WE MOVE AWAY FROM GOD.  Not the other way around.

Christ took that pain upon himself so that we wouldn't have to experience the TOTAL ramifications of our actions...which our frail finite selves could never handle.

TOTAL ramifications which would be nothing less than an endless existence of existential despair. An eternal existence without hope, health, or life.

Eternal conscious torment.

But because Jesus "paid it all"...there's no need for eternal conscious torment.

The "debt" has been paid...IN FULL.

This is not to say that some people won't experience some level of serious pain for their existential despair. They WILL.

But...

Eternal conscious torment is no longer necessary...

FOR ANYONE...

and...

Eventual universal reconciliation CAN be possible.

In short, ladies and gentlemen...

God the Son HEALED the SICKNESS of Creation through taking the SICKNESS into Himself...and destroying it through the power of LOVE.



How about that?

• A human's despair is to not love God
• An angel's despair is to not glorify God
• Christ's despair is to not be in perfect fellowship with God

I just like this because it brings in the idea of frustration of telos as the cause of despair.

AD 451

THEREFORE, following the holy fathers, we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge
one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ,
at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood,
truly God and truly man,
consisting also of a reasonable soul and body;
of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead,
and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood;
like us in all respects, apart from sin;
as regards his Godhead, begotten of the Father before the ages,
but yet as regards his manhood begotten, for us men and for our salvation, of Mary the Virgin, the Godbearer;
one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten,
recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation;
the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union,
but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence,
not as parted or separated into two persons,
but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ;
even as the prophets from earliest times spoke of him, and our Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us,
and the creed of the fathers has handed down to us.

 

Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 9/18/2006 2:59:09 PM (GMT-5)

The death of "One of the Holy Trinity in the flesh" was a voluntary act, a voluntary assumption by God of the entire dimension of human tragedy. "There is nothing in Him by compulsion or necessity; everything was free: willingly He was hungry, willingly thirsty, willingly He was frightened, and willingly He died."²⁶ But — and this was the essential difference between the Orthodox and the Aphthartodocetae — this divine freedom of the hypostasis of the Logos did not limit the reality of His human condition: the Lord assumed a mortal humanity at the very moment of the Incarnation, at which time the free divine decision to die had already been made. "He takes a body, a body which is not different from ours," writes Athanasius; "He takes from us a nature similar to ours; and since we all are subject to corruption and death, He delivers His body to death for us."²⁷

The idea that the cross was the purpose of the Incarnation itself was vividly suggested by the Byzantine liturgical texts of the Nativity. The hymnology of the pre-feast (December 20 to 24) is structured according to that of Holy Week, and the humility of Bethlehem is viewed as leading toward Golgotha: "The kings, first fruits of the Gentiles, bring Thee gifts... By myrrh they point to Thy death..." "Born now in the flesh, Thou shalt in the flesh undergo burial and death, and Thou shalt rise again on the third day."²⁸

The question whether the Incarnation would have taken place, had there not been a Fall, never stood at the centre of attention in Byzantium: Byzantine theologians envisaged rather the concrete fact of human mortality: a cosmic tragedy in which God through the Incarnation undertook to become personally — rather, hypostatically — involved. The major and apparently the only exception to this general view is given by Maximus the Confessor for whom the Incarnation and "recapitulation" of all things in Christ is the true "goal" and "aim" of creation; the Incarnation therefore was foreseen and foreordained independently of man’s tragic misuse of his own freedom.²⁹ This view fits in exactly with Maximus’ idea of created "nature" as a dynamic process oriented toward an eschatological goal — Christ the incarnate Logos. As creator, the Logos stands as the "beginning" of creation; and as incarnate, He is also its "end" when all things are going to exist not only "through Him" but "in Him." In order to be "in Christ," creation had to be assumed by God, made "His own;" the Incarnation therefore is a precondition of the final glorification of man independent of man’s sinfulness and corruption.

Given the fallen state of man, the redemptive death of Christ makes this final restoration possible. But the death of Christ is truly redemptive and "life-giving" precisely because it is the death of the Son of God in the flesh (i.e., in virtue of the hypostatic union). In the East, the cross is not envisaged so much as the punishment of the just one, which "satisfies" a transcendent Justice requiring a retribution for man’s sins. As Georges Florovsky rightly puts it, "the death of the Cross was effective not as a death of an Innocent One but as the death of the Incarnate Lord."³⁰ The point was not to satisfy a legal requirement but to vanquish the frightful cosmic reality of death, which held humanity under its usurped control and pushed it into the vicious circle of sin and corruption. And, as Athanasius of Alexandria has shown in his polemics against Arianism, God alone is able to vanquish death because He "alone has immortality" (1 Tm 6:16). Just as original sin did not consist in an inherited guilt, so redemption was not primarily a justification but a victory over death. Byzantine liturgy, following Gregory of Nyssa, uses the image of the devil swallowing a hook hidden by the body of Emmanuel; the same idea is found in a pseudo-Chrysostomic sermon read during the liturgy of the paschal night: "Hell received a body and encountered God; it received mortal dust and met Heaven face to face."

Summarizing this patristic concept of death and resurrection, in the light of the Christological statements of the fifth and sixth centuries, John of Damascus writes,

Although Christ died as man, and His holy soul was separated from His most pure body, His divinity remained with both the soul and the body and continued inseparable from either. Thus, the one hypostasis was not divided into two hypostases, for from the beginning both body and soul existed in the hypostasis of the Word. Although at the hour of death body and soul were separated from each other, yet each of them was preserved having the one hypostasis of the Word. Therefore, the one hypostasis of the Word was an hypostasis as of the Word; so also of the body and of the soul, for neither the body nor the soul ever had any proper hypostasis other than that of the Word. The hypostasis, then, of the Word is ever one, and there were never two hypostases of the Word. Accordingly, the hypostasis of Christ is ever one. And though the soul is separated from the body in space, yet they remain hypostatically united through the Word.³¹

The triduum of Easter — the three days when Christ’s humanity suffered the common fate of man, yet remained mysteriously en-hypostasized in the one divine hypostasis of the Logos — was graphically expressed in the traditional Byzantine iconography of the Resurrection: Christ trampling down the gates of Sheol and lifting Adam and Eve back to life. Better than any conceptual language and better also than the image of any particular event or aspect of the mystery — such as the empty tomb or even the crucifixion itself — this icon points to the dynamic, soteriological dimension of Christ’s death: God’s intrusion into the domain usurped by the devil and the breaking up of his control over humanity. The same mystery of hypostatic unity which remained unbroken in death itself is expressed in the Byzantine liturgy of Holy Week; on Good Friday, at vespers, at the very moment when Christ gives up the spirit, the first hymns of the Resurrection are beginning to resound: "Myrrh is fitting for the dead, but Christ has shown Himself free from corruption." The hidden yet decisive triumph over death permeates the liturgical celebration of Holy Saturday: "Though the temple of Thy body was destroyed in the hour of the passion, yet even then one was the hypostasis of Thy Divinity and Thy flesh."³² One could discover in these texts the ultimate, soteriological reason why Cyril’s theopaschite formula becomes a criterion of orthodoxy in sixth-century Byzantine theology: death was vanquished precisely because God Himself had tasted of it hypostatically in the humanity which He had assumed. This is the paschal message of Christianity.

http://www.holytrinitymission.org/books/english/byzantine_theology_j_meyendorf.htm