Justification in Eastern Orthodoxy

Justification has never received much attention in Eastern Orthodox theology. The furious debates over grace and free will, ignited by Pelagius and Augustine, and flaring up again and again through the Middle Ages, the Reformation and beyond, were confined to the West.¹ But in the East, justification is mentioned, only in passing, in commentary on Paul’s epistles, and comes up briefly in statements responding to Protestant and Catholic overtures — but it never warranted sustained systematic investigation.²

But is it true that the Orthodox have no theology of justification? A previous generation of Orthodox apologists, keen to liberate Orthodoxy from its so-called Babylonian captivity to the West, sometimes spoke as though juridical language was a Latin imposition utterly foreign to the Greek Fathers.³ A more tempered and less defensive approach recognizes that Orthodoxy can and should integrate justification language into its own distinctive theology. As Orthodox New Testament scholar Edith Humphrey urges,

It is possible (and, in my view, necessary) for Orthodox theologians to begin to reclaim language about dikaiosyne (justice or righteousness) and dikaiosis (justification, rectification, ‘right-wizing’), without allowing the discussion to be constrained by the longstanding debates between the Roman Catholic Church and Protestants, or between Protestants and Protestants (e.g. imputed versus imparted righteousness).⁴

Icon of the Pharisee and the Publican

Since justification is a biblical and patristic theme, even if not the controlling one, some account must be made of it that coheres with the broader framework. This essay, then, is an attempt to sketch a doctrine of justification that is faithful to the mind of the Fathers, integrates well with Orthodox soteriology, and takes advantage of recent Pauline scholarship.

Orthodox theology revolves around theosis, the transfiguration of the human being who is made transparent to the divine energies and participates in the glory, holiness, and immortality of the triune God, through the work of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. The grand arc of human destiny thus stretches farther back and further forward than the smaller story of justification it straddles, for deification through the Incarnate Word was always God’s plan before and apart from the fall into sin. And the process of theosis stretches on into eternity, in which man continually ascends the summit of divinity, endlessly being transformed from one degree of glory into another (2 Cor 3:18).

In this telling, human sin is a costly but temporary detour. But as Roland Chia observes, “The language of justification by faith is unimaginable without reference to notions such as alienation, guilt, hostility, and sin. Its starting point is the fallen human condition as it stands before God’s judgement and grace.”⁵ Those who privilege justification thus tend to view the human being as naturally sinful, and perhaps even totally depraved, rather than as the fundamentally good creation of God. The Orthodox, of course, lament the miserable condition brought about by Adam’s sin, but while Western theology has heavily underlined the curse of inherited guilt, Eastern thinking has given more weight to other effects of sin: “mortality, corruption, and the difficulty in maintaining an unbreakable communion with God.”⁶ Gerald Bray therefore charges that “the Eastern Church has no room in its theology for a doctrine of justification because it has no room for a doctrine of original sin which imputes Adam’s guilt to the whole human race.” He goes on to complain that “in so far as justification was understood at all, it was assimilated to sanctification and the final re-creation of all things in Christ.”⁷ But to the Orthodox mind, the distinction to be made between justification and sanctification is not that the former is a status and the latter a process, but that they are two stages of salvation’s transforming work. Bishop Maximos Aghiorgoussis argues that “justification is not a separate act of God but the negative aspect of salvation in Christ, which is freedom from sin, death, and the devil; whereas sanctification is the positive aspect of God’s saving act, that of spiritual growth in new life in Christ communicated by God’s Holy Spirit.”⁸ As this definition suggests, justification for the Orthodox carries a strongly transformative element. The “righteousifying” declared by the dikaio- word group employed by Paul involves God’s complete rectification of the human predicament, as Chrysostom’s remarks on Rom 5:12 demonstrate:

For it was not remission from punishment only that He gave us, but that from sins, and life also. As if any were not merely to free a man with a fever from his disease but to give him also beauty, and strength, and rank. … If then the latter (i.e. sin) armed death, it is plain enough that the righteousness destructive hereof, which by grace was introduced, not only disarms death, but even destroys it, and undoes entirely the dominion thereof … by God and grace, and leading our life unto a goodlier estate, and to blessings unlimited. … Doubt not then for your life if you have righteousness, for righteousness is greater than life as being the mother of it.⁹

Chrysostom anticipates some of the insights of the New Perspective(s) on Paul. As Michael Gorman sums up Paul’s teaching, “Justification by faith means resurrection from the dead; justifying faith is inherently both participatory and transformative.”¹⁰ The participatory and transformative dimensions of justification which Gorman highlights accord well with the Orthodox account of theosis. For this metamorphosis is achieved through participation in the Incarnate Word who has deified humanity by uniting it to the Godhead. Salvation involves a radical liberation from the enemy powers and a total reorientation of the whole person toward God, through sharing in the crucified and risen Lord. “O strange and incredible thing!” St. Cyril of Jerusalem exclaims to the fourth-century catechumens he is preparing for baptism:

