AGAINST ROMANIDES

Written by Vladimir Moss

AGAINST ROMANIDES

A Critical Examination of the Theology of Fr. John Romanides

Vladimir Moss

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 3

I. ROMANIDES ON HOLY SCRIPTURE AND SCIENCE 5

II. ROMANIDES ON THE HOLY TRINITY 16

III. ROMANIDES ON ORIGINAL SIN 20

Can Sin be Inherited? 20

What is Sin? 24

Sin and Death 25

Romans 5.12 31

IV. ROMANIDES ON THE CROSS AND BAPTISM 35

The Old and the New Testaments 35

The Sacrifice for Sin 37

The Language of Redemption 39

The Effects of Baptism 42

Love and Justice 44

V. ROMANIDES ON HEAVEN AND HELL 51

CONCLUSION: SALVATION AND DEIFICATION 64

INTRODUCTION

We may distinguish between three types of heretical ideas. The first is heresy in the classical sense, an attack on a specific teaching of the faith, such as the Divinity of Christ, the Procession of the Holy Spirit, the uncreatedness of Grace, or the Unity of the Church. A second type is constituted by the modern heresy of ecumenism, which does not so much attack any specific teaching of the faith, but rather adopts a new attitude to heresy in general, arguing that there is no such thing as One True Faith preserved by the One True Church, that the difference between truth and heresy is unimportant or even non-existent, that all denominations or religions are equally true (or untrue), or that, as one reviewer put it, “the greatest heresy is to believe that there is such a thing as heresy”. A third type consists in taking a true formula, declaring it to be the central truth of the faith, and then “restructuring” all the other dogmas around it – without specifically denying them, but nevertheless distorting them through the creation of this new dogmatic centre of gravity. This is the path adopted by the most influential thinker in modern Greek Orthodoxy, Fr. John Romanidis, and the large number of his disciples, including Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos), Protopresbyter George Metallinos, Christos Yannaras and others.

There are links between these different types of heresy. Thus it is likely that the Protestant loss of faith in the dogma of the Church led to the disintegration of the Western Christian world, which in turn led to the need to “recreate” the Church in the form of a kind of coalition of denominations, which in turn led to the need to create a kind of doctrinal “lowest common denominator”, which in turn led to the despising of the concept of the One Faith that is characteristic of the heresy of ecumenism. And then there are links between ecumenism and “Romanideanism”…

Fr. John Romanides (1927-2001) was a member of the new calendarist State Church of Greece, an admirer of the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras, a member of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches, a participant in many ecumenical conferences and a key supporter of the Chambésy union between the Ecumenical (World) Orthodox and the Monophysite heretics. However, while being actively engaged in the ecumenical movement in this way, and subordinate to hierarchs who prayed with and recognized both the eastern and the western heretics, Romanides constructed a theological system that virulently rejected not only Catholicism and Protestantism, but also certain traditional Orthodox teachings on the grounds that they were “Augustinian” and “scholastic” – that is, heretical. Romanides taught that the theology that was taught in Greece in his day “is of western and Russian origin. No relationship with Byzantium.” And so he saw his own work as a revolutionary return to the true Orthodox teaching from the heresy of contemporary Greek and Russian theology.

In order to justify this “mission” of his, Romanides constructed an historical narrative whereby almost all the dogmatic deviations of the West are laid at the door of St. Augustine of Hippo. From the time of Charlemagne and the false council of Frankfurt (794), the leaven of Augustinianism gradually penetrated the whole of the Franco-German West. Then, from the establishment of the Franco-German papacy in 1046, it infected the rest of the West – with the significant exception, according to Romanides, of the supposedly enslaved West Romans of France and Italy. Then, with the discovery of Aristotle in the later Middle Ages, it gave birth to heretical scholasticism – a mixture of Aristotle and Augustine systematized especially in the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. The Augustinian-Aristotelian-Aquinian “pseudomorphosis” of Holy Tradition first infected the Orthodox Church in Russia from about the fifteenth century, and from the Russian Church penetrated the Greek Church after the Greek War of Independence.

This historical theory seriously distorts the truth both of Western and Eastern ecclesiastical history. However, this essay is devoted only to a critique of his dogmatic teaching, beginning with his ideas on Holy Scripture and Science, and going on to discuss his ideas on the Holy Trinity, Original Sin, the Cross and Baptism, and Heaven and Hell.

Romanides has been called “the supreme new-calendarist theologian”. But no man can be called a true theologian who does not continue in the unchanging and never-interrupted Tradition of the Holy Orthodox Church. As for those who think, like the Protestant Reformers, to make a revolution in theology and return to a supposedly purer “Early Church”, their efforts only demonstrate to the truly Orthodox that they have not understood the faith of the Church and have deviated from the straight and narrow path of the Holy Scriptures and Holy Fathers.

February 24 / March 8, 2012.

First and Second Finding of the Honourable Head of St. John the Baptist.

East House, Beech Hill, Mayford, Woking, Surrey. England.

I. ROMANIDES ON HOLY SCRIPTURE AND SCIENCE

The central idea of Romanides, is that the whole of Orthodox theology and Orthodox life can be reduced to the formula “purification, illumination, deification” (or, as he prefers to say, divinization). As he puts it, “Apart from purification, illumination and deification nothing else exists. No theology, that is.”

Let us examine this idea in the context of Romanides’ understanding of theology, Holy Scripture and science…

Deification, or glorification, according to Romanides, is the same as the vision of God in His Uncreated Energies; that is, theosis (deification) = theoria (the vision of God). Alternatively, it may be defined as “the perfection of personhood in the vision of the uncreated glory and rule of Christ in and among his saints, the members of his body, the church. Faith, prayer, theology, and dogma are the therapeutical methods and signposts on the road of illumination to perfection which, when reached, abolishes faith, prayer, theology, and dogma, since the final goal of these is their abolition in glorification and selfless love.”

The therapeutic process by which the soul is purified, illumined and deified through God’s Grace is the touchstone of all theological truth. Truth is known as such because it “works” therapeutically, bringing the soul and body of man to the condition of deification/glorification for which he was created. All heresies and “pseudomorphoses” of the truth in the contemporary Christian world, including the Orthodox Christian world, are to be explained in terms of ignorance of, or deviation from, this saving path. True doctrine is recognized by the fact that it helps men to travel the path of purification, illumination and deification. False doctrine is recognized by the opposite: the failure to achieve, or make progress towards, deification. The possessors of truth, therefore, are, first and foremost, the glorified saints, the Prophets, Apostles, Martyrs and Fathers, who have met the Lord of Glory face to face in the Light of His Uncreated Energies. This meeting gives them a knowledge of God that is certain and unerring, and is the source of all true knowledge of God. Such knowledge is beyond all words and concepts; the deified/glorified cannot convey their knowledge of God to those who have not been purified and illumined. The best they can do is provide signposts to the truth in the form of created words and symbols.

Among such symbols are the Holy Scriptures, the Symbol of the Faith, the writings of the Holy Fathers and the Definitions of the Ecumenical and Local Councils.

Theology in the true sense is the experience of deified men, which cannot be expressed in words. The words of the Scriptures and the Fathers can be relied on insofar as they are the words of deified men. And the words of professional or amateur “theologians” are reliable to the extent that they faithfully reflect the teachings of deified men. But words, being merely created symbols, must not be confused with the Uncreated Reality.

There is much that we can agree with here. The true theologian is truly, as the patristic saying goes, “the man who prays”. And insofar as the end of true prayer is the complete union with God that we call deification, the title of “theologian” can worthily be given only to those who have prayed well and achieved this end – that is, the saints. The saints’ knowledge of God is not theoretical, but “theoric”, to use Romanides’ term; for it is based, not on “theory”, or hypothesis, but on theoria, or direct vision of God. Most “theologians”, by contrast, being still mired in sin and in need of purification, are called such only by condescension. For while they speak and write about the same Being as the true theologians, they do so “through a glass, darkly,” without the immediate, face-to-face apprehension of the truth possessed by the theologian-saints. This does not mean that their work is not necessary or useful, - if it is true, - but only that it is difficult, dangerous, and to a certain degree derivative…

Nevertheless, it is not completely derivative. For even the lowliest of believers, insofar as he is a believer, has a certain direct, definite and certain knowledge of God. For faith is possessed in differing degrees by all believers, and faith, as the Apostle Paul says, is “the substance [hypostasis] of things hoped for, the proof [elegkhos] of things not seen” (Hebrews 11.1). This “proof” provides certainty, and even if that which is proven is not seen it is nevertheless known in a real sense. For “ye have an anointing from the Holy One,” says the Apostle John, “and ye all have knowledge” (I John 2.20).

Of course, the knowledge of God by faith alone cannot compare with the knowledge of Him that was given to the Apostles on Mount Tabor. For they through a transmutation of their senses actually saw God in His uncreated Glory – and lived to tell the story. And yet the lowlier “unseeing” knowledge is not to be scorned, and was actually blessed by Christ when He said to Thomas: “Because thou hast seen Me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed” (John 20.29).

Romanides has very little to say about the “unseeing vision” of God that is faith, and far more about the direct vision of God in theoria-theosis. As a correction of an under-emphasis on deification in western theologians, this is understandable. Nevertheless, the correction has gone too far in his system. It is important that we – and especially we who are converts from the western heresies – should be reminded of the ultimate goal of all faith and works in the complete union with God and the deification of human nature. But no less important is it to know what are the first steps in the ascent to God. These are, according to St. Maximus the Confessor, faith and the fear of God. Faith engenders the fear of hell, which engenders the struggle against the passions, which leads eventually to the supreme state, love. Romanides’ system suffers from its over-emphasis on the higher stages of the ascent to God at the expense of the lower. The lower steps of faith, and justification by faith, are one of the central themes of the New Testament. But Romanides says very little about faith, and seriously distorts the dogma of justification by faith…

Romanides controversially insists that the traditional sources of the faith - the Holy Scriptures, the Symbol of the Faith, the writings of the Holy Fathers and the Definitions of the Ecumenical and Local Councils - must not be “idolized” as the word of God. Thus at the Anglican-Orthodox ecumenical conference in Moscow in 1976 he said: “In what sense can a book embody the revelation of God? The Bible speaks to us of revelation, but is not itself to be identified with revelation.” And again: “Holy Scripture is not the word of God, it is about the Word of God. Everywhere ‘about’, not revelation itself or the word of God.” There are uncreated, ineffable words of Revelation, such as those that St. Paul heard in Paradise. But the words of Scripture are created, and therefore not Revelation, but about Revelation. “God’s revelation to mankind,” he writes, “is the experience of theosis. In fact, since revelation is the experience of theosis, an experience that transcends all expressions and concepts, the identification of Holy Scripture with revelation is, in terms of dogmatic theology, pure heresy.”

And yet the Holy Fathers (and not only Augustine) appear to have embraced this “pure heresy”! For while they were perfectly aware of the distinction between the Uncreated and the created, and understood that the words of Holy Scripture are created in origin, nevertheless they insisted that they are the words of God. This applies not only to the words uttered by Jesus Christ Himself, the hypostatic Word of God: they apply to every word of Holy Scripture. For the Holy Spirit “spoke through the Prophets”, as the Symbol of Faith says: the Scriptures are the created words spoken through the lips of a created man by the Uncreated Spirit, and as such completely reliable and accurate. Thus St. Basil the Great writes: “Plainly it is a falling away from faith and an offence chargeable to pride, either to reject anything that is in Scripture, or to introduce anything that is not in Scripture”. Again, St. Gregory the Theologian writes: “We who extend the accuracy of the Spirit to every letter and serif [of Scripture] will never admit, for it were impious to do so, that even the smallest matters were recorded in a careless and hasty manner by those who wrote them down.” Again, St. Epiphanius of Cyprus writes: “Nothing of discrepancy will be found in Sacred Scripture, nor will there be found any statement in opposition to any other statement.”

The more modern Fathers say the same things. Thus shortly before the Russian revolution, St. Barsanuphius of Optina wrote: “In the Apocalypse it is said: ‘Blessed is he that readeth the words of this book.’ If this is written, it means that it is really so, for the words of the Sacred Scripture are the words of the Holy Spirit.”

Romanides continues: “Today Protestants and Roman Catholics are under the impression that God gave Holy Scripture to the Church. This idea has so greatly influenced modern Orthodox thought that the Orthodox even agree with Protestants and Roman Catholics on this point…

“But now the Orthodox Church has to face a certain paradox. When you read the Old Testament, the New Testament, and even writings from Tradition, you will run across opinions that science proved to be false at least 150 years ago, especially on account of the breakthroughs in research made in the exact sciences. Naturally, this creates a serious problem for someone who does not fully grasp what the Fathers mean when they speak about divine inspiration. This problem mainly applies to the study of the Bible.”

So the Bible is not the Word of God, according to Romanides, because it is contradicted by certain supposed findings of science…

What are these sciences that we can trust, supposedly, more than the Holy Scriptures? First of all, palaeontology. “For we now know that there exist human bones which are proved to have existed for three and a half million years.” And then anthropology. “The cosmology of Genesis when compared with the Babylonian cosmology presents striking similarities…”

In general, Romanides has a great respect – too great a respect - for science. He appears to believe in the “big bang”, and evolution, and psychoanalysis, and seems completely oblivious of the powerful objections brought against all these theories by more independent-minded scientists… He believes that the process of purification, illumination and deification can be reflected in the future findings of neurobiology… Several times he compares his “empirical dogmatics” or “experiential theology” with medicine and psychiatry…

Heresy itself is defined as “a form of quackery (kompogiannitismou), through which there is no healing [therapeia]”.

Theology is close to science, he says, because both are based on experience – the first, the experience of the Uncreated God, and the second, the experience of created nature. Holy Scripture, however, is inspired by God only when it speaks about the experience of the Uncreated God and how to arrive at it through purification, illumination or deification. But when it speaks about historical events, created things or the creation of the universe, it is unreliable and therefore not God-inspired. Then it should be corrected by the findings of modern science. For Holy Scripture “uses the science of its time, which is why it should not be seen as the revelation of God.”

Romanides explains this position as follows: “Nobody can mix created truths with uncreated truths. They are not the same thing. Created truths are one thing, uncreated truths – something else. And insofar as there is no likeness [between them], created truth cannot be the way by which we know uncreated truth…

“Holy Scripture is not the source of knowledge of created truth, but of uncreated truth, that is, of the Revelation of the uncreated glory of God, and cannot be a guidebook either of medicinal or any other science. It is a Book that was written within the bounds of the knowledge of the time in which it was written.

“The place where Holy Scripture is infallible and a guide for the life of men is in the sections concerning purification, illumination and deification, which deification is the basis of the knowledge of God possessed by the Prophets, the Apostles and the saints of the Church.”

This “pick-and-choose” attitude to Holy Scripture is - paradoxically in view of Romanides’ virulent anti-westernism, - typically western. It demonstrates a lack of faith in the word of God that is typical of liberal Catholics and Protestants. And the reason is Romanides’ bowing down to the god of the West, scientism - or “half-science”, as Dostoyevsky called it.

As a consequence of his scientism Romanides believes (following Thomas Aquinas!) that the intellect should not be considered fallen; “for this,” as Sopko writes, interpreting his thought, “would be difficult to maintain in light of the many advances of modern science”… And yet, as Solomon the wise says, “a perishable body weighs down the soul, and this earthly tent burdens the thoughtful mind. We can hardly guess at what is on earth, and what is at hand we find with labour; but who has traced out what is in the heavens, and who has learned Thy counsel, unless Thou give him wisdom, and send Thy Holy Spirit from on high?”(Wisdom 9. 15-17). In other words, the mind of man is fallen, and needs correction and enlightenment from the Holy Spirit in the scientific endeavour of “guessing at what is on earth” and “tracing out what is in the heavens”.

Indeed, while we talk about “the advance of science”, this must be understood in a strictly relative sense; for while we know enormously more about microbes and sub-atomic particles and all kinds of natural phenomena than in the past, “the scientific world-view” of today represents a catastrophic regression from the world-view of Newton or Descartes, let alone that of the Holy Fathers. Thus modern scientists, with some exceptions, do not believe in God or the soul or angels, and embrace the purely mythical idea that the whole of creation, including man himself and his highest religious, artistic and scientific achievements, derives by chance from an infinitesimally small particle of matter that exploded some fourteen billion years ago. In fact, one of the few encouraging features of the modern world is that the evolution myth is being itself exploded by the findings of real science in many spheres. For, as one scientist said, “Small science separates from God and great science returns one to God”. But Romanides was until his death naively oblivious of these developments.

However, naivety or involuntary ignorance in relation to recent developments in science is one thing: the deliberate ignorance – or worse, rejection - by a patristic scholar of the patristic understanding of the creation of the world, of the Book of Genesis, and of the nature of Holy Scripture in general is quite another. Granted, the Book of Genesis is not written in the language of science. But neither is it written in the language of Babylonian mythology. It is simply the truth about creation - and in a perfectly objective, non-mythical, non-poetical and non-allegorical sense. For it is the direct revelation of God, the only “eye-witness” of creation, to the God-seer Moses, the only man counted worthy to “take down” that witness.

As Fr. Seraphim Rose writes: “We all know of the anti-religious arguments about the Scripture, and in particular about Genesis: that it is a creation of backward people who knew little of science or the world, that it is full of primitive mythology about "creator-gods" and supernatural beings, that it has all been taken from Babylonian mythology, etc. But no one can seriously compare Genesis with any of the creation myths of other peoples without being struck by the sobriety and simplicity of the Genesis account. Creation myths are indeed full of fabulous events and fairy-tale beings which are not even intended to be taken as the text is written. There is no competition between these texts and Genesis; they are not in the least comparable.

  ”Nonetheless, there is a widespread popular view - without foundation either in Scripture or in Church tradition - that Moses wrote Genesis after consulting other early accounts of the creation, or that he simply recorded the oral traditions that came down to him; that he compiled and simplified the tales that had come down to his time. This, of course, would make Genesis a work of human wisdom and speculation, and it would be pointless to study such a work as a statement of truth about the beginning of the world.

“… St. Isaac… describes how, in men of the highest spiritual life, the soul can rise to a vision of the beginning of things. Describing how such a soul is enraptured at the thought of the future age of incorruption, St. Isaac writes:

  “’And from this one is already exalted in his mind to that which preceded the composition (making) of the world, when there was no creature, nor heaven, nor earth, nor angels, nothing of that which was brought into being, and to how God, solely by His good will, suddenly brought everything from non-being into being, and everything stood before Him in perfection.’

“Thus, one can believe that Moses and later chroniclers made use of written records and oral tradition when it came to recording the acts and chronology of historical Patriarchs and kings; but an account of the beginning of the world's existence, when there were no witnesses to God's mighty acts, can come only from God's revelation; it is a supra-natural knowledge revealed in direct contact with God. And this is exactly what the Fathers and Church tradition tell us the book of Genesis is.

