In the Western Churches (which include Roman Catholicism as well as all Protestant varieties) we love to debate Soteriology: What it means to be saved, how we are saved, and what are the roles of Divine grace, human free will, faith, and good works in saving us. Throughout History we see Augustinians versus Pelagians, Catholics versus Protestants, Calvinists versus Arminians (as well as Calvinists versus Calvinists versus everyone else). And a thousand variations of similar debates that center around ideas such as whether God’s decrees are Supralapsarian or Infralapsarian or Sublapsarian, or whether prevenient grace entails or merely enables salvation, or the extent and intent of the Atonement.
When you heap up all the corpses of these bloated and loaded words, it seems like something has gone wrong. Like salvation has been degraded to a word game, instead of a living hope. And it has seemed to me for many years that Western Soteriological debates are based in some fundamental misconceptions. Or perhaps a form of theological color blindness. Like if someone was fundamentally convinced 2+2=3, it would quickly and inevitably lead to internal contradictions as they pursued more advanced maths. Or if someone was fundamentally incapable of discerning between reds and greens, it would deeply affect how they approached art projects and stoplights.
In this case, the Latin-based Western tradition seems to juxtapose Divine grace and human effort as two separate and qualitatively different kinds of force. And the ongoing debate is how these two forces can possibly relate to each other, given how different and discontinuous these forces are. And this debate is done through a particular grid: The legal method of correlating texts and assigning contractual responsibility (Lawyers, after all, play an outsized role in the Western tradition). The result is a kind of legislative debate over when human free will proves insufficient to acquire salvation; And when Divine grace must enter in; And who gets that grace, who doesn’t, and why; And at what point salvation or justification happens in this process; And whether the sacraments of the Church help effect this process or merely exemplify it. This kind of conflict is inevitable in the West given their assumptions and methods, and I don’t really blame us for it. We were doing the best with what we got.
In Eastern Orthodoxy— or rather in portions of the East— they have quite different assumptions and methods that don’t quite map onto the Western grid. The meta-assumption is that the nature of salvation is not something done to the recipient from outside the self, but that it is a union within the human self with the Divine Self (theosis). Due to this assumption, Divine grace and human free will are not two separate forces, but rather the interior and exterior of the same phenomenon: The Christ-life working in and through the human life. The human capacity for this theosis is always present, even if the human organism is currently infected with sin. Compare this with a Western view that sin is not an infection or disease, but rather a state of being in which someone is completely devoid of God. Finally, the relation of inward grace empowering externally free action is worked out in a mystical and philosophical framework that assumes a kind of organic unity of diverse elements, rather than the Western legal tradition.
All in all, this makes Orthodox theology vastly superior to Western theology for parsing out sin, grace, freedom, and salvation. But what Orthodoxy makes up for in theology, it certainly lacks in its practice of inclusion, hospitality, cultural adaptation, and openness. If we could maintain a Church that combines the best of Eastern Mystical Theology with the best of Western Cultural Adaptability, we would have something beautiful indeed.
* As a side note, in case you spent time looking at the attached chart: I think this chart is a great example of how Western Theology tends to put everything into legally defined little boxes, thereby fundamentally distorting the nature of what is trying to be understood. To what extent does this chart (which I created a long time ago) capture anything about the ideas being presented? Instead, doesn't the chart really just reveal the conceptual grid being imposed on them? Not even a rough outline of salvation theories can be fit into seven boxes in four categories.
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