Orthodox Reflections

Part V of the Western Series

How Western Beliefs Changed the Original Gospel Message

… Guilt, Suffering, Sickness and Death …

Irene Polidoulis MD

with the blessing of her spiritual father

Although all Christians say that God is Love, many Westerners, and even some Orthodox faithful, do not think of Him that way. They think of God as aloof, demanding, harsh, and even sadistic, if they think of Him at all. A punitive, and juridical view of God often stems from a legalistic theology that predominated in the West, unlike the prevailing mysticism in the East. In addition, the Byzantine populace in the East had an advantage in cohesion, language and education. They worshipped and read the Holy Scriptures in Greek, their spoken language, whereas the West had to wait until 1965 for Vatican II to switch from Latin (comprehended only by the educated clergy) to the various Western vernaculars when holding mass or reading the Gospel. After the fall of Rome in 476 A.D., the West entered the Dark Ages (5^th – 10^th centuries) and began departing in mindset and theology from the East. The typical common Westerner could not read the Bible, nor the Patristic Fathers, and generally believed what he was told. In the East, the laity enjoyed a much more unified culture and language and knew enough theology to discuss it in the marketplace and even hold their own Hierarchs to account, which they sometimes did.

As education and standards of living gradually improved all over Europe, Western apostasy increased compared to the East. While the causes for this are multifactorial, the Crusades, religious wars in the West, the authority of the Pope, and the notion of an austere and legalistic God, had much to do with it. To demonstrate how stark the differences between the Eastern and Western views of God can be, even up to recent times, I shall first paraphrase what was relayed to me as a true story to exemplify the Orthodox mindset:

One day, St. Paisios [20^th century] heard the confession of a man who was a very great sinner. The saint had heard many confessions, but this confession troubled him greatly. He could not stop thinking about this man. For two whole weeks, he prayed with tears, asking God to reveal to him if such a man could be saved. After two weeks of this, he saw a vision: a great sinner had died and his soul was at the Heavenly gates, together with his guardian angel and Christ. Christ was asking the angel about the man’s life, trying to find a reason to admit him into the Heavenly Kingdom, but the angel could not recall a single good thing the man had ever done. The Lord seemed very troubled as the angel frantically tried to think. Finally, the angel brightened and said, “Lord, now I do recall that once, this man shed a tear of repentance.” As soon as he said this, Jesus jumped for joy. “He did?” He asked. “Yes, Lord,” the angel replied, “a single tear”. “That is wonderful!” Jesus exclaimed, “My son, enter into my Kingdom!”

This story should not surprise us since a very similar thing happened to the thief on the cross next to Christ, who was welcomed into Paradise – not because his good deeds outnumbered his bad deeds (it was quite the opposite) but because of his repentance.  Stories such as these resonate with the Orthodox mindset. They drive home the message that God’s immeasurable love, unfathomable mercy and divine justice, are not according to our standards, but far beyond our human understanding. In the Athonite story, God is basically telling the Saint to stop worrying about the man, because he, the holy father, does not love the sinner more than God loves him.

I have watched this story comfort bereaved mothers and widows whose children or husbands had died spiritually unprepared. The inconsolable grief melted away. The bent posture straightened, the face lifted, the flow of tears stopped, and the eyes brightened with new hope and gratitude. Perhaps the soul, inundated by the corruption of the ages, reawakened to a forgotten truth, to an ancient memory of our true relationship with God before the Fall, His intimacy with us in the Garden, His fellowship with us breaking bread at the Last Supper, and the promise of His filiation with us at the right hand of the Father, which makes our Restoration possible. This is the great truth that the early Christians seized, that made them so optimistic, so joyful, and so ready to die for Christ. Compare this Athonite anecdote to a condensed version of the classic 18^th century Protestant sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God:”

They deserve to be cast into hell…justice calls aloud for an infinite punishment of their sins…The wrath of God burns against them…the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them…God is dreadfully provoked, his anger is as great towards them as to those that are actually suffering the executions of the fierceness of His wrath in Hell…your guilt…is constantly increasing, and you are every day treasuring up more wrath…The God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you…you are ten times more abominable in His eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended Him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince…He will have no compassion upon you, He will not forbear the executions of His wrath…there shall be no…mercy…When the great and angry God hath risen up and executed His awful vengeance on the poor sinner, and the wretch is actually suffering the infinite weight and power of His indignation, then will God call upon the whole universe to behold that awful  majesty and mighty power that is to be seen in it. It is everlasting wrath…  (Jonathan Edwards, 18^th century Protestant Theologian)¹

Where is God’s love for His enemies amidst so much wrath for his followers? The character of God, as described in this sermon, is completely foreign to the Orthodox ethos and mindset. Sermons such as these, that permeated Western Christianity, either drive the listener away from God, or keep him stuck in the first stage of spiritual maturity, which is to obey God out of fear. This approach, which conflicts with the joyous salvific message of the Gospel, fosters little potential for spiritual growth and maturation. The early Christians of the first three centuries did not concern themselves nearly as much with the ‘fire and brimstone’ of Hell, as they did with the hope and joy of the Resurrection and the Heavenly Kingdom. It was not petrifying sermons or the fear of hell, but the early Christians’ love for God and neighbour and the joy and fearlessness they showed in martyrdom, that drew millions more to Christ.

