and biblical recognition that humanity lives outside of communion with God, that this lack of communion prevents us from being truly human, and that this state of separation from God is called, in shorthand, “sin”.  There are important differences, however, in the three traditions’ understanding of how we have come to exist in this state, and how seriously it has affected our human nature; in other words, there are different theologies of “original sin”.

Interestingly, the Joint Declaration sidesteps the question of original sin, perhaps because its meaning is hotly debated within confessions as well as between confessions.  For instance, Lutheran theologian Carl Volz, while noting that “[s]ome Lutherans have leaned toward the traducianism of Tertullian,”[10] maintains that the Lutheran Confessions “do not develop a doctrine of the imputation of Adam’s sin to his progeny.  Rather, the fact of the universal relationship of all individuals in sin results in a community of sin.”[11]  Fellow Lutheran theologian Joseph Sittler has compared original sin to “a kind of pail which we’ve drained of the old literal statements and refilled with quite new interpretations.  …  [W]e no longer buy the old notion of biological transmission or try to have a system of inheritance.”[12]  Similarly reworked interpretations of original sin have been posited by Roman Catholic theologians as well.[13]

But Augustinian postlapsarian theological anthropology is built precisely on a notion of biological transmission, and many Western Christian confessions, while not articulating Augustine’s anthropology to its logical extreme, nevertheless base their soteriology on its main outlines.  Thus, “original sin” or, more precisely, “original guilt”, is clearly a key element of theological anthropology and hence of soteriology.  It is important therefore to note that Eastern Christianity distinguishes itself from Western Christianity, especially in its strictest Augustinian forms, in its rejection of any notion of inherited original guilt, that is, the idea that all humans share the guilt of Adam’s sin.

This concept of original guilt, already visible in the theology of the third-century North African Latin Fathers Cyprian of Carthage and Tertullian, was developed in the early fifth century primarily by Augustine, who reacted to Pelagius’ claim that infants need not be baptized since they have committed no personal sins.  Augustine countered Pelagius by arguing from common Church practice and mixing it with traducianism via Rom. 5:12:  “… sin came into the world through one man and death spread through sin, and so death spread to all men because [literally, “in that” or “in which”] all men sinned.”[14]  To briefly summarize Augustine’s argument, which originated in Cyprian:  the Church universally baptized infants; therefore, since baptism confers remission of sins, and since infants have committed no personal sins, the Church baptizes infants obviously in order to remit the original sin which they receive hereditarily from Adam because all of humanity was seminally present in Adam.

While the Christian East consistently recognizes the effects of the “ancestral sin” in terms of human mortality, corruption (phthora), and a difficulty in maintaining an unwavering communion with God (the Eastern Fathers don’t really speak in terms of “concupiscence”), it has never accepted Augustine’s argument that all humanity inherits the guilt of Adam.  Gregory of Nazianzus, fellow Cappadocian and best friend of Basil of Caesarea,[15] is one of the few Eastern Fathers to express any notion of inherited original sin.  However, it would be difficult to ascribe to him a true theology of original sin since, as William Rusch remarks, Gregory “teaches in some passages in such a way as to rule out any doctrine of original sin and on other occasions he speaks of the involvement of all human beings in Adam’s sin and fall (Orations 40,23; 33,9).”[16]  John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople and a contemporary of Augustine, in his Homilies on Romans, interprets Rom. 5:12 simply to explain human mortality: “having once fallen, even they that had not eaten of the tree did from [Adam], all of them, become mortal.”[17]  In other words, the Greek Fathers saw the relationship between Adam and his descendents as organic and existential in nature without the notion of an inherited “guilt”.  We inherit the same mortal and corrupt nature which Adam possessed because of the Fall, but we do not inherit the guilt of that original sin which changed our human nature.[18]

Actually, the East finds slightly repugnant the notion that God would consider someone guilty of something which he or she did not do personally.  Yet, the Eastern Church, like the Western Church, baptizes infants.  The East’s insistence on infant baptism and simultaneous denial of original guilt is possible because Orthodoxy rejects Augustine’s leap of logic regarding the purpose of infant baptism – the remission of sins.  The Eastern Church of course recognizes the importance of baptism in washing away one’s personal sins.  However, that is not the only effect of baptism.  As Carl Volz has noted for the Lutheran practice of infant baptism,[19] it grafts the baptized person, including infants, onto the Body of Christ and confers the gift of the Holy Spirit.  This existential, ecclesiological understanding of baptism is clear in Chrysostom’s Third Baptismal Instruction, where he states:

Although many men think that the only gift [baptism] confers is the remission of sins, we have counted its honors to the number of ten.  It is on this account that we baptize even infants, although they are sinless, that they may be given the further gifts of sanctification, justice, filial adoption, and inheritance, that they may be brothers and members of Christ, and become dwelling places of the Spirit.[20]

This is borne out in the differing sacramental practices of the Western and Eastern Churches.  The West, both Catholic and Lutheran, traditionally has withheld chrismation (or confirmation) and Holy Communion for some years after baptism, and frequently separates confirmation and communion from each other by several years as well.  This sacramental practice is consistent with a soteriology which distinguishes between justification (baptism) and sanctification (chrismation or confirmation).[21]  However, the Eastern Church has continued the early Church’s practice of regarding baptism and chrismation as one rite of initiation – remission of sins and concurrently the beginning of sanctification, i.e., incorporation into both the Body of Christ and the life of the Holy Spirit.  Moreover, as Patriarch Jeremias noted,[22] the Orthodox Church acts sacramentally in a manner consistent with this theology: the baptized person, even if an infant, is incorporated into the full sacramental and spiritual life of the Church, i.e., the Orthodox Church communes baptized infants as full members of the Church. 

