Easter Is More than Remembering

Fr Stephen Freeman shares some good thoughts on the Great Feasts of the Church calendar in this short recording of his:  They are more than static historical events in the past, but ræther events in which we may participate even in our day through the Grace of God:

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/freeman/the_exchange_that_awaits_us

Đis being Holy Friday, Fr Stephen’s recent blog post on the atonement theory of salvation (‘Good News - Your Debt Is Being Cancelled’) is also worth a few minutes’ time.  It begins,

Recent conversations on the blog have bounced around the imagery of debt in the Scriptures. Contemporary Protestant thought often likes to express the notion of a “sin debt.” The idea runs that God’s righteousness and justice have proper demands. When we fail to keep the commandments, we create a debt for which God’s justice demands payment. Christ’s innocent self-offering on the Cross is seen as the payment for that debt. This imagery is absent from Orthodox thought. Indeed, I believe it is absent from the New Testament itself. It is, instead, an image that was created apart from the Scriptures themselves (originating as an atonement theory), and has been read back into the Scriptures, repeatedly misconstruing the actual meaning of the text. This reading has been a dominant part of modern Evangelical thought, and has been mined and minted so thoroughly, that many within the Evangelical mainstream treat it as a touchstone of Christian orthodoxy. It is not only not Orthodox, it is not orthodox. It is a false teaching.

 . . .

Source:  http://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2016/04/27/good-news-debt-cancelled/, accessed 29 April 2016