However, this sermon helped me understand why many Orthodox Saints and Elders do not acknowledge Western churches as even being Christian. According to St. Theophan the Recluse (19^th century), those who view God in this light, do not know or worship the same God or the same Jesus that transformed ordinary men into Apostles and fuelled the upsurge of the ancient Christian Church.²  St. Irenaeus of Lyon (2^nd century) explained this concept in his best-known work, Against Heresies, a refutation of Gnosticism, by using the imagery of a beautiful mosaic of a king. In this example, the gnostic heretics took apart and reassembled the pieces that made up this mosaic, but by doing so, they rearranged the jewels and gems to form the image of a dog or a fox. Then, by drawing the viewers’ attention to the beauty of the individual stones and gems, they claimed that this was what the king really looked like (Against Heresies 1.8). In this example, the gems represent truths. The Gnostic heretics were not missing any of the gems or truths but had rearranged them to present a completely different truth.

A similar modern-day example that helps explain differences between Eastern and Western Christianity might be that of a 500-piece puzzle-icon of Christ, where each piece of the puzzle also represents a truth. In this example, the Orthodox puzzle contains all 500 pieces, giving us a complete icon of Christ. Having rejected various aspects of Holy Tradition and Church history, the Western puzzles are missing varying numbers of pieces, with some Western puzzles missing more pieces than others. The more the missing pieces, the more incomplete the icon becomes, and the further away we depart from God’s revealed Truth, until Christ is no longer recognizable in the puzzle-icon.

All Christians would agree that God is perfect Love, but the examples of the mosaic and the puzzle-icon also drive home that God is perfect Truth. This means that although it is sometimes still possible to approach Him with Love and some truth (some of the puzzle-pieces) and still be saved, the most surefooted way to approach Him and be saved is with Love and the fullness of Truth.  We may be focused on Christ, but if we are focusing on an incomplete Christ, the more pieces we are missing, the more truth we are missing. Then, it becomes dangerously easy to find ourselves filling in the gaps of the puzzle-icon with our own imagination or human rationalism, which puts us in great danger of falling down the rabbit hole of Gnosticism by substituting God’s Truth with the ideas of men. This phenomenon is historically evident in the West from the constant splintering of Protestant denominations, bringing their current count to the tens of thousands of different Protestant sects.

As we explained before, the fullness of God’s revealed Truth is not just found in ‘Sola Scriptura,’ but in Holy Tradition, which includes ‘Scriptura’ (the Holy Scriptures). In John 14:16-26 and John 15:26-27, Jesus promised that after his departure from the world, He would not leave us orphaned, but would send the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth. Holy Tradition, then, is this very Life of the Holy Spirit in the Church that Christ established from Pentecost to the present day. The Life of the Holy Spirit makes the Church a dynamic, living, pulsating organism that perpetually grows and yields many treasures. Besides Holy Scripture, Holy Tradition has given the Church an ever-growing list of Saints and their works, the wisdom of the Ecumenical Councils, the miracles, practices and teachings of the Holy Apostolic and Early Church Fathers, and a great many other treasures that teach, edify and sanctify an ever-growing number of faithful in and of the Church. Each aspect of Holy Tradition is like one piece of that puzzle-icon of Christ, that helps complete the full picture and continuously details and adorns it to a level of infinite beauty. This is the fullness of the Truth that God has chosen to reveal to those who seek Him, love Him and believe in Him in “Spirit and Truth” (John 4:24).

Tragically, the Gospel’s message of God’s Love and Truth, has become progressively more altered and diluted in the West because of doctrinal developments that diverged from the Patristic Tradition of the Ancient Catholic (meaning Universal, not Roman Catholic) and Apostolic (Orthodox) Church that Christ established. Let us examine some of the more critical pieces of the puzzle-icon that are missing in the West.

Are Sickness and Death Punishments from God?

All Christian interpretations, Eastern and Western, believe that Man* turned away from God, and because of his disobedience, he fell from joyful intimacy with God to a state of confusion and death.¹ As we read in Genesis, “…but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you may not eat; for in whatever day you eat from it, you shall die by death [decompose in the grave, emphasis mine]” (Genesis 2:17).