This existential understanding of the purpose of baptism as the beginning of one’s life in Christ through the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit differs substantially from the juridically-rooted emphasis on sin characteristic of the West. It is true that Pelagius spoke of infant baptism in terms of entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven, yet apparently he did not see its primary importance.  As for Augustine, the contrast with Chrysostom is sharp:  they are writing only a few years apart, and yet their understandings of the purpose of infant baptism are light-years apart.  This is why, from the Orthodox point of view, Augustine’s and Pelagius’ arguments are simply flip sides of the same coin.  Both operate under the assumption that the primary purpose of baptism – in fact, virtually the sole purpose as far as their debate is concerned – is the remission of sins.  The Orthodox approach sees the death of the old man (the work of the Cross) only through the lens of the rebirth of the new man (the life of the Resurrection), an organic view which shall be seen again later.

2.  Free Will and the Imago Dei

The question of original sin, or what humanity lost in the Fall, is related to the question of what God gave humanity in the act of creation and what humanity retains even in its fallen state.  For the Greek Fathers, this spiritual capacity of human nature is encapsulated in the language of Gen. 1:26-7:  God created humanity according to God’s own “image”.  Furthermore, both the Eastern Church and the medieval Latin Church distinguished between the “image of God” (Latin imago Dei) and the “likeness” or similitude of God, based on the differences between Gen. 1:26 and 1:27.  The image designated the potential or capabilities inherent in all human beings, i.e., qualities such as reason; the likeness meant true likeness (at the level of human existence, of course) to God, the realization of human potential as the perpetual fulfillment of a dynamic process between the human person and God.  The Greek Fathers in particular developed a generous anthropology around the concept of the imago Dei, even for postlapsarian human nature; as Gregory of Nyssa states in his Sixth Homily on the Beatitudes, the divine imprint may be obscured but it is still intact.[23]  The anthropology of the Roman Church, influenced by Augustine, was less generous than that of the East, but still accented human capacity.

By contrast, classical Lutheran thought presented a sharp break with the general tenor of biblical interpretation of Gen. 1:26-7 in both the Eastern and Western forms of early and medieval Christianity.  As Robert Wilken has shown,[24] Luther, Melanchthon and others rejected the distinction drawn by most early and medieval theologians, Latin and Greek alike, between image and likeness.[25]  As we shall see later, this rejection has consequences for (or, perhaps is itself a consequence of) the reformers’ soteriology.  Moreover, Lutherans from Martin Luther himself to later writers such as the eighteenth-century theologian John Gerhard have interpreted the imago Dei largely in a negative sense:  it encapsulates what humanity lost in the Fall.[26]  Wilken argues that Luther “did not … abandon the image entirely and was willing to say that it remained after the fall”,[27] and that “the Lutheran tradition stands within the broad stream of patristic and medieval tradition that saw freedom of the will, reason, human responsibility, … as marks of the divine image.  This image was not lost, but only tarnished in the fall.”[28]  Nevertheless, he admits that Luther describes the “marks of the image” (memory, will and mind) as “most depraved and most seriously weakened, yes, to put it more clearly, they are utterly leprous and unclean”,[29] and quotes Gerhard as asserting that “to deny that the image of God has been lost is to deny original sin itself”.[30]

The question of the imago Dei is significant because it is here that East and West disagree on a second important element of theological anthropology:  free will.  While Orthodoxy maintains that free will is a constitutive element of the imago Dei, both Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism – sharing an Augustinian heritage – assert that one of the aspects of original sin is the loss of free will with respect to humanity’s orientation toward God.  Human freedom was one of the issues at the heart of the fifth-century Western Christian debate over faith and works, i.e., over the relative divine and human contributions to salvation.  The Western Christian historical context has caused many theologians, particularly evangelical Protestant theologians, to experience great difficulty thinking “outside the box” of the Western either/or approach to this topic.  For instance, at a 1999 conference sponsored by the Society for the Study of Evangelicalism and Eastern Orthodoxy, J. I. Packer distributed a copy of some course materials.  I noted that under the topic of faith and works he listed the Orthodox as “semi-Pelagian”.  He was “semi-right”.  As Bishop Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia proclaimed at the beginning of his address for the 1998 Bellarmine Lecture at Saint Louis University, “I suppose I should tell you straightaway that I am an Arminian.”  Ware’s comment was amusing but also truthful because, in Eastern Christian soteriology, human freedom plays an important role, but not as Pelagian foil to Augustinian determinism.

At the heart of the Orthodox understanding of what constitutes the imago Dei in the human person, even after the Fall, lies the concept of free will.  This is perhaps best seen in the theology of Gregory of Nyssa.  In his seminal work, On the Making of the Human Person, Nyssa lists a variety of traits which characterize the divine image in humanity, but asserts that

pre-eminent among all is the fact that we are free from necessity, and not in bondage to any natural power, but have decision in our own power as we please; for virtue is a voluntary thing, subject to no dominion: that which is the result of compulsion and force cannot be virtue.[31]

Over a thousand years later, Jeremias II, Patriarch of Constantinople, would take up this refrain in his response to the Lutheran theologians of Tübingen regarding the Augsburg Confession.  First, Jeremias quotes at length from Chrysostom’s Twelfth Homily on the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the Antiochene Father asserts that “All indeed depends on God, but not so that our free-will is hindered  . . .  For we must first choose the good; and then He leads us to His own.  He does not anticipate our choice, lest our free-will should be outraged.  But when we have chosen, then great is the assistance he brings to us.”[32]  Linking the concepts of sin and virtue to free will in a manner similar to Nyssa, Jeremias sets the stage for his discussion of faith and works by averring:

I declare that everyone is capable of virtue.  For whatever a person is not able to do, he is not able to do even if forced.  But if a person is able when forced to do what he is not doing, then it is by his own choice that he is not doing it.[33]

Certainly, Eastern Christianity recognizes that humanity has lost an element of its freedom in its subjection to the “passions” (understood as spiritual as well as physical needs and desires).  This is particularly emphasized in ascetic writings.  However, despite recognition of the difficulty in consistently exercising one’s freedom properly, Eastern Christian thought is virtually unanimous from the earliest centuries in affirming humanity’s fundamental freedom to do good or ill, to turn toward God or away from him.  By contrast, the Christian West, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, has been strongly influenced by Augustine’s peculiarly negative concept of free will.  Luther is a prime example:  “After the fall of Adam, free-will is a mere expression; whenever it acts in character, it commits mortal sin.”[34]  The classical Western view is summed up in the very title of section 4.1 of the Joint Declaration – “Human Powerlessness and Sin in Relation to Justification”.  According to the Lutheran signers, “human beings are incapable of cooperating in their salvation, because as sinners they actively oppose God and his saving action [emphasis added].”[35]  In the previous paragraph of the Joint Declaration, the Roman Catholic position presents a more positive assessment of the human response to God, yet it too undercuts the human will by interpreting this human response as essentially divine, not human:  “When Catholics say that persons ‘cooperate’ in preparing for an accepting justification by consenting to God’s justifying action, they see such personal consent as itself an effect of grace, not as an action arising from innate human abilities [emphasis added].”[36]   Catholics and Lutherans together assert in the Joint Declaration that humans “are incapable of turning by themselves to God to seek deliverance”.[37]  So, although certain bilateral dialogues with the Orthodox have tried to present a stronger sense of free human responsiveness, both positive and negative,[38] the understanding of faith for Lutherans especially is not based on human freedom:

… [F]aith is the awareness worked by the Spirit that salvation is not from us, but for us.  Faith is not the response of a person’s free will to choose the grace of God.  The [Lutheran] Confessions slam the door on free will to keep out every possible synergistic intrusion.  They reject the statement used by some of the ancient Fathers that God draws, but draws the person who is willing.  Instead, God makes unwilling persons willing to do the will of Christ.[39]

Thus, neither the Lutheran nor the Roman Catholic understanding of justification includes a truly human component.  The negative anthropology of both negates human freedom because it excludes an inherent desire for and ability to turn toward God in humanity’s fallen condition.  Consequently, the Christian West, following Augustine, developed the idea of prevenient grace:  a human being can only turn toward God after God has first imparted to him or her a special grace which allows the person to recognize and respond to God.[40]  If one also hypothesizes that God may not choose to bestow this prevenient grace on all human beings, then one comes naturally to the theory of election or predestination present in Augustine’s later anti-Pelagian works and resurrected full force in the Reformed Protestantism of Calvin as well as in such branches of Lutheranism as the Missouri Synod.[41]  Happily, the Joint Declaration affirms that “[a]ll people are called by God to salvation in Christ.”[42]

Eastern Christianity counters this negative view of postlapsarian human nature with the positive theological anthropology enshrined in the christology of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, held in Constantinople in 680-681.  The council was convoked to deal with an attempt to underscore the unity of the person of Jesus Christ by declaring that he had only one will, his divine will; hence, the heresy was named monotheletism.  In rejecting monotheletism, the council articulated a christology based on the theological anthropology of the brilliant seventh-century Greek theologian Maximos the Confessor.  Maximos distinguished between 1) the “natural” human will, which is a characteristic of human nature; it is oriented toward God and continues to exist and operate even after the Fall, and 2) the “gnomic” will, a personal property, or personal mode of expressing the natural will which is peculiar to fallen human beings and is characterized by opinion and deliberation because the fallen human person lacks true knowledge of where the Good lies.[43]

Maximos asserted that self-determination (literally, self-determined movement – aujtexouvsio~ kivnhsi~) is a constitutive element of human nature, but is not aimless; our natural free will is oriented toward God precisely because humanity is created by God, in His image.  A special act of God’s grace (i.e., prevenient grace) is not required for us to orient ourselves toward Him; orientation toward God is at the heart of our human nature.  Thus, Maximos’ theological anthropology, based on the conviction that the imago Dei is retained in postlapsarian human nature, assumes that human beings retain a natural orientation toward God.[44]  In part, this is why human freedom plays such a central role in Eastern Christian theology “without the problematic character that it ha[s] in Western writers”.[45]  Interestingly, Western Christianity claims to affirm the christology of the Sixth Ecumenical Council.  However, it is impossible to accept Maximos’ christology without accepting equally the anthropology on which it is based, namely his concept of the natural human will which Christ assumes as part of his fallen human nature.

With respect, then, to the soteriological question of “What is wrong with humanity in its fallen state?”, the problem of the human condition is not, as it is conceived in Western Christianity, that human beings have no natural orientation toward God.  The problem of our fallen condition is that, because we have broken communion with God, our spiritual vision has become “clouded” so that we fail to recognize clearly in what direction our natural orientation lies and therefore fail to move consistently in that direction, i.e., to restore communion with God.