  “St. Ambrose writes: ‘Moses “spoke to God the Most High, not in a vision nor in dreams, but mouth to mouth" (Numbers 12:6-8). Plainly and clearly, not by figures nor by riddles, there was bestowed on him the gift of the Divine presence. And so Moses opened his mouth and uttered what the Lord spoke within him, according to the promise He made to him when He directed him to go to King Pharaoh: "Go therefore and I will open thy mouth and instruct thee what thou shouldest speak" (Exodus 4:12). For, if he had already accepted from God what he should say concerning the liberation of the people, how much more should you accept what He should say concerning heaven? Therefore, "not in the persuasive words of wisdom," not in philosophical fallacies, "but in the demonstration of the Spirit and power" (I Corinthians 2:4), he has ventured to say as if he were a witness of the Divine work: "In the beginning God created heaven and earth."’

  “In a similar vein, St. Basil writes at the very beginning of his Hexaemeron: ‘This man, who is made equal to the angels, being considered worthy of the sight of God face to face, reports to us those things which he heard from God.’  

“St. John Chrysostom in his Homilies on Genesis comes back again and again to the statement that every word of the Scripture is Divinely inspired and has a profound meaning - that it is not Moses' words, but God's: ‘Let us see now what we are taught by the blessed Moses, who speaks not of himself but by the inspiration of the grace of the Spirit.’

  “He then has a fascinating description of how Moses does this. We know that the Old Testament prophets foretold the coming of the Messiah. In the Book of the Apocalypse (Revelation), St. John the Theologian prophesied about the events of the end of the world and the future of the Church. How did they know what was going to happen? Obviously, God revealed it to them. St. John Chrysostom says that, just as St. John the Theologian was a prophet of things of the future, Moses was a prophet of things of the past. He says the following: ‘All the other prophets spoke either of what was to occur after a long time or of what was about to happen then; but he, the blessed (Moses), who lived many generations after (the creation of the world), was vouchsafed by the guidance of the right hand of the Most High to utter what had been done by the Lord before his own birth. It is for this reason that he begins to speak thus: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," as if calling out to us all with a loud voice: it is not by the instruction of men that I say this; He Who called them (heaven and earth) out of non-being into being - it is He Who has roused my tongue to relate of them. And therefore I entreat you, let us pay heed to these words as if we heard not Moses but the very Lord of the universe Who speaks through the tongue of Moses, and let us take leave for good of our own opinions.’

  “Thus, we should approach the early chapters of Genesis as we would a book of prophecy, knowing that it is actual events being described, but knowing also that - because of their remoteness to us and because of their very nature as the very first events in the history of the world - we will be able to understand them only imperfectly, even as we have a very imperfect understanding of the events at the very end of the world as set forth in the Apocalypse and other New Testament Scriptures. St. John Chrysostom himself warns us not to think we understand too much about the creation: ‘With great gratitude let us accept what is related (by Moses), not stepping out of our own limitations, and not testing what is above us as the enemies of the truth did when, wishing to comprehend everything with their minds, they did not realize that human nature cannot comprehend the creation of God.’  

“Let us then try to enter the world of the Holy Fathers and their understanding of the Divinely inspired text of Genesis. Let us love and respect their writings, which in our confused times are a beacon of clarity which shines most clearly on the inspired text itself. Let us not be quick to think we ‘know better’ than they, and if we think we have some understanding they did not see, let us be humble and hesitant about offering it, knowing the poverty and fallibility of our own minds. Let them open our minds to understand God's revelation.”

It is important to realize also that Romanides’ distinction between “uncreated truths” and “created truths” is quite irrelevant in the context of Holy Scripture. Romanides himself describes Moses’ encounter with God on Mount Sinai as his entering into the Divine Light of God’s uncreated Energies, where “uncreated truths” were revealed to him. And yet this uncreated truth was received by him in a specific historical time and place – “created truths”, which, if not verified by science, would place the “uncreated truth” itself in doubt, according to Romanides’ logic.

For let us suppose that scientists discovered that Moses never went up Mount Sinai, and this encounter with God was not a historical event. Then the basis for believing in Moses’ uncreated truth is severely weakened. Such is the dilemma of one who puts his faith in science and not in the Word of God… Moreover, the content of the Uncreated Revelation Moses received was a series of created truths– truths concerning sun and stars, earth and water, plants, animals and men… The important thing for us to know is not whether a given passage of Scripture is a description of uncreated or created truth, but simply whether it is true, coming from the Spirit of truth. Of course, there are vast differences in the sublimity and importance of the different truths revealed by Holy Scripture. The fact that Moses entered the Divine Darkness of Mount Sinai is far more sublime and important that the fact that Tobit is twice mentioned as being followed by his dog on his travels. And yet from the point of view of factual reliability the big fact and the small fact are on the same level, as being both communicated to us by God, Who says: “Who hath despised the day of small things?” (Zechariah 4.10). In any case, every Theophany recorded in the Holy Scripture, every meeting between God and man in glory, involves an “unconfused but undivided” meeting between Uncreated and created elements, between Eternity and Time, which only the sheerest rationalism will attempt to divide…

By denying that Holy Scripture is revelation in the true sense, and by asserting that large parts of Holy Scripture – the “created truths” concerning history, etc. – must be considered to be less reliable than other parts – the “uncreated truths” that “transcend all expressions and concepts”, Romanides provides himself with a tool whereby he can degrade or completely reinterpret certain scriptural expressions and concepts that he does not like – for example, “justification” (which he reinterprets as “vivification”) or “justice” (which he reinterprets as “love”). For he thereby introduces the idea that there is a “higher” theology, that of deification, which is without words, expressions and concepts, and a “lower”, Biblical theology with words, expressions and concepts. And he who has the higher theology can correct, or even do without, the lower theology.

He buttresses this idea with the teaching that there is no likeness, no analogy at all “between teachings in the Bible and the truth about God. Why not? Because there is absolutely no similarity between God and creation. This is the reason why Biblical concepts about God are concepts that can be set aside and are set aside during the experience of theosis. Before theosis, these concepts are clearly helpful, necessary, correct, and right, but only as guideposts towards God, not as truths from God or about God.

“The Bible is a guide to God, but the description of God in the Bible does not bear any similarity to God. Holy Scripture talks about God; it talks about the Truth, but it is not the Truth. It is a guide to the Truth and the Way Who is Christ. The words in the Bible are simply symbols that contain certain concepts. These concepts lead us to Christ, but they are no more than thoroughly human concepts.

“So you cannot hope to theologize correctly simply because you have read the Bible and base your theology on the Bible. If you do this, you cannot avoid becoming a heretic, because Holy Scripture can be correctly interpreted only when the experiences of illumination or theosis accompanies the study or reading of the Bible. Without illumination or theosis, Holy Scripture cannot be interpreted correctly.”

Let us separate the wheat from the chaff here. It is true that Holy Scripture cannot be correctly interpreted without the help of the Holy Spirit. That help comes to us both directly and through the whole of the Holy Tradition of the Holy Orthodox Church. However, it is not true that “you cannot avoid becoming a heretic” if you have not had the experience of illumination (by which Romanides means the conscious experience of the Holy Spirit praying in one’s heart) or theosis. If that were the case, then the vast majority of Orthodox Christians would in fact be heretics…

Orthodoxy or heresy is not determined by the presence or absence of a specific spiritual experience: it is determined by the public acceptance of the official doctrinal pronouncements of the Orthodox Church. For, as the Apostle Paul says: “With the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Romans 10.10). Of course, every dogma has an infinite depth; and that depth is plumbed only to the degree that one has made progress in the spiritual life; and those saints who have acquired prayer of the heart and seen the Divine Light undoubtedly plumb the depths of the dogmas to a far greater degree than us sinful mortals. Nevertheless, the criterion of Orthodoxy remains for all the “holding fast the pattern of sound words” (II Timothy 1.13), which is, as the Holy Church chants, “the garment of truth woven from the theology on high”.

Secondly, it is not true to say that since there is no similarity between God and creation, and that the words of the Bible are “simply symbols” containing “no more than thoroughly human concepts”. First, a symbol, as the original meaning of the word in Greek (sym-bole) suggests, is a thing that brings together a material form and an immaterial content into an indivisible and unrepeatable unity. The sign that this unity has been achieved is beauty. In secular thought and art, the content is a “thoroughly human” thought or emotion. In sacred thought and art, it is a “divinely human” thought or emotion – that is, one overshadowed and infused by the Grace of God. And in rare examples of sacred art, such as the “Icon-not-made-by hand-of-man”, the content is God Himself (not in His Essence, of course, but in His uncreated Energies). Romanides appears to regard the words of Holy Scripture as “simply symbols” that cannot reveal the Uncreated God: at best, they are signposts, or instructions on how to attain to the true Revelation. But this, as he appears not to understand, was the position of the iconoclast heretics in the eighth and ninth centuries…

The iconoclasts did not object to the instructional use of icons – but only so long as they were not venerated, for that implied that they were not simply created objects, but holy, Grace-filled objects. However, if they were venerated, then they were idols, and should be destroyed. Thus for the iconoclasts the icons were essentially opaque, and were not the medium of communication with any higher reality; whereas for the Orthodox, the venerators of the holy icons, they were transparent – “windows into heaven”, in the expression of St. Stephen the Younger. Moreover, for the Orthodox the words of Holy Scripture are verbal icons, which is why the Book of the Gospel is venerated as an icon. For in the words of Holy Scripture we hear the voice of Him Who declared Himself to be the Word of the Father. And so our veneration of the created type does not mire us in idolatry, as Romanides suggests, but allows us to ascend in true worship to the Uncreated Archetype.

Thirdly, although there is no similarity between the essence of God and creation, there is a certain likeness between the energies of God and His rational creatures, men and angels. That is why man is said to be made in the image and likeness of God. And that is why it makes sense to talk of God’s “love”, “anger”, etc., which presupposes a certain likeness between the Divine and the human. These words were created to describe purely human emotions; but the Holy Scriptures use them also to indicate – approximately, but nevertheless truly – a certain likeness between human experience and God’s actions towards us. And when these words are found in Holy Scripture in reference to God we know that they are the best approximation to the truth and therefore cannot be replaced. Yes, they are human artefacts which are more or less inadequate in describing the mysteries of God. But this applies to all the anthropomorphic expressions of Holy Scripture. God neither loves nor hates as human beings do; both the love and the wrath of God are not to be understood in a human way. For, as St. John of Damascus says: “God, being good, is the cause of all good, subject neither to envy nor to any passion”. And, as St. Gregory the Theologian says, by virtue of our limitations and imperfection as human beings we introduce “something human even into such lofty moral definitions of the Divine essence as righteousness and love”.“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, saith the Lord” (Isaiah 55.8). And yet, provided we guard ourselves by this apophatic warning, our thoughts can ascend closer to the thoughts of God by accepting with gratitude and faith those words and images that God Himself has given us for our understanding, remembering that they are now not merely human words, but the Word of God, and that “the words of the Lord are pure words, silver that is fired, tried in the earth, brought to sevenfold purity” (Psalm 11.6). Moreover, we ourselves, by studying the Word of God in this way, become purer, loftier, more spiritual, more understanding. Such understanding cannot be accomplished by replacing the vivid words of Holy Scripture with the dry categories of secular philosophy – or even of Romanidean theology. The Word of God is above all human attempts to explain it. And any attempt to “improve on” or “explain away”, still less “set aside”, the Word of God in Holy Scripture can only lead to distortions and heresies.

For, as Romanides’ teacher, Fr. Georges Florovsky writes: “Revelation is the voice of God speaking to man. And man hears this voice, listens to it, accepts the Word of God and understands it. It is precisely for this purpose that God speaks; that man should hear him. By Revelation in the proper sense, we understand precisely this word of God as it is heard. Holy Scripture is the written record of the Revelation which has been heard. And however one may interpret the inspired character of Scripture, it must be acknowledged that Scripture preserves for us and presents to us the voice of God in the language of man… God speaks to man in the language of man. This constitutes the authentic anthropomorphism of Revelation. This anthropomorphism however is not merely an accommodation. Human language in no way reduces the absolute character of Revelation nor limits the power of God's Word. The Word of God can be expressed precisely and adequately in the language of man. For man is created in the image of God. It is precisely for this reason that man is capable of perceiving God, of receiving God's Word and of preserving it. The Word of God is not diminished while it resounds in human language. On the contrary, the human word is transformed and, as it were, transfigured because of the fact that it pleased God to speak in human language. Man is able to hear God, to grasp, receive and preserve the word of God…

“When divine truth is expressed in human language, the words themselves are transformed. And the fact that the truths of the faith are veiled in logical images and concepts testifies to the transformation of word and thought – words become sanctified through this usage. The words of dogmatic definitions are not ‘simple words’, they are not ‘accidental’ words which one can be replaced by other words. They are eternal truths incapable of being replaced.”

II. ROMANIDES ON THE HOLY TRINITY

As we have seen, Romanides’ “theology of experience” places enormous stress on the impossibility of true knowledge of God unless that knowledge is acquired through direct experience of God in deification. Now deification, according to Romanides, was possible in the Old Testament, as well as the New – that is, even before the Incarnation of the Word and His saving Sacrifice on the Cross. Nevertheless, he asserts that we can have no direct, personal knowledge of Christ before His Incarnation, but only after. And we can have no direct, personal knowledge at any time of the Father and the Holy Spirit. In other words, our relationship with God, even at the highest stage of spiritual development, deification, is impersonal – in spite of the fact that it is defined as “the perfection of personhood”!

As he writes: “Since God became man, the Incarnation brought about a special relationship between God and man or Christ and man, a relationship that is nevertheless non-existent when we consider the Holy Trinity as a whole. We do not have a relationship with the Holy Trinity or with the uncreated Divinity that is like our relationship with Christ. In other words, our relationship with the Father or with the Holy Spirit is not like our relationship with Christ. Only with Christ do we have a personal relationship. The Holy Trinity came into personal contact with man only through the Incarnation, only through Christ. This relationship did not exist before the Incarnation, because we did not have a relationship with God as we do with other people before the Incarnation…”

Since many will find it hardly credible that a famous Orthodox theologian should say such blasphemous things, and may suspect that Romanides has been taken out of context, it will be useful to cite the whole of the passage from which the above text has been quoted. My comments are in italics:-

“There are certain Orthodox theologians of Russian descent who claim that God is a personal God.

“They claim that God is not the God of philosophy, a construction of human philosophical thought, but that He is a personal God.

“Western tradition makes similar statements.”

God is most certainly a personal God. The Holy Fathers, the Russians and the Westerners until the most recent times are unanimous on this.

“But in Patristic tradition, God is not a personal God. In fact, God is not even God. God does not correspond to anything we can conceive or would be able to conceive.”

The latter statement is true, but does not justify the first two statements, which are false. We have already mentioned that the inevitable imprecision of human language in speaking about the things of God in no way invalidates the attempts of men, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to make true statements about God. And one of these true statements is indubitably the statement that God is personal, and that He enters into a personal relationship with men.

“The relationship between God and man is not a personal relationship and it is also not a subject-object relationship. So when we speak about a personal relationship between God and man, we are making a mistake. That kind of relationship between God and human beings does not exist. What we are talking about now has bearing on another error that some people make when they speak about a communion of persons and try to develop a theology based on a communion of persons using the relations between the Persons in the Trinity as a model. The relations between God and man are not like the relations between fellow human beings. Why? Because we are not on the same level or in the same business with God.”

But God came down to our level, and made it His business to enter into a personal relationship with us in Christ. Nor did this relationship only begin to take place after the Incarnation, as Romanides goes on to say:

“What we have just said holds true until the Incarnation. However, after the Incarnation of God the Word, we can have a personal relationship with God by means of and on account of the Incarnation. But this relationship is with God as the God-man (as the Son of God and the Son of man).”

God had a personal relationship with Adam and Eve before the Fall. He had a personal relationship with the patriarchs and prophets after the Fall. He spoke with Abraham and Jacob “face to face” (Genesis 32.20). He “spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (Exodus 33.11). He called David a man “after My own heart” (I Kings 13.13), and of Solomon He said: “I will be his Father, and he will be My son” (II Kings 7.14; I Chronicles 17.13). And David himself said of his relationship with God: “Thou hast held me by my right hand, and by Thy counsel hast Thou guided me, and with glory hast Thou taken me to Thyself” (Psalm 72.22).

What are these if not deeply personal relationships? – and all before the Incarnation of Christ. Of course, the relationship between God and man has been raised to a new level now that sin has been abolished through the Cross and Baptism, we have received the Holy Spirit through Chrismation and have participated in the Body and Blood of Christ in the Divine Eucharist. But the relationship existed also before the Fall, albeit in an imperfect way. Even then, God entered into relationships of great intimacy and love with the Righteous of the Old Testament. To call such relationships “non-personal” is an abuse both of language and of the facts.

What reason could Romanides have for denying that God is a Person(s) and that our relationship with Him is personal? The present writer can only speculate here, but the answer may lie in Romanides’ obsession with the distinction between the Essence and the Energies of God, according to which God is unknowable in His Essence, but knowable in His Essence. Now this is a valid and very important distinction, but Romanides abuses it as often as he uses it correctly. It would be an abuse, for example, to say that since God can only be known through His Energies, our relationship with Him can only be “energetic”, not personal. For Who is known through His Energies? Is it not the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit – that is, the Persons of the Holy Trinity? So our relationship with God is both “energetic” and personal: we know the Persons of God through His Energies. For, as St. Paul says, God has “shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God [His Energies] in the face of Jesus Christ [a Person]” (II Corinthians 4.6).

Another possibility – again, purely speculative – is that personhood in God and personhood in man are for Romanides so different as to be in fact two quite distinct concepts. A Divine Person would then be unable to have a personal relationship with a human person. But the Incarnate Word is able to have a personal relationship with men, because His Personhood is composite, being not only Divine, but also human – “theandric”. However, the Person of the Word is the same before as after the Incarnation; it was not a different Person who communicated “impersonally” with the Prophets before the Incarnation and “personally” with men afterwards. Indeed, this idea comes close to the heresy of Nestorianism, to the theory that there are in fact two Persons in the Word, one Divine and the other human.