After this point, all Western churches assert that death is a sentence pronounced by an “angry” God when He “curses” the Serpent, Adam and Eve, as a literal “punishment” for their wrongdoing. After Adam and Eve’s disobedience, God had “no choice” but to impose suffering and death upon them because Divine Justice “demanded” it. Their punishment was of a legal nature, demanded of God by His Divine Justice, a necessity to which God, Himself, was bound.¹

In contrast, Orthodoxy believes that “God [the Giver of Life] did not make death” (Wisdom of Solomon 1:13). Death is not punitive (imposed on man’s nature by a “curse” from God) but the natural consequence of sinfulness. Being cut off from the grace of God through disobedience leads to death because our very lives are continuously upheld by God’s grace. When God told Adam he would die if he ate the forbidden fruit, it was a caution and a statement of fact. The Lord warned him, saying, “if you turn from Me, the only source of Life, then death will be the outcome.” This was not a threat of retribution, but a warning. The issue is not legal or juridical, but ontological. For Adam and for Man in general, the issue was a change of heart at the deepest level.¹ The Holy Fathers explain:

…God created neither death of the soul nor death of the body…neither did He command saying, ‘Die on the day when thou shalt eat,’ but ‘On the day when thou shalt eat, thou shalt die.’ And neither did He say, ‘Return thou to the earth’ but ‘…thou shalt return,’ announcing beforehand and allowing [complete] freedom [to disobey the commandment], and not even justifiably staving off [preventing] the outcome. (St. Gregory Palamas, 13-14^th century, Natural, Theological, Moral, and Practical Chapters, 150)

In other words, God did not say, “I will kill you,” He said, “you will die.” In turning away from the Fountain of Life, man turned towards death.

[Life] is God, and the deprivation of life [God] is death. Thus, Adam prepared death for himself through his withdrawal from God…therefore, God did not create death, but we brought it upon ourselves by our wicked purpose. Neither did He prevent the dissolution [of death] … so that the illness [sin] would not be preserved immortal in us. (St. Basil the Great, 4^th century, On the Human Condition)

In his concluding sentence, St. Basil explains that God permitted our potentially immortal bodies to become mortal and to die so that sin and sinfulness (our tendency to sin) would not perpetuate into eternity.³ The Orthodox understand this is as an act of great mercy rather than judgment. They also view the death of a righteous person as his birthday into the Kingdom of Heaven. Man’s expulsion from the Garden before they could eat of the Tree of Life⁴ and the separation of the soul from the body (physical death) was God’s providential way of doing “damage control,” to prevent the perpetuity of the tragedy of sin and the sinful condition. This was part of His plan for our eventual full Restoration. Contrast this 4^th century teaching to the subsequent Western innovation of the Roman Catholic Council of Trent in 1546 A.D.:

If any one does not confess that the first man, Adam, when he had transgressed the commandment of God in Paradise, immediately lost the holiness and justice wherein he had been constituted; and that he incurred, through the offence of that prevarication, the wrath and indignation of God, and consequently death, with which God had previously threatened him, and, together with death, captivity under his power who thenceforth had the empire of death, that is to say, the devil, and that the entire [whole] Adam, through that offence of prevarication, was changed, in body and soul, for the worse; let him be anathema [emphasis mine].⁵

While Western developments such as these were often attempts at resolving internal issues, the Orthodox Church has never adopted them. If we believe that death is from God, then to gain salvation, God becomes an obstacle that must be overcome. The goal then, becomes the appeasement of an angry God, a view that distorts the nature of the Holy Trinity as follows: God the Father becomes the fierce and vindictive God of justice and judgment. Jesus Christ becomes the loving, compassionate Son and gentle Lamb, who sacrifices Himself to appease His angry Father, and the Holy Spirit tries to please them both. The Virgin Mary becomes the gentle, kind, and sympathetic motherly figure. In this model, those who dread the Father direct more prayers to the Holy Mother for intercession. She is viewed as appealing to her Son on their behalf, encouraging Him to approach the austere Father. This is not official Western doctrine, but this popular devotional approach, which stems from belief in a punitive and legalistic God, has led to misunderstandings of the unity and equality of the Holy Trinity, and of God’s Love and purpose. ¹

Orthodoxy has never understood the relationship of the three Persons of the Holy Trinity according to this popular devotional Western approach. Through the Orthodox lens, the Trinitarian community is perfect. Each Person of the Holy Trinity freely works with the Other in perfect humility and love, united in one Godhead. As we stated before, “Love and humility is the frequency in which God works” (St Paisios, 20^th century). When Adam and Eve sinned, they did not incur wrath or indignation from God, for God is dispassionate. He is not governed by anything, least of all any passions or emotions. When we say that God is Love, He is not our kind of emotional love that comes and goes. Divine Love is one of His uncreated energies, a love that Man cannot comprehend or achieve. God’s love does not change, and He loves us to death – not our death, His death – a death He freely and willingly embraced on the Cross.