We did not really die, we were not really buried, we were not really crucified and raised; our imitation was in an image, but our salvation was real. Christ was truly crucified, and buried and raised up, and all these things he graciously gave to us, so that by imitation of his passion we might gain participation in salvation in reality. O surpassing love of humanity! Christ received the nails in his pure hands and suffered, and to me grants salvation without my suffering and pain, through sharing [his suffering].¹¹

The Orthodox thus deny a strictly forensic doctrine of justification in which the sinner is declared righteous through the imputation of the merits of Christ to the believing sinner. As Stylianopoulos points out, “the legal concept of merit and the notion of a treasury of merits are entirely missing from the Orthodox tradition.”¹² Divine justice is not a currency that can be transferred between accounts; God’s righteousness becomes ours as we are incorporated into Christ himself.

Celebrating the transformative aspects of justification does not require that we deny its declarative and juridical character, however. God’s comprehensive “righteousifying” of the sinner indeed begins with him pronouncing the sentence of vindication over us. And because God is God, his justifying declaration is a performative utterance with creative power — it is, to use Peter Leithart’s neologism, a “deliverdict”.¹³

Justification is a divine act in which God, without violating human free will, graciously partners with his creatures. In Greek patristic thought, free will was a vital aspect of the divine image, and though weakened by sin and confused by the passions, human beings have not lost their capacity to choose the good. The East holds to a synergistic model of salvation, in which receiving and continuing in the grace of God hinges on the human choice to believe. In the larger story of deification, as man fully participates in the divine image, he continually offers the highest gift given to him by God — his free will — back to his Creator in glad submission. The supreme example of this movement is seen in Christ himself. As Maximus the Confessor defended at such great cost, in the single person of the God-man, the human will is not swallowed up by the divine will, but freely offers itself in obedience to God.¹⁴ Through participation in Christ, who in his incarnation deified human nature, “human beings, who in a historical fall abused their freedom to turn to what was worse, in Christ are able to move toward God who draws them by grace into his divinizing life.”¹⁵

The synergy between God and man is seen by the vital role played by faith in justification. Chrysostom reminds his hearers that righteousness is not earned by human effort but received by faith: “For you do not achieve it by toilings and labors, but you receive it by a gift from above, contributing one thing only from your own store, ‘believing.’”¹⁶ Faith is receptive and dependent, but it is not passive. It must not be confused or mixed with “works of the law”. Irenaeus, who could identify more readily with Paul’s own conflicts with Judaism, identifies this with the Mosaic law and Jewish covenantal boundary markers.¹⁷ Chrysostom, writing two centuries later, interprets these as the activities of autonomous human reason apart from faith. But faith is in no way in tension with Spirit-empowered, Christ-imitating virtue. In fact, “far from viewing obedience as needing to be carefully distinguished from faith, Chrysostom everywhere associates faith with obedience, virtue, and power to do good works.”¹⁸

Another window into Eastern thinking on the relationship between faith and works comes from the 5th-century monk and writer St. Mark the Ascetic. In “On Those Who Think that They are Made Righteous by Works: Two Hundred and Twenty-Six Texts” (written for fellow wrestlers and not systematic theologians), he urges his readers to pursue works of love in the spirit of faith. “Some without fulfilling the commandments think that they possess true faith. Others fulfil the commandments and then expect the kingdom as a reward due to them. Both are mistaken.” Faith must express itself in works, and the test of those works is whether they were done in faith. “When Scripture says ‘He will reward every man according to his works’ (Matt. 16:27),” he writes, “do not imagine that works in themselves merit either hell or the kingdom. On the contrary, Christ rewards each man according to whether his works are done with faith or without faith in Himself; and He is not a dealer bound by contract, but God our Creator and Redeemer.”¹⁹

It is a striking paradox of Orthodox liturgy that it both exalts and abases the worshipper in ways not experienced in Western Christianity. Khaled Anatolios describes the Byzantine liturgy as an expression of “doxological contrition.”²⁰ It summons the faithful to become by grace what God is by nature and to experience the uncreated light, but as the surest path to those heights it offers the continuous repetition of the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

A key moment in the Orthodox liturgical calendar comes during the preparation for Lent. The Sunday of the Publican and Pharisee commemorates the one story in the Gospels where Jesus identifies the person whom God will justify. During Divine Liturgy the faithful are reminded, “The Pharisee was exalted in his righteousness, and so he fell. The Publican was abased, defiled by many sins; yet he was exalted and, against all expectation, he was justified. Though he was rich in virtues, foolish pride brought the Pharisee to poverty; but in the extremity of his need the Publican was justified through his humility.”²¹

Ultimately, justification, like every facet of salvation serving humanity’s deification, is a gift of God’s grace. In our ascent to God, we who share in his image have the dignity of cooperating freely with him — but always in humble reliance on the One who declares and makes sinners righteous, who powerfully rectifies all that has gone wrong with humanity and sets us back on the path to our true destiny in the triune life.

