What Christians Mean by Salvation

Ask a room of Christians what it means to be saved and many will answer in one sentence: when I die, I go to heaven and not to hell. The answer is not wrong. Paul could write of “a desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better,” and Jesus promised the dying thief, “today you will be with Me in Paradise.”¹ That hope runs through all Christian prayer, and nothing here takes it away.

Still, it is a small answer to a large question. The New Testament speaks of salvation as forgiveness, and also as adoption into God’s family, freedom from sin, victory over death, new life in the Spirit, the resurrection of the body and a real share in the life of God himself. A definition that leaves most of this out struggles to explain why the Son of God took flesh, why he rose bodily, and why the Church baptizes and gathers at a table.

The question also matters because Christians answer it differently, and in the sixteenth century those differences divided the Western Church. This article sets out the Orthodox understanding from Scripture and the Fathers, compares it with Catholic and Protestant teaching in those churches’ own words, answers the main objections, and says plainly what remains disputed.

In brief

In the Orthodox understanding, salvation is God’s healing of the whole human person and, through redeemed humanity, of creation. The problem it answers is larger than a legal debt. Since Adam, the human race has been held by death and corruption, and that bondage breeds sin in each of us. The eternal Son became man, died and rose so that our nature might be freed from death, adopted as God’s children and united with God. The Fathers called the goal of that union theosis or deification: becoming by grace what God is by nature, without ever ceasing to be creatures. Grace always comes first, yet God does not save anyone against his will; our response of faith, repentance and love is a real cooperation (synergy) that grace itself makes possible. This life is received in baptism and chrismation, fed by the Eucharist and lived out in repentance within the Church. Roman Catholics share much of this picture, including the language of deification, while defining justification in their own terms at the Council of Trent. Lutheran and Reformed Christians stress justification as God’s free acquittal received by faith alone, though their traditions also speak of union with Christ. In 1999 Lutherans and Catholics declared a consensus in basic truths on justification. The Orthodox were not party to that agreement and can welcome much in it, while holding that salvation is finally about communion with God, of which God’s verdict about us is one part.

Thesis: Scripture and the early Church describe salvation chiefly as God’s healing and adoption of humanity in Christ, leading to real union with God by grace, and that picture includes the legal language of acquittal while being considerably larger than it.

The problem salvation answers: death, corruption and sin

Every account of salvation assumes an account of what went wrong. Paul names the enemy plainly: “The last enemy that will be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). The Letter to the Hebrews says the Son shared our flesh and blood “that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Hebrews 2:14–15). Here the human plight is captivity as much as guilt.

St Athanasius of Alexandria built his fourth-century treatise On the Incarnation on this theme. Human beings were made from nothing and kept in being by God’s grace; when they turned away from God, “transgression of the commandment was turning them back to their natural state,” a slide toward corruption and finally toward nothing.² For that reason, he argues, repentance by itself could not undo the damage: “Now, if there were merely a misdemeanour in question, and not a consequent corruption, repentance were well enough.” What was needed was the Word himself, through whom we were made, taking our nature and restoring it from within. In fairness, the same chapter also speaks of “the just claim of God” concerning death, so Athanasius holds a legal element alongside the healing one; the weight of his argument still falls on corruption and life.

Ancestral sin in the Orthodox sense

The central text is Romans 5:12: “just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned.” The Latin Vulgate rendered the last phrase in quo omnes peccaverunt, “in whom all sinned.”³ St Augustine taught that the whole race was present in Adam when he fell: “For we all were in that one man, since we all were that one man, who fell into sin.”⁴ Western theology developed this into the doctrine of original sin; the Reformed Westminster Confession, for example, teaches that “the guilt of this sin was imputed” to Adam’s descendants.⁵