Similarly, we often fail to understand God’s Justice which is never wrathful or punitive but loving, merciful and restorative. He gives us the freedom to make our own mistakes and then experience the painful consequences so that we may learn from them and come to repentance as we grow. This may feel punitive; we may feel that God is angry or indignant because of our guilty conscience, and hence the presence of such expressions in the Bible; but if there is punishment, we are the source of it, not God. The hardest and most painful lessons can also lead to the deepest repentance and the greatest spiritual benefits, provided we are humble enough to acknowledge our mistakes. A perfect example of this is the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32). Repentance does not mean beating ourselves up by self-inflicting pain so that the “punishment” can “erase” the sin. Nor does it mean despairing and killing ourselves as Judas Iscariot had done. It means, as the parable teaches, changing on the inside and turning ourselves around to return home, back to the embrace of our loving Father, who waits patiently and is eager to celebrate our restoration as His daughter or son.

God permitted our bodies to die so that sin and its associated suffering would not become eternal. In like manner, He mercifully reduced Man’s lifespan to mitigate our wickedness and encourage our earlier repentance. Too many people already put off their spiritual needs, thinking they have many years ahead of them to take care of their souls. Imagine the added sinfulness many of us would accumulate if we knew we had a lifespan of several centuries ahead of us. After the Fall, because of His great love for Man, God graced Adam, Eve and their descendants with several centuries of life on earth so they would have enough time to come to repentance; but when sinfulness accelerated, He diminished the human lifespan:

“So, all the days that Adam lived were 930 years, and he died” (Genesis 5:5) …

                 … but during the days of Noah, Man’s wickedness had grown and this grieved God.

“Then the Lord God said, ‘My spirit [My life-giving grace] shall not remain with these people forever, for they are [sinful according to the] flesh. So, their days shall be 120 years [emphasis mine]’” (Genesis 6:3) …

   … God’s grace was always available to Man, but Man continually refused It, preferring to continue in the sins of the flesh. So, God gave them a grace period of 120 years to come to repentance. But when the rampant murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts and every manner of sin increased, indicating their unrepentance, God blotted them out with a Great Flood to end their sinfulness and reduce their suffering in the afterlife. He spared the family of only one righteous man, Noah.⁶

Later in the Old Testament, in A prayer of Moses, a man of God, we read …

   … “As for the days of our years, their span is 70 years…perhaps 80…” (Psalm 89(90):10). ⁵

   This verse indicates that by the time of Moses, sin had again increased, and God had again diminished the human lifespan.

In addition to shortening Mankind’s* lifespan, God also mercifully permits each person’s death to take place when it is of greatest spiritual benefit to them and those around them. The manner of death can also be salvific if the illness that precedes it brings about repentance. St. Paisios had once said that Paradise is filling up with the souls of those who die of cancer, because suffering patiently with the foreknowledge of a near death has brought many people to repentance. What sometimes seems like a tragic, sudden, unfair or difficult death can also be an expression of God’s love and mercy. For example,

I once heard a famous story of a very pious widow who had two sons. She devoted herself to God, raising her sons in the Orthodox Church with all piety, and living an exemplary sacramental and liturgical life. One day, both her beloved teenage sons died suddenly in a tragic car accident. The grief-stricken widow was beside herself. She was so angry with God for allowing this to occur after the death of her husband, the hardship she had patiently endured, and all the devotion she had for Him, that she no longer wanted anything to do with God or His Church. The clergy and people of the parish fervently prayed for her until one day, she had a vision. An angel of the Lord appeared to her and showed her the future of her sons had they not died when they did. In the vision, the boys grew up and both fell in love with the same young woman. The competition between them escalated into a conflict so great, that each shot the other. Both died in the exchange of gunfire and in the act of murder. When the vision ended, the mother was stunned. She realized that by permitting their earlier deaths, God had protected her sons from a far worse outcome – the loss of their lives and their salvation. She repented of her anger and returned to her parish.

At the End Times, God promises to shorten time again, not only to mitigate wickedness but also to reduce suffering.

For then, there will be great tribulation [suffering], such as has not been seen since the beginning of the world until this time, no, nor ever shall be. And unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved; but for the elect’s sake those days will be shortened [emphasis mine] (Matthew 24:21-22).⁶

The Orthodox, therefore, view both physical death and Man’s shortened lifespan as the all-knowing God’s way of being merciful for the benefit of our souls in eternity.

