The Facebook video was this:
The questions raised in the video
The speaker challenges the Christian teaching of the Atonement, arguing approximately as follows:
- The idea that God could only forgive sins by having His Son tortured to death as a scapegoat is presented as morally objectionable.
- The speaker questions whether God needed a ransom and whether He could simply have forgiven mankind.
- The captions refer to Adam losing perfection through disobedience and to death coming to mankind through sin.
- The speaker questions the idea that another perfect being, of the same degree of perfection, was needed as a ransom.
- The speaker asks why God did not simply say, in effect, “I forgive you,” rather than requiring Christ’s death.
- The argument also raises the consequences of Adam’s sin reverberating down through the ages.
- The speaker challenges the moral implications of the doctrine being presented.
Was Adam truly perfect? And why did Christ have to die?
These questions sound difficult only if we misunderstand what the Orthodox Church teaches about the Fall and salvation.
Adam was created good, but he was not created incapable of choosing wrongly. God created him as a rational and free being, called to live in communion with his Creator. The freedom to turn away from God was not itself evil; Adam’s misuse of that freedom was.
Nor does Orthodox Christianity teach that every human being personally committed Adam’s sin. We inherit the consequences of the Fall: corruption, suffering, and death. We also commit our own sins.
And why could God not simply forgive us?
Because the human problem is not merely that we need a declaration of pardon. We are mortal, corrupted by sin, and separated from the Source of Life. Forgiveness is essential, but salvation also requires our healing and deliverance from death.
The Father did not force an unwilling victim to suffer. The eternal Son of God freely became man and offered Himself for our salvation. The Cross was an act of divine love, and the Resurrection was the destruction of death.
Christ did not merely pay a fee so that God could finally become merciful. God was and is always merciful.
Christ came to accomplish what we could not accomplish for ourselves: to reconcile us to God, to heal our fallen nature, and to open the way to eternal life.
The Gospel is not simply that God has decided to overlook our sins. It is that God became man so that fallen man might be restored to communion with God, and that through Christ’s death and Resurrection, death itself might be conquered.
This is the mystery of salvation proclaimed by the Holy Fathers and celebrated by the Church: Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.
The Orthodox response is what the Church actually confesses: the goodness and freedom of the first-created man, the reality of the Fall, the inheritance of corruption and death, the Incarnation of the Word, the voluntary Cross, and the bodily Resurrection.
The most important point is this: Christianity does not teach that God needed to become loving. It teaches that, because God loves mankind, He came to save us from sin and death.