“Since God became man, the Incarnation brought about a special relationship between God and man or Christ and man, a relationship that is nevertheless non-existent when we consider the Holy Trinity as a whole. We do not have a relationship with the Holy Trinity or with the uncreated Divinity that is like our relationship with Christ. In other words, our relationship with the Father or with the Holy Spirit is not like our relationship with Christ. Only with Christ do we have a personal relationship. The Holy Trinity came into personal contact with man only through the Incarnation, only through Christ. This relationship did not exist before the Incarnation, because we did not have a relationship with God as we do with other people before the Incarnation…”

This is the height of impiety and the destruction of the whole of Christianity! The whole essence of our faith lies in our belief in the Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and in the possibility of our entering into a perfect and personal union with all Three Persons of the One God for all eternity. God the Holy Trinity entered into a personal relationship with us already when He said: “Let US create man…” (Genesis 1.26). And all Three Persons already showed that they were “in the same business” with us, as Romanides puts it, when they said: “Let US go down and confuse their language” (Genesis 11.7). And all Three Persons appeared to Abraham in the form of men or angels at the Oak of Mamre (Genesis 18).

For, as St. Gregory Palamas writes: “I shall remind you of Abraham’s most wonderful vision of God, when he clearly saw the One God in Three Persons, before He had been proclaimed as such. ‘The Lord appeared unto him by the oak of Mamre; and he lifted up his eyes and looked, and lo, three men stood by him: and he ran to meet them.’ He actually saw the One God Who appeared to him as Three. ‘God appeared to him,’ it says, ‘and lo, three men.’ Having run to meet the three men, however, he addressed them as one, saying, ‘My Lord, if now I have found favour in thy sight, pass not away from thy servant’. The three then discoursed with him as though they were one. ‘And he said to Abraham, Where is Sarah thy wife? I will certainly return unto thee about the same time of year: and Sarah thy wife shall have a son.’ As the aged Sarah laughed on hearing this, ‘the Lord said, Wherefore did Sarah laugh?’ Notice that the One God is Three Hypostases, and the Three Hypostases are One Lord, for it says, ‘The Lord said’.”

If, even after the Incarnation, we can have a personal relationship only with Christ, and not with the Father and the Holy Spirit, why does Christ tell us to pray directly to the Father in the words: “Our Father…”? Why does He say: “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him” (John 14.23)? And why, when Philip asked, “Lord, show us the Father”, did the Lord reply: “Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me?” (John 14.14).

As for the Holy Spirit, why, if we do not have a personal relationship with Him, do we pray to Him at the beginning of the Divine services: “O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of truth…”? Why did Christ call Him another Comforter, Who would “teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you” (John 14.25)? And why, if we do not have a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit, does the Apostle Paul say that it is precisely the Spirit Who teaches us to have a deeper personal, filial relationship with the Father; ”for you have received the Spirit of adoption, by Whom we cry out: ‘Abba, Father’” (Romans 8.16)?

The “empirical theology” of Romanides is a many-headed hydra that strangles our faith at many points, and even strikes it at its very heart – the fact of our real, personal, empirically experienced communion with the One God in Three Persons.

III. ROMANIDES ON ORIGINAL SIN

Modern man hates the idea of sin more than all others. He will do anything to avoid admitting that he is sinful in more than a superficial sense. Sin must be excused, or denied, or redefined as something different from sin. Great theoretical systems such as Marxism, Darwinism and Freudianism are constructed in order to explain how we are supposedly not sinful at all: the real causes of “sin” are our biological inheritance, our childhood training, our nationality or our position in the class system. And if sin is not sin as traditionally understood, then it follows that the traditional methods of expiating sin are invalid or based on a misunderstanding.

This being the case, it is not surprising that attempts to reinterpret the idea of sin and its expiation have crept into the Orthodox Church and Orthodox theology. Romanides is the main exponent of the renovationist attitude towards sin. He has attacked the traditional concepts of sin and expiation from sin at three points: the doctrine of original sin, the doctrine of the Sacrifice for sin on the Cross, and the doctrine of Holy Baptism.

Let us examine his teaching on original sin…

Can Sin be Inherited?

Nobody pretends that the doctrine of original sin is easy to understand: it is mysterious and to a certain degree counter-intuitive. But then so are several of the deepest and most central teachings of the Orthodox Faith. The temptation for the rationalist mind is to try and strip away the mystery and replace it with something that is clearer, more commonsensical. In the case of original sin, it is difficult for us to understand how sin can be passed down from Adam and Eve to all their descendants, and it offends our sense of justice.

Of course, it is not personal responsibility for Adam’s personal sin that is inherited. For how can we be personally responsible for something that happened before we were even born? However, a certain sinful pollution of human nature is inherited by all those who have the same nature as Adam. As St. Symeon the New Theologian writes: “Human nature is sinful from its very conception. God did not create man sinful, but pure and holy. But since the first-created Adam lost this garment of sanctity, not from any other sin than pride alone, and became corruptible and mortal, all people also who came from the seed of Adam are participants of the ancestral sin from their very conception and birth. He who has been born in this way, even though he has not yet performed any sin, is already sinful through this ancestral sin.”

This is the teaching of the Orthodox Church. And that is why babies are baptized “for the remission of sins”, not because they have committed any personal sins – they are too young for that – but because they have inherited original sin. So a certain mystery remains: the mystery of inherited, collective guilt that is manifest in the fact that every human being comes into this world already polluted by sin.

Now the idea of collective guilt is accepted by many even of those outside the Church. Thus there are many in the contemporary generation of Germans who feel guilt for the sins of the Nazis even though they were not born at that time. The Fathers of the Russian Church Abroad – St. John Maximovich and Archbishop Averky (Taushev) taught that all Russians are responsible for the sin of allowing the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. The sin of a single man can be felt to taint his whole family or even his whole nation. But the idea that the sin of the father of mankind could have tainted the whole of the human race is rejected by Romanides and the Romanideans.

Of course, this rejection is not new. The British monk Pelagius (ca. 354-420) was perhaps the first openly to question original sin. And although the ideas of Pelagius are not identical to those of Romanides, there is much in the old polemic between Pelagius and his main opponent, St. Augustine of Hippo, that is relevant to an evaluation of this neo-Pelagian teaching.

Thus St. Augustine defends the idea of collective guilt as follows: “Why did Ham sin and yet vengeance was declared against his son Canaan? Why was the son of Solomon punished [for Solomon’s sin] by the breaking up of the kingdom? Why was the sin of Ahab, king of Israel, visited upon his posterity? Now we read in the sacred books, ‘Returning the iniquity of the fathers into the bosom of their children after them’ (Jeremiah 32.18) and ‘Visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation’ (Exodus 20.5)?... Are these statements false? Who would say this but the most open enemy of the divine words?”

However, there are other passages of Holy Scripture that appear to deny the idea of collective or inherited guilt. Thus: “Parents shall not die for their children, nor children for their parents” (Deuteronomy 2.16). Moreover, in some cases there may be hidden reasons that explain the apparent injustice of children suffering for their parents. Thus St. John Chrysostom, commenting on Canaan’s suffering for his father Ham’s sin, writes: “Seeing their children bearing punishment proves a more grievous form of chastisement for the fathers than being subject to it themselves. Accordingly, this incident occurred so that Ham should endure greater anguish on account of his natural affection, so that God’s blessing should continue without impairment and so that his son in being the subject of the curse should atone for his own sins. You see, even if in the present instance he bears the curse on account of his father’s sin, nevertheless it was likely that he was atoning for his own failings…”

Again, Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich wrote to a “Mrs. J.”: “You complain about the bad fate of your cousin. Her suffering, you say, is unexplainable. Her husband, an officer, contracted a vile disease and died in a mental institution. She caught the disease from her husband and now she is in a mental institution as well. You praise her as a good and honourable woman and you marvel, how could the all-knowing God allow such a marriage to even happen, and then for such an innocent creature to suffer so much? If your cousin is indeed so innocent and honourable as you believe, then her suffering has befallen her, of course, without her own sin. Then you have to look for a cause in the sin of her parents. It is said for the Most High that He is ‘visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and fourth generation’ (Exodus 34.7). I know you will say that which is usually said – why should children suffer for the sins of the parents? I will ask you also – how else would the Lord God scare the people from sinning except by visiting their children with the punishment for the sin?” As he writes in another place: “All men from the first to the last are made from the same piece of clay, therefore they all, from the first to the last, form one body and one life. Each is responsible for all, and each is influencing all. If one link of this body sins, the whole body must suffer. If Adam sinned, you and I must suffer for it…”

However, the Romanideans reply to this: “We do not deny that Adam’s descendants suffer for his sin. But we cannot accept that they are guilty of his sin. Rather, they inherit, not the sin itself, but its punishment.” This sounds plausible at first, and yet it does not go to the heart of the matter. For there is a distinction between personal sin and the sinfulness of nature or “the law of sin” (Romans 7.23). This is the same as the distinction between sin as the act of a human person, and sin as the state or condition or law of human nature. Personal sin cannot be transferred to another human being. But the sinfulness of nature can.

Archbishop Theophan of Poltava points out that St. Paul “clearly distinguishes in his teaching on original sin between two points: paraptoma or transgression, and amartia or sin. By the first he understood the personal transgression by our forefathers of the will of God that they should not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, by the second – the law of sinful disorder that entered human nature as the consequence of this transgression. When he is talking about the inheritance of the original sin, he has in mind not paraptoma or transgression, for which only they are responsible, but amartia, that is, the law of sinful disorder which afflicted human nature as a consequence of the fall into sin of our forefathers. And emarton - ‘sinned’ in Romans 5.12 must therefore be understood not in the active voice, in the sense: ‘committed sin’, but in the middle-passive voice, in the sense: amartoloi in 5.19, that is, ‘became sinners’ or ‘turned out to be sinners’, since human nature fell in Adam.”

We find essentially the same distinction in St. Maximus the Confessor: “There then arose sin, the first and worthy of reproach, that is, the falling away of the will from good to evil. Through the first there arose the second – the change in nature from incorruption to corruption, which cannot elicit reproach. For two sins arise in [our] forefather as a consequence of the transgression of the Divine commandment: one worthy of reproach, and the second having as its cause the first and unable to elicit reproach”. Thus the original sin of Adam, in the sense of his personal transgression, the original sin which no other person shares or is guilty of, has engendered sinful, corrupt, diseased, mortal human nature, the law of sin, which we all share because we have all inherited it, but of which we are not guilty since we cannot be held personally responsible for it. And if this seems to introduce two original sins, this seems to correspond to the teaching of the Holy Fathers.

We have inherited the law of sin, in the most basic way: through sexual reproduction. For“in sins,” says David, - that is, in a nature corrupted by original sin, - “did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 50.5). It follows that even newborn babies, even unborn embryos, are sinners in this sense. For “even from the womb, sinners are estranged” (Psalm 57.3). And as Job says: “Who shall be pure from uncleanness? Not even one, even if his life should be but one day upon the earth” (Job 14.4).

St. Ambrose of Milan writes, commenting on the Lord’s washing of Peter’s feet: “Peter was clean, but his feet must be washed, since he had the sin inherited from the first man, at the time when the serpent felled him and misled him into error. Thus Peter’s feet were washed to remove the hereditary sin.”

Again, St. Anastasius of Sinai writes: “In Adam we became co-inheritors of the curse, not as if we disobeyed that divine commandment with him but because he became mortal and transmitted sin through his seed. We became mortals from a mortal…”

Again, St. Gennadius Scholarius, Patriarch of Constantinople, writes: “Everyone in the following of Adam has died, because they have all inherited their nature from him. But some have died because they themselves have sinned, while others have died only because of Adam’s condemnation – for example, children”.

Christ was born from a virgin who had been cleansed from all sin by the Holy Spirit in order to break the cycle of sin begetting sin. As St. Gregory Palamas writes: “If the conception of God had been from seed, He would not have been a new man, nor the Author of new life which will never grow old. If He were from the old stock and had inherited its sin, He would not have been able to bear within Himself the fullness of the incorruptible Godhead or to make His Flesh an inexhaustible Source of sanctification, able to wash away even the defilement of our First Parents by its abundant power, and sufficient to sanctify all who came after them.”

We conclude that children can indeed inherit sin from their parents, not simply in the sense that they inherit the punishment for their parents’sin, but also in the sense that they inherit sin itself – although this inherited sin is not the personal sin of their parents, but the sinful nature that they inherit from them. This takes place on the level of the family, of the nation, and of mankind as a whole. Thus just as the sin of a father can poison the life of his children, and the sin of a Lenin or a Hitler can poison the lives of generations of Russians or Germans, so the sin of Adam and Eve has poisoned the lives of all their generations after them.

This is possible because, while human persons are multiple and distinct from each other, human nature is one. For, as St. Basil the Great writes, what we inherit from Adam “is not the personal sin of Adam, but the original human being himself”, who “exists in us by necessity”. That is why St. Gregory Palamas calls Adam’s sin “our original disobedience to God”, “our ancestral sin in Paradise”. It follows, as St. Athanasius the Great writes, that “when Adam transgressed, his sin reached unto all men…” And this, as St. Cyril of Alexandria writes, “not because they sinned along with Adam, for they did not then exist, but because they had the same nature as Adam, which fell under the law of sin”.

What is Sin?

But Romanides’ radicalism goes further than his denial of the inheritance of sin: it extends to his understanding of sin as such. Thus even Adam’ssin is not deemed by him to be sin in the usual sense. “Many understand the fall now as an ethical fall, whereas when St. Symeon the New Theologian speaks about the fall, he does not have in mind an ethical fall… Symeon the New Theologian is an ascetic. He teaches asceticism and not ethics. He has in mind that men do not have noetic prayer. That is what he means…

“In the Augustinian tradition sin has appeared under an ethical form, whereas in the Fathers of the Church it has the form of illness and the eradication of sin is presented under the form of therapy. When we have illness, we have therapy. Sin is an illness of man and not simply a disorder of his when he does not obey God like a subordinate. For sin is not an act and transgression of the commandments of God, as happens with a transgression of the laws of the State, etc. There exist laws, a transgressor transgresses the law and must be punished by the law. Augustine understood sin in this way, that is, that God gave commands, man transgressed the command of God and consequently was punished.”

This is nonsense. First of all, the contrast Romanides draws between ethics and asceticism is artificial and false. Sin is the primary category of ethics, and asceticism is the science and art of the struggle against sin. So the sin of Adam and Eve was both an ethical and an ascetic fall. Ascetics train themselves to guard themselves against sinful thoughts coming to them from the world, the flesh and the devil. Eve failed to guard herself and therefore sinned. As St. Paul says, “the woman being deceived was in the transgression” (I Timothy 2.15) – and transgression (parabasis) is an ethical category…

Secondly, the darkening of the mind and the loss of noetic prayer are the consequences of the original sin, not the sin itself. Romanides defines the fall as “the identification of the energies of the mind [nous] with the energies of the logical faculty [tis logikes]. When the mind was darkened, [it] was identified in energy with the logical faculty and the passions.” Maybe. But this is the consequence of the fall, not the fall itself. Nor does St. Symeon the New Theologian teach anything different. As we have seen, his teaching on original sin is completely traditional - what Romanides calls “Augustinian”!

Thirdly, while sin can be called illness, and the process of removing sin – therapy, this in no way implies that the illness is not the illness of sin. While there are obvious analogies with physical illness, sin is more than a physical illness. Whereas an ordinary physical disease is morally neutral, so to speak, the disease of original sin is far from being such: it is a sinful condition, which therefore requires, not simply treatment, but expiation through repentance and sacrifice - which cannot be identified with any changes in the relationship between the mind and the logical faculty.

For, as Alan Jacobs writes, “Many of us would agree that sin, like the more communicable diseases, transfers to other people; few of us have strong immunity to its ravages. But we would also agree that the affliction of disease is not moral in character. Although it is possible to act in such a way that one becomes more prone to illness, surely there is no sin in being ill.”

Fourthly, it is nonsense to say that “sin is not an act and transgression of the commandments of God”. Both the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Fathers understand personal sin as precisely a transgression of the commandments of God. “The strength of sin is the law” (I Corinthians 15.56), and “where no law is, there is no transgression” (Romans 4.15). Therefore sin is precisely a transgression of the law or the commandment of God – in this case, the law that Adam and Eve were not to eat of the fruit of the tree of life.

As for the idea that “sin is an illness of man and not simply a disorder of his when he does not obey God like a subordinate”, does Romanides not think that man is God’s subordinate?! Of course, man in the unfallen state is not merely a subordinate: he is also God’s son. But even the sinless son is subordinate to his father, as Adam was to God in Paradise, and as Christ Himself will be to the Father at the Second Coming (I Corinthians 15.28).

Sin and Death

According to Romanides, what is passed down from Adam to his descendants is not sin, but death. And death is not considered to be a punishment for sin, but God’s mercy. “God did not impose death on man as a punishment for any inherited guilt. Rather, God allowed death by reason of His goodness and His love, so that in this way sin and evil in man should not become immortal.”

This is half true. What is true is that God did not create death, and that man (with the devil), rather than God, is the cause of the entrance of death into the world. Moreover, death is a mercy insofar as it stops the continuation of sin, and allows sinful human nature to be dissolved into its elements and resurrected in a sinless form at the General Resurrection from the dead. But none of this entails that death is not also a punishment.

That death is both punishment and mercy is indicated by St. Athanasius the Great: “By punishing us with death, the Lawgiver cut off the spread of sin. And yet through that very punishment He also demonstrated His love for us. He bound sin and death together when He gave the law, placing the sinner under punishment of death. And yet He ordered things in such a way that the punishment might in itself serve the goal of salvation. For death brings about separation from this life and brings evil works to an end. It sets us free from labour, sweat and pain, and ends the suffering of the body. Thus the Judge mixes His love for us with punishment.”

So what we inherit from Adam and Eve, according to Romanides, is not sin in any shape or form, but only death, including the process of corruption and ageing that leads to death. It follows that for him every human being is born in complete innocence, and only becomes sinful later. “The Fathers emphasize that every man is born as was Adam and Eve. And every man goes through the same fall. The darkening of the mind happens to everyone. In the embryo, where the mind [nous] of man exists, it is not yet darkened. Every man suffers the fall of Adam and Eve by reason of the environment.”

As we have seen, this teaching is directly contradicted by St. Symeon the New Theologian: “Human nature is sinful from its very conception”. And Nicholas Cabasilas, writes: “We have not seen even one day pure from sin, nor have we ever breathed apart from wickedness, but, as the psalmist says, ‘we have gone astray from the womb, we err from our birth’ (Psalm 58.4).” And perhaps the Father he admires most of all, St. Gregory Palamas, writes: “Before Christ we all shared the same ancestral curse and condemnation poured out on all of us from our single Forefather, as if it had sprung from the root of the human race and was the common lot of our nature. Each person’s individual action attracted either reproof or praise from God, but no one could do anything about the shared curse and condemnation, or the evil inheritance that had been passed down to him and through him would pass to his descendants.”

