How the Death of Christ Forgives Sin: An Orthodox Christian Understanding 

Praise God!❤️

Pray for me

Except that's all you're relying on, the ideas and imaginations of men and your devout blind faith in them. 👍

amen

Help me with that Master

Christ died so we can die to sin in Him. In confession we die to sin in Christ and He cleanses us from all impurity. When we leave confession we walk out of the tomb a new man.

Another way to put it is, what does Christ's physical death actually accomplish that couldn't have been accomplished some other way?

kabane52.tumblr.com/post/133210453200/what-is-death

@@xpictos777 If Christ pursued another method, couldn’t you still ask the same question? Ultimately, it had to be done one way or another.

Thank you for that link. That helps define death for me (and a separation of the soul and will), but again I am not sure of the application. For context I am a convert from Protestantism to Orthodoxy, so me the elevator pitch around penal substitution makes sense (despite knowing it isn’t actually the focus of the gospels) I just wish we had a similar way to express why Christ had to die. It seems to me that we can’t get a simple answer from our clergy or theologians alike.

Yes true, but why the horrific suffering and death? It just plays into the hands of Protestants and their penal substitutionary atonement ideas of Christ being punished in our place by a vengeful Father. If we can’t come up with a simple alternative it is going to make it very difficult to engage and evangelise from an Orthodox perspective.

Great explanation!! 🙏

Christ didn't reunite "fallen" man with God. There never was, is, or ever will be any separation between God and man and All That Is.

This is a poor video as you point out. Simply Adam lost access to eternal life for everyone even those without sin as Romans 5:14, at the Cross Jesus changed the covenant with Moses to allow forgiveness by repentance, as he was raised he took power over death. The power to forgive our sins prior to baptism is in heaven not at the Cross, there was no atonement at the Cross, as we must be baptised into the church to seek justification through sanctification. I have a Ytube video series called 'Myths in so-called Christianity' for NT truth, you might check it out.

Please elaborate

St Augustine got some things wrong, and some things right, it's just latins decided to try and follow his most idiosyncratic opinions in isolation from how much the wider church actually accepted from the saint

@@parkermize It follows from the definition of sin which Sero gave that when we are sinning, we are doing so in order to get something we perceive to be valuable. I.E. the cause of the sin is somehow *extrinsic* to the person. Augustine purports to refute this position by an examination of a childhood episode of steeling some of his neighbors pears. Augustine says the pears were bad, he knew they were bad, he knew they would not give him any pleasure, but he stole them anyways. Why? Since he could find no value in sgteelig the pears, he concludes that it was just his innate cussedness, his soul was evil and therefore did evil things. original sin, etc etc. Jason Beduhn claims this was one of the things Augustine dragged back into Christianity when he converted from Manacheaism. That this sort of close examination of one's motives and actions with the help of an interlocutor was a spiritual discipline which he learned from them.

Sin is the alienation from God who is Love and Life! The cause of this alienation was the misuse of our freedom in the ancestral sin. Because of such a misuse, our freedom was wounded and we were trapped in a hostile egocentric tendency, which is the core of sin. Sin is slavery, caused by the misuse of freedom. Sin is inability of a creature to move in accordance with the principle (logos) of its nature towards the fulfilment (telos, stasis) of its being, which lies in God's Love. The antidote to such an egocentric tendency was an ultimate act of love which is the voluntary sacrifice of the absolutely innocent Christ! Such a sacrifice was a ransom. However, God never needed such a ransom! That ransom was an antidote of absolute Love to our hostile egocentric tendency towards God! That ransom is the ultimate act of love, which humanity needed to commit in order to get out of the egocentric tendency of sin which caused death as a result of alienation from God Who is Life and Love! No man except for the incarnated Son of God could ever commit such a perfectly innocent self-sacrificing act of love! However we needed to freely respond to God's Love because freedom is a prerequisite for love! You could neither love by force nor be loved forcibly! Christ responded to God's Love and gave himself as a ransom for all people! To Whom? To God the Father! Had God needed any ransom in order to be satisfied? NO!!! God is not necessitous, according to the Orthodox Church. Who needed that ransom? Our ultimate trauma needed an ultimate act of Iove in order to be healed! Ransom is not a penalty! Ransom is paid for the release of a captive! By accepting Christ to be formed in us (Gal. 4:19), we respond to God's Love, through His Son's Grace in His Spirit Communion!

