The Chasm between Orthodoxy's Primitive Apostolic understanding of Salvation and the Western Approximations
Why are Western theologians still ignoring their own roots in the East and yet there's the example of John Wesley, who lived in the 18th century. He was an Anglican priest who managed to transcend the bonds of Western near-theology's rooms, and return to the common Christian heritage and theological understand of the Early Orthodox Greek speaking fathers and the Apostles. He returned to what he called "primitive Christianity" what I call "Ancient and Apostolic Christianity" before it was systematically scholasticized and bastardized by Western theological errors. John Wesley took from the early Christians the concept of salvation as the healing of humanity. The Christ event ceased to be for him the "legal transaction between God and the devil" or "a punishment of the Son by the Father for the satisfaction of the Father's honor" or "for the appeasement of an angry God."
Following the early church Fathers Irenaeus, Origen and Athanasius he saw Christ's incarnation as "the loving condescension of God in order to lift humanity and bring it closer to divinity." For God became man so that man may be deified. Following the thought of Gregory the Theologian he saw the Incarnation as God assuming humanity to heal it, to heal that which on it own was not capable of healing but moved inexorably to sickness and death. The idea of judgment and juridical justification gave way in his understanding to allow for God's love and transforming power for the perfecting and sanctification of fallen humanity. Wesley recognized in the early fathers understanding that in the process of salvation man's free will participates with the free flowing Grace of God, because the image of God in man has not been completely destroyed by the fall as Augustine wrongly taught and most in the West believe; that image of God was only distorted and disfigured and can still exercise his free will to choose the good; it can still respond to the love of God so that man my be healed and transformed and reach sanctification (or the more precise term theosis). Wesley incorporated the practical aesthetic teachings of the fathers, fasting, confessional prayer, and the Eucharist into a specific method for the modern man to assist him in his wilful transformation by God's grace and love into a new renewed human (in Christ).
Wesley termed this discipline of life, "methodism" and it was adopted by the early Methodist and later Wesleyans - having been lost by subsequent generations in the apostasy of Modern Methodism. For those who have only understood the "sloganized theology" of the West, they have the teaching of Wesley himself, sadly not the Church that holds his name, to meet the teaching of the Early Church un-distorted by the Roman Catholic Church post Charlemagne and the scholastic reformers and Roman dissidents like Luther. Here they can find early Christian theology undisturbed by rationalistic, humanistic dead theology, the which is a river of error from Augustinian thought that did not take into account carefully the theological tradition before him.
The understanding and practice of Orthodox Christians is based on the Apostles and early Fathers seeing its Golden Theological era between the "Age of the Apostles" and the fifth century and this offers both the ascetic discipline, the reasonable approach as well as the rich mystical symposium of spiritual offering drawn from the centuries of Christian suffering and sacrifice. The lessons to be learned will be many. Salvation will be seen not as a juridical transaction but in the light of the resurrection and the transformation of human persons who become healed in the Theanthropos- Christ, Who is God and man, the incarnate LOGOS who defeated sin in the flesh abolished death by death and raised human nature, deified it and glorified it as he ascended to heaven and he is seated at the right hand of the Father. There is no salvation in "concepts" of salvation, believing a slogan cannot save one. Salvation is HEALING in the true unity of Christianity which is the flow of Christ's Life in his Church, in His Body in the continuity and conquest of sin. This is the primary Apostolic/Primitive Christianity where Christology was debated and clarified. There is a great chasm between this primitive Christian reality and the modern salvation theories. But for those who dare not read the Fathers who knew the Apostles and their successors, (an if you are going to read the don't read secondary sourced but their own works which are extant) there is the touchstone of Truth in John Wesley's own writings, (again don't read secondary sources but Wesley's own words, which are extant.)
_ Written by Archpriest Symeon Elias based on a lecture by Fr. Panayiotis Papageorgiou, Ph.D.
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