Since Romanides regards every human being as pure when he first comes into the world, without any specifically sinful inheritance, he is forced to see the consequent fall of every man as coming, not from inside his nature, but from outside, from his environment. “The fall of the child comes from the environment, from parents, from uncles, from friends, etc. If the child is in the midst of a good environment, this child can grow without a problem, with noetic prayer. The child has less of a problem than the adults. He learns quickly. The child is destroyed by the environment…”

Only one thing from within human nature contributes to man’s fall, according to Romanides: the process of ageing and corruption. For this engenders the fear of death, which in turn engenders the multitude of passions. This was Romanides’ revolutionary thesis in his first major work, The Ancestral Sin (1957), but became less prominent in his later work. There he writes: “Because of the sins that spring forth from the fear of death ‘the whole world lieth in wickedness’. Through falsehood and fear, Satan, in various degrees, motivates sin.”

Again he writes: “All human unrest is rooted in inherited psychological and bodily infirmities, that is, in the soul’s separation from grace and in the body’s corruptibility, from which springs all selfishness. Any perceived threat automatically triggers fear and uneasiness. Fear does not allow a man to be perfected in love… The fountain of man’s personal sins is the power of death that is in the hands of the devil and in man’s own willing submission to him.”

Now there is an important element of truth in this thesis, which is valuable and should not be denied. But it is also an exaggeration, which ignores and obscures certain vital facts. We shall come to these facts after citing his most extensive exposition of his thesis in full: “When we take into account the fact that man was created to become perfect in freedom and love as God is perfect, that is, to love God and his neighbour in the same unselfish way that God loves the world, it becomes apparent that the death of the soul, that is, the loss of divine grace, and the corruption of the body have rendered such a life of perfection impossible. In the first place, the deprivation of divine grace impairs the mental powers of the newborn infant; thus, the mind of man has a tendency toward evil from the beginning. This tendency grows strong when the ruling force of corruption becomes perceptible in the body. Through the power of death and the devil, sin that reigns in man gives rise to fear and anxiety and to the general instinct of self-preservation or survival. Thus, Satan manipulates man’s fear and his desire for self-satisfaction, raising up sin in him, in other words, transgression against the divine will regarding unselfish love, and provoking man to stray from his original destiny. Since weakness is caused in the flesh by death, Satan moves man to countless passion and leads him to devious thoughts, actions, and selfish relations with God as well as with his fellow man. Sin reigns both in death, and in the mortal body because ‘the sting of death is sin’.

“Because of death, man must first attend to the necessities of life in order to stay alive. In this struggle, self-interests are unavoidable. Thus, man is unable to live in accordance with his original destiny of unselfish love. This state of subjection under the reign of death is the root of man’s weaknesses in which he becomes entangled in sin at the urging of the demons and by his own consent. Resting in the hands of the devil, the power of the fear of death is the root from which self-aggrandizement, egotism, hatred, envy, and other similar passions spring up.”

In another work, Romanides writes: “Because [a man] lives constantly under the fear of death, [he] continuously seeks bodily and psychological security, and thus becomes individualistically inclined and utilitarian in attitude. Sin… is rooted in the disease of death.” But this is an exaggeration: the fear of death is notthe root of all evil. Many pagan vices have nothing to do with the fear of death. When the warrior risks his life in order to rape and plunder, is his motivation the fear of death? No, it is lust and greed – which are stronger than the fear of death that threatens rapists and plunderers. As for the more subtle but still more serious sins, such as pride, these are much more primordial than the fear of death. The devil did not rebel against God out of fear of death, but simply out of pride.

There is no doubt that the fear of death, which is natural to man in his corrupted state, provides an incentive to sin. Nevertheless, this fear is not sin in itself, which is proved by the fact that Christ, having assumed a corruptible but sinless body, allowed Himself to feel the fear of death in the Garden of Gethsemane. The fear of death is an innocent passion in itself, otherwise Christ, Who is completely sinless, would not have allowed Himself to feel it. Personal sin begins only when out of fear of death we turn away from God’s commandments. Christ feared death in the Garden, but He did not allow this fear to turn Him away from the feat of dying for the salvation of the world, but trampled on His fear, showing Himself to be perfect in love. The holy martyrs also conquered the fear of death in their martyric exploits. But the exploit was not in the fact that they did not fear death, but in that they did not allow this fear to turn them away from the confession of Christ.

The root of all evil is the desire to live in defiance of God and His law, which is pride. That was the motivation of Eve when she took of the forbidden fruit. She feared neither God nor the death that God prophesied would take place if she disobeyed Him. If we look for a cause of her pride in her own nature or in her environment, we look in vain. For sin, as Dostoyevsky powerfully demonstrated in Notes from Underground, is ultimately irrational.

If sin were not irrational, but the determined effect of a definite cause, it would not be sin. Thus if all the blame for Eve’s sin could be placed on the devil, it would not be her sin, but the devil’s. And if the blame could be placed on her nature alone, again it would not be her sin, but simply an inevitable product of her nature, like the behaviour of animals. But her nature was not fallen and not purely animalian, and could be led in the right direction by the image of God in her – freewill and reason. The mystery and the tragedy of sin – both before the fall and after the fall – lies in the fact that, whatever incitements to sin exist in our nature or in our environment, they do not explain the sin, and therefore do not excuse it. The much-maligned St. Augustine was surely right in attributing the cause of the fall to pride, and in not seeking any cause of that pride in anything beyond itself.

Romanides continues: “In addition to the fact that man ‘subjects himself to anything in order to avoid dying’, he constantly fears that his life is without meaning. Thus, he strives to demonstrate to himself and to others that it has worth. He loves flatterers and hates his detractors. He seeks his own and envies the success of others. He loves those who love him and hates those who hate him. He seeks security and happiness in wealth, glory, bodily pleasures, and he may even imagine that his destiny is a self-seeking eudaemonistic and passionless enjoyment of the presence of God regardless of whether or not he has true, active, unselfish love for others. Fear and anxiety render man an individualist. And when he identifies himself with a communal or social ideology it, too, is out of individualistic, self-seeking motives because he perceives his self-satisfaction and eudaemonia as his destiny. Indeed, it is possible for him to be moved by ideological principles of vague love for mankind despite the fact that mortal hatred for his neighbour nests in his heart. These are the works of the ‘flesh’ under the sway of death and Satan.”

In support of his thesis Romanides quotes from St. John Chrysostom on the phrase “sold under sin” (Romans 7.14): “Because with death, he is saying, there entered in a horde of passions. For when the body became mortal, it was necessary for it also to receive concupiscence, anger, pain, and all the other passion which required much wisdom to prevent them from inundating us and drowning our reason in the depth of sin. For in themselves they were not sin, but in their uncontrolled excess this is what they work.”

But Chrysostom does not so much support Romanides’ thesis here as limit and correct it. He limits it by referring only to what we may call physical passions, such as concupiscence, anger and pain: there is no reference to pride. He corrects it by indicating that these passions are not in themselves sinful. They may incite sin by attempting to inundate our reason. But it is our reason that sins or refrains from sin by giving in to, or resisting, passion.

The physical passions are fallen, a corruption of the original unfallen nature of man. Nevertheless, God allowed their introduction into our nature in order to counteract the effects of death. Thus concupiscence was allowed to enter in order that man should want to reproduce himself, and be able to do so in his new, corrupt body. Pain was introduced in order that he should learn what is dangerous for his existence; and anger in order that he should fight against such dangers. Since these passions are useful and good for our continued existence in the conditions of the fall and death, the saint does not call them sinful as such, even though they can lead to sin and are the product, in their present form, of sin. Nor are they the direct product of death, but rather a form of resistance to death. So Chrysostom does not support Romanides’ thesis that death is the direct cause of sin.

More in favour of Romanides’ thesis are the words of St. Cyril of Alexandria: “Because he [Adam] fell under sin and slipped into corruptibility, pleasures and filthiness assaulted the nature of the flesh, and in our members was unveiled a savage law. Our nature, then, became diseased by sin through the disobedience of one, that is, of Adam. Thus all were made sinners, not by being transgressors with Adam, something which they never were, but by being of his nature and falling under the law of sin… Human nature fell ill in Adam and subject to corruptibility through disobedience, and, therefore, the passions entered in.”

However, even here it is not said that death and corruptibility are the cause of our nature’s sickness, but the other way round: our nature’s sickness is the cause of death and corruptibility, and the cause of that sickness is sin (“our nature… became diseased by sin”), which is, of course, a perfectly Orthodox thought. So the only difference between St. Cyril and St. John Chrysostom is that while Cyril prefers to speak about our nature falling under the law of sin, Chrysostom prefers to speak about the introduction of passions (concupiscence, anger, pain) which, if not checked by our reason, lead to sinful acts, but which are not sinful in themselves. This difference, as Romanides himself admits, is only a matter of terminology.

Romanides tries to encapsulate the argument that death is the cause of sin by asserting that “death is a kind of parasite in which sin dwells”. This is an elegant phrase, but it is not immediately clear what it means. He comes closest to a clarification a little later: “Because of the action of the devil through the death of the soul, that is, the loss of divine grace, and the infirmity of the flesh, men are born with a powerful inclination toward sin. And all, whether in knowledge or in ignorance, violate the will of God. All are born under captivity to the devil, death, and sin. Moreover, as a result, they fail to attain to their original destiny, that is, to moral perfection, immortality, and theosis, and are bereft of the glory of God.”

As it stands, this is perfectly acceptable – distinctly more so than his earlier statements. For his earlier statements stressed the fear of death, physical death, as the cause of sin, which is patently not true for many sins; whereas here he places the emphasis on the much broader and deeper category, “the death of the soul, the loss of divine grace”. Nevertheless, this passage still begs the question: what is the cause of the death of the soul? Is it not sin? And whose sin could this be, if not Adam’s, insofar as we are already born in the condition of spiritual death before we have committed any personal sin?

Romanides reverses the true relationship between sin and death. “Instead of the wages of sin being death,” writes Patrick Pummill, “it is turned upside down and the wages of death becomes sin. No doubt, death fuels the fire of sin, but the inner fallenness/corruption we inherit from Adam is the root of human sin”.

St. Augustine expressed essentially the same thought, against a very similar error of the Pelagians, as follows: “People speak in this way, who wish to wrest men from the apostle’s words into their own thought. For where the apostle says, ‘By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so passed upon all men’, they wish the meaning to be not that sin passed over, but death… [But] all die in the sin, they do not sin in the death.”

The Council of Orange (529) also condemned the Romanidean thesis: “If anyone asserts that Adam’s transgression injured him alone and not his descendants, or declares that certainly death of the body only, which is the punishment of sin, but not sin also, which is the death of the soul, passed through one man into the whole human race, he will do an injustice to God, contradicting the Apostle who says: ‘As through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, so also death passed into all men, in whom all have sinned’” (canon 2).

However, Romanides here directly contradicts the teaching of the Fathers, who do not emphasize that every man is born as was Adam and Eve. On the contrary, Adam and Eve were born in innocence, but their descendants in sin and corruption - “I was conceived in iniquity” (Psalm 50.5). Nor is it true that the embryo is not yet darkened, for “even from the womb, sinners are estranged” (Psalm 57.3)…

The fact that original sin taints even children is the reason for the practice of infant baptism. And this practice in turn confirms the traditional doctrine of original sin. Thus the Council of Carthage in 252 under St. Cyprian decreed “not to forbid the baptism of an infant who, scarcely born, has sinned in nothing apart from that which proceeds from the flesh of Adam. He has received the contagion of the ancient death through his very birth, and he comes, therefore, the more easily to the reception of the remission of sins in that it is not his own but the sins of another that are remitted”.

Still more relevant here is Canon 110 of the Council of Carthage in 419: “He who denies the need for young children and those just born from their mother’s womb to be baptized, or who says that although they are baptized for the remission of sins they inherit nothing from the forefathers’ sin that would necessitate the bath of regeneration [from which it would follow that the form of baptism for the remission of sins would be used on them not in a true, but in a false sense], let him be anathema. For the word of the apostle: ‘By one man sin came into the world and death entered all men by sin, for in him all have sinned’ (Romans 5.12), must be understood in no other way than it has always been understood by the Catholic Church, which has been poured out and spread everywhere. For in accordance with this rule of faith children, too, who are themselves not yet able to commit any sin, are truly baptized for the remission of sins, that through regeneration they may be cleansed of everything that they have acquired from the old birth.”

It follows that the teaching of Romanides on original sin falls under the anathema of the Orthodox Church.

Romans 5.12

Romanides’ seemingly most powerful argument rests on his rejection of the translation of Romans 5.12 used by the Councils of Carthage and Orange above. His translation goes: “As through one man sin came into the world, and through sin death, so also death came upon all men, because of which [’ in Greek] all have sinned.” This implies that all men sin because of death; so death is the cause of sin. Another translation favoured by many theologians is as follows: “As through one man sin came into the world, and through sin death, so also death came upon all men, because all have sinned.” This implies that sin is the cause of death, but everyman’s sin, not Adam’s. The traditional translation, however, which was adopted not only in the Orthodox West but also in the Slavonic translation of SS. Cyril and Methodius, is as follows: “As through one man sin came into the world, and through sin death, so also death came upon all men, in whom [i.e. in Adam] all have sinned.” This implies that all men are sinners because they are “in” Adam by nature.

If we open Joseph Thayer’s authoritative Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, and look at the various usages of the preposition επι with the dative case, we find that both the second and third translations are possible from a purely grammatical and linguistic point of view, but not Romanides’ translation. Thus ’, according to the Lexicon, is sometimes equivalent to επιτουτω, οτι, meaning “on the ground of this, because”, and is used in this sense in II Corinthians 5.4 and Philippians 3.12. On the other hand, in other places – for example, Mark 2.4, Mark 13.2, Matthew 9.16, Luke 5.36, Mark 2.21, Matthew 14, 8, 11, Mark 6.25, Mark 6.55, Mark 6.39, John 11.38, Acts 8.16 and Revelation 19.14 - επι with the dative case is equivalent to the Latin in with the ablative case, indicating the place where or in which something takes place or is situated. This place can also be a person, as in the famous passage: “Thou art Peter, and on this rock (επι ταυτη τη πετρα) I will build My Church” (Matthew 16.18; cf. Ephesians 2.20).

Romanides’ translation is excluded, not only because “because of which” corresponds to neither of the two possible translations of ’, but also because the second half of the verse, in his translation, is in direct contradiction to the first. For while the first half says that death came into the world through sin, the second half says that sin came into the world through death! It seems very unlikely that St. Paul would have meant to contradict himself in one and the same sentence!

For, as Archbishop Eleutherius of Lithuania writes: “The two halves into which we can divide the content of this verse [Romans 5.12] through the conjunctions ‘as’ (ωσπερ) and ‘so also’ (και ουτως) represent, not a parallelism, and not a comparison, but a correspondence, according to which the first is the base, the common thesis, while the second is the conclusion from it. This logical connection is indicated by the conjunction ‘also’… With the universalism characteristic of the Apostle, and the highly generalizing flight of his thought, St. Paul in the first half speaks about the sin of the forefathers as being the cause of death in the world generally, and not in humanity alone. For the whole of creation is subject to corruption and death, not willingly but ‘by reason of Him Who hath subjected the same’ (Romans 8.12-22), because of the sin of Adam… From this general proposition the holy Apostle draws the conclusion concerning people that for the very same cause, that is, because of the sin of one man, they also die.”

Having established that, from a purely grammatical and linguistic point of view, the Greek conjunction ’ can be translated as “because” or “in whom”, but not as “because of which”, let us try and determine which of the two linguistically possible translations is correct.

This decision will be made on grounds of (1) coherence with the context of the passage, and (2) conformity with the general dogmatic teaching of the Apostle Paul.

1. The Context of the Passage. In order to clarify his meaning in Romans 5.12, St. Paul goes on to say: “By one man’s disobedience many were made sinners” (Romans 5.19). This is the doctrine of original sin in a nutshell: Adam’s sin made all his descendants sinners – not simply mortal, as Romanides would have it, but precisely sinners. And it is not because of death that all men have sinned, as Romanides would have it, but because of Adam – and more specifically, because of his “disobedience”, that is, his sin, which, as the Fathers, explain is inherited by us.

2. Other Passages in St. Paul’s Epistles. Now the question arises: are there any other passages in St. Paul’s works which are consistent with the traditional interpretation of ’ inRomans 5.12 as meaning “in him” (i.e., in Adam)? And the answer is: yes. For in I Corinthians 15.22 we read: “As in Adam (εν τω Αδαμ) all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.” If we all die in Adam, then there can be no objection to saying that we all become sinners in him, as the traditionalist translation of Romans 5.12 asserts, insofar as “death is the wages of sin” and sin is “the sting of death”.

But in what sense are we “in” Adam? In a rather literal, physical sense, as we have seen earlier. Adam, “the original human being himself”, is in us; he “exists in us by necessity” (St. Basil the Great). For all men, “from the first to the last, form one body and one life” (Bishop Nikolai). So if Adam is in us, his sinful human nature is in us, too.

We can see this more clearly if we recall St. Paul’s teaching on the exact correspondence between Adam and Christ, between Adam who made all his descendants by carnal birth sinners and Christ Who makes all His descendants by spiritual birth righteous: “As through the transgression of one man [judgement came] on all men to condemnation, so through one man’s act of righteousness [acquittal came] to all men for justification of life. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous.” (Romans 5.18-19)

St. Paul goes on to say that “the law [of Moses] entered in, that sin might abound” (Romans 5.20), by which he meant that it is the existence of the law that makes sin to be accounted as sin. However, before the law the personal sins of men were not imputed to them; they were not counted as having committed them. And yet they died. But death is “the wages of sin” (Romans 6.23). So of what sin was their death the wages? There can only be one answer: Adam’s.

Thus those who died before the Law of Moses died in spite of the fact that no personal transgressions were imputed to them, so that their death was “the wages of sin”, not in the sense of being the result of their personal transgressions, but of the sin of Adam. For before the Law only Adam was condemned to die because of his personal transgression. All the others died, not because of their personal transgressions, but because of Adam’s sin…

As St. Gregory of Nyssa writes: “Evil was mixed with our nature from the beginning… through those who by their disobedience introduced the disease. Just as in the natural propagation of the species each animal engenders its like, so man is born from man, a being subject to passions from a being subject to passions, a sinner from a sinner. Thus sin takes its rise in us as we are born; it grows with us and keeps us company till life’s term”.