Many Greek-speaking Fathers read the chapter differently. Asking how anyone could be “made sinners” by another’s disobedience (Romans 5:19), St John Chrysostom answers: “To me it seems to mean liable to punishment and condemned to death.”⁶ Orthodox teaching today generally speaks of ancestral sin: we inherit from Adam a nature subject to death and corruption, and with it a strong inclination to sin, but we are not personally guilty of Adam’s act. An Orthodox Church in America answer puts it this way: “while everyone bears the consequences of the first sin, the foremost of which is death, only Adam and Eve are guilty of that sin.”⁷ {{moderate: The dominant Greek patristic reading of Romans 5 stressed inherited mortality and corruption more than inherited guilt.}}

Two honest qualifications belong here. First, the gap with Roman Catholicism is narrower than polemic suggests: the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls original sin “a sin ‘contracted’ and not ‘committed’ – a state and not an act,” and says it “does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam’s descendants.”⁸ Second, Orthodox formulations have not been uniform. The Synod of Jerusalem (1672), an important Orthodox council, spoke of “hereditary sin,” though it identified the inherited burden with suffering and “bodily death”; and it said baptism delivers from “the eternal punishment, to which he was liable, as well for original sin, as for mortal sins.”⁹ That language sits closer to Western usage than many modern Orthodox writers do. See Original Sin vs. Ancestral Sin for more. Either way, if the inheritance from Adam is above all mortality and corruption, then salvation must be above all life: the defeat of death and the healing of a wounded nature, with forgiveness as an indispensable part of it.

What salvation is: healing, adoption and union with God

Healing and new life

Jesus forgave sins and healed bodies in the same breath, and the apostles call the Christian life a new creation: “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17). In baptism, Paul says, we are joined to Christ’s death and resurrection, “that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). Salvation is something God does in us as well as for us; it does not change our legal destination while leaving us untouched.

Adoption

One of Paul’s family words for salvation is adoption. “You received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:15–17). St Irenaeus of Lyons, in the late second century, tied adoption to the Incarnation: “For it was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God.”¹⁰ The eternal Son shares his own relation to the Father with those united to him.

Union with God: theosis

The boldest statement of the goal comes in the Second Letter of Peter. God has given “exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust” (2 Peter 1:4). In John 17 Jesus asks “that they also may be one in Us” and says, “the glory which You gave Me I have given them” (17:21–22). Paul speaks of believers “being transformed into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18), and John promises that “when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2).

The Fathers drew the conclusion in memorable sentences. Irenaeus spoke of the Word, “who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.” Athanasius summed up the purpose of the Incarnation in one line: “For He was made man that we might be made God.”¹¹ St Basil the Great, describing the work of the Holy Spirit in purified souls, lists “abiding in God, the being made like to God, and, highest of all, the being made God.”¹² {{very-strong: The language of deification appears in major Greek Fathers from the second to the fourth century, including Irenaeus, Athanasius and Basil.}} Norman Russell’s standard history traces the idea from its classical and Jewish background to its fullest development in Maximus the Confessor in the seventh century.¹³ See also What Is Theosis? and Did Paul Teach Theosis?

By grace, never by nature

Phrases like “made God” are easy to misread. The Fathers never meant that the boundary between Creator and creature dissolves. God alone is God by nature; we become “gods” only by grace, by participation in what is his. In the fourteenth century St Gregory Palamas gave this a precise form. God’s essence, his inner being, remains forever beyond any creature’s grasp, while his uncreated energies, his life, light and grace, are truly shared. Those “deemed worthy of union with God are united to God in energy,” he wrote, and the Spirit by whom they cling to God is “the uncreated energy of the Spirit and not the substance of God.” When the Fathers speak of God’s substance as participable, he explains, “take it as the procession, manifestation and energy belonging to God by nature.”¹⁴

Local councils in Constantinople in 1341, 1347 and 1351 upheld Palamas’s teaching, and the distinction became part of Orthodox doctrine; many Western theologians have questioned it.¹⁴ For the Orthodox it keeps God fully God, untouched in his essence, and keeps salvation real: what we receive is God himself in his self-giving, not a created substitute. Nor does such union swallow the person; a saint is more himself or herself in God, not less.

