ATONEMENT IN THE ANCIENT CHURCH

A Jewish Shabbat Chalice, Commemorating the Ark of the Covenant and the Founding of the First Temple

By Bp. Joseph (Ancient Church of the West) 

Substitutionary Atonement is one of five early theories of salvation, all based upon biblical evidence. The Early Church saw it as biblical, one of the facets of the mystery of salvation, but not a complete system unto itself. 

Ancient Christianity tended to have an expiational view of sacrifice because it was consistent with the Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Covenant and the Alexandrian terminology found in the Gospel of St. John and the theology of St. Paul. Early Greek and Syriac Fathers, building upon Alexandrian Judaism, explained salvation in the philosophical language of the Greco-Roman Logos-centered Stoics and Platonists. It was not a "syncretism" or a "Platonized Christianity", but the "Fullness of Time" which converged to uncover the true meanings of the prophetic Scripture. 

The simple way to understand what this idea meant to the Early Church is that sacrifice was conceived as joining life to life through blood, instead of life for life or death for death through the arbitrary sacrifice of a substitute. This view focuses on what God accomplished through sacrifice, because the "life is in the blood." The joining of man's life with God's life, a link broken in the Fall, had to be re-accomplished through a medium consistent with man's physical creation. It was all about the life, not about the death. 

This is the only view that explains all of the OT's theological constructs, although it doesn't explain biblical descriptions of God's anger or judgement. Because of the relative triumph of the expiatory theory early on, Greek and Syriac soteriology tended to focus on the NT revelation of God as love, light, truth and beauty, and explained the anger of God as the perception of God's goodness from the standpoint of alienated and sinful humanity. We perceived God as angry because we were not reconciled with Him, but He was never angry at us or demanding our deaths. We died because we were separated from Him. Since the final and complete revelation of God and His nature is found in Christ and His Church, and God's nature is changeless and perfect, this view is consistent with Who Christ showed the Father to be. 

Christ's Blood is how we receive God's life, reconciliation and forgiveness of sins, and He promised that His Blood would be available to us in the Anamnesis of the Lord's Supper. This view of salvation leads directly into the practice of the Early Church and is the foundational reality of the sacramental practice of Communion, which was absolutely central to every generation's understanding of the Gospel until challenged by the Radical Reformation. 

Therefore, the message of expiation is that we need not be obsessed with God's wrath or judgment as characterized in the OT, but fully participating in God's goodness, mercy and love through the expiation of Christ's sacrifice. His blood links our finite, created lives with the infinite, Uncreated Life of God. We actively participate in His "once and for all" sacrifice upon the Cross in the mystery of Faith and the Sacrament of Communion! This is the "Good News" of the Gospel!