ORLAPUBS OPR134: WHAT IS SALVATION?

WHAT IS SALVATION?

© 2000. 2001 by Orchid Land Publications

[updated 20010707]

A correspondent on an email list wrote: "I've got a question for any members of this newsgroup who belong to the Orthodox Church: A statement was made recently in a mailing list I'm subscribed to--that the Orthodox do not believe in the Atonement (katallayé "exchange"), i.e. they do not believe Jesus' Death was for the forgiveness of sins. Is this accurate? Can anyone explain in greater detail, or direct me to resources that explain the Orthodox view of the crucifixion?"

While etymologies are often used inappropriately and without recognizing their lack of psychological validity for users of the language in question, they are occasionally worth discussing. Consider the words for atonement:

--Hebrew KPR, with the idea of covering over (and thus appeasing)
--Greek katallayé, with the idea of exchange and reciprocity
--Latin reconciliatio, with the idea of calling together again
--English atonement, emphasizing union (very Orthodox!)
--German Versöhnung, apparently not the obvious "making a son or daughter of" or to Sünde "sin," but derived fron a participial form of sinnen "bethink, reflect" (Sinn can mean "sense" in German)

Of course speakers of English don't think of at-one-ment when they use the word in its current global sense; nor is it over-likely that Greeks had some feeling of the "each-otherness" connoted in the Greek word. Atonement itself simply calques Late Latin adunamentum "at-one-ment," which to a speaker of that language could possibly have connoted unity in a way that reconciliatio would not have.
What strikes one immediately is the wide diversity of connotations that different languages have employed to express making peace with another party--compensation or payment, appeasing or placating, uniting with, doing whatever is enough to reconcile, etc.

THE FALL AND SALVATION IN EAST AND WEST
THE ONTOLOGICAL EAST	THE JURIDICAL WEST
THE FALL: Ontological separation from God and His uncreated Energies (Grace)— Loss of the Assimilation to God--death and decay. These are not punishments but are the natural result of being separated from God; they result in a proneness to sin, since the reason and freechoice of the Image of God became impotent to please God when it lost the Energization of those potentials by the (lost) Assimilation to God. The soul is not immortal “by nature” but only by the Grace of Assimilation.	THE FALL: Hereditary guilt in all newborn descendents of our first ancestors. The Re-formers add that God imputes Adam’s guilt to each newborn and then disimputes them from believers, while also im-puting Christ’s merits to be-lievers, who now have virtual righteousness while remaining sinners in reality. The Image of God was either lost or badly damaged. The soul is often regarded as immortal by nature.
SALVATION What Christ did: He (i) elevated human nature and made it divinizable by becoming human; (ii) expiated our sins in his Immolation on the Life-giving Cross and thus removed the block against worshipers’ become divinized; and (iii) in His RESURRECTION made it possible for individual worshipers to be incorporated into His risen Body as members of It sharing in the uncreated Energies of His Life—Grace. The result is DIVINIZATION by partaking of God’s uncreated Energies (not of His Essence: that would be a pagan Deification). Unity with Christ’s Energies is ontological. Grace is God’s uncreated Energy—His Life. What we have got to do: We must believe in the all-holy Trinity, become a member of Christ in Baptism (the last part or culmination of which is Chrismation with oil blessed by a bishop) Christ’s Body and Blood in the Holy Communion; and then embrace and agree to the Holy Spirit’s “energizing in [us] both to will and to energize” such good works as meet with God’s “being pleased” (Philp. 2:13) These works of the Spirit in co-operating worshipers are soterial in that they contribute to one’s Salvation if energized by the Spirit	SALVATION What Christ did: He died to SATISFY what was due to placate an angry God’s jealousy or ven- geance at our disobedience of His commands. Grace is a “supernatural” habit of the believer’s soul. Unity with Christ’s Essence is intentional (conceptual). Protestants add that God is wrathful at even newborns be-cause of the guilt He has imputed from Adam to them. Christ was punished with death as a Substitute for each of us—more a holy Scapegoat than a Lamb of God. The good that Christ did on the Cross is “imputed” to each believer. Grace is divine goodwill imputed to a believer. Unity with Christ’s Essence is covenantal—virtual. What we have got to do: Latin Catholics say we should receive Baptism and Communion with faith followed by, or coupled with, good works. Protestants require faith (de-fined volitionally as fiducia (“loyalty, trust”) and embrace Jesus as one’s “personal” Savior. (Luther advised occisio rationis “the death of reason” and to “sin boldly” with faith.) Good works are (officially) only signs of Salvation; they are not soterial.