Endnotes

1. Theodore G. Stylianopoulos, “Orthodox Readings of Paul,” in The Blackwell Companion to Paul (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 478.
2. An additional factor, as Valerie Karras notes, is “the Western tendency to define, differentiate, and compartmentalize, as opposed to the Eastern tendency to theologize apophatically and, when cataphatically, primarily in a holistic and organic fashion” — much as do St. Paul and the other New Testament authors. Valerie A. Karras, “Beyond Justification: An Orthodox Perspective,” in Justification and the Future the Ecumenical Movement: The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, 2003, 4.
3. See the survey of recent Orthodox anti-Westernism in Pantelis Kalaitzidis, “The Image of the West in Contemporary Greek Theology,” Orthodox Constructions of the West, 2013, 142, 317–160, 324.
4. Edith M. Humphrey, “Orthodox Christian Reception of the Pauline Teaching on Dikaiosynē : Chrysostom, in Conversation with Calvin, on Romans 1–3,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 20, no. 2 (April 2018): 271–72.
5. Roland Chia, “Salvation as Justification and Deification,” Scottish Journal of Theology 64, no. 2 (May 2011): 127.
6. Julija Vidovic, “An Orthodox Perspective on the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification,” The Ecumenical Review 71, no. 3 (July 2019): 282.
7. Gerald Bray, “Justification and the Eastern Orthodox Churches,” in Here We Stand: Justification by Faith Today, ed. James I. Packer (Hodder and Stoughton, 1986), 106, 107.
8. Maximos Aghiorgoussis, “Orthodox Soteriology,” in Salvation in Christ: A Lutheran-Orthodox Dialogue (1992): 48–49, quoted in Lucian Turcescu, “Soteriological Issues in the 1999 Lutheran-Catholic Joint Declaration on Justification: An Orthodox Perspective,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 38, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 64, 66. Cf. Vidovic, “An Orthodox Perspective on the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification”, 285 and Karras, “Beyond Justification: An Orthodox Perspective”, 16.
9. Homilies on Romans, §10.5.16–17, 20–21, quoted in Bradley R. Cochran, “The Superiority of Faith: John Chrysostom’s Eastern Theology of Justification,” 2013, https://www.academia.edu/5610613/The_Superiority_of_Faith_John_Chrysostoms_Eastern_Theology_of_, 6.
10. Michael J. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2009), 67–68.
11. St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Lectures on the Christian Sacraments: the Procatechesis and the Five Mystagogical Catecheses ascribed to St Cyril of Jerusalem, trans. Maxwell E. Johnson (Yonkers, New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2017), 101. For further discussion of Cyril’s baptismal theology of unitive participation in Christ by the Spirit, see (M. C. Steenberg, Of God and Man: Theology as Anthropology from Irenaeus to Athanasius (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009), 128–57).
12. Stylianopoulos, “Orthodox Readings of Paul,” 481.
13. Gregory of Nyssa, Peri tou kata Theon skopou (PG 46.289C), quoted in Christoforos Stavropoulos, “Partakers of Divine Nature,” in Eastern Orthodox Theology: A Contemporary Reader, ed. Daniel B. Clendenin (Baker Academic, 2003), 183–92, 190–191.
14. As St. John of Damascus summarizes Maximus’s dyothelitism, “the Lord’s soul willed freely when it acted, but it freely willed to will the same as those things which his divine will willed.” St. John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith, 215.
15. P.M. Blowers and R.L. Wilken, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St. Maximus the Confessor, Popular Patristics Series (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 24.
16. Homilies on Romans, §2.1.17, quoted in Cochran, “The Superiority of Faith: John Chrysostom’s Eastern Theology of Justification”, 10.
17. Hans Boersma, “Justification Within Recapitulation: Irenaeus in Ecumenical Dialogue,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 22, no. 2 (2020): 180–82.
18. Cochran, “The Superiority of Faith: John Chrysostom’s Eastern Theology of Justification,” 13.
19. St. Mark the Ascetic, “On Those Who Think That They Are Made Righteous by Works: Two Hundred and Twenty-Six Texts,” in The Philokalia: The Complete Text, ed. St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth, vol. I (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), 126–27.
20. Khaled Anatolios, Deification through the Cross: An Eastern Christian Theology of Salvation, New edition (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2022), 32.
21. Mary and Kallistos, The Lenten Triodion, Service books of the Orthodox Church (London: Faber, 1978), 101.