Death is twofold: physical and spiritual. In physical, bodily death, the body loses the soul that quickens it (gives it life). Without the soul, the body dies and decays. This is also the meaning of the verse, “… you shall die by death [decay]” (Genesis 2:17).⁶  The immortal soul gives life to the body, and God’s grace gives life to the soul. When the soul departs from the body, the body dies and sinfulness ends; but the soul is sustained in immortality by God’s continuous loving grace. In spiritual death, the soul, which God has graced with immortality, departs from God, who quickens it with the higher spiritual life. When the soul turns away from God, Man’s intimacy and fellowship with God diminishes. In this manner, the soul suffers but it does not die like the body because God’s grace continuously sustains it.

Human nature has not been completely lost as death has not laid hold upon the Divine image in man [which is in the soul]. Death occurs externally [to the physical body] but not internally [to the soul] as the soul is immortal and not subject to physical corruption [sickness]. How did death take hold? The participation of evil … affects both the soul and body but only leads to the corruption [sickness] and death of the body – not the soul. The soul, apart from the grace of Christ, still suffers regardless, from a diseased [sinful] condition of the will.  (St. Gregory of Nyssa)

Sickness, also called corruption, entered Man’s reality in the same manner as death. Adam and Eve’s transgression had a profound effect on their nous as they descended from a condition naturally prone to godliness, to confusion, inclination to sin, corruptibility (sickness) and death. The following quotes demonstrate that sickness and death are not a punishment for sin, but the inevitable result of transgression, a result that in His great mercy, God did not prevent, to encourage repentance and to end the sinful condition in man.⁷

[In Eden] there was not a trace of sickness or death, for there was not even a thought of sin (St. Nicolai of Zica)

[Sin] darkened, blackened, crippled the beautiful image of God in the soul of the primordial man…Due to the close and direct connection of the soul with the body, sin caused disorder [sickness] in the body of our first parents. The consequences of the Fall for the body were sickness, suffering and death.  (St. Justin Popovic)

“…diseases, hard labor, and death… are the natural [physical] result of the moral fall, the falling away from communion with God, man’s departure from God. Man became subject to the corrupt elements of the world, in which dissolution [sickness] and death are active. Nourishment from the Source of Life [God] and from the constant renewal of all of one’s powers became weak in men [emphasis mine] …”  (Fr. Michael Pomazansky)

Through the Orthodox lens, one can better understand God’s great Love for Mankind. The Greek word for “God” (Greek: Θεός, Theos) means All-good and All-pure. God created everything good and all His activities are good.** A controlling God does not give complete freedom to His creation to reject Him (Genesis 2:15-17); and an angry, vindictive, cruel or selfish God does not condescend, in utter humility, to the Cross to redeem His fallen creation through His own human sacrifice and still invite him to the same banquet of Theosis, to share in His divine glory (Philippians 2:5-8). God gifted Man with complete freedom, but His foreknowledge of how Man would use that freedom reveals to us God’s two wills: His primary will and his permissive (or secondary) will. God’s primary will was for Mankind to reach Theosis in the Garden of Eden, without experiencing sickness, suffering or death. Because Man freely turned away from God, then, out of His great Love and Mercy, God gave Man a second chance through His permissive (secondary) will.

Having foreknowledge of how Man would use his freedom, but not interfering with it, God created Man both with flesh (a body) and with spirit (a soul). He allowed Man’s flesh to die so that wickedness would not drag on into eternity but kept his spirit alive for immortality. Then, to save us from sin, the devil (Hades) and death, He died Himself. God did not create sickness and death, but He permitted them to enter our reality so that repentance would be born of suffering and lead Man back to God. By inheriting the capacity to sin from our ancestors, we also inherited the knowledge of good and evil. This earthly life, then, has become the new training ground for us to mature spiritually, and to progress from God’s image to His likeness. This may first begin with fear of God, then faith in God, and finally in perfect love for God, which casts out fear. This is why the Orthodox Church teaches us to thank God for our hardships, as these are pedagogical and help bring about repentance. Repentance is the key that opens the door to Salvation and Theosis, because God, Himself, in the Person of Jesus Christ, freely and willingly entered our fallen reality of sickness, suffering and death, to restore Man to his true destiny.

“God became Man so that Man may become God” (St. Gregory the Theologian)

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How Guilty are We and of What?

Adam and Eve’s first sin is commonly known as Original Sin in the West and Ancestral or Forefatherly Sin in the East. Although these two terms are often used interchangeably, they do not mean the same thing. The Western understanding of Original Sin is that all of Adam’s progeny, even innocent newborns, inherit the guilt (Greek: ενοχή, enohi) of Adam’s first sin.¹ The Eastern Orthodox understanding of Ancestral Sin is that Adam and Eve are guilty of their own sins, and we are guilty of ours, not theirs. However, because their sin marred the image of God in them, and therefore in us, this changed human nature, and what we have inherited from them is not the guilt, but the knowledge of good and evil and the capacity or inclination to sin.