To begin with, the Orthodox do believe in Atonement, though the purpose of the Crucifixion of our Lord, God, and Savior, Jesus Christ, was not limited to that, nor was Christ's sacrificial Atonement limited to His Crucifixion. Since mortality is the cause of sin, the central idea is that Christ defeated death by becoming incarnate, by dying, and by rising again--each phase playing its specific soterial rôle. To being with, God is not humanity's Enemy, punishing them with death even before they are old enough to sin; it is humanity that is inimical to God. Death is the cause of sin.

Protopresvyter John Romanides charges Western theologians in the Augustinian context of treating decay and death as a punishment for sins, even those not yet committed (especially in newborn infants), rather than as being the cause of sin (as in the East)! He says, "Most importantly, in the Augustinian context, corruption and death became a punishment from God for sin rather than only a cause of sins." Hence Salvation is destroying death--"taking the sting" out of death, i.e. making it impotent. In his "The ecclesiology of St. Ignatius of Antioch," Fr. Romanides explains why death causes sin: "Because [a human] lives constantly under the fear of death, [s/he] continuously seeks bodily and psychological security, and thus becomes individualistically inclined and utilitarian in attitude. Sin . . . is rooted in the disease of death." He cites Heb. 2:14-15, which passage reads: "Since, then, the children [of God] have shared in blood and flesh, and He Himself has likewise participated in those, so that through death He might destroy the one having the power of death, i.e. the devil, and that he might release them, as many as were in the bonds of servitude throughout their life(time)."

He separates from Christians who have been saved by Christ two kinds of people under the dominion of death: Sinners and the righteous people before Christ who were endowed with God's promise of Grace, but not--till Christ came--with Grace itself. He doesn't mention innocent infants, who are buried with Orthodox funerals. Though Old Testament Law could reveal the reality of sin and death, we are told, it could not abolish them.

A good example of how paradigms understand an expression differently 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 wrong; it is better to say "State of hamartía," where the word in the Greek Bible is understood to be a condition or state that is conducive to sin brought on by death and the the separation from God's Life (Grace, uncreated Energies) that resulted from Adam's disobedience. No guilt is implied in the term. Reader are recommended Dr. A. Kalomiros's "River of Fire." Greek has other words for the act of sinning and its result, viz. (h)amartíosis & (h)martíoma.

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 separation of God and humanity 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 might be able to function as vehicles of Grace--the Life of the Being beyond Being--if not His Essence, certainly His uncreated Energies. We speak of Christ as having died and risen for our Salvation.

Works are contributory to Salvation only when they are energized by Christ in His members. Philp. 2:13 says: "For it is God energizing in you all both to will and to energize for the sake of [His] good pleasure." Uncreated Grace--the Life of Christ conveyed to believers through the Mysteries--is the efficacious cause of Salvation; a repentant believer's acceptance (if s/he is an adult of sound mind) of this Grace is the conditional cause of Salvation. Accepting and using Grace results in more Grace on top of Grace (John 1:16).

FOR MORE ON PARADIGMS AND SALVATION,
SEE HERE & HERE

Death resulted from the sinning of our first ancestors, and even though we today are not guilty of their sinning, we nonetheless inherit the "bad gene" of death that resulted from their sins. (It's rather like the way an innocent child could inherit a disease like AIDS incurred through sin [or otherwise] by its parents.)
The Orthodox speak simply of "Salvation" (without all of the juridical categories of the West--Satisfaction, Atonement, Justification, Redemption [Ransoming, an analogy discussed by St. Gregory the Theologian [of Nazianzos], Adoption, etc.). Salvation is becoming a partaker of the divine Nature (2 Pet. 1:4), the ontological and uncreated divine Energies, on which more below. But first the Atonement. The Orthodox believe in sacrificial propitiation or Atonement (i) without the judicial conceptualizations, a view leaning more to to the latreutic (having to do with Worship) concepts of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and which (ii) embraces Jesus's entire Life, not just His Crucifixion. It is difficult to answer a question framed in a Western framework (common to Latins and Protestants) when one is used to an Eastern Framework in which Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection are not thought of an entirely discrete "moments" in the Life of Christ--all of which was a Sacrifice, a soterial kénosis (cf. Philp. 2:7) or Self-emptying. Instead of viewing Atonement as a single event in our Savior's Life (in the Latin or Protestant manner) focused on the Savior's life-giving Crucifixion, the Orthodox adhere to a holistic view in which the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection are phases of a single, sacrificial and saving Life on earth. The whole Life of our Savior can be thought of in terms of perfect Worship--an atoning Sacrifice (katallaktikè thysía). It is was a Life in which Christ, through dying, conquered death and through rising again conquered the Devil and sin--as the Fathers view it. Christ's glorious Resurrection and return to human life in a glorified form capped and climaxed the validation of the cosmos and of human nature that the Incarnation had initiated and the Sacrifice that the Crucifixion had plumbed the depths of in Christ's Immolation (Ékthysis). The Resurrection validated the rest of Christ's humbling himself (His Self-emptying) to become human. His whole life was Worship of God--a sacrificial return of a creature--in this instance, a perfect Creature--to the all-holy Trinity as an acknowledge of His ownership and sovereignty over the entire cosmos. The return or offering back of a perfect living Creature to God--Anaphora or Oblation-- is the essential thing in sacrifice (No one thinks of mactating or immolating latreutic offerings of grain or incense--creatures offered to God in acknowledgement of the Creator's ownership of and sovereignty over the entire created cosmos--only those offerings of living creatures that typify propitiatory sacrifices.)