My brother, we have to apprehend that God was never our enemy! He is Love! We became His enemy because of our self-centered attitude towards Him! Our Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God became one of us to heal our trauma(=our hostile tendency towards God-Love) by his loving sacrifice(=the ultimate offering of love) and He conquered death(=seperation from God-Life) by his death(=the ultimate offering of love) and since then He became our Resurrection! Our ultimate trauma needed that ultimate act of Iove in order to be healed! Our trauma was our alienation from God who is Love and Life! The cause of this alienation was the misuse of our freedom in the ancestral sin! Because of such a misuse, our freedom was wounded and we were trapped in a hostile egocentric tendency, which is the core of sin! The antidote to such an egocentric tendency was an ultimate act of love which is the voluntary sacrifice of the absolutely innocent Christ! Such a sacrifice was a ransom for our wounded freedom! God never needed such a ransom! That ransom was an antidote of absolute Love to our hostile egocentric tendency towards God! That ransom is the ultimate act of love, which humanity needed to commit in order to get out of the egocentric tendency of sin which caused death as a result of alienation from God Who is Life and Love! No man except for the incarnated Son of God could ever commit such a perfectly innocent self-sacrificing act of love! However we needed to freely respond to God's Love because freedom is a prerequisite for love! You could neither love by force nor be loved forcibly! Christ responded to God's Love and gave himself as a ransom for all people! To Whom? To God the Father! Had God needed any ransom in order to be satisfied? NO!!! God is not necessitous, according to the Orthodox Church. Who needed that ransom? Our ultimate trauma needed an ultimate act of Iove in order to be healed! Ransom is not a penalty! Ransom is paid for the release of a captive! By accepting Christ to be formed in us (Gal. 4:19), we respond to God's Love, through His Son's Grace in His Spirit Communion!

Christ became incarnate and died because what's intended for humanity is far more than what we usually think of as forgiveness. What's being offered is full restoration of the relationship between God and man which includes reconciliation, adoption as sons/daughters, and an eternally deepening communion. Human beings don't and can't offer that to one another. Christ's death is not some idiosyncratic means of accepting an apology. Human nature had to be taken up by Christ for the disease of sin to be healed and for death to be destroyed by his resurrection.

@@dimitrispeiraias it never ceases to amaze how people can write a book in response and not even come close to addressing, let alone answering the question.

@@bouncycastle955 Have you really read the whole message? Are you sure that you really want any answer at all?

Atonement is fundamentally about love. It is not about satisfying anger, but rather becoming united. The Son of God assumed a human nature. He became one with humanity (at-one-ment). He inherits everything that is ours and we inherit everything that is His, just like in marriage. He "became sin" by becoming married to sinners, and we become "the righteousness of God" by our sharing in Him (2 Cor. 5:21). Jesus inherits our debts and we inherit eternal life. The two mingle and the infinite source of life wins out. If He never died, then He would not have become what we are, and thus we would not be able to become what He is and become "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich" (2 Cor. 8:9). The Son of God brought humanity into the eternal love of the Holy Trinity by "knowing" (being experientially and intimately united to) man. All things were united to God through Jesus. "And He has made known to us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure, which He purposed in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth" (Eph. 1:9-10). He closed the chasm between the infinite and the finite. Thus, atonement is essentially sharing. God became what we are, thus us sharing with Him our debts and infirmities, and we become what He is, as much as that is possible for us to do (theosis). Thus, atonement has to do with our intimate uniting with God. It could be argued that even if Adam had not sinned, there would still be an incarnation (though Jesus would not need to die since He would not inherit death in this hypothetical scenario). God has transfigured the whole creation (not to be confused with pantheism, as God still remains distinct from the creation, just united as much as ontologically possible).