How did the Roman Catholic church adopt the dogma of guilt in Original Sin? This partly stems from a Greek to Latin mistranslation of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans (5:12). In the original Greek text, St. Paul writes, «δια τούτο ώσπερ δι ενός ανθρώπου η αμαρτία εις τον κόσμον εισήλθεν και δια της αμαρτίας ο θάνατος και ούτως εις πάντας ανθρώπους ο θάνατος διήλθεν εφ ω πάντες ήμαρτον [emphasis mine]». The words «εφ ω» (Modern Greek: εφόσον) mean “since”, “because” or “because of.” ¹

The correct English translation from the original Greek is as follows: “Therefore, just as through one man [Adam] sin entered the world, and death through sin [death is the result of sin and not God’s punishment], and thus death spread to all men because [since] all have sinned [men die as the result of being sinful, not as an arbitrary punishment for something Adam did, emphasis mine].” According to St. Paul, we are all subject to death and corruption because of Adam’s sin, but we are guilty only of our own personal sins. The early Church Fathers held that there is no such thing as inheriting the guilt of another person’s sin, and babies are not born guilty of Adam’s sin. They are born with Ancestral or Forefatherly Sin, which means the inclination or capacity to sin.

The erroneous Latin translation reads “…in quo omnes peccaverunt.” and means “… in whom [Adam] all have sinned.” The original Greek does not say this. The Latin translation misleads readers into believing that the guilt of Original Sin is inherited. This wording was used in the West since the fourth century to justify the doctrine of guilt inherited from Adam, which spread to his descendants.¹ In Holy Scripture, the prophet Ezekiel explicitly contradicts the doctrine of guilt:

“The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.”  (Ezekiel 18:20)

The Orthodox Church believes that we all suffer because of Adam’s first sin but we are only guilty of our own sins. We are all born innocent, without sin, but as we grow, we all eventually do sin because Adam’s fall gives us the ability or capacity to sin. This capacity to sin, which alienates us from divine life, is due to our fallen nature, and is called Ancestral Sin. The original term Ancestral Sin (Προπατορικόν Αμάρτημα), was coined by the Greek Fathers and literally means “Forefatherly Sin.”

The Latin term Original Sin came later, first appearing in the earlier writings of St. Augustine (5^th century). The term Original Sin is sometimes used in Orthodox circles, such as in the quote below, but in Orthodoxy it always means Ancestral Sin:

When in the Orthodox Tradition there is talk of inheriting the original [Ancestral] sin, this does not mean the inheriting of the guilt of the original [Ancestral] sin, but mainly its consequences, which are corruption [sickness] and death. Just as when the root of a plant dies, the branches and the leaves become ill, so it happened with the fall of Adam. The whole human race became ill. The corruption and death which man inherits is the favourable climate for the cultivation of passions and in this manner the intellect [nous] of man is darkened. Adam and Eve’s sin resulted in the loss of communion with God, estrangement from God, and the deprivation of His Glory. This had physical consequences on the human body with the entrance of illness and death.” (Metropolitan Ierotheos (Vlachos) of Nafpaktos)

The term Original Sin as meaning inherited guilt, had several lasting repercussions for the Roman Catholic and some Protestant churches. These are covered in some detail in Part VII but the key ones are summarized below:¹

The first repercussion of the Latin Original Sin is the belief that should infants*** die unbaptized, “they shall not have life but the wrath of God abideth on them” (Augustine, 5^th century). In Orthodoxy, judgment on the fate of the soul of any dead person, baptized or not, belongs only to God. Infant baptism in Orthodoxy is practised to give the child the opportunity, with the help of his parents and godparents, to grow with God’s grace as a full member of His Church, and to reap all the spiritual benefits of a Sacramental and Liturgical life, as early in the child’s life as possible. Infants who die unbaptized are prayed for with perpetual hope for God’s divine mercy. The “Holy Innocents” who were murdered by Herod because he wanted to kill the Christ Child, are remembered by the Orthodox Church as the first holy martyrs for Christ and are considered saints in His Heavenly Kingdom. These children were not baptized, and neither were any of the saints of the Old Testament.¹