Why do the Orthodox shun the idea that Christ was a Substitute for us in His Dying and Rising again? Besides the verses that say He died "for us" or "for our sake" (Rom 5:8, 2 Cor. 5:14, where Greek has [h]ypèr, not antì, as one viewer of this site has pointed out)--rather than "in our place" there is a very important consideration. For "substitute" signals a separation between the Doer and those benefitting, whereas Orthodoxy views Christians as members of Christ--at one with Him, in a close unity with Him in His risen Body because of His members' sharing the uncreated Energies of His Life--Grace--therefore partaking of all that their Head has done for them--something that Denominationists do not accept in its literal, ontological meaning--the way a foot can benefit from something the hand or mouth does. Another important consideration is that, when a person pays another's debt, that person is not a "substitute" for the debtor! Protopresbyter John Romanides has pointedly stated (in "The ecclesiology of St. Ignatius of Antioch") that the idea "that Salvation is a matter of changing the disposition of God toward [hu]man, and [hu]man toward God, completely balancing the business interest of each, is completely missing from the thought of Ignatius." Father Romanides immediately adds (www.romanity.org/htm/ro10entx.htm, page 5):

Atonement is not . . . an intellectual problem of identifying human concepts with the immutable prototypes of God's Essence which all together comprise truth. It is not the proper relationship of two immortalities, that of God and man, that is at stake, but rather the restoration of a lost immortality now bound to death." [And so on.]

If Christ's Incarnation, life and teaching, Immolation (Crucifixion), and Anaphora or Oblation ("Offering up"--the Resurrection [and Ascension]) are phases of a single on-going, atoning Sacrifice--humbling, immolation, anaphora--it was the Resurrection of Christ that made possible the incorporation of believers with Him as His members in His glorified Body--in their reception of the ontological Energy of uncreated Grace, His Life--through holy Baptism and the all-holy Eucharist received with true belief and repentance.
The percipient late Latin thinker, Canon E. Masure, who, thinking of the eucharistic Sacrifice, insisted that Anaphora or Oblation is the sine qua non of sacrifice in general--something that explains why the "bloodless" Sacrifice of the Body and Blood on Orthodox Altars is a sacrificial Offering or Oblation without any repeating of the Immolation on Calvary; "bloodless" is indeed another way of saying "immolation-free": Christ in His members (as the words of the divine Liturgy say) is the Offerer of Himself as an acceptable Sacrifice; and (as in many kinds of sacrifice) those members of Christ's Body partake of the Sacrifice by consuming it in order to share in the benefits ("virtue" in Latin) of what He did in His human Birth, Life, Death, and Resurrection as Christ's members' own.