The body and the whole creation

Because salvation is the healing of human nature, it includes the body. Paul says that even we who have the Spirit are “eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body” (Romans 8:23), and that “the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (8:21). Scripture ends with the One on the throne saying, “Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21:5). The Creed confessed by Orthodox Christians closes in the same key: “I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”¹⁵ The Christian hope is the transfiguration of the world God made and called good, bodies and souls together.

Grace first, and a free response: synergy

If salvation is union with God, it cannot be forced, because love cannot be forced. The Orthodox therefore speak of synergy, from the Greek for working together. Paul uses the word himself: “we are God’s fellow workers” (1 Corinthians 3:9). The classic text holds both sides together: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12–13).

Synergy does not mean that God does half and we do half. Grace is always first. “By grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). Jesus is blunter still: “without Me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). In the parable of the prodigal son, the son turns for home, but the father sees him “a great way off” and runs to meet him (Luke 15:20).

The Church found a model for this in Christ himself. Against the Monothelites, St Maximus the Confessor defended the reality of Christ’s human will and suffered for it, and the Sixth Ecumenical Council (680–681) declared that Christ has two natural wills and that “his human will follows and that not as resisting and reluctant, but rather as subject to his divine and omnipotent will.”¹⁶ In Christ a fully human will freely agrees with God, and salvation extends that agreement to us by grace. The Synod of Jerusalem (1672) likewise taught that fallen humanity, though “utterly undone,” kept “the same power of his nature, that is free-will, living and operating.”¹⁷

Faith and works

Paul writes that “a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law” (Romans 3:28), and James that “a man is justified by works, and not by faith only” (James 2:24), adding that “faith without works is dead” (2:26). Orthodox readers have not taken these as rival slogans. Paul rejects the idea that works of the law could earn God’s favor; James rejects a faith that never becomes love. Paul himself says what counts is “faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6), and Ephesians follows “not of works” with “created in Christ Jesus for good works” (2:10). The Synod of Jerusalem put the Orthodox position in a sentence: “We believe a man to be not simply justified through faith alone, but through faith which worketh through love, that is to say, through faith and works.”¹⁸

Where salvation is received and lived

The Orthodox do not picture salvation as a private transaction that the Church later decorates. From Pentecost onward, the gospel was received in a community and through visible acts. Asked “what shall we do?” (Acts 2:37), Peter answered, “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38).

Baptism is the believer’s share in Christ’s death and resurrection (Romans 6:3–4), a birth “of water and the Spirit” (John 3:5). Chrismation, the anointing that follows baptism in the Orthodox Church, corresponds to the apostles laying hands on the baptized so that they “received the Holy Spirit” (Acts 8:17), and to God who “has anointed us” and “sealed us” (2 Corinthians 1:21–22). The Orthodox Church in America describes it as receiving “the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit,” our personal share in Pentecost.¹⁹

The Eucharist is where union with God is fed week by week. “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53). St Ignatius of Antioch, writing as a prisoner bound for martyrdom in Rome, called the eucharistic bread “the medicine of immortality, and the antidote to prevent us from dying.”²⁰ The lectures to the newly baptized attributed to St Cyril of Jerusalem teach that in Communion, “according to the blessed Peter, we become partakers of the divine nature.”²¹ St Gregory of Nyssa wrote that God joined himself to perishable humanity “that by this communion with Deity mankind might at the same time be deified,” and for this end gives himself to believers in the Eucharist.²² The site’s infographic Why Sacraments at All? explains why material means fit an incarnate faith.

Repentance, finally, is not a door passed through once. Jesus’ preaching opens with a call to repent (Mark 1:15), and the New Testament assumes believers will keep confessing: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9); “Confess your trespasses to one another ... that you may be healed” (James 5:16). Confession, prayer, fasting and almsgiving are understood as medicine, the ordinary means by which a wounded person is healed over a lifetime.