IV. ROMANIDES ON THE CROSS AND BAPTISM

The Old and the New Testaments

According to Romanides, the Prophets of the Old Testament had exactly the same gift of deification as the Apostles and Saints of the New Testament. “The Fathers of our Fathers in the Old Testament have deification without the human nature of Christ. After them the Apostles also have deification with the human nature of Christ.” Even non-Jewish Prophets, such as Job the Much-Suffering, are asserted to have attained deification: “the Old Testament Job reached theosis even though he was a heathen and not a Jew”. Again he writes, speaking of the Eucharist, which is the mystery of Christ’s Sacrifice in the Church: “There is one Christ and He dwells in His entirety within every believer who has communed of the Immaculate Mysteries… This same mystery was also at work before Christ assumed flesh…”

How are we to interpret this? That even those who lived before the Incarnation and the Crucifixion participated in the Immaculate Mysteries?... St. Gregory of Nyssa teaches that at the Last Supper, the Apostles partook of the Sacrificed Body and Blood of Christ a few hours before that Body and Blood was actually – that is, spatiotemporally - sacrificed on the Cross. This is an instance of what has been called the mystery of liturgical time. Since the mystery takes place not only in time, but also in eternity, not only on an earthly altar, but also on the Altar of Heaven, its fruits can be received even before it was actually accomplished in space-time. However, the instance of the Last Supper must be seen as exceptional, and permitted, perhaps, because of the exceptional importance of the Apostles in the economy of salvation. The Church teaches that the Old Testament righteous went to hades after their deaths precisely because they had not yet received the mysteries of salvation that came only with the Coming of Christ…

Romanides sees two major differences between the Old and the New Testament. The first is that the Prophets saw the Word in His pre-incarnate form, whereas the Apostles saw Him incarnate. “Each Prophet received a revelation of the same Christ before He became Christ, when He was the Angel of the Lord only, the Word, etc., insofar as He became Christ with the Incarnation.”

The second is that the Prophets’ experience of deification was interrupted temporarily by death. “In the Old Testament there exists a temporary participation [in God]; that is, the experience of deification is temporary. Those who saw the uncreated glory of the Word nevertheless died in both body and soul, whereas now, with the Incarnation, as many as have seen the glory of the Word participate in a stable way in the glory of the Holy Trinity, for with the death of the body the soul does not undergo death. For the death of the soul is the eclipse of deification, which means the vision of God.”

“After death,” writes Romanides, “both the righteous and the unrighteous descend to the same place, to Hades, ‘where, without exception, all the souls of the dead go down and are together’, and there they anticipate the general resurrection and judgement, the only means of salvation or damnation. Death, which was initiated by the operations of Satan, constitutes a real though temporary diminishing of the divine plan for the world. Before the descent of Christ into Hades, Satan alone had the power of death. Once human nature was stricken by the disease of death, all the living and the dead became the devil’s captives. For the righteous of the Old Testament, however, captivity to Satan was unjust. They were to be saved in the future; their justification was realized through Christ Who imparted life to them…”

However, the idea that, for the righteous of the Old Testament, captivity to Satan was “unjust” is false. There is not a hint of such an idea in the Holy Fathers. None of the Old Testament righteous was without sin; and being in sin, they were not allowed to enter Paradise – a sentence whose justice no God-fearing man would dispute. Of course, this does not mean that they were in torment, or deprived of all consolation. The Prophet Jeremiah, though in hades, was seen by Judas Maccabaeus praying “in glory” for the people of Israel (II Maccabees 15. 12-16). But the all-holy God cannot be united with sinners; “without holiness no man shall see the Lord”.

This holiness, complete freedom from sin, was given only with the Coming of the Lord, and the completion of His Sacrifice for sin on the Cross. That is why St. Paul, after listing the great virtues of the Old Testament righteous, adds: “And all these, having obtained a good testimony through faith, did not receive the promise. For God had provided something better for us [the New Testament Christians], that they should not be made perfect apart from us” (Hebrews 11.39-40).

Romanides, however, considers, in direct contradiction to the apostle just quoted, that perfection was possible also in the Old Testament. “The way of perfection, the means of perfection, do not exist only in the New Testament, but exists also in the Old Testament. Consequently, the Grace of perfection was in both Testaments…”

Again, Romanides writes: “the Church was not founded on the day of Pentecost. The Church was founded from the time that God called Abraham and the Patriarchs and the Prophets. The Church was founded from then. The Church exists in the Old Testament. The Church existed in hades.”

Now there is nothing wrong with speaking about “the Church of the Old Testament”. However, in the context of Romanides’ theories, the phrase acquires a new and dubious meaning, for it appears to exclude the more traditional and more strictly accurate teaching that the Church in its fullness only began to exist in the New Testament, on the day of Pentecost. For the Church is the Body of Christ, and it was only from Pentecost that the Body of Christ in the Eucharist and the other mystical gifts that proceed from the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Ascension of Christ began to be distributed to the faithful…

It is not possible to be made perfect without being freed from original as well as personal sin, which was impossible for the Old Testament righteous but is possible for the New Testament Christians insofar as they belong to the Body of Christ. This shows that Romanides’ rejection of the doctrine of original sin led him to distort the relationship between the Old and New Testaments. The gulf between the Old and the New was bigger than he admitted; and this fact led him to distort also the nature of the New Testament teachings on the Cross and Baptism…

The Sacrifice for Sin

Having abolished the idea of inherited, original sin, and having asserted that the Old Testament righteous were in essentially the same relationship to God as the redeemed of the New Testament, it is not surprising that Romanides grossly downplays, if not totally abolishes, the significance of Christ’s Sacrifice for sin. Thus he objects to “the peculiar teachings of the Franco-Latin tradition concerning original sin as guilt inherited from Adam, or the need of satisfying divine Justice through the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross”. In other words, he rejects the central doctrine of the Christian faith, that we are saved only by the Sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, whereby the state of injustice, or sin, that acted as a barrier to the full communion between God and man was abolished, opening the path into Paradise.

This fact is obscured for some by Romanides’ reference to “the mystery of the Cross”. However, “the mystery of the Cross” for Romanides is not the Cross that Christ assumed at Calvary, His Sacrifice, which only He could take up, but the cross that we human beings take up in obedience to His command – that is, our sacrifice. The confusion is exposed if we look up the patristic text from St. Gregory Palamas that Romanides quotes in talking about “the mystery of the Cross”.

The holy Father speaks of “the mystery of the Cross” in the context of St. Paul’s words: “The world is crucified to me, and I to the world” (Galatians 6.14). The crucifixion of the world to me is the first mystery of the Cross: the second is the crucifixion of the world to me. “The first mystery of the Cross is flight from the world, and parting from our relatives according to the flesh, if they are a hindrance to piety and a devout life, and training our body, which Paul tells us is of some value (I Timothy 4.8). In these ways the world and sin are crucified to us, once we have fled from them. According to the second mystery of the Cross, however, we are crucified to the world and the passions, once they have fled from us. It is not of course possible for them to leave us completely and not be at work in our thoughts, unless we attain to contemplation of God. When, through action, we approach contemplation and cultivate and cleanse the inner man, searching for the divine treasure which we ourselves have hidden, and considering the kingdom of God within us, then it is that we crucify ourselves to the world and the passions.”

The saint says that even Old Testament righteous such as Abraham and Moses were initiated into these mysteries. And so, just as in a sense the antichrist exists even now, before his coming in the flesh (cf. I John 2.18), so “the Cross existed in the time of our ancestors, even before it was accomplished”. It is this fact that Romanides seizes on in order to justify his de-emphasizing of the main differences between the Old and New Testament eras, and, more particularly, his assertion that the Cross of Christ (and Holy Baptism, as we shall see) is not a Sacrifice for the remission of sins (this is supposedly “scholastic” doctrine), and that such a Sacrifice is not the necessary condition of the salvation of every man. Of course, he does not say the latter explicitly. But, as we shall see, it is implicit in his teaching.

The main difference between the Old Testament righteous and the New Testament Christians according to the Orthodox teaching lies in the fact that whereas the Old Testament righteous attained great spiritual heights, such as Moses’ seeing the Divine Light on Mount Sinai, sin and death had not been abolished in them, and still reigned in them. Thus Moses died, and went to hades; and he died just outside the boundaries of the Holy Land, signifying that he did not enter the Kingdom of heaven before the Coming of Christ, the new Joshua. The New Testament Christians, on the other hand, have the Kingdom of God dwelling in them through the Cross of Christ and Holy Baptism, as a result of which, although they die, they do not go to hades if they have pleased God, but straight into Paradise, like the good thief. The Lord emphasized the importance of this difference when comparing St. John the Baptist, who, though the greatest of all those born of women, still died before the Cross of Christ, and therefore went to hades, with the lowest-ranking New Testament Christian: “He that is least in the Kingdom of heaven is greater than he” (Matthew 11.11).

Romanides, on the other hand, while acknowledging that the “unjustly condemned” Old Testament righteous went “temporarily” to hades, seeks to de-emphasize the importance of this fact. Moreover, he ascribes the deliverance of the Old Testament righteous from hades, not to Christ’ Sacrifice on the Cross, which wiped out the sins, both original and personal, of all those who believe in Him, but to His Resurrection – in spite of the fact it was precisely the Cross that laid low the gates of hades, as we see on all icons of the harrowing of he, where Christ is depicted holding the Cross in His hands. This is in accordance with Romanides’ persistent emphasis on death and the resurrection from the dead at the expense of sin and the propitiation for sin – although the former is the direct fruit of the latter and could not have taken place without it.

This is not to deny that the Cross of Christ was mystically present even in the times of the Old Testament, as St. Gregory Palamas explains. For in a mystical sense the Lamb of God “was slain before the foundation of the world”, and its fruits extend backward as well as forward in time to all those worthy of appropriating them. But “the mystery of the Cross” as manifest in the ascetic activity and Divine contemplation in the lives of Abraham and Moses did not show its fruits until the moment that Christ said: “It is finished”… From that moment, and only from that moment, could the crosses taken up by all the great strugglers of history bring forth their fruit in their final deliverance from sin and death and entrance into the Kingdom of heaven.

Moreover, this deliverance took place, not through the power of their own crosses, but through that of Christ. “Desiring His [Christ’s] Cross,” sings the Church of the Holy Martyr Theodulus, “thou didst endure crucifixion”. Similarly, the good thief truly bore his cross, but it was the Cross of the Man Who hung beside him that took him into Paradise…

The Language of Redemption

Why does Romanides reject the traditional understanding of the Cross of Christ as the Sacrifice for sin? According to him, it is because the words employed in this traditional understanding – words such as “wrath”, “ransom”, “sacrifice”, “propitiation”, “atonement” – presuppose an heretical, “scholastic”, even pagan concept of salvation that is alien to the true (non-Augustinian) tradition. However, it is easily proved that both the Holy Scriptures, and the liturgical tradition of the Church (especially the Divine Liturgy), and the Holy Fathers from the earliest times employed these words to express precisely that teaching which Romanides condemns as heretical.

The Holy Scriptures of the New Testament are full of such words as “ransom” and “propitiation” to describe the Work of Christ on the Cross. Thus the Son of Man, came “to give His life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20.28), “as a ransom for all” (I Timothy 2.6), “to be the propitiation for our sins” (I John 4.10), “as a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people” (Hebrews 2.17). The concept of blood sacrifice is equally central. Since the Law was only “a shadow of the good things to come” (Hebrews 10.1), and “our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ” (Galatians 3.24), the purpose of the Old Testament sacrifices was, by drawing a parallel between the Old Testament sacrifices (the types) and that of the New Testament (the anti-type), to instruct and prepare the people for the mystical meaning of the latter, the Sacrifice to end all sacrifices. For “if the blood of bulls and goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh; how much more shall the Blood of Christ, Who through the Eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, purge your consciences from dead works to serve the living God?” (Hebrews 9.13-14).

The word “wrath” is used so often that no demonstration is needed. As for “curse”, in the Old Testament everyone who fails to fulfil every commandment of the Mosaic Law, and everyone who is hanged on a tree (i.e. crucified), is accursed. And in the New Testament St. Paul says that both these curses were voluntarily taken on Himself by Christ: “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us” (Galatians 3.13). So the language is impeccably Scriptural.

Nor are the Holy Fathers averse from using the same language. Thus on Holy and Great Friday we chant: “Thou hast redeemed us from the curse of the Law by Thy precious Blood”. And St. Cyril of Alexandria writes: “In His own Person, He bore the sentence righteously pronounced against sinners by the Law. For He became a curse for us, according to the Scripture: For cursed is everyone, it is said, that hangeth on a tree. And accursed are we all, for we are not able to fulfil the Law of God: For in many things we all stumble; and very prone to sin is the nature of man. And since, too, the Law of God says: Cursed is he that continueth not in all things that are written in the book of this Law, to do them, the curse, then, belongeth unto us, and not to others. For those against whom the transgression of the Law may be charged, and who are very prone to err from its commandments, surely deserve chastisement. Therefore, He That knew no sin was accursed for our sakes, that He might deliver us from the old curse. For all-sufficient was the God Who is above all, so dying for all; and by the death of His own Body, purchasing the redemption of all mankind.

“The Cross, then, that Christ bore, was not for His own deserts, but was the cross that awaited us, and was our due, through our condemnation by the Law. For as He was numbered among the dead, not for Himself, but for our sakes, that we might find in Him, the Author of everlasting life, subduing of Himself the power of death; so also, He took upon Himself the Cross that was our due, passing on Himself the condemnation of the Law, that the mouth of all lawlessness might henceforth be stopped, according to the saying of the Psalmist; the Sinless having suffered condemnation for the sin of all.”

Let us now turn to the words “ransom”, “propitiation” and “sacrifice”. All the Holy Fathers used this language, both those who came before both the scholastics and St. Augustine, and those who lived at the time of scholasticism, and those who specifically warred against scholasticism.Thus one of the earliest Fathers of the Church, St. Cyprian of Carthage, writes: “If Jesus Christ our Lord and God, is Himself the Chief Priest of God the Father, and has first offered Himself as a sacrifice to the Father, and has commanded this to be done in commemoration of Himself, certainly that priest truly discharges the office of Christ who imitates that which Christ did; and he then offers a true and full sacrifice in the Church to God the Father”.

Again, Blessed Theophylact, writes: “Since the Lord offered Himself up for us in sacrifice to the Father, having propitiated Him by His death as High Priest and then, after the destruction of sin and cessation of enmity, sent unto us the Spirit, He says: ‘I will beseech the Father and will give you a Comforter, that is, I will propitiate the Father for you and reconcile Him with you, who were at enmity with Him because of sin, and He, having been propitiated by My death for you and been reconciled with you, will send you the Spirit.”

Still more striking is the language of one of the greatest opponents of scholasticism, St. Gregory Palamas: “Man was led into his captivity when he experienced God’s wrath, this wrath being the good God’s just abandonment of man. God had to be reconciled with the human race, for otherwise mankind could not be set free from the servitude. A sacrifice was needed to reconcile the Father on high with us and to sanctify us, since we had been soiled by fellowship with the evil one. There had to be a sacrifice which both cleansed and was clean, and a purified, sinless priest…. God overturned the devil through suffering and His Flesh which He offered as a sacrifice to God the Father, as a pure and altogether holy victim – how great is His gift! – and reconciled God to the human race…”

Romanides and his disciples do not accept this. Thus Fr. James Bernstein writes: “For the Jews, offering a sacrifice to God was an act of self-denial, an aspect of purification. Orthodoxy taught me a new view of sacrifice: The sacredness of the blood and its efficacy consists not in what the offering of the blood does to God (to influence or change God), but in what it does to the offerer (to influence and change him). When the offerer places his hands on the head of the animal to be offered, he indicates that the offering is being given in his name and for his benefit. It does not imply a magical transference of sins from the offerer to the animal being sacrificed. Discarding sin from one's heart and life should be so easy? So when Orthodox read a verse like ‘Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures’ (I Corinthians 15:3), it is understood to mean that Christ died for us - to heal us, to change us, to make us more godlike - not that He died instead of us. The ultimate purpose of His death is to change us, not to avert the wrath of God.”

This is half-true and half-false. It is true that the ultimate purpose of all the sacrifices, both of the Old and of the New Testaments, is not to change God, Who is immutable, but to change us – “to heal us, to change us, to make us more godlike”. But it is false to say that there is no transference of sins, and no dying of one being instead of another. When Abraham, following the command of God, offered his son Isaac in sacrifice, God stopped his hand and gave him a ram “in the place of his son” (Genesis 22.13), which was a prefiguring of the Sacrifice of Christ in our place. Again, the concept at the root of the sacrifice on the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, is clearly the transference of sin…

Perhaps the clearest witnesses to the truth of the traditional understanding of the Cross, as against the Romanidean understanding, come from the three holy hierarchs, St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian and St. John Chrysostom.

St. Basil writes: “The Lord had to taste death for each, and having become a propitiatory sacrifice for the world, justify all by His blood”. Again, in his interpretation of Psalm 48, at the words: “There be some that trust in their strength, and boast themselves in the multitude of their riches. A brother cannot redeem; shall a man redeem? He shall not give to God a ransom [] for himself, nor the price of the redemption of his own soul” (vv. 7-9), he writes: “This sentence is directed by the prophet to two types of persons: to the earthborn and to the rich…. You, he says, who trust in your own strength…. And you, he says, who trust in the uncertainty of riches, listen…. You have need of ransoms that you may be transferred to the freedom of which you were deprived when conquered by the power of the devil, who, taking you under his control, does not free you from his tyranny until, persuaded by some worthwhile ransom, he wishes to exchange you. And the ransom must not be of the same kind as the things which are held in his control, but must differ greatly, if he would willingly free the captives from slavery. Therefore a brother is not able to ransom you. For no man can persuade the devil to remove from his power him who has once been subject to him, not he, at any rate, who is incapable of giving God a propitiatory offering even for his own sins…. But one thing was found worth as much as all men together. This was given for the price of ransom for our souls, the holy and highly honoured blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which He poured out for all of us; therefore we were bought at a great price (I Corinthians 6.20)….

“No one is sufficient to redeem himself, unless He comes Who turns away ‘the captivity of the people’ (Exodus 13.8), not with ransoms nor with gifts, as it is written in Isaiah (52.3), but with His own blood… He Who ‘shall not give to God His own ransom’, but that of the whole world. He does not need a ransom, but He Himself is the propitiation. ‘For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, undefiled, set apart from sinners, and become higher than the heavens. He does not need to offer sacrifices daily (as the other priests did), first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people’ (Hebrews 7.26-27).”

St. Gregory the Theologian writes that “Christ Himself offers Himself to God [the Father], so that He Himself might snatch us from him who possessed us, and so that the Anointed One should be received instead of the one who had fallen, because the Anointer cannot be caught”. And again: “He is called ‘Redemption’ because He set us free from the bonds of sin and gives Himself in exchange for us as a ransom sufficient to cleanse the world.”

St. John Chrysostom writes: “David after the words: ‘Sacrifice and offering hast Thou not desired”, added: “but a body hast Thou perfected for me’ (Psalm 39.9), understanding by this the body of the Master, a sacrifice for the whole universe, which cleansed our souls, absolved our sins, destroyed death, opened the heavens, showed us many great hopes and ordered all the rest”.