     In line with the teachings of Christ as our great High Priest in the Epistle to the Hebrews, Christ's Immolation on the Cross was sacrificial (the office of a priest), latreutic (worshipful), and soterial (verse 2:3): Our Savior's human life itself constituted a victory over the world (2:8), death, (2:9, 14), and the devil (2:14). Jesus's Suffering on the Cross, was especially soterial (2:10), but would have no value as Immolation (ceremonial mactation) unless Anaphora or Oblation (offering) followed as the point of sacrificing.   (The Book of Hebrews uses anaphérein "offer"--just as the Orthodox still do.)   Christians view our Savior's Suffering (Passion) and Death as a propitiating or atoning Immolation.   But the Crucifixion, perfect in Itself, was not all there was to Christ's humiliation. Of His Incarnation, Hebrew 2:17 says: ". . . it was needful for Him to become like [his] brothers in all [respects], in order that He might also become a compassionate and faithful high Priest with regard to things pertaining to God for the sake of atoning for the sins of the people." The following verse adds: "For in that He has suffered, He Himself having been tested [or tempted], He is able to give aid to those being tested [or tempted; cf. verse 15]." Subsequently, He entered His rest (4:10), a rest we are to strive to enter (4:11).   It is hard for a Western Christian to think in this ancient Greek-language, Hebrew-dominated framework. Since Protestants do not typically define a priest as a sacrificer, Luther's "priesthood of all believers" becomes irrelevant to the message of the Book of Hebrews.
     The pervading theme of Priesthood is this Epistle is a theme of sacrificial Worship. This is the way to Salvation, an important thing that Salvation depends on, though its result is Divinization.   Worship has a material and a spiritual side in the ancient framework that Protestantism rejects.   The West has no place for uncreated Energies--Christ's Life that His members ontologically share with Him--something that the Apostle Paul makes much of.   In Christ, believers become participatory priests too, ontologically and not just by imputation; the Apocalypse speaks (1:6, 5:10; cf. 20:6) of Christian believers as kings and priests. (Where does Luther say that all believers are kings?" It is IN His members that Christ offers up Himself on our Altars.   Note that ceremonial offering (anaphérein) is the function that defines what a "priest" is [Heb. 8:3-4, 10:11).
     In His human nature, Jesus offered the one Sacrifice that is forever--an everlasting Sacrifice which Christ, in His members, can, without repeating It, offer up and, at every Eucharistic Liturgy, present anew (i.e. re-present--which is very different from represent; Masure shows that offering or oblation is the heart of the Eucharist or any other sacrifice; there need be no [re-]immolating, no repetitio of the Cross.)   If Salvation is Divinization, true Worship is a condition to be met on the way there as well as the result of being there. But where the Orthodox Liturgy frames the central Sacrifice offered to God when consecrated by the Holy Spirit (at the epíklesis) with a preceding human-oriented instructional Liturgy of the Catechumens and a following human-oriented (soterial) holy Communion, the Reformation lopped off the latreutic or sacrificial part in favor of an (except among the Disciples and their relatives) infrequent proceeding that comes close to being thoroughly human-oriented.   If perfect Worship is perfect Sacrifice, there is only one Offering--Christ's Body and Blood--that qualifies as such. (This is not to deny that worship occurs outside of the Eucharist, but the monastic Hours and private prayers are, for the Orthodox, satellites around the eucharistic Altar.)
     NOTE BENE: If Salvation were based, as Protestants contend, on no more than an atoning Immolation, if time had no value, and if the Offering of Christ were as once-for-all (ephápax, [h]ápax; Heb. 7:27, 9:26,28, 10:10) as His Immolation (1 Pet. 3:18 says that what was "once" was Christ's Suffering) , then of course Protestants would be justified in rejecting the Offering of Christ's Body and Blood as the main service of Christian Worship.   But that confuses the onceness of Christ's Immolation with a putative onceness of Offering up His Body and Blood. Having gotten rid of the Holy of Holies, Protestants put the preacher in the middle of the building where they assemble and misname the part where the people congregate the "Sanctuary."   But the true Sanctuary of any temple is the Holy of Holies, where the Altar stands--in Orthodox temples set off (as was also the case in the Jewish temple) from the nave by a veil or wall with icons on it.

I wonder whether some of those Orthodox teachers that the writer you are citing had in mind was speaking more of the Incarnation + Crucifixion + Resurrection + Ascension as a single whole when s/he rejected the kind of Atonement (i.e. Reconciliation with God) understood in the West as something restricted to our Savior's life-giving Death in Western theology. Fr. Romanides or someone has shown how the St. Gregory of Palamas's position mirror-images that of the western Augustine: Where Augustine had a positive view of human reason's ability to know God's Essence and a negative view of will's ability to love God, St. Gregory had a negative view of reason's ability to know God's Essence and a positive view of a human will's ability to love the God that reason knows.

Not only does the West separate our Savior's Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection into discrete "moments" of His earthly existence (of which the first and, it often seems, the third play a minimal rôle in current Protestant soteriology); it is also evident that Protestants do not deduce from the Incarnation anything of an ontological nature about the soterial rôle of matter --not just icons, relics, holy oil, prostrating one's body, making the sign of the Cross on oneself, lighting candles for prayer, etc., but even Mysteries [Sacraments], doxological Sacrifice in the divine Liturgy--as offering back to the Creator a part of creation) any more than they accept the soterial rôle of time (the crucial moment of Jesus' Birth by the all-pure Theotokos [CLICK HERE], tradition and the continuing unfolding of the meanings of the dogmas of the Faith). Protestants accept a once-for-all Anaphora or Oblation at one moment and an instantaneous Salvation of a believer. But the Fathers insisted that Worship and Salvation involve the whole human being, both body and soul: The body is resurrected; the soul is purified; both become partakers of God's Being--of His Nature or Energies, not of His imparticipable Essence beyond being and knowing. The Fathers viewed the Incarnation as the Mystery (Sacrament: a material channel or vehicle of uncreated Grace) that all of our other Mysteries (Sacraments) depend on. If the Orthodox Fathers and Mothers have, from the beginning, seen in the Incarnation the validation of matter in religion, they have also seen matter to be an integral part of an overall Sacrifice in which the divine LOGOS humbled His Person (not His divine Nature) in order to become a full Sharer in human nature and human mortality.