How other Christians describe salvation

Roman Catholic teaching

The Council of Trent answered the Reformation in its sixth session (1547). It is often caricatured as teaching salvation by works, which it explicitly rejects. Its first canon condemns anyone who says “that man may be justified before God by his own works ... without the grace of God through Jesus Christ.” It teaches that “the beginning of the said Justification is to be derived from the prevenient grace of God,” and that “none of those things which precede justification—whether faith or works—merit the grace itself of justification.”²³ {{very-strong: Trent taught that justification begins with God’s prevenient grace, which nothing can merit.}}

Where Trent parts company with the Reformers is in what justification is. It defines justification as “not remission of sins merely, but also the sanctification and renewal of the inward man,” and it condemns the views that we are justified “by the sole imputation of the justice of Christ” to the exclusion of grace and charity inherent in us, or “by faith alone” in a sense that excludes the will’s cooperation.²³ The present Catechism says that “justification establishes cooperation between God’s grace and man’s freedom” and that “no one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification.”²⁴ It also uses the language of deification, citing Irenaeus and quoting Athanasius: “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.”²⁴

The Orthodox will recognize much of this; the differences lie less in the priority of grace than in categories such as merit, which Orthodox theology does not use in the same way. The site’s articles on what the Council of Trent actually taught and on merit and grace in Catholic teaching give fuller detail.

Lutheran and Reformed teaching

The Lutheran Augsburg Confession (1530) states the Reformation conviction in Article IV: people “cannot be justified before God by their own strength, merits, or works, but are freely justified for Christ’s sake, through faith,” and “this faith God imputes for righteousness in His sight.”²⁵ The Reformed Westminster Confession (1646) is more explicit about the forensic character of justification: God justifies “not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous,” imputing to them “the obedience and satisfaction of Christ.”²⁶ Justification here is a legal declaration, distinct from the sanctification that follows it.

It would be unfair to stop there. The same Confession says that justifying faith is “not alone in the person justified, but is ever accompanied with all other saving graces, and is no dead faith, but worketh by love.”²⁶ John Calvin gave “the highest rank” to “the mystical union” of Christ with believers, “the residence of Christ in our hearts.”²⁷ Some Protestant scholars now argue that Calvin, and Luther too, had a real place for union with God, even deification, though others dispute this.²⁸ The real disagreements with the Orthodox concern how justification relates to that union, and the human will: the Lutheran Formula of Concord (1577) rejected “the doctrine of the Synergists, who pretend that man is not absolutely dead to good in spiritual things, but is badly wounded and half dead.”²⁹ The Orthodox would describe fallen humanity as gravely wounded rather than dead in will. See also Sola Fide: What Did the Reformers Mean by “Faith Alone”?

The Joint Declaration of 1999

On 31 October 1999 in Augsburg, the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. Its central confession reads: “By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works.” The signatories declared “a consensus in basic truths of the doctrine of justification,” and stated that the Lutheran teaching it presents “does not fall under the condemnations from the Council of Trent,” and vice versa.³⁰ Questions about the Church, ministry and the sacraments were left for further work. The World Methodist Council joined in 2006, the Anglican Consultative Council welcomed and affirmed its substance in 2016, and the World Communion of Reformed Churches associated itself in 2017.³¹ {{strong: The Joint Declaration recorded a Lutheran–Catholic consensus in basic truths on justification.}}

The agreement was not universally welcomed. More than 165 German Protestant theologians publicly objected in 1998 that no real consensus had been reached on faith alone or on the importance of good works.³² The Orthodox Church was not a party; Orthodox readers can welcome its stress on grace and the Holy Spirit, while noting that the Western debate turns on questions the Orthodox never framed in the same way.

“Once saved, always saved”

The slogan “once saved, always saved” is popular in parts of evangelicalism, but it is not how the historic Protestant confessions put the matter. The Reformed tradition teaches the perseverance of the saints: the truly regenerate “can neither totally nor finally fall away from the state of grace, but shall certainly persevere therein to the end.”³³ That is a claim about what God will do in the elect, not a license to ignore holiness. Lutherans condemned in the Augsburg Confession “the Anabaptists, who deny that those once justified can lose the Holy Ghost.”³⁴ The Council of Trent likewise taught that “the received grace of Justification is lost” by mortal sin.²³ Lutherans, Catholics and the Orthodox therefore agree that a believer can fall away.