Second, sexual intercourse and reproduction was viewed as the means of inheriting the “guilt” of Original Sin, even in Marriage. In the West, some churches even go so far as to view intercourse itself as the Original Sin. This is not the case in Orthodoxy, as “Marriage is honorable among all, and the [marriage] bed undefiled” (Hebrews 13:4). The Orthodox liturgical cycle even commemorates holy days devoted to the conception of some saints, such as the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist. According to the Orthodox understanding, sexual intercourse is the obvious and necessary means of procreation. What every newborn inherits through the act of procreation, is not Adam’s guilt (Original Sin), but the capacity to accumulate personal sins (Ancestral Sin) as the individual grows and begins to freely choose and act.¹

Third, the Roman Catholic Church had to solve a problem that did not exist in Eastern Orthodoxy. The West had to come up with an explanation of how the guilt of Original Sin was prevented from “infecting” the Virgin Mary during Christ’s miraculous conception. Their solution was to invent the “Immaculate Conception” of the Holy Mother through fabricated “special merits,” which God applied to Mary so that she would not inherit the guilt of Original Sin when she was conceived. Orthodoxy believes that Mary’s conception between her saintly parents, was like that of everyone else; the only exception being that Mary’s parents were barren and advanced in years, which made their ability to conceive her a miracle from God. Regardless, the Holy Mother was still born with Ancestral (the capacity to) Sin. However, because of her own merits, she stood out from all other women. Apart from her purity of body and soul, what sealed her singular worthiness of becoming the New Eve and Mother of God in the flesh, was her incomparable virtue and her absolute free obedience to His will. This was the fruit of her deep humility and intense love for God, which is unparalleled in human history. The outcome was Christ’s immaculate conception in her pure body. At a time when unmarried mothers and unfaithful wives were stoned to death, such was her immense faith and love that she accepted, without any reservation or fear, Gabriel’s annunciation of God’s plan for her.  When the Holy Spirit overshadowed her, He utterly purified her, and she miraculously conceived the Godman, Jesus Christ, not by means of sexual intercourse with any man, but by the Holy Spirit, who being God, is devoid of any sin.¹

The Orthodox Church teaches that the Virgin Mary was conceived by Joachim’s [her father’s] seed, and the period of gestation was nine months. None of the ancient holy Fathers say that God in miraculous fashion purified the Virgin Mary while yet in Anna’s [her mother’s] womb. Only Jesus Christ is completely pure of every sin, while all men, being born of Adam, have borne a flesh subject to the law of sin … the Virgin Mary, just as all men, endured a battle with sinfulness, but was victorious over temptations, and was saved by her divine Son …

If, for the sake of argument, we maintain the invalid heterodox teaching that the Theotokos was preserved from this “original sin”, that would make God unmerciful and unjust. If God preserved her, why then does He not purify all men? But then that would have meant saving men before their birth, apart from their will. This teaching would then deny all her virtues. After all, if Mary, even in the womb of Anna, when she could not even desire anything, either good or evil, was preserved by God’s grace from every impurity, and then by that grace was preserved from sin even after her birth, then in what does her virtue consist?  She would have been placed in the state of being unable to sin.

The Virgin, as a true daughter of Adam and Eve, also inherited death [for] she was not in a state of never being able to die … the Virgin was not placed in the state of being unable to sin, but continued to take care for her salvation and overcame all temptations. The righteousness and sanctity of the Virgin Mary was manifested in the fact that she, being human with passions like us, so loved God and gave herself over to Him, that by her purity she was exalted above all other creatures. ⁸

The fourth repercussion of the Latin Original Sin is that the “guilt” of Original Sin became the basis on which a substantial segment of Protestantism developed the view of total depravity, upon which John Calvin (1509-1564) and his followers developed a belief in predestination. This will be discussed in greater detail in Part VI. According to the ideas of total depravity and predestination, Man fell so low because of the fall of Adam and Eve, that on his own, he no longer had any ability to believe in God or do anything good without God’s help. Therefore, God had to intervene by preselecting (predestinating) who to save so that not everyone would be lost to eternal damnation. This idea is entirely rejected by the Orthodox Church, which believes that God wants to save everyone. Christ, Himself, taught that He leaves the 99 sheep to look for the one that was lost. In the Prayer of the Anaphora, while profoundly respecting our freedom, “[God leaves] nothing undone until [He brings] us to heaven and [gives] us [His] kingdom to come.” The Western God who angrily punishes people for the sins of their ancestors, cannot be the same God of the Scriptures, who freely gives half His inheritance to his prodigal son and then forgives, embraces and elevates him when he returns.¹

 Father John Romanides nicely summarizes the Western problem of guilt and death in his well-researched book, The Ancestral Sin.⁹

… the juridically framed problem of guilt inherited from Adam and the consequent punishment of mankind because of an offense against divine justice do not even exist for the Greek Fathers simply because they teach that God is not the cause of death. Man’s withdrawal from God unto his own death, like the freedom of human will, is outside God’s jurisdiction. And it is outside His jurisdiction by His own will. The fact that God desires the salvation of all does not mean that all are saved. God saves only through [our] love and [our] freedom [according to our will]. This point is exactly what theologians under the influence of [early] Augustine have never comprehended [emphasis mine]. (Fr. John Romanides, The Ancestral Sin)

To be continued with Part VI – Faith, Works and Human Destiny…

Footnotes

• The terms Man, Mankind are used interchangeably and in the plural sense to mean both the masculine and the feminine together. The terms he, him, his also denote the singular feminine unless otherwise stated in the text. These terms will be used in this manner throughout all Parts of this Series.