The Effects of Baptism

Romanides makes the astonishing claim that “Baptism… is not a negative forgiveness of guilt inherited as a consequence of the sin of Adam. On the contrary, it is a release from the powers of the devil… In the entire service of baptism there is not one statement about the forgiveness of any kind of guilt that may have been inherited from Adam.”

This is not true. The very first words sung by the choir after the new Christian has emerged from the waters of Holy Baptism are: “Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered” (Psalm 31.1). Moreover, three times he recites the Nicene Creed, which includes the words: “I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins”. Thus the baptismal rite reflects the fundamental belief of the Church that Holy Baptism is first and foremost the rite of the remission of sins. As St. Peter said to the repentant Jews on the Day of Pentecost: “Repent, and every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2.38).

Romanides makes this elementary and fundamental mistake because of his deep-rooted rejection of the Orthodox teaching on original sin and the Sacrifice for sin on the Cross. For if there is no original sin, then there is no Sacrifice necessary that would take away that sin, and no Baptism that communicates to us the fruits of that Sacrifice “for the remission of sins”. Or if, nevertheless, personal sins are remitted in Baptism, this is a secondary, “negative” aspect of the sacrament, which is not to be compared in importance to “release from the powers of the devil” or “the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit”.

But why, then, does the Nicene Creed say only that baptism is “for the remission of sins”? Because this is the necessary condition for the reception of the other gifts. For there can be no “release from the powers of the devil” if the sins that give the devil power over us are not remitted; and the Holy Spirit could not be given until Christ had suffered on the Cross (John 7.39, 20.22).

Another way to approach the question is to ask: what precisely does Holy Baptism remove or destroy? The traditional answer is: all sin, whether personal or original. However, it is obvious that mortality and corruption are not removed by Baptism: we all die, we are all corrupted, we all can feel within ourselves the workings of the old, fallen Adam. So if original sin, according to the new Romanideans, is mortality and corruption, then original sin (or whatever term they prefer) is not removed by Baptism, according to them. But this is contrary to the teaching of the Holy Church… It follows that there must be a difference between original sin, which is removed at Baptism, and mortality and corruption and fallen nature in general, which are not. The cause is removed, but its consequences are allowed to remain.

“An analogy,” writes Jonathan Grossmeister, “is when an infection damages an organ (like pneumonia can scar the lungs). After the infection is cured, nevertheless the scars remain, which permanently weaken the organ, rendering it more susceptible to future infections. In the same way, after baptism "cures" original sin, nevertheless our nature remains scarred and susceptible to sin, which is why we must continue to struggle…”

The reason why the Lord allows the consequences of original sin to remain is explained by St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite: “An internal cause of thoughts, however remote, is the passionate and corrupted condition of human nature which was brought about by the ancestral sin. This condition remains in our nature also after baptism, not as ancestral sin as such (for this is removed through baptism, according to Canon 120 of Carthage), but as a consequence of the ancestral sin, for the exertion and testing of our free will, and in exchange for greater crowns and rewards, according to the theologians. For after the fall the intellect lost its innocent memory and thought which it had fixed formerly only on the good; but now when it wishes to remember and think upon the good, it is immediately dispersed and also thinks upon the bad. For this reason the divine Gregory of Sinai said: ‘The source and ground of our thoughts is the fragmented state of our memory. The memory was originally simple and one-pointed, but as a result of the fall its natural powers have been perverted: it has lost its recollectedness in God and has become compound instead of simple, diversified instead of one-pointed.’” Again, he writes: “Although baptism removes the ancestral sin and every other voluntary sin, it does not, however, remove the ignorance of the intellect, and lust, and the implanted inclination of the heart toward sin, and the other effects which that ancestral sin brought about in human nature; for these things remain as a consequence even after baptism in order to test our free will and for us to struggle and conquer, and for the baptized to receive their crowns.”

As St. Diadochus of Photiki writes: “Although baptism removes from us the stain resulting from sin, it does not thereby heal the duality of our will immediately, neither does it prevent the demons from attacking us or speaking deceitful words to us. In this way we are led to take up the weapons of righteousness, and to preserve through the power of God what we could not keep safe through the efforts of our soul alone.”

In the Old Testament, before the gift of Baptism was bestowed on us through the Cross of Christ, it was possible to struggle against fallen nature, but it was not possible to be saved, because it was not possible without baptism to conquer original sin. The greatest of the Old Testament saints, such as Enoch and Elijah, were even granted to be in “suspended animation”, by being removed temporarily from this life of corruption. But they, too, will eventually die… Even St. John the Baptist, “the greatest born of women”, died. Even the Mother of God, the greatest of all rational creatures, died…

Death was finally conquered by Christ. Being alone without sin of any kind, whether personal or original, He alone did not have to die. But He destroyed “the sting of death”, which is sin, by offering the perfect sacrifice for sin in His voluntary death, and thereby destroyed its effect, death itself.

For us “the sting of death” is removed, but not death itself – for the time being. And yet through baptism the antidote to death, “the medicine of immortality”, has been implanted in us, and when Christ comes in glory, that medicine will bring forth its full fruits and show its full healing and restorative powers. Then “the last enemy, death”, together with every remnant of corruption will be finally and permanently removed…

Love and Justice

Romanides and the Romanideans have a particular aversion to the concept of justice in the mystery of our redemption. They exhibit a kind of impatience when mention is made of the need for the satisfaction of God’s justice. It is not simply the scholastic overtones of the word “satisfaction” that annoy them: they are unhappy also with the emphasis on justice. It is as if they are saying: “Why all this talk about justice? Is not love enough? Are we not saved through God’s love for mankind, demonstrated to a supreme degree on Golgotha? All we need is love…”

As the echo of the Beatles’ pop song suggests, this is a very modernist, ecumenist-Protestant attitude. In our ecumenist age love has become the catch-phrase and the cure-all. All we need is love…

But it is not true that all we need is love. We also need truth and justice. These three principles are one in God, but at the same time they are three. God is love, but He is also truth and justice, and His love is incompatible with all untruth and injustice. For, as St. John of the Ladder writes: “God is called love, and also justice.”

Romanides gets round the evidently very great importance of the concepts of justice and justification in our redemption by redefining the latter as “deification”. Thus commenting on St. Paul’s words in I Corinthians 6.11: “you are washed, you are sanctified, you are justified”, which are repeated in the rite of Baptism, Romanides redefines “justification” as “deification”. And this in spite of the fact that St. Paul himself clearly distinguishes the two concepts in the famous verse: “Those whom he justified (edikaiosen), he also glorified (edoxasen)” (Romans 8.30) – where “glorification”, as Romanides repeatedly asserts, has the same meaning as “deification”. In other places, Romanides redefines “justification” as “vivification, or the imparting of life through His personal, uncreated energies.” Thus justice and justification are defined in terms of life and death, not with sin and sacrifice.

Romanides writes: “The Old Testament righteous were unjustly held by satan, and Christ’s incarnation brings justice to them, a justice which is both the imparting of the life of Christ to man and the destruction of the devil’s power of death. This Orthodox notion of justification as 1) theoric vision and immortalization of the saints of all ages in Christ, and 2) destruction of the power of Satan through human co-working with divine energy, is completely alien to the atonement Christology of Anselm, according to which God requires a sacrifice on the cross from Christ and meritorious works afterward from man which together constitute a literal deus ex machine for the vexing Western problem of how God, his absolute justice offended by the fall, could change his hatred of man back to love.”

We have already seen that to reject the concept of the Sacrifice for sin in this way is to reject, not a scholastic heresy, but the central dogma of the Orthodox Faith as expressed by the Holy Scriptures, all the Holy Fathers and the liturgical and Eucharistic tradition of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church… We shall therefore not waste time by a detailed refutation of this identification of justice and justification with vivification. More useful may be an attempt to explicate the scriptural and patristic understanding of justice…

What is justice? In its most primitive meaning, justice signifies order, equity and balance. In its loftier, religious meaning, it signifies the right functioning of all things in accordance with their God-given nature.

St. Dionysius the Areopagite writes: “God is named Justice because He satisfies the needs of all things, dispensing due proportion, beauty and order, and defines the bounds of all orders and places each thing under its appropriate laws and orders according to that rule which is most truly just, and because he is the Cause of the independent activity of each. For the Divine Justice orders and assigns limits to all things and keeps all things distinct from and unmixed with one another and gives to all beings that which belongs to each according to the dignity of each. And, to speak truly, all who censure the Divine Justice unknowingly confess themselves to be manifestly unjust. For they say that immortality should be in mortal creatures and perfection in the imperfect and self-motivation in the alter-motivated and sameness in the changeable and perfect power in the weak, and that the temporal should be eternal, things which naturally move immutable, temporal pleasures eternal, and to sum up, they assign the properties of one thing to another. They should know, however, that the Divine justice is essentially true Justice in that it gives to all things that which befits the particular dignity of each and preserves the nature of each in its own proper order and power.”

Injustice in rational creatures is what we call sin. It is a transgression of God’s law, a deviation from His righteousness, an offence against His love. The attitude of God to sin and injustice is called in the Holy Scriptures the wrath of God. This term does not denote a sinful passion of anger, for God is completely pure and passionless, but the utterly inexorable determination of God to destroy that which is evil and unjust, that is, which is opposed to love. As Archbishop Theophan of Poltava puts it: "The wrath of God is one of the manifestations of the love of God, but of the love of God in its relationship to the moral evil in the heart of rational creatures in general, and of man in particular."

The wrath of God is expressed in vengeance, which in God is not a sinful passion, but the expression of perfect justice: “The Lord is the God of vengeances; the God of vengeances hath spoken openly” (Psalm 93.1). The saints, too, being in all things like God, desire vengeance against sin, but in a pure, passionless manner. Thus in the Apocalypse the Apostle John sees “under the altar the souls of those who were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice, saying: How long, O Lord, holy and true, does Thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?” (Revelation 6.9-10). That the motivation of these saints is pure is confirmed by the Venerable Bede, who writes: “The souls of the righteous cry these things, not from hatred of enemies, but from love of justice.”

Injustice in man is blotted out by repentance and the works of repentance, of which the most characteristic is sacrifice. Even before the Coming of Christ a partial blotting out of injustice through repentance was possible. Thus we know that God frequently forgave the sins of people in the Old Testament who sincerely repented before Him, such as David. However, since man was mired in sin, - not only his personal sins but also “the law of sin” that had penetrated his very nature, - he was unable to justify himself; his personal repentance was insufficient and his personal sacrifices tainted. “A brother cannot redeem; shall a man redeem?” (Psalm 48.7).

That is why even the best men of the Old Testament were barred from entry into heaven and went to hades after their death. Thus the Patriarch Jacob said of his son Joseph: “I will go down to my son mourning to hades” (Genesis 37.35). For “[sinful] flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of heaven” (I Corinthians 15.50).

If the injustice of man was to be blotted out, and peace restored between God and man, a Mediator had to be found Who would take upon himself the sins of all men and blot them out through a supreme Sacrifice that would be completely untainted by sin. Such a Sacrifice was offered by the Lord Jesus Christ on the Cross. It was offered by Himself as man to Himself and the Father and the Holy Spirit as God. This teaching was officially dogmatized at the Councils of Constantinople in 1156 and 1157, and included in The Synodicon of Orthodoxy.

The Romanideans deny that any Sacrifice in the full sense – that is, in the sense of vicarious, propitiatory atonement – took place, but only an outpouring of Divine energy, or love. All is mercy, nothing is justice… Now nobody denies that the motive power of our redemption was God’s supremely merciful love for man. But God’s love acted in a very specific manner without which we would not have been saved. God acted by offering a Sacrifice of Himself to Himself for the justification of man – that is, the restoration of justice in man’s relationship with God through the destruction of sin. God’s mercy was accomplished in and through His re-establishment of justice. The problem with speaking of God’s love without speaking of His justice, of what He accomplished in and through the Cross, is that it becomes incomprehensible why God had to become man and die on the Cross. Why was it necessary for Christ to die? Did He not manifest His compassionate love long before the Cross in innumerable ways? Was He not the same God of love in the Old Testament? But then why did He not carry out His redemptive work long before? Why did He have to wait five thousand years before forgiving all the sins of men and destroying the chains of hades?

The answer to all these questions is: because only in this way, the way of the Cross, could justice be accomplished. As St. Gregory of Nyssa writes: “That the deceiver was deceived and got his deserts shows forth God’s justice. The entire aim of the transaction bears witness to the goodness of its Author.”

Again, St. Gregory Palamas, the Romanideans’ favourite Father but no supporter of theirs, explains: “The pre-eternal, uncircumscribed and almighty Word and omnipotent Son of God could clearly have saved man from mortality and servitude to the devil without Himself becoming man. He upholds all things by the word of His power and everything is subject to His divine authority. According to Job, He can do everything and nothing is impossible for Him. The strength of a created being cannot withstand the power of the Creator, and nothing is more powerful than the Almighty. But the incarnation of the Word of God was the method of deliverance most in keeping with our nature and weakness, and most appropriate for Him Who carried it out, for this method had justice on its side, and God does not act without justice. As the Psalmist and Prophet says, ‘God is righteous and loveth righteousness’ (Psalm 11.7), ‘and there is no unrighteousness in Him’ (Psalm 92.15). Man was justly abandoned by God in the beginning as he had first abandoned God. He had voluntarily approached the originator of evil, obeyed him when he treacherously advised the opposite of what God had commanded, and was justly given over to him. In this way, through the evil one’s envy and the good Lord’s just consent, death came into the world. Because of the devil’s overwhelming evil, death became twofold, for he brought about not just physical but also eternal death.

“As we had been justly handed over to the devil’s service and subjection to death, it was clearly necessary that the human race’s return to freedom and life should be accomplished by God in a just way. Not only had man been surrendered to the envious devil by divine righteousness, but the devil had rejected righteousness and become wrongly enamoured of authority, arbitrary power and, above all, tyranny. He took up arms against justice and used his might against mankind. It pleased God that the devil be overcome first by the justice against which he continuously fought, then afterwards by power, through the Resurrection and the future Judgement. Justice before power is the best order of events, and that force should come after justice is the work of a truly divine and good Lord, not of a tyrant….

“A sacrifice was needed to reconcile the Father on High with us and to sanctify us, since we had been soiled by fellowship with the evil one. There had to be a sacrifice which both cleansed and was clean, and a purified, sinless priest… It was clearly necessary for Christ to descend to Hades, but all these things were done with justice, without which God does not act.”

“Justice before power”, the Cross before the Resurrection. And “all things done with justice, without which God does not act.” Clearly, justice is no secondary aspect of the Divine economy, but the very heart, the very essence of our salvation…

There is no conflict between love and justice. To say that God should be loving but not just is like saying that the sun should give light but not heat: it is simply not in His nature. It is not in His nature, and it is not in the nature of any created being, for the simple reason that justice is the order of created beings, it is the state of being as it was originally created. When people say that God is loving but not just, or that His justice demonstrates a lack of love, they do not know what they are saying. For His love is aimed precisely towards the restoration of justice, the restoration of “the nature of each in its own proper order and power”, in which alone lies its blessedness.

But justice can be restored, and injustice blotted out, only through suffering. “For it was necessary,” writes Nicholas Cabasilas, “that sin should be abolished by some penalty and that we by suffering a proportionate punishment should be freed from the offences we have committed against God.” And if the restoration of justice involves suffering, this is not the fault of God, but of His creatures, who freely go against their nature as God created it and thereby create injustice.

Nor is justice a kind of cold, abstract principle imposed upon Him from without, as it were. As Vladimir Lossky writes: “We should not depict God either as a constitutional monarch subject to a justice that goes beyond Him, or as a tyrant whose whim would create a law without order or objectivity. Justice is not an abstract reality superior to God but an expression of His nature. Just as He freely creates yet manifests Himself in the order and beauty of creation, so He manifests Himself in His justice: Christ Who is Himself justice, affirms in His fullness God’s justice… God’s justice is that man should no longer be separated from God. It is the restoration of humanity in Christ, the true Adam.”

Love and justice are the positive and negative poles respectively of God’s Providence in relation to the created universe. Love is the natural, that is, just relationship between God and man. Sin has destroyed love and created injustice. Divine Providence therefore acts to destroy injustice and restore love. We would not need to speak of justice if sin had not destroyed it. But with the entrance of sin, justice is the first necessity – love demands it.

However, since love never demands of others what it cannot give itself, the justice of God is transmuted into mercy. Mercy is that form of justice in which the punishment of sin is not removed altogether, but placed on the shoulders of another, who thereby becomes a propitiatory sacrifice. Thus, as Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov says, Christ “offered Himself as a redemptive Sacrifice to the Justice of God for sinful mankind – and the Holy Scriptures witness with all justice concerning Him: Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world (John 1.29)”. Thus the Cross is both love and justice, both mercy and sacrifice, the perfect manifestation of love, and the perfect satisfaction of justice. It is “the mercy of peace”, in the words of the Divine Liturgy, the mercy that restores peace between God and man.

Christ’s redemptive work can be described as perfect love in pursuit of perfect justice. The beginning of all God’s works is without question love: God created the world out of love. But with the appearance of sin, or injustice, God directed His love towards the abolition of injustice and the justification of man. This He achieved through a propitiatory sacrifice. As the Apostle of love - who is also the son of thunder - writes: “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3.16). And again: “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the expiation [or propitiation or atonement] () of our sins” (I John 4.10). “Let our lives, then,” chants the Holy Church, “be worthy of the loving Father Who has offered sacrifice, and of the glorious Victim Who is the Saviour of our souls”.

So the Cross is perfect justice - but justice of a supremely paradoxical kind. Sin, that is, injustice, is completely blotted out - but by the unjust death and Sacrifice of the Only Sinless and Just One. Christ came "in the likeness of sinful flesh" (Romans 8.3) and died the death of a sinner, uttering the words expressive of sinners’ horror at their abandonment by God: “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” The innocent Head died that the guilty Body should live. He, the Just One, Who committed no sin, took upon Himself the sins of the whole world. When we could not pay the price, He paid it for us; when we were dead in sin, He died to give us life. "For Christ hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust" (I Peter 3.18). And the self-sacrificial love of this sacrifice was so great in the eyes of Divine Justice that it blotted out the sins of the whole world - of all men, that is, who respond to this free gift with faith, gratitude and repentance.

The Church has expressed this paradox with great eloquence: "Come, all ye peoples, and let us venerate the blessed Wood, through which the eternal justice has been brought to pass. For he who by a tree deceived our forefather Adam, is by the Cross himself deceived; and he who by tyranny gained possession of the creature endowed by God with royal dignity, is overthrown in headlong fall. By the Blood of God the poison of the serpent is washed away; and the curse of a just condemnation is loosed by the unjust punishment inflicted on the Just. For it was fitting that wood should be healed by wood, and that through the Passion of One Who knew not passion should be remitted all the sufferings of him who was condemned because of wood. But glory to Thee, O Christ our King, for Thy dread dispensation towards us, whereby Thou hast saved us all, for Thou art good and lovest mankind."