If Sacrifice is the Worship and Offering of a part of creation to the Creator as an acknowledgement of His ownership and sovereignty over the whole cosmos created by the LOGOS, and if the Offering of Christ's Body and Blood constitute a perfect Anaphora or Oblation, then both the Resurrection of OLGS Jesus Christ and His Offering up Himself in His members at the divine Liturgy is both a perfect Sacrifice and an atoning Sacrifice--and, what is most germane, perfect Worship. Believers in the LOGOS who are baptized and receive His incarnate Body and Blood (as do even Orthodox infants) become sharers of Christ's Life-giving Energies of His Life, of Grace, in such a way that they are enabled--i.e. energized--to act according to the divine Will to please God (as Philp. 2:13 makes clear in Greek).
In short, Salvation is becoming divine, becoming partakers of the divine Nature (2 Pet. 1:4)--but not partakers of the imparticipable, uncreated divine Essence. It is achieved through perfectly atoning Worship--the perfect Sacrifice of Christ, our divine-human Savior and in the Church is centered around the daily or weekly offering of Christ's Body and Blood in the divine Liturgy.

     While the forgiveness of sins has been a paramount perpetual concern of the Fathers and Mothers of Orthodoxy, an even greater Patristic emphasis and onus has been on the victory of Christ over death and over the devil as well as over the sinning that the devil instigates and promotes. If our Savior hadn't died, He would not have shared our entire mortal nature, He would have been unable to meet death and reveal His power to conquer both death and the devil and--let it be said--sin.   If the handbooks offer numerous patristic references (from as early as St. Eirenaios and, later, St. Athanasios the Great and the great Cappadocians) concerning Christ's becoming human in order for humans to become (partakers of the nature of) God; and if the soterial view of ecclesiastical writers includes the Incarnation, Life, and Resurrection as parts of Christ's overall Sacrifice, they certainly don't in the slightest neglect the propitiatory Crucifixion--Christ's Immolation. Crosses are everywhere in Orthodoxy. The Crucifixion is a necessary part of the whole. (If Christ's Resurrection, His victorious "return" to Life and defeat of Hell and Satan [in the harrowing of Hades], was the culmination of His holy Life on earth, His Ascension was simply His "physical" His departure from earth to Heaven.) Note that His resurrection body was preternatural; it could pass through doors, even though it was still a "body."
     So even if it happens that one cannot find "Atonement" in the index of a theological volume (e.g. Fr. Pomazansky's);, the Bible and the Orthodox believe that Christ atoned for believers' sins, if not solely through His Immolation on the precious and life-giving Cross, certainly not without that essential deed. If the Orthodox emphasis is not chiefly or solely juridical, as in the West (where Latins and Protestants write extensively on Satisfaction, Atonement, Justification, Redemption, Adoption, covenantal unity, and other juridical concepts), it also is not on a purely "substitionary" Atonement (substitutionary punishment was a Germanic notion, as studies of Luther's revolution point out) in which the sins that God allegedly imputed from Adam to humans (and to their nature--as if natures could sin) were then laid on (i.e. reckoned or imputed) to Christ--after which the merits of Christ's Death get imputed or ascribed to believers in what amounts to a virtual reality.    Although one compilation of latter-day (often Latin-influenced) theologians (by Frank Gavin, and Anglican clergyman) gives seven pages on "Atonement,"    trying to think Orthodoxy in Western categories is not really feasible and does not enjoy the vogue it once did between the Fall of Byzantion to the Turks in a good deal of academic Orthodoxy; none of this means that anyone should object to thinking of an Atonement by OLGS Jesus Christ in an Orthodox conceptualization.
     But when one says that Christ overcame the devil, death, and sin in His entire earthly existence, one has the right to ask how; and while our finite minds humbly refrain from dissecting the Mystery, we are not wrong in trying to enter the Mystery a little. Often metaphors help, even the juridical metaphors of the Bible. (The problem lies in making these definitive and exhaustive.) But trying to understand a Mystery exhaustively is alien to the Fathers. They limited their attempts to understand Mysteries by saying what they are not and by seeking formulas like the homoöúsios that prevent one from saying they are what they are not.   If the Orthodox are not prone to break down Mysteries analytically questions like "How does Christ save believers?" and "What is Salvation?" are perfectly natural and legitimate notions for us to contemplate--so long as we stay in the proper boundaries of finite human understanding.     Satisfactory answers to the first question cannot go much beyond affirming: "Through His Sacrifice in becoming Flesh, living a human life, dying a human death, and rising again--defeating Satan, death, and sin through the perfect Worship of offering up Himself as a propitiatory Doxology and Sacrifice to God.
