Those laboring under the delusion that Orthodox theology has many affinities or is of a pattern with anything like Western theology as it developed after Augustine can disabuse themselves of this error by reading the recently published translation of THE ANCESTRAL SIN.   This volume is a doctoral thesis for the University of Athens in 1957 by the recently reposed genius and greatest of twentieth-century Orthodox theologians--Protopriest John Romanides.  Fr. John wrote it when he was a young man, after leaving his native America, where he had been a football-player in highschool.  He became the pre-eminent restorer of Orthodox theology--which in Greece and Russia had been seriously infected with Western assumptions--to its Patristic roots.  The writings of Fr. John reveal his wide aquaintance with the works of the reigning Protestant and Latin authors of the time.  His writings are thus able to speak to English-language OTHERdox in a way that prominent Orthodox thinkers of America and England who promoted a similar movement were unable to do; the same goes for the translators of works by Vl. Lossky, etc.  (These writers in other languages have not been any more fortunate in the quality of English translations of their writings  that Westerners have made than the Fathers have have been in many a well-known series; series.  The translators of the Philokalia have done much better, as have the translators of the Orthodox New Testament, whose 2d ed. is available from Holy Apostles Monastery, Buena Vista, CO.)  Lacking Fr. John's Greek-American background and resources, they proved themselves impotent to convince Western theologians (and ecumenists!), not to speak of scores of  North American Orthodox leaders of the exact nature and extent of the gulf between Eastern and Western Christianity.  Many pages of this book offer more than one quotable statement destined to become aphorisms of third-millennium Orthodox theology.  
     DO NOT BE MISLED BY THE TITLE OF THIS SEMINAL WORK.   The volume covers the ground of doctrinal theology.  The title itself is due to the author's understanding that GOD and SALVATION cannot be properly thought of apart from a true concept of the Fall of Adam and Eve.  The understanding of the Fall in the Bible and Eastern Fathers is incommensurate with the juridical paradigms of Western Christianity--as is clearly shown in this book.  Juridical understandings of Salvation from Augustine and Anselm to Aquinas and the Protestant Reformers are as alien to the Eastern understanding as the energy-ontology understanding of the East is to the West.  The paradigm-shift that is necessary for either side to understand the other is difficult, but Fr. John makes it--perhaps because he grew to maturity in a non-Orthodox country. 

     It is important to that until Western thinkers gain a proper understanding of the Eastern paradigm and the gulf between its assumptions and the presuppositions of Latin and Protestant  theologies, they will not be able to understand the Greek-language Bible or Greek-language Christianity.  The juridicalism of the Punic inventors of Western theology (Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine) and the Roman St. Ambrose (a Milanese judge), as well as of the Teutonic Lombards (Anselm, Gratian, and Peter), Teutonic Normans (Thomas and the whole Oxford school up to Scotus, Bacon, and Ockham), the Teutonic Burgundian (Bernard), and the Teutonic Luther (an Ockhamist) is as alien to the East as the Eastern ontological outlook is to the West after its seven-century Dark Age disconnect from the Greek-language roots of Christianity. 

     The just published translation of this book of 190 pages by the eminent lay  theologian and master translator, Dr. George Gabriel, is now available from  Zephyr Publishers  (Ridgewood, NJ.).   Dr. Gabriel, an American,  received his doctorate from the famous St. Denys Institute of Orthodox Theology in Paris.