On Salvation From An Eastern Perspective

Someone dear to me recently wrote and said that while reading a book by an Orthodox author, she ran into a stumbling block. This is the quote from the book with the challenging parts in bold:

Orthodox Christian Scriptures and saints all stress the necessity, and indeed the inevitability, of blessed mourning (penthos) over life in this sinful world. They say, as is often emphasized in Orthodox Church services, that without tears of sorrow over the "sin of the world" and one's own sins, and those of one's family and friends, no person can be saved. A human being who sees and experiences the grim realities of life in this world will necessarily weep as Jesus wept, and weep together with Him. "Blessed are they who mourn," Christ teaches, "for they shall be comforted" (Matt. 5:4). (from Christian Faith and Same Sex Attraction: Eastern Orthodox Reflections by Fr. Thomas Hopko of blessed memory).

I want to share my response to her below.

You said that "no person can be saved" is a "stumbling block". I think I can anticipate the reason, so I will do my best to explain what the text means.

My guess is that you instinctively disagree with the text because you have two assumptions about the word saved that I don't have:

• When you read the word saved, you primarily think of an event; whereas I think of a process.
• When you read the word saved, you primarily think in terms of a change of legal status from guilty to not guilty (a juridical model of salvation). When I read the word saved, on the other hand, I think primarily in terms of progress from unhealth to health (a therapeutic model of salvation).

So, let's break these down. I will use as much Scripture as I can because I know that this is your authority base. This will be long, so read slowly.

Event versus Process

In Sunday School, you probably heard this saying: "I was saved; I am being saved; I will be saved". Even at that age, my teacher was trying to communicate to me something of the progressive nature of salvation. When she unpacked that sentence, she meant this: When I prayed Jesus into my heart, I was justified. As I make good decisions in life, I am being sanctified. And after I die and I get a new body without sickness, I will be glorified. So even in the Baptist Church I was taught that there were technically three aspects of salvation: 1) a one-time event in the past, 2) a on-going process in the present of becoming more like Christ, and 3) a one-time event in the future. I might package it differently these days, but at its core, it was an important distinction.

Sadly, aspect 2 gets overlooked a lot, so let me quote some passages that are clearly using it in that sense:

• Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. (1 Cor 15:2)
• For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. (1 Cor 1:18)
• For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. (2 Cor 2:15)

A frequent communication obstacle occurs when western Christians (Catholics and Protestants) discuss salvation with eastern Christians (Orthodox). The reason is that in the West, the default aspect is the first one (the one-time event in the past) whereas in the East, the default aspect is the second one (the on-going process in the present). What does that mean? It means that if the author is a western Christian and he writes saved, you can assume he means a one-time event in the past--unless he explicitly indicates differently. On the other hand, if the author is an eastern Christian and he writes saved, you can assume he is referring to the on-going process in the present--unless he explicitly indicates otherwise.

So let's look again at the above stumbling block sentence. As a western Christian, maybe you read it like this: "Without tears of sorrow over the sins of the world, self, and family, a person cannot experience that one-time event where you go from the state of being unsaved to the state of being saved." Is that how you read it? I don't want to project here, but I would guess that that is how you read it.

On the other hand, as an eastern Christian, I would read it like this: "Without tears of sorrow over the sins of the world, self, and family, it is hard for a person to make progress in his on-going process of becoming more like Christ."

And maybe you still disagree with this second sentence, but you at least now have a better understanding of the way Christians from different backgrounds use the word saved to point to different default aspects.

Juridical Versus Therapeutic

This next part will get pretty deep, so read slowly.

In Christ, we are offered a "great salvation" (Hebrews 2:3), full of "precious and very great promises" (2 Peter 1:4). At the same time, as mere creatures and not the Creator, we are capable of comprehending this greatness in only a small way: "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:9).

Because of this limitation, whenever God wants to communicate truth to us, He has to accommodate our finiteness. That is, He uses metaphors or parables to help us grasp a part of the truth. We see Jesus’ using parables all the time, and the metaphors in the Bible are uncountable: God is a King, a Judge, a Shepherd, a Lamb, a Husband, a Rock, a Father, etc.

All the metaphors taken together create a very big and multifaceted mental picture of God, but it is hard to keep that complete multifaceted picture in the mind all at once. So different groups of people have focused on different subsets of the metaphors, and this has given each group a distinctive approach to Christianity.

Western Christianity, for example, has drawn heavily on juridical metaphors because it developed around Rome, which had a highly developed law system. For example, God is a wrathful Judge, we have guilt because of our sin, and Jesus’ blood satisfies the wrath of God through being our substitute. Thus, in the West, justification, or a change in legal status before God, is a dominant metaphor for understanding salvation.

Eastern Christianity, on the other hand, for whatever historical reasons, focused on the therapeutic metaphor. For example, the Church is a hospital and salvation is about getting truly healthy.

Again, I am not saying that either metaphor is right or wrong. They are all in the Bible. But because salvation is such an all-encompassing concept, we all tend to emphasize a metaphor by default. So, again, if you read a western Christian author and he uses the word saved, you can assume that he is talking about a legal change--unless he explicitly says otherwise. And if you read an eastern Christian author and he uses the word saved, you can assume that he is talking about progressing from unhealth to health--unless he explicitly says otherwise.

So let's look again at the above stumbling block sentence. As a western Christian, maybe you read it like this: "Without tears of sorrow over the sins of the world, self, and family, a person cannot change his legal state from guilty to not guilty".

As an Eastern Christian, I read it as "Without tears of sorrow over the sins of the world, self, and family, it is hard for a person to make progress in his healing."

And again you still might disagree with this second sentence, but you at least now have a better understanding of the Orthodox Christians use the word saved.

Extra Credit

The Greek word translated commonly as saved in the NT is interesting: sozo. You can read about it here: https://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Strongs=G4982&t=ESV

You can see that its primary meaning is this: "to save a suffering one (from perishing), i.e. one suffering from disease, to make well, heal, restore to health"

In other words, sozo can just as easily be translated heal instead of save. And in my opinion, a lot of the time, it should have been as heal instead of save. The word save has such legal baggage in the West that by translating sozo this way, it is hard for a western reader of the English Bible to see beyond Law and Wrath, and so he misses out on the invitation to health and healing that the Greek word implies.

Let me just list several verses where thankfully you can see that sozo has been translated as healed instead of saved. Just imagine what good news the NT would be offering if it were translated healed in other places too!

• And he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” (Mark 5:34)
• And those who had seen it told them how the demon-possessed man had been healed. (Luke 8:36)
• If we are being examined today concerning a good deed done to a crippled man, by what means this man has been healed ... (Acts 4:9)

Summary

I believe that it is hard for a person to make on-going progress in transformation from unhealth to health in the present without sorrow over sin. Do you?