     As for the question of how we share the benefits of Christ's atoning Salvation, the Orthodox maintain that we are saved by Grace--that is, by the uncreated Energy or Grace of Christ, the Head of the Body of Christ-- and not without it. Becoming members of Christ through Baptism and Eucharist received with faith and repentance, the Energy of His Life--Grace--flows into His members. But how can infants receive these Mysteries with faith and repentance, since they are too young to believe or will and have no sins to repent of?   It should be remembered that Grace is life, not knowledge or will. So the essential thing is not faith or repentance, even though these are essential conditions among adults of sound minds, but rather the incorporating of our bodies and souls into the Body of Christ as His members, members Who share His Life, Death, and Resurrection, and who will rise again at the Day of Judgment: For what OLGS Jesus Christ did on earth, His members have participated in and done. Believers mysterically (sacramentally) incorporated into Christ by Baptism and Eucharist share in His perfect act of Worship, His lifelong Sacrifice when they partake with faith and repentance of His most sacred Body and Blood in the holy Communion; they receive Grace for Grace (John 1:16) in allowing Him to make them through Grace co-workers (syneryoí in 1 Cor. 3:9; see also 1 Thes. 3:2) with Him, i.e. by allowing Him to energize them to energize behavior that is pleasing to Him (Philp. 2:13 in Greek).   We Orthodox mustn't forget that the Proskimide "section" of the divine Liturgy includes a prayer in which it is said that Christ is the true Offerer of His own Body and Blood, that is, IN the believers that offer Him up through the agency of the Priest. Though it is not said in so many words, it is also true that His members are also offered up in Him--though not as <perfect> parts of creation--not perfect by imputation, as in the Protestant concept of Grace--but at least as members of the only One Who is Perfect.
      To sum up, our Savior's Death on the Life-Giving Cross was an essential part of an atoning, propitious Immolation, an essential part of His overall perfect Sacrifice that included His Incarnation, His teachings, and, in His glorious Resurrection,   Return of Himself to the Creator and to life--a perfect culminating the Anaphora, Oblation, or Offering of His entire life on earth to God for the sake of human Salvation. Our Savior's death was part of his becoming human, since it is the destiny of humans to taste death.   Christ's Life on earth was, in truth, the first Mystery (or Sacrament) of human Salvation, as the Fathers maintained.
     If Immolation is not, in and of Itself, the whole of a sacrificial act--It is not even the entire Propiation or "Atonement"--and in fact is not really anything until validated in the Anaphora or "Return" of the Resurrection, then there is no point in narrowing down Atonement to that most noble and pitiable humiliation of the incarnate LOGOS. The Orthodox don't believe in the Atonement the way Western Christians do when they limit Atonement to the Crucifixion with no regard given to the Incarnation and Resurrection--just to juridical Satisfaction, etc. Even Adoption and unity with Christ are "covenantal," juridical realities and virtual rather than "real." The West, and most particularly Protestants, do not take much interest in the physical aspect of Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection but focus far more on the aspect of Christ's earthy existence that lends itself to a juridical view--the Crucifixion. It is hard to attach a juridical sense to the Incarnation or the Resurrection; the life-giving Crucifixion can be made to fit the juridical bill without filling in the remaining dots representing events in the life of Christ on earth. This easily accounts for the centrality of the Crucifixion in the West and the diminished interest in the Incarnation and Resurrection. The Gnostic outlook of Protestants toward matter and time is evident and accounts for their lack of interest in the implicates of the Incarnation--icons, Mysteries [Sacraments], pilgrimages, temporal development and tradition, and the rest--as well as the bodily resurrection of believers. Words (sermons, etc.) have replace Mysteries.