V. ROMANIDES ON HEAVEN AND HELL

The downgrading of the Cross by Romanides is accompanied, as we have seen, by a downgrading of justice. But we see this downgrading not only in the work of redemption, but also in the Last Judgement. Thus he writes: “Should we identify religion with the final victory of universal justice? Are we obligated to have religion because there must be a God of justice Who will ultimately judge all mankind so that the unjust will be punished in Hell and the just (in other words, good boys and girls) will be rewarded in Heaven? If our answer is yes, then we must have religion so that justice will ultimately prevail and the human longing for happiness will be fulfilled. Is it conceivable for good boys and girls to be unhappy after their death in the life to come? It is inconceivable. And if they were wronged in this life, is it possible for these good boys and girls who suffered unjustly to receive no justice in the next life? It is impossible. And in Heaven shouldn’t they lead a pleasant life, a life of happiness? Of course, they should. But for all this to happen, life after death has to exist as well as a good and righteous God Who will settle the score with good and just judgement. Isn’t that how things stand? He has to exist, at least according to the worldview of Western theology in the Middle Ages.

“But then modern psychology comes along and discredits all of this. Modern psychology tells us that these views are products of the mind, because human beings have an inner sense of justice, which calls for naughty boys and girls to be punished and good boys and girls to be rewarded. And since compensation fails to take place in this life, the human imagination projects this idea into another life where it must take place. This is why someone who feels vulnerable becomes religious and believes in his religion’s doctrines. It also applies to someone who is devoted to justice and has profound and earnest feelings about what is right. They both believe, because the doctrinal teaching that they have accepted satisfies their psychological need for justice to be done. Their reasons are not based on philosophy or metaphysics but on purely psychological considerations…”

What a slander against the holy apostles, prophets and martyrs, who all longed for the final triumph of truth and justice! The Lord came “to proclaim good news to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, to preach liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind; to declare the acceptable year of the Lord, the day of recompense” (Isaiah 61.1-2). The whole burden of the Old Testament Prophets was an impassioned, yet holy lament against the injustice of man against God and against his fellow man, and a longing for the day of recompense when justice will be done by “the God of justice” (Malachi 2.17).

But “modern psychology”, says Romanides, has proved that the longing for that day is just a projection of the human imagination, merely the expression of a (fallen) psychological need! What then of those martyrs under the heavenly altar who cry out with a loud voice: “How long, O Lord, holy and true, until You judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” (Revelation 6.10). Is their cry based “on purely psychological considerations”? Is their faith and hope founded on a medieval worldview? Are they not deified saints in the Kingdom of heaven and so not in need of any “purely psychological” gratification? If even the saints in heaven cry out for justice and vengeance against evil, this shows that the love of justice is an essential part of holiness and in no way a subject for pseudo-psychological reductionism…

Romanides blames St. Augustine for “introducing into Christianity the idea that hell is the nether regions, under the earth, where men go to be punished… so that we should all be good kids and go to Paradise, above the stars and heaven, etc., while if we are bad kids we shall go under the earth to be punished in the nether regions (katakhthonia)”. But of course the idea of heaven above the earth and hell below it is far from being an invention of Augustine’s: we find it in the New Testament, as, for example, where St. Paul tells us that every knee should bow at the name of Jesus, “of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth (katakhthonion)” (Philippians 3.10). However, as we have seen, the witness of the Apostles and Fathers means nothing to Romanides if it contradicts the findings (or rather, prejudices) of modern science…

For Romanides “it is precisely here that we find the basic difference from the Protestant and Franco-Latin traditions that followed Augustine. In these same Protestant traditions, as in the Latin tradition, there is clear difference between Hell and Paradise. Paradise is one thing, and Hell – another.” But the truth, according to Romanides, is that “the same God is Hell and Paradise”! “Paradise and Hell are the same thing”! And so, according to Romanides’ interpreter, Vlachos, “Paradise and Hell do not exist from the point of view of God, but from the point of view of men”. How so? Romanides explains: “Hell is the glory of God, but those who contemplate it see the glory as glory while those being tormented see the same glory as eternal fire and outer darkness. Eternal fire and outer darkness. For the same fire both enlightens and burns. There is both a ‘consuming fire’ and a fire that enlightens ‘every man that comes into the world’”.

These teachings of Romanides clearly derive from the Protestant and ecumenist scepticism about Heaven and Hell that has become so fashionable in the modern world. He wraps them in Orthodox theological terminology, but that does not disguise their real origin. However, this wrapping had made it acceptable to many Orthodox theologians who are also infected by the spirit of modernism…

Let us look briefly at the teachings of these Romanideans…

First, Christos Yannaras, who writes: “God is not the ‘judge’ of men in the sense of a magistrate who passes sentence and imposes a punishment, testifying to the transgression. He is judge because of what He is: the possibility of life and true existence. When man voluntarily cuts himself off from the possibility of existence, he is automatically ‘judged’. It is not God's sentence but His existence that judges him. God is nothing but an ontological fact of love and an outpouring of love: a fullness of good, an ecstasy of loving goodness.... Man is judged according to the measure of the life and existence from which he excludes himself. Sin is a self-inflicted condemnation and punishment which man freely chooses when he refuses to be a personal hypostasis of communion with God and prefers to ‘alter’ and disorder his existence, fragmenting his nature into individual entities-when he prefers corruption and death. For the Church sin is not a legal but an existential fact. It is not simply a transgression, but an active refusal on man's part to be what he truly is: the image and ‘glory’, or manifestation of God.”

There is an element of truth in this. It is true that “sin is a self-inflicted condemnation and punishment which man freely chooses”. And it is true that a heretic, for example, who refuses to listen to a first and a second exhortation, is “self-condemned”, as St. Paul says (Titus 3.11). This self-condemnation, as Bishop Theophan the Recluse explains, is the condemnation of his conscience: “In his conscience he is condemned for his disagreement with the truth, but he still does not listen to its voice, being ashamed to humiliate himself by making a concession. Thus he brings the clearly recognized truth as a sacrifice to his self-love, and sins in going against his conscience.”

However, the fact that sinners are condemned by their own conscience, “the eye of God in the soul of man”, in this life in no way implies that they will not be condemned again in the next life. “It is appointed unto men to die once, and then [follows] the judgement” (Hebrews 9.27). And then “all the nations” will be judged again – this time in the sight of the whole universe - at the Last and Most Terrible Judgement, when God will indeed be a Judge Who passes sentence, as the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25) clearly demonstrates. For there is a difference between the guilt and self-condemnation of the criminal and the sentence of the Judge.

Another Romanidean, Fr. Luke Dingman, writes: “When we think of the Last Judgment the fathers say we are not to think of harsh justice, a strict angry judge, we should think rather of being in the presence of Supreme Love. In the presence of God that is of Supreme Love, that is our judgment. For God does not cause judgment at anytime, he doesn't do something vengeful to evil doers, nor does He prepare a place of punishment. God is Love and by His very nature He cannot do what is evil, hateful or destructive to anyone. Judgment and Hell are spiritual conditions of sin and darkness. Judgment results when someone is separated from God who is the source of life and light. Judgment results when we shut off ourselves from God's redeeming Love. Yes there is a Judgment, there will be a judgment day temporary and eternal, but we judge ourselves. What about the fearful descriptions of hell, fire and brimstone that are in the Bible. These are warnings and pictorial representations, but they are not to be interpreted literally as geographic or physical places created by God for the punishment of human beings. Rather they are admonitions with a serious message: Life outside of God results in evil, falsehood, hatred, guilt, alienation and pain. Life apart from God leads to an agony of darkness, in which people torment themselves and each other. It is a spiritual hell created not by God, but by the wilful refusal to turn to God who is Love, in order to be forgiven and cleansed and renewed and set free. Yes there is a judgment, but it is we who judge ourselves, by the thoughts we think, by the values we hold, the decisions we make, the things we do and do not do. The people we are today and in the afterlife.”

Here we find the familiar refrain of the Romanideanss: “God does not judge us, we judge ourselves”. But Dingman goes further than Romanides or Yannaras (at least as I have cited them above) in denying that hell is anything more than a spiritual condition, “created not by God, but by the wilful refusal to turn to God who is Love”. Moreover, the descriptions of fire and brimstone are merely “warnings and pictorial representations” of a non-physical state: in essence they are merely metaphors of a non-physical reality.

However, the Lord Himself tells us that the everlasting fire is created by Him - “for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25.41) and those men who follow the devil in their works. As for the description of hell as a purely spiritual state, this fails to take into account the fact that it is the souls and bodies of men who are cast into the fire of gehenna (we shall have more to say on this below). Again, however “pictorial” the description of the torments of hell, they are not purely allegorical, just as the bodies cast into those torments will not be allegorical…

Perhaps the best-known attempt to deny the justice of God and God’s status as Judge is made by the Old Calendarist Romanidean Alexander Kalomiros in his famous article, “The River of Fire”. Kalomiros writes: “God never takes vengeance. His punishments are loving means of correction, as long as anything can be corrected and healed in this life. They never extend to eternity…” (p. 6)

But how can this be true?! What about the sentence of death passed on all mankind? Is that not a punishment? What about the terrible deaths of various sinners, such as Ahab and Jezabel, Ananias and Sapphira, Heliodorus and Herod and Simon Magus? How can they be said to have been “loving means of correction”, since they manifestly did not correct the sinners involved, who were incorrigible? And what about the torments of gehenna? Do they not extend to eternity? Will not the Lord Himself say to the condemned at the Last Judgement: “Depart from Me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25.41)?

Many of God’s punishments are indeed “loving means of correction” – that is, they are pedagogical. But when correction and pedagogy fail, then God punishes in a different, final, purely retributive way. Bishop Nikolai (Velimirovich) distinguishes between the two kinds of punishment or judgement as follows: “One is conditional and temporary. We can refer to it as the pedagogical judgement of God over men in the school of this life. And the other judgement will be just and final. This is obvious from the many examples in the Holy Scriptures. God punished righteous Moses for one sin by not being allowed to enter the promised land towards which he spent forty years leading his people. This is the temporary and pedagogical judgement of God. It is there for the sinners to see and say with fright, ‘If God did not forgive such a righteous man one sin, what will He then do to us who are lade with so many sins?’ But Moses’ punishment was not the final, conclusive judgement of God over him. Nor does it mean that Moses will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. You know that this great servant of God appeared along with the prophet Elijah at the Transfiguration of the Lord. This testifies to the fact that even though he was punished once for one sin, he was not discarded by God nor left out of the eternal life. Pedagogical punishments, or pedagogical judgements of God, serve that very purpose – to correct people, and make them suitable for the Kingdom of Heaven. Or, look at that ill man at Bethesda who lay paralyzed for 38 years. The fact that his illness was there because of sin was clearly stated by the Lord when He said, ‘Behold, now you are healthy; sin no more that even worse does not happen to you’. And what worse thing could happen to him than being cast out and left out of the Kingdom of Life at the Terrible Judgements of God because of his new sins?

“Our Saviour clearly spoke of the Terrible Judgement of God – of the day which ‘burns as a furnace’. When the sun and the moon darken , when the stars get confused and start falling, when the shining ‘sign of the Son of Man’ appears in that utter darkness, then the Lord Jesus will appear in power and glory to judge justly the living and the dead.”

Kalomiros writes: “Death was not inflicted upon us by God. We fell into it by our revolt.” (p. 6). And he quotes St. Basil: “God did not create death, but we brought it upon ourselves”.

Certainly God did not create death: we brought it upon ourselves by our wilful transgression of His commandment. But does this mean that God was completely inactive in His pronouncement of the sentence on Adam and Eve, in their expulsion from Eden, in His placing the cherubim with the sword of fire to prevent their return? Of course not! God did not will our first parents to fall. Nor did He, being Life Itself, create death. However, He allowed our first parents to fall, and He permitted death to enter into their life. Why? Partly in order to correct them, to humble them and lead them to repentance. Partly in order to cut off sin and allow the dissolution of the body for the sake of its future resurrection. And partly because crime requires punishment, because God is the just Judge Who cannot allow sin to go unpunished if it is not repented of.

Man is the ultimate cause of his own misery: but that by no means implies that God does not punish him. In fact, as St. John of Damascus writes, "a judge justly punishes one who is guilty of wrongdoing; and if he does not punish him he is himself a wrongdoer. In punishing him the judge is not the cause either of the wrongdoing or of the vengeance taken against the wrongdoer, the cause being the wrongdoer's freely chosen actions. Thus too God, Who saw what was going to happen as if it had already happened, judged it as if it had taken place; and if it was evil, that was the cause of its being punished. It was God Who created man, so of course he created him in goodness; but man did evil of his own free choice, and is himself the cause of the vengeance that overtakes him."

Again, St. Photius the Great writes: “Let us comprehend the depths of the Master’s clemency. He gave death as a punishment, but through His own death He transformed it as a gate to immortality. It was a resolution of anger and displeasure, but it announces the consummate goodness of the Judge…”

Thus the truth is more complex than Kalomiros would have it. Death is both a punishment and, through Christ’s own Death, a deliverance from death. It is both judgement and mercy. Nor could it be otherwise; for God is both love and justice. As St. John of the Ladder says, He is called justice as well as love.

Turning now to the question of eternal torments, we note that Kalomiros does not deny their existence, but denies that they are inflicted by God because “God never punishes” (p. 19). Rather, they are self-inflicted. “After the Common Resurrection there is no question of any punishment from God. Hell is not a punishment from God but a self-condemnation. As Saint Basil the Great says, ‘The evils in hell do not have God as their cause, but ourselves.’” (p. 16).

Kalomiros here follows Romanides in confusing two very different things: the crime of the criminal, and the sentence of the judge. If the judge sentences the criminal to prison for his crime, it is obvious that the primary cause of the criminal’s being in prison is his own criminal actions: it is the criminal himself who is ultimately responsible for his miserable condition – this is clearly the point that St. Basil is making. Nevertheless, it is equally obvious that the judge, too, has a hand in the matter. It is he who decides both whether the criminal is guilty or innocent, and the gentleness or severity of the sentence. In other words, there are two actors and two actions involved here, not one.

Kalomiros also confuses the free acts of the criminal and his involuntary submission to his sentence. Thus, corrupting the words of Christ in Matthew 25.41, he writes: “Depart freely from love to the everlasting torture of hate” (p. 20). But the sinners do not freely depart into the everlasting fire! On the contrary, they “gnash their teeth” there, witnessing, as the Fathers explain, to their fierce anger and rejection of the justice of their punishment. We may agree that they have been brought to this plight by their own sinful acts, freely committed. But they do not freely and willingly accept the punishment of those acts! The God-seer Moses and the Apostle Paul were willing to be cast away from God for the sake of the salvation of their brethren, the Jews – here we see the free acceptance of torture and punishment, but out of love. Those condemned at the Last Judgement, however, will be quite unlike these saints, and will be cast against their will into the eternal fire.

Again, Kalomiros distorts the nature of heaven and hell. In a characteristically modernist, rationalist manner he reduces them to psychological states only: a state of supreme joy and love enlightened by the fire of God’s grace, on the one hand, and a state of the most abject misery and hatred, burned but not enlightened by the fire of God’s grace, on the other. “This is hell: the negation of love; the return of hate for love; bitterness at seeing innocent joy; to be surrounded by love and to have hate in one’s heart. This is the eternal condition of all the damned. They are all dearly loved. They are all invited to the joyous banquet. They are all living in God’s Kingdom, in the New Earth and the New Heavens. No one expels them. Even if they wanted to go away they could not flee from God’s New Creation, nor hide from God’s tenderly loving omnipresence…” (p. 20).

Like all heretics, Kalomiros mixes truth with falsehood. So let us first freely admit what is true in his account. It is true that a large part of the torment of hell will be psychological: the hatred and bitterness that continues to seethe in the sinner’s heart – together with remorse, shame and the most soul-destroying despair. It is also true that that bitterness will be exarcebated by the thought of the “innocent joy” of the blessed in Paradise. It is true, furthermore, that in a certain sense it is precisely God’s love that torments the sinners in hell. For, as Archbishop Theophan of Poltava writes: “In essence the wrath of God is one of the manifestations of the love of God, but of the love of God in its relation to the moral evil in the heart of rational creatures in general, and in the heart of man in particular.”

However, it is stretching traditional theological understanding far too far to say that those condemned in the eternal fire of gehenna are at the same time “all living in God’s Kingdom, in the New Earth and the New Heavens”! There is no place for the damned in God’s Kingdom! As was revealed to St. John in the last chapter of Revelation: “Blessed are they that do His commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city. For outside are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie” (22.14-15). In other words, the New Earth and the New Heavens, Paradise and the City of God, will not be accessible to the condemned sinners; they will not be living there! Nor is it true that even the damned will be “invited to the joyful banquet” and that “no-one will expel them”. In this life, yes, even sinners are invited to the joyful banquet of communion with God in the Church. But on the last Day, when the sinner is found naked of grace, the King will say to His servants: “Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness: there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 22.13).

God is not as passive as Kalomiros makes out. He acts – and acts to expel the unrepentant sinner from His presence. Thus to the “inner darkness” of the sinner’s hate-filled, graceless soul will be added the “outer darkness” of the place that is gehenna, where the river of fire will consume his body as well as his soul. This outer aspect of the eternal torments appears to have been ignored by Kalomiros in his over-sophisticated understanding of the torments of hell. And if he were to object: “There is no space or time as we understand it in the life of the age to come”, we may reply: “As we understand it, in our present fallen and limited state - yes. And yet we cannot get rid of the categories of space and time altogether. Only God is completely beyond space and time. The idea of a body burning in hell is incomprehensible if it is not burning somewhere. Nor is the idea of our earth being transfigured into Paradise comprehensible if it not located in any kind of space…”

Kalomiros makes all these distortions of Holy Scripture because he refuses to admit that God punishes, not only pedagogically, to correct and rehabilitate the sinner, but also retributively, as a pure expression of His justice. Since retributive punishment does not lead to the rehabilitation of the sinner, he considers it pointless and cruel, and therefore unworthy of God. In other words, he sees no value in justice in itself, independently of its possible pedagogical or therapeutic effect.