Thus, Orthodoxy understands human sin primarily not as deliberate and willful opposition to God, but rather as an inability to know ourselves and God clearly.  It is as though God were calling out to us and coming after us in a storm, but we thought we heard his voice in another direction and kept moving away from him, either directly or obliquely.  It is illuminating that the Greek word for sin, hamartia, means “to miss the mark”.  Despite our orientation toward God, we “miss the mark” because, not only does the clouded spiritual vision of our fallen condition make it difficult for us to see God clearly, but we fail to understand even ourselves truly; thus, we constantly do things which make us feel only incompletely and unsatisfactorily good or happy because we don’t recognize that God is himself the fulfillment of our innate desire and natural movement.  Explaining Maximos’ theology, Andrew Louth offers, “… with fallen creatures, their own nature has become opaque to them, they no longer know what they want, and experience coercion in trying to love what cannot give fulfilment.”[46]  Ultimately, it is not our natural human will that is deficient, but rather how we perceive it and the way, or mode, by which we express it; as Louth sourly opines, “it is a frustrating and confusing business.”[47]

Soteriology – Justification and Sanctification, or Sharing and Deification

1.          Restoration of Fallen Humanity – Justification as “Sharing”

Having examined the problem of “What’s wrong with humanity?”, it is appropriate now to consider the soteriological solution which dominates the Joint Declaration, i.e., “What will make humanity right?”, or, more specifically, “How does Jesus Christ make humanity right?”  The first thing to note is that the ecumenical councils made no dogmatic definitions explicitly on soteriology alone.  However, in the medieval Latin Church, the satisfaction theory of atonement gained currency, and the penitential system (temporal punishment is still required of human beings even for forgiven sins) arising from it, which is still part of the theology and practice of the Roman Church, led to an “opposite reaction” in the justification soteriology of Martin Luther.  And, by insisting on “justification by grace alone, received through faith alone”, by enshrining it in such creeds as the Augsburg Confession, and by “ ‘proclaim[ing] this as the doctrine by which the church “stands or falls”’ (articulis stantis et cadentis ecclesiae)”,[48] the partisans of the Reformation, as thoroughly as the medieval Latin theologians, dogmatized a particular soteriology.

Meanwhile, as noted in the introduction, Eastern Christianity never developed either a doctrine of forensic justification or a real atonement soteriology (and certainly nothing akin to the theory of “satisfaction” proposed by Anselm in the twelfth century).  In other words, Orthodox soteriology stands outside the juridical approach of Western Christianity, both Roman Catholic and Protestant.[49]  Rather, it is based deeply and consistently on the theology of the ecumenical councils, in particular, on the christology articulated in the ecumenical councils.  For, while no doctrinal statements of what effects (or causes) salvation are articulated in the ecumenical councils, one cannot truly grasp the logic and significance of the christological definitions except insofar as one understands the soteriological issues (and, hence anthropological issues) which lie behind them.[50]

Thus, Eastern Christian soteriology constitutes a challenge to Bernhard Lohse’s claim that Luther’s doctrine of justification expresses “the Christology of the ancient church”:

In Luther, Christology and soteriology are intimately connected with each other, as they are in Athanasius, or Cyril of Alexandria, except that Luther makes the connection much more explicit.  Christology is realized in the doctrine of justification, and the doctrine of justification, and the doctrine of justification is nothing else but a summary of Christology in soteriological perspective.[51]

The insight that christology and soteriology are integrally linked is important.  After all, the ecumenical councils were not interested in producing esoteric christological texts for speculative theologians with an arcane interest in the nature of Jesus Christ.  The bishops of these councils recognized the soteriological significance of the christological issues raised in the fourth through ninth centuries.  And, there is no doubt that christology is integrally linked to Luther’s soteriology.

The question is whether Luther’s soteriology – and, for that matter, other forms of Western atonement soteriology – are truly based on the christology of the early Fathers, especially those behind the dogmatic formulations of the ecumenical councils.  Both the dogmatic definitions and the supplementary patristic writings surrounding the christological controversies seem to indicate a negative answer to the question.  Far from emphasizing atonement as satisfaction or a forensic notion of justification, these writings express an understanding of human salvation rooted not simply in a particular activity of Jesus Christ[52], but in the very person of Jesus Christ.  Gregory of Nyssa, writing more than a millennium before the development of the Lutheran doctrine of “imputed righteousness,” in the context of the controversy over the extreme form of Arianism known as Eunomianism, rejects the notion that one could be “totally righteous” in a legal but not existential sense.  Human beings are not restored to communion with God through an act of spiritual prestidigitation where God looks and thinks he sees humanity, but in fact is really seeing his Son.[53]  Justification must be as organic and existential as sin is:

Humanity’s justification through forgiveness of sins is not a mere covering over man’s sins, but a real destruction of them.  It is not a mere external decision but a reality.  Sins are forgiven truly and really.  God does not declare someone to be justified if he [or she] is not really free.  We understand this teaching better if we remember the relation between Adam and Christ.

     As we became not only apparently but really sinful because of Adam, so through Christ the Second Adam we become really justified.[54]

This emphasis on the personal christological nature of soteriology is particularly evident in the Second, Fourth, Sixth, and Seventh Ecumenical Councils.[55]  These four councils insisted on the full humanity of Christ not because it was simply “fitting” for God to become fully human in order to “pay the price” for other humans, but because it was ontologically necessary for God to become human.  Thus, Gregory of Nazianzus, the presider and theological leader of the Second Ecumenical Council, described what the Joint Declaration calls “justification” in terms of the healing of our fallen human nature through Christ’s sharing of that same fallen human nature:  “For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved.”[56]  It is this same soteriological consideration which informs both the anthropology and the christology of Maximos the Confessor three hundred years later, and which causes iconophile authors such as John of Damascus and Theodore of Stoudios in the eighth and ninth century, respectively, to recognize that an unwillingness to depict Jesus Christ in the flesh amounted to a denial of the reality of the incarnation and hence threatened the entire framework of salvation.