The Orthodox Church rejects the idea that a single moment of decision guarantees final salvation regardless of what follows. It takes seriously both the promise that no one can snatch Christ’s sheep “out of My hand” (John 10:28) and the warnings: “let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12). Scripture speaks of salvation in three tenses: “by grace you have been saved” (Ephesians 2:8), “to us who are being saved” (1 Corinthians 1:18), and “now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed” (Romans 13:11). Orthodox confidence rests on the faithfulness of God, not on a past event considered in isolation. See Once Saved, Always Saved? The Orthodox Christian Understanding for more.

Objections and responses

“Theosis is pagan, not biblical”

The objection. Talk of “becoming gods” sounds like Greek philosophy or the deification of Roman emperors, not like the Bible. Plato, after all, said that “to escape is to become like God, so far as this is possible.”³⁵ On this view the Fathers dressed a Hellenistic idea in Christian clothes.

Response. The overlap in vocabulary is real, and it should be admitted. Russell’s history itself begins with the classical background. But the content differs at the decisive points. Plato’s likeness to the divine is an ascent of the soul away from the body, and the deification of rulers in the ancient world was a civic honor. Christian theosis begins with God becoming man, includes the resurrection of the body, depends entirely on grace, and keeps an absolute line between Creator and creature. Its starting point is biblical: “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), “the glory which You gave Me I have given them” (John 17:22), “we shall be like Him” (1 John 3:2). Jesus himself quoted Psalm 82, “I said, ‘You are gods’” (John 10:34). The Fathers borrowed words their hearers understood and filled them with the gospel. Nor is the idea only Eastern: the Catholic Catechism quotes Athanasius’s line, and some Protestant scholars have found it in Calvin.²⁸

“Synergy is works-righteousness, even Pelagianism”

The objection. If our cooperation is required, salvation depends partly on us, which is what Pelagius taught and Paul denies (Ephesians 2:8–9). Lutheran confessional theology rejects synergism for this reason.

Response. Pelagianism, as the early Church condemned it, made grace an aid to natural human powers rather than their source. The Christian East rejected that too. The Council of Ephesus (431), received by Orthodox and Catholics alike, ordered the deposition of clergy who held “the doctrines of Nestorius or Celestius,” Pelagius’s associate.³⁶ Orthodox synergy holds that grace comes first, sustains every step and brings it to completion; what it denies is that grace overrides the will. A drowning man who takes hold of the rope has not saved himself. Trent also condemned justification by works without grace, so the charge of Pelagianism does not fit Catholicism either.

Honesty requires one more point. St John Cassian, whom the Orthodox Church venerates as a saint, wrote that when God “sees in us some beginnings of a good will, He at once enlightens it and strengthens it and urges it on towards salvation, increasing that which He Himself implanted or which He sees to have arisen from our own efforts.”³⁷ Western critics have long read lines like this as conceding too much to human initiative, and later attached the label “semi-Pelagian” to such views. Orthodox readers take Cassian as a pastor describing experience, and note that he insists in the same passage that God’s providence “constantly precedes” us. The disagreement has not been settled.

“Salvation is just a legal verdict”

The objection. Scripture uses courtroom language: “It is God who justifies. Who is he who condemns?” (Romans 8:33–34); God “justifies the ungodly” (Romans 4:5). Talk of healing and union, on this view, blurs the clear message that a guilty sinner is declared righteous for Christ’s sake.

Response. The Orthodox do not deny the courtroom. Forgiveness, acquittal and the removal of condemnation are part of the gospel, and Orthodox worship asks for them constantly. The question is whether the legal image is the whole picture. The same chapter of Romans speaks of adoption, the Spirit’s indwelling and the redemption of the body, which a verdict alone does not accomplish. Athanasius saw this when he said that repentance would be enough “if there were merely a misdemeanour in question,” but not when nature itself had fallen into corruption. Even the most forensic confessions insist that justifying faith is never without love. Orthodoxy holds the legal and the healing language together, placing the weight on life and communion, because that is where Christ himself puts it: “this is eternal life, that they may know You” (John 17:3).