In thinking about Salvation and particularly its mode--we can call that "Atonement"--the Orthodox emphasis is on Worship, a propitious and atoning Worship through the august Sacrifice of the Body and Blood of the Creator LOGOS, Who became incarnate, Who died, Who rose again for us, and Who in His members offers up His Own Body and Blood daily on the Altars of the holy Church--which is His Body. Worship is, of course, the primary duty of a believer. No other Worship or Sacrifice could be perfect; no other Offering could be a perfect Anaphora to God than Christ--the perfect "Victim." The Crucifixion without the Resurrection is neither a victory nor is It in fact a real complete Sacrifice--because the Immolation would lack what is essential--the Anaphora! Together, Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection are atoning; the Resurrection makes the other two phases of the whole valid. Without the Resurrection, the Orthodox do not see the Incarnation and Crucifixion as atoning--a big difference from Western Christianity--for whom the Crucifixion is the main event--the Atonement, in short.
If it's hard to present Orthodox theology to a Western view of Christianity, it's hard for the Western view of Salvation to be grasped in the East; it seems so piecemeal, despite--or because of--its complex proliferation of juridical categories that are so little prominent or meaningful, except in an allegorical way, in Eastern thinking. It is no exaggeration to say that the thought ways of Greek-speaking (and therefore Greek-thinking) early Christians are at odds with the Latin and Protestant thought world based on Latin-speaking late-Mediæval frameworks invented so many centuries after the Apostles, which were derived from the will-based, juridical framework of Cordovan Aristotelianism.

> I John 2:2 states: "And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins,
> and not for ours but also for the whole world." (NKJV)
>
> I John 4:10 states: "In this is love, not that we loved God, but
> that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our
> sins." (NKJV)
>
> In an Orthodox understanding how is Christ a "propitiation" for our
> sins and who (or Who) is propitiated and why?

     (H)ilasmos (hilasm, "propitiation") is a latreutic (i.e. worship-related), sacrificial term. It is not a juridicial term, though it could not avoid having juridical overtones/undertones in Semitic cultures (as distinct from the Hellenistic-Judaic culture of Jesus's Galilee and
other parts of the ancient Near East). The idea of "appeasing" was certainly not absent at all events, but perhaps "making it up to" would be nearer the mark. The term's sense involved that of "expiation"--e.g. Greek "katharmos" "cleansing" and "lysis" "release." The sacrificial idea was not so much a juridical "fine, punishment" or any sort of divine "tit-for-tat": It was the idea of "offering to God a good piece of His creation in acknowledgment of His ownership and sovereignity over it all" so that God would find true respect and worship in the offerer, and so that the latter would be cleansed of his/her sins, and find release from the devil and evil--by, as we believe, becoming a member of Christ and partaking of the uncreated Energies--God's Life.

     When the Christian religion is envisioned in the Calvinist manner as a giant courtroom--an inheritance from the West's intellectual Islamic-Cordovan origins--the Reformation's will-based-cum-Gnostic framework will accept (along with Islamic predestination, anti-iconism, emphasis on the "word"/"book") the idea of a juridical exchange. This all came into sharp focus in the Nominalist framework. (Luther bragged about being a Nominalist and said that Ockham was the only philosopher worth reading.) The framework entailed the "substitutionary" idea of our Savior's Self-Sacrifice on the Life-Giving Cross as a punishment or penalty for humanity's sins, imputed to the God-human Person of Christ. The two NT/Patristic phrases (hypèr pándon, hypèr pándon) meaning "for the sake of all" could also mean "in place of all." The holy Tradition accepts the first sense; Luther and Calvin, the second. Here's the picture: God imputes Adam's sins even to newborns and then gets wrathful at us for having such virtual sins. [A Latin sister (nun) has written me that one Scott Hahn is fond of saying "Christ came to pay a debt he didn't owe for us who owe a debt we could not pay."] Luther then has God dis-imputing those sins and imputing Christ's virtual merits and virtual righteousness to those who are still as sinful as before but predestinated to be righteous "in the eyes of God." Christ died as the Lamb of God, not as a propitiatory act of Worship, a latreutic act, but as a juridical punishment for sins that God imputed from us (they had originally been imputed to us by God) to Christ. He was punished in place of each of us, and the "merits" of this were then imputed, reckoned, attributed to those predestinated to trust in Him. (Fides "faith" was re-defined in will-based terms as fiducia "trust, loyalty." At least, the Reformation teaching does not mean that Adam's sin or guilt [depending on who you read] was passed to each of us by "natural generation" in the Latin manner--a category confusion of the spiritual or moral with the physical.)