In other words, the christological definitions of the ecumenical councils are grounded in a relational-ontological soteriology based on humanity’s being homoousios (one in essence, substance, or nature) in our humanity with Jesus Christ, who is in turn homoousios with God the Father.  Thus, the soteriology of the ecumenical councils (and hence of Eastern Christianity) is based not on putting us juridically “right” with God, but on the existential healing of human nature through the person of Jesus Christ.  As Bishop Kallistos Ware notes in his introduction to Orthodox theology and spirituality, The Orthodox Way, Orthodox soteriology is inescapably linked to Christology and may be described “salvation as sharing”.[57]

Lucian Turcescu[58] has rightly criticized Orthodoxy for focusing so strongly on theosis that it has tended to ignore the “justification” side of the coin.  However, I disagree with him that, simply because Jewish notions of justification had forensic significance, therefore Paul, or the early church, understood the term in the same legalistic way (in fact, Paul’s point in Romans is precisely to rid Jewish Christians of their forensic understanding of justification rooted in the Levitical law).  Orthodoxy may emphasize theosis (correlated to “sanctification” in the Lutheran model) and see one continuous relational process between the human person and God,[59] but it does not ignore the distinction between justification and sanctification.  Rather, the Eastern Church recognizes two purposes to the incarnation, which may be identified with justification and sanctification:  restoring human nature to its prelapsarian state of “justification” and providing the possibility for true union with God through participation, respectively.  The former purpose was necessitated by the Fall and has been the focus of Western soteriology.  For the East the restoration of human nature to its prelapsarian potential (justification) explains why the Son of God took on humanity’s fallen human nature, i.e., why it was necessary for Christ to die and be resurrected.  Hence, Orthodoxy agrees in affirming the free nature of that restoration through grace (in fact, Orthodoxy proclaims the gratuitous nature of our justification even more strongly than most of Western Christianity since it is given to all humanity, not just the “elect” or those receiving prevenient grace).[60]  However, the Fall is not the primary reason for the incarnation itself since, as Maximos and others point out, the incarnation was always part of God’s plan since it was the means by which humanity could truly achieve salvation, understood as theosis or union with God, an approach which will be discussed in more detail in the following section.

The Cross thus acquires ontological rather than forensic significance.[61]  This is why juridical notions of atonement and justification cannot truly be reconciled with the soteriology underlying the christology of the ecumenical councils.  John Breck identified this as the primary reason why Eastern soteriology never developed along Western lines:  “… none of the traditional Western theories of justification, atonement, etc., really necessitates personal divine involvement in the death that accomplishes our redemption.”[62]  In other words, the soteriology implicit in the christological definitions of the ecumenical councils is based on the assumption that Christ saves us primarily by who he is as opposed to what he does, although the importance of the latter is affirmed as well, e.g., in the Nicene Creed, without however defining the exact manner in which his actions were salvific.

Thus, as many theologians have noted, the Orthodox understanding of Christ’s crucifixion, derived from soteriological christology, is diametrically opposed to the Anselmian theory of satisfaction which underpins both Catholic and Lutheran notions of justification.  God is not a judge in a courtroom, and Christ did not pay the legal penalty or “fine” for our sins.  His redemptive work was not completed on the Cross, with the Resurrection as a nice afterword.  The eternal Son of God took on our fallen human nature, including our mortality, in order to restore it to the possibility of immortality.  Jesus Christ died so that he might be resurrected.  Just as Christ is homoousios with the Father in his divinity, we are homoousios with him in his humanity; it is through our sharing of his crucified and resurrected human nature that our own human nature is transformed from mortality to immortality.  John Meyendorff summarizes the significance of the Cross for the Christian East as follows:

…  In the East, the Cross is envisaged not so much as the punishment of the just one, which “satisfies” a transcendent Justice requiring a retribution for one’s sins.  As George Florovsky rightly puts it:  “the death on the Cross was effective, not as a death of an Innocent One, but as the death of the Incarnate Lord.” The point was not to satisfy a legal requirement, but to vanquish the frightful cosmic reality of death, which held humanity under its usurped control and pushed it into the vicious circle of sin and corruption.[63]

The limited atonement, satisfaction, or justification language in certain Greek Fathers, such as Athanasius,[64] read within these Fathers’ broader theological framework, are thus recognized not as reified doctrinal statements supporting Western atonement soteriologies that would not fully develop for close to or even more than a millennium yet, but as metaphors for an existentialist soteriology of sharing.  The dramatically different nature of this ontological soteriology, grounded in the christology of the ecumenical councils, explains why, as the “Common Statement” from the American Lutheran-Orthodox dialogues notes, “the Orthodox have been uneasy with medieval Western formulations that conceive of Christ’s atonement as a ‘satisfaction’ for sins.”[65]

2.          Beyond Justification – Salvation as Deification

This ontological approach to our redemption in Christ has at least two important implications with respect to the Joint Declaration.  First, justification, as has been seen, is understood not in a juridical sense but in an existential sense; hence, as mentioned above, God’s initiative and action in the creation of humanity according to his image, and in the incarnation, Cross, and resurrection are of universal significance to humanity and cosmic significance to creation as a whole.[66]  Orthodoxy understands justification in Christ as restoring to all humanity the potential for immortality and communion with God lost in the Fall.  This is because all human beings share the human nature of Jesus Christ, which was restored in the resurrection.  Christ’s incarnation, passion, and resurrection thus serve as a restoration of the potential of prelapsarian human nature.