What we can say confidently

• The New Testament describes salvation with many images, from forgiveness and adoption to resurrection and sharing in the divine nature; no single image exhausts it.
• Major Greek Fathers, including Irenaeus, Athanasius, Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, used the language of deification, always by grace and never by nature.
• The Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed traditions all teach that salvation begins with God’s grace and cannot be earned.
• Trent condemned justification by works without grace; the Augsburg and Westminster confessions teach justification by faith while insisting that true faith is never without love.
• In 1999 the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church declared a consensus in basic truths on justification; the Orthodox were not party to it.
• Historic Lutheran, Catholic and Orthodox teaching holds that a believer can fall away; the Reformed doctrine of perseverance is not the same as the popular slogan “once saved, always saved.”

What remains disputed

• How uniform Greek patristic teaching on inherited sin was, and how far modern Orthodox accounts of “ancestral sin” match older formulations such as the Synod of Jerusalem (1672).
• Whether Orthodox and Catholic teaching on original sin differ in substance or mainly in vocabulary, given the Catechism’s statement that original sin is not a personal fault.
• Whether Gregory Palamas’s distinction between God’s essence and energies is the faithful expression of the Fathers (the Orthodox view) or an innovation (the view of many Western critics).
• How far Luther and Calvin themselves taught a form of union or deification, a live debate among Protestant scholars.
• Whether the Joint Declaration reached real agreement or papered over differences.
• How to read John Cassian on grace and free will, and where exactly the line falls between Orthodox synergy and what the West calls semi-Pelagianism.

Conclusion

“Going to heaven” is a true hope, but it is the edge of a much larger one. In the faith of the Nicene Creed, salvation is the Father’s love reaching us through the Son and in the Holy Spirit: death defeated, sins forgiven, a wounded nature healed, and creatures brought into communion with the uncreated God. It is given entirely by grace and worked out over a lifetime in the company of the Church.

Orthodox Christians do not need to caricature their Catholic and Protestant neighbors to say this, since much of what the Orthodox confess about grace is confessed by them too. What the Orthodox tradition offers is a wider frame, in which the courtroom stands inside the household, and the household inside the life of God. Each Pascha the Church sings the center of that hope: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!”³⁸ Each Sunday it confesses where that hope ends: “I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”