And yet Holy Scripture is full of the idea of retributive justice as being the norm of existence, proceeding from the very nature of God. Thus: “To them there is no requital, because they have not feared God; He hath stretched forth His hand in retribution” (Psalm 54.22). And again: “The Lord is the God of vengeances; the God of vengeances hath spoken openly. Be Thou exalted, O Thou that judgest the earth; render the proud their due” (Psalm 93.1-2; cf. Psalm 98.8; Isaiah 34.8; Jeremiah 50.15, 51.6; II Thessalonians 1.8). And again: “They [the martyrs] cried with a loud voice, saying: How long, O Lord, holy and true, doest Thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?” (Revelation 6.10). It goes without saying that in none of these quotations are God or the saints understood as being vengeful in a crudely human and sinful manner, as if they were possessed by a fallen passion of anger. As the Venerable Bede writes: "The souls of the righteous cry these things, not from hatred of enemies, but from love of justice." So the desire that justice should be done is by no means necessarily sinful; it may be pure, proceeding not from the fallen passion of anger, but from the pure love of justice. Indeed, when the Lord says: “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay” (Romans 12.19), He is not saying that justice should not be desired, but that it should be sought, not through the exercise of the fallen human passions, but through God, Who acts with the most perfect and passionless impartiality.

Even St. Basil the Great, upon whom Kalomiros relies so heavily, does not deny the idea of retributive justice in God – and precisely in the context of the river of fire. As he writes, commenting on the verse: “The voice of the Lord divideth the flame of fire” (Psalm 28.6): “The fire prepared in punishment for the devil and his angels is divided by the voice of the Lord. Thus, since there are two capacities in fire, one of burning and the other of illuminating, the fierce and punitive property of the fire may await those who deserve to burn, while its illuminating and radiant part may be reserved for the enjoyment of those who are rejoicing.”

So the river of fire is punitive – for “those who deserve to burn”. It is punitive retribution, as expressing the pure love of justice that is part of the nature of God. Of course, God longs to have mercy even on the most inveterate sinner. But if that sinner does not wish to believe and repent, He wills that the sinner should be punished - even though the punishment can have no rehabilitative effect…

An ardent admirer of Romanides is Fr. George Metallinos, who adopts a somewhat different approach to the same goal of downgrading the traditional Orthodox teaching on the last things. After various scriptural and liturgical references, Metallinos presents his major thesis as follows: “Paradise and hell are not two different places. (This version is an idolatrous concept.) They signify two different situations (ways), which originate from the same uncreated source, and are perceived by man as two, different experiences. Or, more precisely, they are the same experience, except that they are perceived differently by man, depending on man’s internal state. This experience is the sight of Christ inside the uncreated light of His divinity, of His ‘glory’. From the moment of His Second Coming, through to all eternity, all people will be seeing Christ in His uncreated light. That is when ‘those who worked evil in their lifetime will go towards the resurrection of their life, while those who have worked evil in their lifetime will go towards the resurrection of judgement’ (John 5.29). In the presence of Christ, mankind will be separated (‘sheep’ and ‘goats’, to His right and His left). In other words, they will be discerned in two separate groups: those who will be looking upon Christ as paradise (the ‘exceeding good, the radiant’) and those who will be looking upon Christ as hell (‘the all-consuming fire’, Hebrews 12.29).

“Paradise and hell are the same reality…”

If Metallinos wrote these words in order to shock, he succeeded. The common-sense reaction to these words is: “How can it be true that Paradise and hell are the same experience, the same reality?! Surely no two experiences or realities could be more different!”

Of course, there is a purpose to this “shock-therapy”. Metallinos is trying to shock us out of our traditional understanding of heaven and hell, which he considers to be rooted in a western, “scholastic” mind-set. And he thinks he has the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Fathers on his side. But perhaps his ideas have more in common with modern western thinkers, especially the existentialists, and less with the Holy Fathers, than he thinks…

Let us begin with the statement that paradise and hell are not two different places, but two different experiences. Now if he had said that Paradise and hell are not only places, but also experiences, or spiritual conditions, we would not object. But he seems to have a purely subjective, psychological interpretation of heaven and hell that is completely abstracted from anything spatio-temporal or material.

God planted Paradise, or Eden, “toward the east” in a definite part of planet earth (by tradition near Tabriz in North-West Iran), and “placed there the man that He had formed” (Genesis 2.8). Paradise had (and has) earth, and plants, and rivers, and birds and trees. After the fall of man, the entrance to Paradise was blocked by the sword of the Seraphim, and then Paradise itself was removed from the earth, in order that it should not be corrupted. But it has only changed place; it has not ceased to be what it was in the beginning. The Apostle Paul was taken up to Paradise, which is also called the Third Heaven (II Corinthians 12.1-4) – and he admits the possibility that he was there in body as well as soul, which implies that Paradise is physical, as well as a spiritual reality. Again, St. Irenaeus writes that “Enoch of old, having pleased God, was translated in the body, foreshowing the translation of the righteous… The Elders… say that those who have been translated are taken to Paradise, and remain there until the consummation of all things, being the first to enter into incorruption.” If Enoch, who has not died, is in Paradise in the body, then Paradise is a physical place even now, after its translation from the earth. Of course, the Fathers also understand Paradise in other ways: as the mind in which God dwells noetically, and as a type of future, eschatological realities. But these spiritual interpretations should not be seen as contradicting the physical reality. Even in St. John’s vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem, after “the first heaven and the first earth have passed away” (Revelation 21.1), there is still a place “in the middle of its street” for the tree of life, and for the river of Paradise (Revelation 22.2).

Similarly, Hell has always been understood to be a place. And just as Heaven and Paradise have always been understood to be “up”, above us, so Hell has always been understood to be below us, in the bowels of the earth. Thus St. Paul’s words have a definite spatial connotation: “At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow, of those in heaven, and those on earth, and those under the earth” (Philippians 2.9).

A sophisticated rationalist will mockingly reply: “Do you mean to say that if you go far enough up from earth in a spaceship you will someday reach Heaven, or if you dig a hole far enough into the earth you will eventually reach Hell?!” No, we do not mean that. Clearly, when Christ descended into Hell and then ascended into Heaven, he entered a region that is in some sense beyond our normal space-time continuum. Of course, modern physics has revealed that space-time is very far from what it seems to be to our normal, unsophisticated sense-perception. We experience it in four dimensions, but modern string-theory physicists believe it has eleven! So the question arises: could Paradise and Hell be in one of the seven dimensions that we do not normally experience? Or even in a twelfth dimension not yet discovered by scientists? Even if we give negative answers to these questions, and conclude that Heaven and Hell exist in some completely different kind of reality, we must nevertheless accept the fact that Heaven and Hell must in some way interact with our familiar four dimensions of space and time. For when Christ ascended into Heaven, he definitely went up in relation to the observing Apostles, and not down, or to the right or left. And again, when He descended into Hell, he definitely went down, and not in any other direction.

As C.S. Lewis writes, referring to the “New Nature” of Christ’s resurrection Body, “the New Nature is, in the most troublesome way [for sophisticated rationalists], interlocked at some points with the Old. Because of its novelty we have to think of it, for the most part, metaphorically; but because of the partial interlocking, some facts about it [the local appearances, the eating, the touching, the claim to be corporeal] come through into our present experience in all their literal facthood – just as some facts about an organism are inorganic facts, and some facts about a solid body are facts of linear geometry.”

And in another place he writes: “The remark so often made that “Heaven is a state of mind’ bears witness to the wintry and deathlike phase of this process in which we are now living. The implication is that if Heaven is a state of mind – or, more correctly, of the spirit – then it must be only a state of the spirit, or at least that anything else, if added to that state of spirit, would be irrelevant. That is what every great religion except Christianity would say. But Christian teaching by saying that God made the world and called it good teaches that Nature or environment cannot be simply irrelevant to spiritual beatitude in general, however far in one particular Nature, during the days of her bondage, they may have been torn apart. By teaching the resurrection of the body it teaches that Heaven is not merely a state of the spirit but a state of the body as well: and therefore a state of Nature as a whole. Christ, it is true, told His hearers that the Kingdom of Heaven was ‘within’ or ‘among’ them. But His hearers were not merely in a ‘state of mind’. The planet He had created was beneath their feet, His sun above their heads; blood and lungs and guts were working in the bodies he had invented, photons and sound waves of his devising were blessing them with the sight of His human face and the sound of His voice. We are never merely in a state of mind…”

Again, Fr. Seraphim Rose writes that, in reacting to an over-materialist understanding of heaven and hell, “many Christians… have gone to the opposite extreme and declare that heaven is ‘nowhere’. Among Roman Catholics and Protestants there are sophisticated analogies which proclaim that heaven is ‘a state, not a place’, that ‘up’ is only a metaphor, the Ascension of Christ… was not really an ‘ascension’, but only a change of state. The result of such apologies is that heaven and hell become very vague and indefinite conceptions, and the sense of their reality begins to disappear – with disastrous results for Christian life, because these are the very realities toward which our whole earthly life is directed.

“All such apologies, according to the teaching of Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, are based on the false idea of the modern philosopher Descartes that everything that is not material is ‘pure spirit’ and is not limited by time and space. This is not the teaching of the Orthodox Church. Bishop Ignatius writes: ‘The fantasy of Descartes concerning the independence of spirits in space and time is a decisive absurdity. Everything that is limited is necessarily dependent on space’ (vol. III, p. 312). ‘The numerous quotations from the Divine service books and the works of the Fathers of the Orthodox Church decided with complete satisfaction the question as to where paradise and hell are located… With what clarity the teaching of the Orthodox Eastern Church indicates that the location of paradise is in the heavens and the location of hell is in the bowels of the earth’ (vol. III, pp. 308-9; the emphasis is his). Here we shall only indicate just how this teaching is to be interpreted.

“It is certainly true, as Bishop Ignatius’ numerous citations indicate, that all Orthodox sources – the Holy Scripture, Divine services, Lives of Saints, writings of Holy Fathers – speak of paradise and heaven as ‘up’ and hell as ‘down’, under the earth. And it is also true that since angels and souls are limited in space…, they must always be in one definite place – whether heaven, hell, or earth…

“Heaven, therefore, is certainly a place, and it is certainly up from any point on the earth, and hell is certainly down, in the bowels of the earth; but these places and their inhabitants cannot be seen by men until their spiritual eyes are opened… Further, these places are not within the ‘coordinates’ of our space-time system: an airliner does not pass ‘invisibly’ through paradise, nor an earth satellite through the third heaven, nor can the souls waiting in hell for the Last Judgement be reached by drilling for them in the earth. They are not there, but in a different kind of space that begins right here but extends, as it were, in a different direction…”

Returning to Metallinos, we can agree that heaven is “noetic”; but we cannot deny that they are also in some real sense places, because we humans, in both our souls and our bodies, are located in space and time; we are circumscribed. Even the angels are circumscribed; they cannot be in two places at once. Only God and His Grace are completely uncircumscribed, not bounded by space and time. So when our souls are sent by God to Heaven and Hell, they are sent to places, because they cannot be in a non-place, so to speak. True, the space and time of the other world are different in some ways from the space and time we know. That is, the images of heaven and hell that we form in our earth-bound imagination are more or less inadequate to the reality. And yet both the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, and the experiences of many who have been to the other world and come back, agree that they are places, even if they are much more than only places...

Let us turn to Metallinos’ statement that Heaven and Hell “are the same experience, except that they are perceived differently by man”. As it stands, this statement makes no logical, let alone theological sense. An experience is an event in one man’s subjective consciousness. If it is an experience in Heaven or of Heaven, then it must be joyful; if it is in Hell or of Hell, then it must be painful. But a joyful experience cannot be the same as a painful experience: they must be different experiences. The experience of Uncreated Grace as described by the saints could be called an experience of Heaven on earth. In any case, it cannot be described as an experience of Hell…

As for one and the same experience being "perceived differently", this is possible, but only later, in recollection. But this is not what Metallinos is saying. He is saying that at the Second Coming of Christ, the righteous will look upon the Uncreated Light – the Divine Fire that will sweep through the whole universe – and rejoice, being enlightened but not burned, while the sinners will look upon It and grieve, being burned but not enlightened. This is true, as the patristic references cited by Metallinos prove. But the truth of this statement by no means proves that Heaven and Hell are one experience. Rather, it demonstrates that the righteous and the sinners have two, completely different experiences in relation to one and the same event – the Appearance of Christ in all His Majesty at the Second Coming.

All spiritual experiences, insofar as they involve an interaction between the uncreated God and created man, have a dual nature. It is a characteristic of Romanides and his followers, such as Kalomiros and Metallinos, that they tend to emphasize the uncreated, Divine aspect of these experiences at the expense of their created, human aspect. This “eschatological monophysitism” has the effect, as Fr. Seraphim Rose noted, of making our ideas about heaven and hell vague and indefinite, with disastrous consequences for the spiritual life.

CONCLUSION: SALVATION AND DEIFICATION

While undermining the traditional Christian concepts of sin, redemption and the Last Judgement, the neo-soteriologists at the same time try to replace them with other concepts. The most popular of these, especially among the Greek neo-soteriologists, is that of deification or theosis. In conclusion, therefore, let us briefly examine the relationship between salvation as traditionally understood and deification.

“God became man, so that men should become gods.” This patristic dictum going back to the fourth century was rediscovered with enthusiasm by theologians of the twentieth century at the same time that they rediscovered the teaching of the Holy Fathers – especially Saints Maximus the Confessor, Symeon the New Theologian and Gregory Palamas – on the Divine Light and uncreated Grace. As a result, a “revolution” has been created in the teaching of the faith, with references to the Divine Light, uncreated Grace and deification peppering even the sermons of ordinary parish priests.

In itself there is nothing to be regretted in this “revolution”. For many, including the present writer, it came as a revelation to learn that the aim of the Christian life is not only to escape hell, not only to become good, but to become god, to acquire the Holy Spirit in such fullness that our humble human nature becomes completely transfigured by the Divine Energies and is transformed “from glory into glory”. We cannot attain the goal of the Christian life if we do not realize how lofty it is: “without a vision the people perish” (Proverbs 29.18). Losing sight of this goal carries with it the great danger of reducing Christianity to a kind of Victorian bourgeois morality that is satisfied with a level of attainment far short of holiness or deification. We must always bear in mind that God requires us to be holy as He is holy, and that unless our righteousness greatly exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisees, we shall in no wise enter the Kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5.20)…

The tragedy is that, in the Romanideans, the loftiness of this vision is combined with a pride that is in its own way no less pharisaical. They become intoxicated by the goal rather than humbled by their distance from it. They forget that while the goal of the Christian is indeed to become a god, it was the premature desire to attain precisely the same goal in a manner contrary to God’s will that led to Adam and Eve being expelled from Paradise…

This is most clear in the writings of Romanides. He talks constantly about deification and the main means to it, noetic prayer. About the other commandments and dogmas he says comparatively little – of redemption through the Cross, for example, there is no discussion at all in his Patristic Theology and very little in his Outline of Orthodox Patristic Dogmatics.

But Orthodox dogmatics has a definite order of exposition, and each step must be fully and correctly understood before going on to the next step. Thus a profound understanding of original sin requires a prior understanding of the original creation; the necessity of the Redeemer, and of His Sacrifice on the Cross, is incomprehensible if the true predicament of fallen mankind is not appreciated; the acquisition of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church, and especially her sacramental life, is inconceivable without the Economy of the Son that made it possible; and finally, deification and the resurrection of the dead presupposes the prior presence of the Spirit of life in those who are being saved in the Church. To concentrate almost exclusively on the later steps at the expense of the earlier is like attempting to place the roof on a house before the foundation has been dug and the walls have been completed: it threatens the collapse of the whole structure.

Yet this is precisely what we see in Romanides. As a clear example let us return to his words: “the Old Testament Job reached theosis even though he was a heathen and not a Jew”. We pointed out earlier that if this were true, it makes Christ’s Sacrifice on the Cross superfluous; for we can reach no other conclusion if a man can attain the highest goal of existence while living in original sin and before the conquest of sin and death by Christ. Of course, Job is a saint of the Church and lives in the glory of the Divine Light. But his salvation and complete deification, like that of all the Old Testament saints, took place only after, and in strict dependence on, the Sacrifice of Christ on the Cross.

Romanides’ error involves him directly in two heresies: Pelagianism and Ecumenism. His thinking is Pelagianist because it implies that a man can conquer sin and death, and attain deification, without Christ and without the Holy Spirit Who was given only after the Resurrection of Christ. And it is Ecumenist because it implies that there is salvation outside the Church – indeed, that the Church is unnecessary as the Ark of Salvation.

The irony is that although Romanides is possessed by an especially fierce anti-western pathos, Pelagianism and Ecumenism are two quintessentially western heresies. That this is not an accident is proved by the fact that several other leading Romanideans display the same combination of fierce anti-westernism with susceptibility to western modes of thinking. Thus Alexander Kalomiros, who railed so much against westernism that he doubted whether a person brought up in Catholicism or Protestantism could ever become truly Orthodox, nevertheless believed in the western heresy of Darwinism. It is a case of “Physician, heal thyself!” The new soteriologists protest too much against precisely that heretical West from which their own errors emanate. While fiercely condemning flawed but Orthodox thinkers of the West, like Augustine, they themselves separate themselves from Orthodoxy…

It is not for nothing that the Church in her prayers cries out: “O Lord, save us!”, not: “O Lord, deify us!” While we long for both salvation and deification, and while the two undoubtedly go together in the end, as sinners for whom salvation is by no means yet assured we cry out humbly for deliverance from sin before we ask for the still greater gift of glorification. It is the new soteriologists’ reversal of this relationship, and their concentration on the more “exciting” and exalted teaching on deification at the expense of the more basic and better-known teaching on salvation, that reveals that inner pride which is the cause of their heretical assault on the Justice of God.

They could learn from the story of a famous anchorite who came to see Abba Poemen in the Egyptian desert. “Abba Poemen received him with joy. They greeted one another and sat down. The visitor began to speak of the Scriptures, of spiritual and of heavenly things. But Abba Poemen turned his face away and answered nothing. Seeing that he did not speak to him, the other went away deeply grieved and said to the brother who had brought him, ‘I have made this long journey in vain. For I have come to see the old man, and he does not wish to speak to me.’ Then the brother went inside to Abba Poemen and said to him, ‘Abba, this great man who has so great a reputation in his own country has come here because of you. Why did you not speak to him?’ The old man said, ‘He is great and speaks of heavenly things and I am lowly and speak of earthly things. If he had spoken to me of the passions of the soul, I should have replied, but he speaks to me of spiritual things and I know nothing about that.’ Then the brother came out and said to the visitor, ‘The old man does not readily speak of the Scriptures, but if anyone consults him about the passions of the soul, he replies.’ Filled with compunction, the visitor returned to the old man and said to him, ‘What should I do, Abba, for the passions of the soul master me.’ The old man turned towards him and replied joyfully, ‘This time, you come as you should. Now open your mouth concerning this and I will fill it with good things...’”

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Vladimir Moss – Orthodox Christianity Author

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