However, whether or not human beings avail themselves of the redemption and restoration offered in Christ is dependent on how they exercise their human freedom by responding positively to union with Christ.  As Maximos the Confessor demonstrated and the Fathers of the Sixth Ecumenical Council implicitly affirmed, orientation toward God and the freedom to act on it are inherent in human nature.  John Breck observes that, while God is the one who initiates, “the objects of that initiative – humanity and the cosmos – are neither passive nor static.  By virtue of created nature, humanity possesses an inner, dynamic capacity for response, one that engages the entire cosmos of which humanity is the microcosm.”[67]

But, secondly, Eastern Christianity’s “sharing” soteriology, because of its relational nature, does not equate salvation with justification alone, particularly justification conceived in a juridical fashion (“imputed righteousness”).  The first section of the Joint Declaration acknowledges the numerous biblical facets of the term justification or righteousness, including its spiritual, ethical, and sacramental significance but does not integrate this broad spectrum fully into the third and fourth sections (“The Common Understanding of Justification” and “Explicating the Common Understanding of Justification”, respectively).

Orthodoxy conceives of justification broadly, and of salvation more broadly still – as a relationship and an organic process, not as an event or static state of being.  This is, in part, because “it was clear that the Eastern Fathers regarded salvation as more than simply a restoration of what had been lost in the first Adam.  For whatever the final consummation brought, it had to incorporate what had been won in the second Adam.”[68]  In other words, salvation in Christ means more than a return to the prelapsarian human existence of Paradise.  From the perspective of Irenaeus of Lyons, for example, Adam and Eve were spiritual infants.  Salvation must encompass not only healing but also spiritual development and maturity.

To approach this idea from another angle, Gen. 1:26-27, because it forms the basis for Eastern Christian anthropology, consequently is normative for its soteriology as well.  Summarizing an earlier section, humanity, according to Gen. 1:27, is created in the image of God but, based on Gen. 1:26, it is created to become the image and likeness of God.  The likeness of God, however, is not understood in an ethical sense, i.e., as simply acquiring “virtues”.  Eastern Christianity is not Pelagian in the sense it is typically understood in the West; that is, human beings cannot acquire the divine likeness through human-initiated and -dominated activity.  Rather, growing into the divine likeness – living an ever more authentic human existence – means communion and union with God.  As Meyendorff observes, “ ‘natural’ human life presupposes communion with God”.[69]  Again, Irenaeus of Lyons, a disciple once removed from John the Evangelist, is instructive.  Meyendorff explains the double significance of the incarnation for Irenaeus, viewed through his dynamic anthropology of spiritual maturation and his soteriology of recapitulation in Christ, in the following way:

This approach implies that in Christ there was a restoration of the true human nature, not an external addition of “grace” to an otherwise autonomous human existence.  Salvation does not consist in an extrinsic “justification” – although this “legal” dimension is fully legitimate whenever one approaches salvation within the Old Testament category of the fulfillment of the law (as Paul does in Romans and Galatians) – but in a renewed communion with God, making human life fully human again.[70]

This Eastern Christian understanding of communion or union with God connotes a true union which, like the appearance of Christ on Mt. Tabor, transfigures and deifies our human nature.  In one of the most succinct and explicit articulations of this doctrine, known as theosis (deification),[71] Athanasius declared, “He [the Logos] became man that we might be deified”.[72]  Similarly, in his Defense of the Nicene Definition, the Alexandrian bishop asserted:

. . . the Word was made flesh in order to offer up this body for all, and that we[,] partaking of His Spirit, might be deified[,] a gift which we could not otherwise have gained than by His clothing Himself in our created body, for hence we derive our name of “[people] of God” and “[people] in Christ.”[73]

As William Rusch has demonstrated,[74] this concept of salvation as theosis is consistently evident in the early writings of the Christian East:  implicitly in the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, and explicitly in the writings of second- and early third-century theologians such as Irenaeus of Lyons,[75] Clement of Alexandria,[76] and Origen,[77] as well as later in the fourth-century Athanasius and the Cappadocians, and later still in Pseudo-Dionysius and Maximos the Confessor.

The doctrine of deification is a direct consequence of an incarnational, hence ontological, soteriology.  Theosis is not just the “goal” of salvation; it is salvation in its essence and fulfillment.  Orthodox theologian John Breck argues:

If the telos of human existence were less than a total sharing in triune life – if people were called, for example, to mere “fellowship” with God through justification or even to eternal enjoyment of the “beatific vision” – then it would have been theoretically possible for God to work out salvation without restoring to a true incarnation that required the eternal divine Logos to accept death in his assumed humanity.  Full ontological participation of God in our human life is necessary if we are to know the same quality and degree of participation in his divine life.[78]

So, if understanding the soteriological significance of the incarnation as “justification” classically refers to the restoration of fallen human nature through Christ’s death and resurrection, then the flip side of the incarnation is the fulfillment of humanity’s authentic existence in communion with God.  Hence, Rusch identifies in Irenaeus’ theology two images of the soteriological effect of Christ’s incarnation:  “one of salvation by sharing in Christ’s human conquest of sin, the other salvation by participation in the nature of the divine Logos.”[79]

Because the incarnation has a double significance – restoring humanity’s prelapsarian human nature and making possible a deified human existence – it is not dependent on humanity’s Fall.  This is why Orthodoxy eschews the notion of felix culpa, the “happy fault” of Adam.  Maximos the Confessor, for instance, articulates the concept of humanity as mediator or priest to all creation because its unique microcosmic makeup allows it to overcome and unite the various divisions existing in creation (e.g., between physical and spiritual).  However, Maximos insists, only God Himself is able to overcome the ultimate division – that between the Uncreated and the created, and He can do so only in His own Person.