Notes

1. Philippians 1:23; Luke 23:43. Scripture is quoted from the New King James Version (NKJV) throughout. ↩
2. Athanasius, On the Incarnation 4.4 and 7.2–4, trans. Archibald Robertson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series (NPNF2), vol. 4 (1892). Chapter 7 also refers to “the just claim of God.” ↩
3. Romans 5:12, Latin Vulgate (Biblia Sacra Vulgata), as given on BibleGateway. ↩
4. Augustine, City of God 13.14, trans. Marcus Dods, NPNF1 vol. 2 (1887). ↩
5. Westminster Confession of Faith 6.3 (text as published by the Orthodox Presbyterian Church). ↩
6. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans 10, on Romans 5:19, trans. J. Walker, J. Sheppard and H. Browne, rev. George B. Stevens, NPNF1 vol. 11 (1889). ↩
7. Orthodox Church in America, “Original Sin,” Questions & Answers (oca.org). This is a pastoral answer, not a formal synodal statement. ↩
8. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§404–405. ↩
9. Synod of Jerusalem (1672), Decree VI and Decree XVI, in J. N. W. B. Robertson, trans., The Acts and Decrees of the Synod of Jerusalem (London: Thomas Baker, 1899), pp. 118–119 and 139–142. The synod met under Patriarch Dositheus to condemn a Calvinist-leaning confession published under the name of Patriarch Cyril Lucaris (Robertson, Introduction, p. v). ↩
10. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.19.1, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, Ante-Nicene Fathers (ANF), vol. 1 (1885). ↩
11. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5, Preface (ANF 1); Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54.3 (NPNF2 4, trans. Robertson). ↩
12. Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit 9.23, trans. Blomfield Jackson, NPNF2 vol. 8 (1895). ↩
13. Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). The outline follows Andrew Louth’s review, Times Higher Education, 13 May 2005. ↩
14. Gregory Palamas, The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters 75 and 107, ed. and trans. Robert E. Sinkewicz, Studies and Texts 83 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988). On the councils of 1341, 1347 and 1351, see Orthodox Church in America, The Orthodox Faith, vol. 3, Church History, “Saint Gregory Palamas” (oca.org). ↩
15. The Symbol of Faith (Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed), English text of the Orthodox Church in America, without the later Western addition of the Filioque. ↩
16. Third Council of Constantinople (680–681), Definition of Faith, trans. Henry Percival, NPNF2 vol. 14 (1900). On Maximus’s opposition to Monothelitism and his sufferings (his tongue was cut out and his right hand cut off before his final exile), see the Orthodox Church in America’s life of “Venerable Maximus the Confessor” (oca.org, commemorated January 21). ↩
17. Synod of Jerusalem (1672), Decree XIV, in Robertson, Acts and Decrees, pp. 132–133. ↩
18. Synod of Jerusalem (1672), Decree XIII, in Robertson, Acts and Decrees, p. 132. ↩
19. Orthodox Church in America, The Orthodox Faith, vol. 2, Worship, “Chrismation” (oca.org). ↩
20. Ignatius of Antioch, To the Ephesians 20, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, ANF vol. 1 (1885). The date of Ignatius’s letters is debated; the early second century is the usual view. ↩
21. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture 22 (Mystagogical Lecture 4).3, trans. Edwin Hamilton Gifford, NPNF2 vol. 7 (1894). Whether Cyril or his successor, John II of Jerusalem, wrote the five Mystagogical Lectures has long been disputed; Alexis James Doval, Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogue: The Authorship of the Mystagogic Catecheses, Patristic Monograph Series 17 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), argues for Cyril. ↩
22. Gregory of Nyssa, The Great Catechism 37, trans. William Moore and Henry Austin Wilson, NPNF2 vol. 5 (1893). ↩
23. Council of Trent, Session 6 (13 January 1547), Decree on Justification, chapters 5, 7, 8 and 15 and canons 1, 9 and 11, trans. J. Waterworth (London: Dolman, 1848). ↩
24. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§460, 1993 and 2010. ↩
25. Augsburg Confession, Article IV, in Triglot Concordia (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921), as published at BookOfConcord.org. ↩
26. Westminster Confession of Faith 11.1–2 (OPC text). ↩
27. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 3.11.10, trans. Henry Beveridge (first published 1845; Christian Classics Ethereal Library). ↩
28. Carl Mosser, “The Greatest Possible Blessing: Calvin and Deification,” Scottish Journal of Theology 55, no. 1 (2002): 36–57, answered by later replies in the same journal; for Luther, Tuomo Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith: Luther’s View of Justification, trans. and ed. Kirsi I. Stjerna (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), a foundational text of the “Finnish school,” whose reading of Luther is also contested. ↩
29. Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration, Article II (“Free Will”), §77, in Triglot Concordia (1921), as published at BookOfConcord.org. ↩
30. Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church, Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (1999), §§15, 40, 41 and 43 (official English text, Lutheran World Federation). ↩
31. Lutheran World Federation, “Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (JDDJ)” (lutheranworld.org), timeline of later affirmations. ↩
32. Richard Nyberg, “Germany: Protestant Theologians Object to Lutheran-Catholic Accord,” Christianity Today, 15 June 1998. ↩
33. Westminster Confession of Faith 17.1 (OPC text). ↩
34. Augsburg Confession, Article XII, in Triglot Concordia (1921). ↩
35. Plato, Theaetetus 176b, trans. Harold N. Fowler, Loeb Classical Library 123 (1921), via the Perseus Digital Library. ↩
36. Council of Ephesus (431), canons 1 and 4, trans. Henry Percival, NPNF2 vol. 14 (1900). ↩
37. John Cassian, Conferences 13.8, trans. Edgar C. S. Gibson, NPNF2 vol. 11 (1894). On his veneration, see the Orthodox Church in America’s life of “Venerable John Cassian the Roman” (commemorated February 29). ↩
38. The Paschal Troparion, English text of the Orthodox Church in America, “Selected Liturgical Hymns.” ↩