**If God is All-good and All-pure, why, in the Old Testament, did He destroy whole cities and nations of people, as in the Great Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Canaanites and others? The Orthodox teaching is that God is long-suffering, most merciful, compassionate and wants everyone to be saved. God has foreknowledge of, but does not interfere with, our choices, which we determine because of His gift of absolute freedom to us. He gives people and nations every opportunity to repent and turn to Him but many, who persistently resist His grace, become so hardened by sinful passions, they will not repent. A good example of this was the King of Jericho and his people. They had all heard of Moses, the destruction of Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea and the decimation of the Amorites. Yet, despite their great fear of the Israelites and their God, they would not repent, except for the harlot, Rahab, who hid two Israelite spies in her house in Jericho. Because of her repentance and faith in God, she and her family were spared from the destruction and massacre of Jericho. Rahab married Salmon of the tribe of Judah and is mentioned in the opening Chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, which outlines the genealogy of Christ in the flesh. God had commanded Joshua to spare none of the Canaanites (with few exceptions, as in the case of Rahab), because He had the foreknowledge that they would never repent. Unless they died, their wickedness would not only continue to augment and corrupt the Israelites, but by increasing, it would also amplify their suffering in the afterlife. (Joshua 2, 6)⁶

***John M. Phountoules was a Greek theologian and prolific scholar of Orthodox liturgy. As Professor or Liturgics and Homiletics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Phountoules dedicated over three decades to studying, preserving, and revitalizing liturgical life, particularly through his in-depth research and study of historical liturgical manuscripts. The first-ever English translation of Answers to Liturgical Questions by Ioannes M. Phountoules, defines the word ‘infant’ as follows:

The word, “νήπιον, το,” which is translated “infant,” does not necessarily mean a child of less than one, but has a range of meanings, including children one to seven years of age as in the case of the questioner, or in some of the manuscripts that Phountoules references, less than three years of age. There is a wide variation of use locally in Greece. Other words for children such as “μωρό, το,” also have a wide variation in meaning with regard to age (baby or child).¹⁰

Orthodoxy does not strictly define the term “infant” in terms of age because the exact duration of childhood innocence is unknown. The age of reason and the onset of the sinful condition varies from child to child. For this reason, the Orthodox Church encourages the baptism of children as young as possible, so that as full members of His Church, they may grow and mature with God’s grace and protection as soon as possible.

References

1. A. James Bernstein, Surprised by Christ, My Journey from Judaism to Orthodox Christianity, 2008. Pg. 241-244, 215, 216, 222, 224-227, 218-219
2. Theophan the Recluse, A letter by St. Theophan the Recluse – Preaching Another Christ – An Orthodox View of Evangelicalism, Translation by Dimitri Kagaris, Orthodox Witness 2011
3. Basil the Great, On the Human Condition (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005), p. 75. Homily: That God is Not the Cause of Evil, P.G. 31, 345.
4. Why did God not want man to eat of the Tree of Life? | Fr. Athanasios Mytilinaios | otelders https://otelders.org/questions-and-answers-orthodox-christian/why-did-god-not-want-man-to-eat-of-the-tree-of-life-fr-athanasios-mytilinaios-otelders/?amp=1
5. The Council of Trent, Fifth Session, First Canon, https://history.hanover.edu/texts/trent/ct05.html.
6. The Orthodox Study Bible, Ancient Christianity Speaks to Today’s World, Old & New Testaments, texts & exegesis Pg. 11, 6, 742, 1316, 258
7. Fr Aidan Kimel, St Athanasius: The Fall of Man into the Body, Eclectic Orthodoxy, April 5, 2013, accessed July 25, 2018, https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2013/04/04/st-athanasius-the-fall-of-man-into-the-body/
8. Holy Apostles Convent and Dormition Skete, The Life of the Virgin Mary, the Theotokos,10-11
9. John Romanides, The Ancestral Sin (Ridgewood, NJ:Zephyr, 1998), pp 32-33
10. Ioannes M. Phountoules, Answers to Liturgical Questions, Volume II, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, Pg 192