… God becomes a human being, in order to save lost humanity.  Through himself he has, in accordance with nature, united the fragments of the universal nature of the all, ... by which the union of the divided naturally comes about, and thus he fulfils the great purpose of God the Father, to recapitulate everything both in heaven and earth in himself (Eph. 1:10), in whom everything has been created (Col. 1:16).[80]

3.          Grace, Faith, Theosis, and the Finns

To sum up the previous sections:  Orthodoxy sees human nature as fallen and mortal, but as retaining its fundamental orientation toward God and not as inheriting some type of juridical guilt; we are redeemed from this fallen human nature by the incarnation of the Son of God, who assumes and shares this fallen, mortal nature in every aspect except sin, even unto death, restoring it to its former potentiality (i.e., “justifying” us) through his resurrection, in which we share.  But restoration to the potentiality of Adam and Eve is just a starting point in Orthodox theology; we are called to communion with God, to grow and mature into the likeness of God, to become “deified” by participation in God’s own life through the Holy Spirit.

Communion with God is of course a vital part of the spirituality of Western Christianity.  Its soteriological significance, however, has been weaker in the West than in the East.  Roman Catholic theology historically has been much closer than Lutheran theology to Orthodoxy in this regard with its doctrine of the “beatific vision”.  Its spirituality has been closer yet.  That is, while much medieval Western spirituality is articulated in terms of true union with God,[81] medieval scholastic theology describes communion with God in terms that create a barrier between the human and the divine.  Thomas Aquinas, for instance, develops through his epistemology a theology of participation in God which might be related to theosis.[82]  However, as William Cavanaugh explains Aquinas’ understanding of “participation”, it excludes true union because Aquinas defines divine grace as created:  “… the participation of the Holy Spirit in us is ‘created’ charity”.[83]  Not surprisingly, it is the return to the Fathers at the heart of much of Catholicism’s nouvelle théologie which helped to produce in the modern era theologians such as Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, who provide an integralism between God and humanity found, in a slightly different way, in Karl Rahner as well.[84]

By contrast, the East never experienced scholasticism.  The continuous witness of the Eastern Church Fathers, from Origen and the Cappadocians to the 14th-century Byzantine monk and archbishop Gregory Palamas,[85] is that grace is not “created” by God.  It is God’s own Being:  not the divine essence, which remains utterly unknowable, but the divine energies, which are God’s own self as immanent in creation.  Palamas observes that there are three unions with or within the Divine:  1) essential union or union of essence, i.e., the Trinity; 2) personal union, i.e., the hypostatic union of the theanthropos Jesus Christ; and 3) participatory union, or union by participation, i.e., with God’s energies.  It is this third union which makes possible theosis – the deification of the human person.  Thus, while the union between human and divine in Christ is qualitatively different (hypostatic as opposed to participatory) from that possible to us, Christ’s transfigured human nature, revealed to the disciples on Mt. Tabor, serves as the model for realizing our full potential as human beings created for communion with God and who, while remaining always creatures, may be transformed into “divine creatures”[86] through grace, that is, through union with God’s own energies.

If Roman Catholic theology differs markedly from Orthodoxy in respect to the created versus uncreated nature of grace and hence participation as presence versus participation as union, traditionally Lutheranism’s doctrine of justification “by grace alone, through faith alone” has seemed even more removed from the Orthodox doctrine of salvation as deification.  However, the work of several Finnish Lutheran scholars over the past two decades is doing much to revise that assessment.[87]  Under the informal leadership of Tuomo Mannermaa, these theologians have reexamined the meaning of the word “faith” in the writings of Martin Luther, particularly in his earlier works.  What they have uncovered has sparked controversy and shaken the foundations of Luther scholarship and of Lutheran thought.  Faith, for Luther, is not primarily intellectual or emotional, nor is it something which God simply gives to us.  Mannermaa and his disciples have latched onto the significance of Luther’s expression, “in ipsa fide Christus adest” (“in faith itself Christ is present”).  Faith, these Finnish scholars say, is for Luther nothing less than union with Christ.  Mannermaa argues that Luther teaches justification or righteousness as inseparable from communion with God, theosis, in his Lectures on Galatians:

‘Christ who is grasped by faith and who lives in the heart is the Christian righteousness, on account of which God counts us righteous and gives us eternal life as gift.’  …  At least on the level of terminology, the distinction, drawn in later Lutheranism, between justification as forgiveness and sanctification as divine indwelling, is alien to the Reformer.  Forgiveness and indwelling of God are inseparable in the person of Christ … .  In that sense, in Luther’s theology, justification and theosis as participation in God are also inseparable.[88]

Moreover, fellow Finn Simo Peura notes that Luther abandoned the concept of created grace because the scholastic notion of habitual grace as an accident “did not go far enough to stress the ontological points that Luther wished to maintain.”[89]  Furthermore, Mannermaa discerns in the Formula of Concord (FC) divine indwelling – inhabitatio Dei – not simply as gift, but as reality.[90]  Nevertheless, the FC distinguishes divine indwelling from justification and places it subsequent to it.  In addition, Peura contends that the FC “excludes from gift everything else that according to Luther is included in it”,[91] and argues that the Formula of Concord falsely – and contrary to Luther’s theology – divorces forensic justification (God’s favor) from effective justification or sanctification (God’s gift).[92]

