SUMMARY OF GRACE IN THREE PARADIGMS

THE ENERGY-BASED ONTOLOGICAL PARADIGM
OF THE ORTHODOX FATHERS AND MOTHERS
Grace is uncreated ENERGY--God's Life

     The beginning of Grace is the ontological Assimilation to God--omoíosis Theõ[i]) as a member of Christ; the end is théosis ("Divinization") through the Vision of uncreated Light--God's Being-beyond-being.

THE INTELLECT-CENTERED JURIDICAL PARADIGM 
OF THE LATIN SCHOLASTICS WITH A VIRTUAL 
(INTENTIONAL OR CONCEPTUAL) UNITY OF 
BELIEVERS WITH GOD
Grace is an inoperative and created--but supernatural--
HABIT (ABIDING QUALITY) of the human soul

     Through an intellectual Vision of God's Essence (Visio Essentiæ), one becomes a partaker of the Essence ("Deification"--apothéosis; Aquinas ST I-II,iii,7; cf. also ScG III.51-57).  Thomas says that the participation is non autem quan­tum ad modum essendi “not, however, to the extent of [being a participation in] the mode of [God’s] being” (ST I-II, cx,2 ad 2)—but real enough.  For a Scholastic, such a union could nevertheless be ontological as well as "intentional" and "conceptual," since in their view, really knowing something is to make it part of one's being.

     LIKE MUCH ELSE THAT DIFFERENTIATES THE DETAILS OF ORTHODOXY FROM THOSE OF WESTERN CHRISTIANITY IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE ONTOLOGICAL VIEW OF THE FALL AND SALVATION AND THE WESTERN JURIDICAL VIEW OF THE FALL AND SALVATION (AS THOUGH GOD CANNOT PARDON WITHOUT REQUIRING REQUITAL--INHERITED "SIN" AS WELL AS SATISFACTION, ATONEMENT, JUSTIFICATION, VIRTUAL UNITY WITH THE IMPARTICIPABLE UNCREATED ESSENCE, ADOPTION, ETC.).  UNLIKE THE EASTERN PARADIGM, BOTH WESTERN PARADIGMS TREAT THE ILL EFFECTS OF THE FALL AS PUNISHMENTS AND ADMIT THAT ONE--EVEN A NEWBORN--CAN BE ACCUSED AND PUNISHED FOR AN ANCESTOR'S SIN!  FOR AN OVERVIEW CLICK HERE.

THE WILL-FIRST JURIDICAL PARADIGM OF THE 
PROTESTANT REFORMERS WITH A VIRTUAL 
(COVENANTAL, IMPUTED) UNITY OF 
BELIEVERS WITH GOD
Grace is God's GOODWILL or BENIGNITY

    For the Reformers, Grace coats over reality (note that sinners remain sinners after being "justified"--a term based on the Western penal concept of Christ's work on earth) with a virtual reality--viz. the virtual reality of being "righteous in God's eyes."  The result is a will-based, covenantal virtual unity with Christ--with His Essence, since the concept of Energies is lacking in Western theology.

     CHRIST WAS HANDED OVER [TO DEATH]  FOR OUR TRESPASSES AND WAS RAISED UP FOR OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS [Rom. 4:25].   To be like us sinners, Christ appropriately died as a mortal sinner in the manner of a sacrificial Immolation.  In dying--and in dying the way He did--Christ drank the dregs of the human condition.  Had He not died, would he have truly shared our mortal condition?  He died to make a perfect Oblation to God, handing human nature back to God for God to rescue it from satan in satain's defeat in the harrowing of Hades during Christ's time of bodily death and in the reversal of Death in the glorious Resurrection--which had the benefit of allowing Chistians to become members of His risen Body and share His Life--the Assimilation to God, Théosis or Divinization in the uncreated Light of uncreated Energy.  In the divine planning, the Crucifixion was God's way--a condition necessary to the Energization of the Triumphant Resurrection.  Death is abolished when we become new creatings in Christ through our participation in His victorious Resurrection.  Sin is conquerable in the new cosmos energized by the divine Majesty.  In His glorious return to Life in His bodily Resurrection, Christ completes the Oblation of Himself as a perfect Offering for our sins.  His whole Life--His Birth as a Gd-man by the all-glorious, completely graced, and all-sinless Theotokos, teachings, Transfiguration, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension are an Offering and are all soterial.    
     Note that where the Fall and Salvation are not ontological, the Theotokos plays no rôle or only an atavistic role harking back to pre-Augustinian views of her rôle.  Where soteriology olntologically depends on her essential consent and willingness to give birth to the Savior, she is central among non-divine humans.  Born, like all, without sin, she had special Graces (Luke 1:43, etc.) to preserve her virginity; dying sinless (death is not a punishment for sin in the East), she had a special resurrection to dwell with her Son and to intercede for us with Him until the final trumpet sounds and judgment is pronounced on all.

