The Living Tradition An Orthodox Archive of the Church Fathers and Early Church

Theme

Salvation, grace and freedom

Not a transaction but a healing: what Orthodoxy means by being saved.

  • Received Orthodox teachingTaught consistently and received throughout the Orthodox Church, though not necessarily formulated in a conciliar definition. This is not a claim that no Father ever wrote differently.
  • Common theological opinionWidely held among Orthodox theologians without having been defined. Not dogma, and disagreeing with it is not heresy.

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Orthodox theology speaks of salvation less as a legal settlement than as the healing of a nature that had become mortal and disordered. Christ takes what is ours so that what is his may become ours.

Grace and human freedom are not competitors in this account. God's grace is what makes a free response possible, and the response is genuinely the person's own. The Orthodox tradition has generally resisted framings in which a stronger grace requires a weaker freedom.

Orthodox theology speaks of an inherited mortality and corruption rather than of inherited guilt. That difference of emphasis is one of the clearest points at which Orthodox and much Western theology diverge.

Follow this theme through the archive

  • Theosis

    Becoming by grace what God is by nature — and what that does and does not mean.

    Theme

  • Augustine of Hippo

    The most influential theologian of the Latin West, honoured as a saint in the Orthodox Church, and read there with a discrimination that the West has not always applied.

    Father or writer

  • John Cassian

    A monk who learned the ascetic tradition in Egypt and transmitted it to the Latin West in two books that shaped monastic life for a thousand years.

    Father or writer

  • Salvation, grace, freedom and theosis

    Healing rather than settlement, and what it means to become by grace what God is by nature.

    Lesson

Sources for this page

  1. Tier C The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church Henry R. Percival (ed.); Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (series eds.) The Seven Ecumenical Councils annotated edition of conciliar texts Source record

Tiers are explained in the methodology. No page on this site has been reviewed or approved by any bishop, priest, synod or seminary.