Conclusion

Unfortunately, while the stimulating research by Mannermaa and company has found its way into the Common Statement of the American Lutheran-Orthodox dialogue, it is marginalized in the Joint Declaration.[93]  It is true that the Joint Declaration was intended to treat the historical misconceptions of battling confessions regarding the understanding of justification and to underscore the inefficacy of human works to achieve salvation.  Perhaps, then, the Finnish research on Luther can help point the way to the next stage of bilateral and multilateral theological dialogue.  From an Orthodox perspective, one of the most valuable contributions of the Finns is that, by spotlighting the non-existential and non-relational view of faith in forensic justification and by rediscovering within their own tradition an ontological relationship between soteriology and christology through broadening justification to include theosis, they have moved Western Christian theology outside the differentiating, delineating, defining, compartmentalizing “box”.[94]  From an Orthodox perspective, continued movement away from a compartmentalized methodology and a juridical and passive anthropology and soteriology and toward a holistic methodology explicating a more generous anthropology and an existential, relational, synergistic soteriology would be welcome.  Most of the pieces are there, but soteriology needs to be integrated not only more ontologically with christology, but also with spirituality and sacramental theology.  It is not coincidental that Eastern Christian theology is not articulated in philosophical syllogisms or biblical proof-texting; nor does it rely primarily on one or two figures (e.g., Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin).  Orthodox theology, equally based with Catholicism and Lutheranism in Scripture and the ecumenical councils, is articulated through the personal and communal spiritual experiences of a number of significant figures in the life of the Church, from the Apostle John to Gregory the Theologian to Maximos the Confessor to Gregory Palamas.

Integrating dogmatic theology more closely with spirituality and sacramental theology, in turn, would also help to make Western Christian soteriology more explicitly pneumatological.  Unfortunately, the pneumatology of the Joint Declaration is relatively weak.[95]  Spirituality and sacramental theology are only occasionally referenced, with apparently more stress on these areas from the Roman Catholic participants than from the Lutheran.[96]  By contrast, the Holy Spirit is crucial to Orthodoxy’s ontologically incarnational soteriology, conceived as both restoration and deification.  Its dynamic and relational nature, and the emphasis on free human responsiveness to God’s initiative, seen especially in the East’s consistent integration of its soteriology into its sacramental theology, make it inherently pneumatological.  It was through the Holy Spirit that the Son of God became incarnate; it was through the Holy Spirit that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead; it is through the Holy Spirit that we are doubly initiated into the twofold salvific effects of the incarnation – restoration of our fallen nature through baptism, and the beginning of our growth toward theosis through the reception of the Holy Spirit in chrismation; and it is through the Holy Spirit (the epiclesis or “calling upon”) that communally we are united to Christ, present in the Eucharist.

The criticisms and suggestions in this article should not be interpreted to mean that the Joint Declaration is a failure, or, worse yet, useless.  The lifting of condemnations over four centuries old, and the recognition of a like theology in two important churches not in communion, is a cause for rejoicing.  And, of course, Orthodoxy agrees with both Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism in the fundamental theme of the Joint Declaration:  works do not save us, Christ does.

And yet, salvation is an ongoing process of existential faith:  as St. Paul says, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12), which the Joint Declaration cites in paragraph 12.  And so, we do indeed “work out our own salvation”.  Orthodoxy soteriology is synergistic, but not in the perceived Pelagian sense which has resulted in such a pejorative connotation to the word synergy in Protestant thought.[97]  We do cooperate, or participate, in our salvation precisely because salvation is relational – it is union with God – and relationships are not a one-way street.  As human beings created in the image of God, we respond freely to God’s love and to his restoration of our fallen human nature.  As Kallistos Ware asserts,

As a Trinity of love, God desired to share his life with created persons made in his image, who would be capable of responding to him freely and willingly in a relationship of love.  Where there is no freedom, there can be no love.[98]

ADDITIONAL READING

Anderson, H. George, T. Austin Murphy, and Joseph A. Burgess, eds.  Justification by Faith.  Minneapolis, Minn.:  Augsburg Publ. House, 1985.

Braaten, Carl E. and Robert W. Jenson, eds.  Union with Christ:  The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther.  Grand Rapids, Mich.:  Wm. B. Eerdmans Publ. Co., 1998.

Bray, G. L.  “Justification and the Eastern Orthodox Churches,” in David Field, ed., Here We Stand: Justification by Faith Today (London:  Hodder and Stoughton, 1986), 103-19.

Cavanaugh, William T.  “A Joint Declaration?:  Justification as Theosis in Aquinas and Luther,” The Heythrop Journal 41:3 (July 2000), 265-280.

Edwards, Henry.  “Justification, Sanctification and the Eastern Orthodox Concept of ‘Theosis’”, Consensus: A Canadian Lutheran Journal of Theology 14:1 (1988), 65-80.

Florovsky, Georges.  “The Ascetic Ideal and the New Testament:  Reflections on the Critique of the Theology of the Reformation,” in Richard S. Haugh, gen. ed., The Byzantine Ascetic and Spiritual Fathers, vol. 10 in the Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, trans. Raymond Miller et al.  Vaduz, Europa : Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987

Meyendorff, John and Robert Tobias, eds. and intro.  Salvation in Christ:  A Lutheran-Orthodox Dialogue.  Minneapolis, Minn.:  Augsburg Fortress Press, 1992.

Williams, Anna.  The Ground of Union:  Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1999).