     Now look at Orthodoxy: When a perfect part of creation was offered to the all-holy Trinity, a perfect act of Worship was finally achieved by humanity. We share in this by becoming one with Christ, i.e. by partaking of His uncreated, Life-giving Energies. What He did is not simply imputed to us, but we actually share in what He did by being ontological (not virtual or metaphorical) members of His Body--one with Him in true, not virtual, reality. The divine Liturgy says that Christ is both Offerer (in us) and Offered.
(Offering is the essence of Sacrifice and can be repeated; Christ's Death on the Cross, mistaken for the essence of Sacrifice by Protestants, cannot be repeated, but does not even occur in non-propitiatory sacrifices--as the Latin theologian, Canon E. Masure,
made clear to Western Christians.) Our Savior's Dying is not the end of soteriology. His whole Life and teachings, culminating in His all-glorious Resurrection from the dead, are soterial. His Incarnation transformed the cosmos, making human nature (but not any individual) salvable--something that requires will, assent, synergy--; and it rendered the human body resurrectible. It also rendered matter a channel of uncreated Grace (i.e. in the dozens of Mysteries the Orthodox accept) and time soterial--in the events just enumerated, and also in the way that the holy tradition (cf. John 16:13, which operated for 1500 years prior to the Reformation) has been sifting out one truth from the many (mostly erroneous) opinions on each mooted issue. Since energy is the basic ontological idea in Orthodoxy, the creation is not instantaneous but developmental and progressive--from lower creatures to higher ones, as St. Vasil said--; and Salvation is also not instantaneous but a progression from receiving the Assimilation to God on to the final Theosis or Divinization--partaking of Christ's uncreated Life/Energies in their fulness.

     Those who have moved out of the Luther-Calvin or Latin thought-world (paradigm) into the early Christian (also later Eastern Orthodox) Greek-language thought-world, have to make a big shift in their cognitive gears. (Those who have not moved out of the Latin or Reformation thought-world may not have as focused an idea of what that switch involves; since words are important, Latin terminology is often misleading.) Note that Orthodoxy took its content or "matter" from the Hebrew respect for created matter and time--but its intellectual "form" from Greek--the dýnamis "potential force" VS. enéryeia "actualization, realization" framework. The Reformation did the very opposite: It took its "matter" from Hellenistic Gnosticism (an anti-matter, anti-time outlook, so far as things religious are concerned) but its "form" from a will-based Hebrew juridicalism . . . and more immediately from the like will-based juridicalism of its Cordova-derived (Muslim, Jewish) thought-world.

     Incarnation and Resurrection (esp. the resurrection of each Christian's body) are not integrated into Protestantism, since they are "material": The Incarnation was necessary but incidental for that Renaissance outlook; Christ became human to preach to us and die for us in this outlook; and His Resurrection served to reverse the Crucifixion, being likewise basically incidental. I've read that the Puritans rejected an Easter celebration (as well as Great Friday), along with all other "holy days"; calendar time, like tradition, is not integrated into that Faith. For Orthodoxy, the Incarnation, Transfiguration, and Resurrection (the last two "framed" the Crucifixion on either side in time) are as soterial as the Crucifixion--which we honor with crossings and signs of the Life-giving Cross everywhere you look. But while Orthodoxy sees Christ's Resurrection, the culmination of His Life on earth, as the main event, and views the relevant "Return of the creation to God," the essence of Sacrifice, in the "Resurrection Event" (in modern Western theologians' jargon), the West viewed it as an incidental reversal of our Savior's juridical Immolation on the Cross. Immolation (the mactation of a living creature) is a prelude to propitiatory Offerings--necessary but not the main sacrificial event in such sacrifices; the main and essential event is the Anaphora, Oblation, Offering. Inasmuch as Christ's Sacrifice was propitiatory, it had to have an Immolation or mactation. That is not repeatable (it is hápax, ephápax "once (for all)," as the Book of Hebrews says), whereas in His members Christ can reiterate His Offering (the essence of Sacrifice) till the end of time. I invite you to re-read the Book of the Hebrews (at least the first half) in the light of the above--to see whether it looks on the Sacrifice of Christ as a substitutionary juridical punishment or latreutically as a propitiation and expiatory (cleansing, releasing) Sacrifice.

     To return to your questions (I haven't forgotten them), the One WHO is propitiated is God, the all-holy Trinity; the reason WHY He is propitiated with the Immolation and Sacrifice of a perfect part of creation (everything that was and still is being created by YHWH = the LOGOS = Christ = God the Son = the Person of Jesus Christ--John 1:1,3) is: Such a sacrificial acknowledgement of God's ownership and sovereignty over "all that has been made" is latreutically necessary in a framework in which respect for the Creator God (not just punishments by God in a condition of high dudgeon) is a pre-requisite for coming to be part of Him and living with Him in paradise forever. It's a different world from the one you came from, I would be willing to bet.

in Christ God,