Saturday, September 30, 2023

George Cadwalader Foley on the Greek and Latin Understandings of Sin

  

It is sometimes asserted that we need to modify the Greek theology by the ideas developed in the Latin theology, especially with reference to the conception of sin. It is admitted that the Latins contributed much that was valuable to Christian thought; but they added very little in the department of Soteriology, and whatever was original with them was generally mischievous. Their theological concept were to commonly cast in legal phraseology, in which they seem to have entirely misunderstood the difference between the νομος of St. Paul’s Epistles and the lex of Roman jurisprudence. The paternal idea of the relation between God and man was displaced by the juridical. The “divine kinsmanship” between Creator and creature was rejected in favour of a profound unlikeness and disjunction between them, that could be remedied only by a series of forensic transactions. Sin was not essentially spiritual, the substitution of self-will for the will of God, a missing of the end for which man was made; it was a “crimen,” a “delictum interdictum.” Penalty was no longer the natural and inevitable consequence of sin, the separation of the life from God, the deterioration of the spiritual nature; it was a judicial imposition from without, extrinsic and contingent. Forgiveness was not so much the remission of sins as a legal quittance from penalty; redemption was transformed from the deliverance of man at the cost of a loving sacrifice, by figures that reduced it to the payment of costs imposed by the judgment of a court; the ruling motive in the work of Christ was not so much a divine and righteous love as divine punitive justice. The legal morality of merit and good works, which St. Paul so vehemently opposed, was the appropriate correlative of this forensic theology. (In many respects, Augustin was a noble exception to this representation; but I speak of the theology that was generally wrought out in the Western Church)

 

It is true that no Greek ever uttered such intense and passionate confessions of sin as did some of the Latins, in which they went far beyond St. Paul in Romans vii. But that was because sin could not bulk so large to the consciousness of men who dwelt upon the Incarnation as the evidence of an affinity between divine and human nature, as it did to that of men who denied or at least underestimated this affinity. The Greek were not insensitive to the “exceeding sinfulness of sin”; but they were splendidly alive to the truth that, “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” It is mainly a matter of emphasis. The Greeks placed it upon God in Christ in man; the Latins placed it upon human sin. There can be very little doubt as to which of these thoughts is the more spiritually fruitful. (George Cadwalader Foley, Anselm’s Theory of the Atonement: The Bohlen Lectures, 1908 [New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909], 262-63 n. 1)