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982. (Romans 5:12 also checked in the Latin Vulgate.)
• Plato. Theaetetus. Translated by Harold N. Fowler. Loeb Classical Library 123 (Plato, vol. 7). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1921.
• Council of Ephesus (431) and Third Council of Constantinople (680–681). In The Seven Ecumenical Councils, translated by Henry Percival. NPNF2 vol. 14. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1900.
• Robertson, J. N. W. B., trans. The Acts and Decrees of the Synod of Jerusalem, Sometimes Called the Council of Bethlehem, Holden under Dositheus, Patriarch of Jerusalem in 1672. London: Thomas Baker, 1899.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Ignatius of Antioch. Epistle to the Ephesians. Translated by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. ANF vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885.
• Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies. Translated by Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut. ANF vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885.
• Athanasius of Alexandria. On the Incarnation of the Word. Translated by Archibald Robertson. NPNF2 vol. 4. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1892.
• Basil of Caesarea. On the Holy Spirit. Translated by Blomfield Jackson. NPNF2 vol. 8. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1895.
• Cyril of Jerusalem. Catechetical Lectures. Translated by Edwin Hamilton Gifford. NPNF2 vol. 7. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1894.
• Gregory of Nyssa. The Great Catechism. Translated by William Moore and Henry Austin Wilson. NPNF2 vol. 5. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1893.
• John Chrysostom. Homilies on Romans. Translated by J. Walker, J. Sheppard and H. Browne; revised by George B. Stevens. NPNF1 vol. 11. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1889.
• Augustine of Hippo. The City of God. Translated by Marcus Dods. NPNF1 vol. 2. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1887.
• John Cassian. Conferences. Translated by Edgar C. S. Gibson. NPNF2 vol. 11. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1894.
• Gregory Palamas. The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters. Edited and translated by Robert E. Sinkewicz. Studies and Texts 83. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988.
• Orthodox Church in America (oca.org). “The Symbol of Faith”; “Selected Liturgical Hymns” (Paschal Troparion); The Orthodox Faith, vol. 2, Worship, “Chrismation,” and vol. 3, Church History, “Saint Gregory Palamas”; Questions & Answers, “Original Sin”; Lives of the Saints, “Venerable Maximus the Confessor” and “Venerable John Cassian the Roman.”

Other scholarship

• Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Reviewed by Andrew Louth, Times Higher Education, 13 May 2005.)
• Mosser, Carl. “The Greatest Possible Blessing: Calvin and Deification.” Scottish Journal of Theology 55, no. 1 (2002): 36–57. (Disputed by later replies in the same journal.)
• Mannermaa, Tuomo. Christ Present in Faith: Luther’s View of Justification. Translated and edited by Kirsi I. Stjerna. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005. (A revisionist reading of Luther that other Lutheran scholars dispute.)
• Nyberg, Richard. “Germany: Protestant Theologians Object to Lutheran-Catholic Accord.” Christianity Today, 15 June 1998.
• Doval, Alexis James. Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogue: The Authorship of the Mystagogic Catecheses. Patristic Monograph Series 17. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001.

Sources from the traditions being compared

• Council of Trent. The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent. Translated by J. Waterworth. London: Dolman, 1848. Session 6.
• Catechism of the Catholic Church. English text, Holy See (vatican.va).
• Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921. (Augsburg Confession; Formula of Concord.)
• The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646). Text as published by the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
• Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Translated by Henry Beveridge. First published 1845. Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
• Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church. Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. Signed at Augsburg, 31 October 1999. With the Lutheran World Federation’s account of the later Methodist, Anglican and Reformed affirmations.