     1 John 2:2 and 4:10 say:  "And He Himself is the propitiation ('ilasmós) for (peri) our sins--not for ours alone but for those of the entire cosmos. . . . In [the Father's sending His Son into the world] is Love . . . in that He loved us and sent His Son [as] a propitiation [hilasmós] for our sins."  ('Ilasmós does not mean "satisfaction.")  Rom. 3:25 speaks of Christ's work as a propitiatory act 'ilasterion).  Rom. 5:8,10 says:   "God showed His own love toward us in that [while we were] still impotent Christ died for us . . . for if we, being enemies, were reconciled to God by the Death of His Son, much more, [now that we are] reconciled will we be saved in/by His Life." 
     Other passages tell us that we are made holy (sanctified) by Christ's Blood; 2 Cor. 5:15 says the Christ "died for the sake of all."  Heb. 7:27 says that Christ did not, like Hebrew archpriests, have to under His Immolation repeatedly; It was "once for all" (ephápax; hápax "once" in 9:28; cf. 9:12; in 1 Pet. 2:18, we read that Christ "suffered" one time [hápax]).  In  1 Pet. 1:18-20, Christ's Self-Offering on the Life-giving Cross  is likened to the offering of a sacrificial Lamb in the Old Testament.  (Note that Immolation is not an essential of sacrifice; its essence is the Offering.  Note that many sacrificial offerings in the third book of the Old Testament have no preceding immolation.  Christ in His members is constantly offering Himself at the divine Liturgy, so that we may ontologically take part of Him and be preserved to persevere in true piety.) 
      Christ's Life and Death offered a true Sacrifice of His human nature--true and perfect Worship in all of its aspects--to the Trinity to remove any religious obstacles to individuals sharing in His Resurrection and His incarnate Union of Deity and humanity.  Freed from satan and decay and death, His members can serve the Trinity when energized by the uncreated Grace diffused in us by the Holy Paraclete.  So guided Christ's members perform works that can please God, as Adam could not after the Fall.  There is no Salvation apart from Christ and the sharing of His Life--Grace.  This is the undiluted Orthodox position.

     In  his treatise, Concerning the Enhumanization of the Logos, St. Athanasios the Great says that Christ is the propitiation of our sins.  In Ch. 8, sect. 2, he does mention the fulfilling of the Law [regarding propitiation?] and then continues in a very ontological manner about the inappropriateness of the passing away "of what He Himself was the Maker."  In sect. 4, Athanasios points out that because all were under the condemnation of the decay of death, delivering His body to death for the sake of all, [Christ] offered it to the Father."   He did this in order that "He might bestow on them Life from Death, that, in what happened to their own body and [of course] through the Grace of the Resurrection, He might put away death from them . . ."  In Ch. 9, sect. 1, we read of the purpose of the Incarnation--that His Body, "partaking of the LOGOS . . . might for the sake of all be made suitable for dying."   "When He, in offering a Body free of every defect. . . to death as a Victim and Sacrifice, abolished death from all of those like Him] in the Offering of something corresponding."   Sect. 2 directly continues with "For as the LOGOS of God over all [(h)ypèr pántas], He, appropriately offering His own Temple and bodily instrument  [or "means":  órganon] as a reciprocal [or "complementary"]  life  [or "payment": antípsychon] for the sake of all [(h)ypèr pánton], fulfilled what was due in death."     

     Reading the foregoing in a Western paradigm would entail translating (h)ypèr pánton as "instead of all"; antípsychon, as "substitute"; and fulfilled as "satisfied."  These teachings were unknown to St. Athanasios.

     St. Gregory (of Nazianzos) the Theologian says (Post-Nicene Fathers 7, p. 431) that "by His Suffering, Christ taught us how to suffer, and by His Glorification, grants us to be glorified with Him."  (He proceeds to discuss Christ's Sacrifice.)  

   A good example of how a given expression is understood differently in different paradigms is "state of sin"; it carries different meanings in East and West.  In the West, it is equivalent to a state of being guilty.  In the East, the very expression is inapplicable.  It is better to say "condition of hamartía," where this word in the Greek Bible is understood to be a condition or state that is conducive to sin brought on by the separation from God's Life (Grace, uncreated Energies) that resulted from Adam's disobedience.  No guilt is implied in the term.  To readers, one can commend Dr. A. Kalomiros's "River of Fire."  Greek has other words for the act of sinning and its result, viz. (h)amartíosis & (h)martíoma.  'Amartía has another sense.  

     The Orthodox honor and revere Christ's Suffering in the Crucifixion for many valid reasons, Crosses are very evident  in and on Orthodox temples, as are icons of that event ; the Orthodox frequently cross themselves and fast on Wednesdays and Fridays to remember our Savior's betrayal and Suffering.  But it is the Resurrection that overcomes the individual's separation of God consequent on the Fall; Christ's Resurrection makes real the potential of the En-flesh-ment of the LOGOS that sanctified matter (John 6:53-54) and time (tradition) so that they can function as vehicles of Grace--the Life of the Being beyond Being--not His Essence but certainly His uncreated Energies.

FOR MORE ON PARADIGMS AND SALVATION, 
SEE HERE & HERE

WHAT IS COMMON TO JURIDICAL WESTERN VIEWS

     Common to both Latins and Reformers are assumptions about our being guilty of what our first ancestors did; the loss or "marring" of the Image of God; the sinfulness of human nature propagated by natural generatioin; and juridical views about satisfaction, expiation/propitiation, atonement, justification, redemption (ransoming), adoption, regeneration, and virtual unity with Christ and God's Essence.  The Latins do not hold the purely substitutionary view of Christ in justification the way the followers of the Reformation do but accept that the faithful ontologically become members of Christ's risen Body.  Nor is a judicial covenant emphasized by the Latins the way it is by Protestants.

     On page 72 of Mary, the untrodden portal of God, George Gabriel, having distinguished the concept of Christ's work in earth as a punishment from the Orthodox outlook, writes: 

     "Thus, Augustine's doctrine of original sin was preserved [scil. in the West], including his legalistic theory of atonement which says that Christ came into the world to placate the divine wrath.  Under this system of thought, then, the obstacle to salvation and the reconcilation of God mankind was God Himself."