Salvation is the goal of Christianity, and the purpose of the Church. Orthodox Christianity believes that God became man, so that man may become like God. The Church rejects the idea that salvation is a resolution to a legalistic dilemma, but understands it as a process of healing and union with the triune God in the Person of Jesus Christ. Our inclination to sin is a symptom of a malady that needs treatment, not merely a transgression that calls for punishment. One of the distinctive characteristics of Orthodox Christian thinking is that it sees the Gospel message not as law, but as relationship. We speak of the mystery of the Holy Trinity in terms of the relationship of love that exists among them. To participate in that love and become by grace a partaker of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4) is the goal of the Christian.

God created man in his own image and likeness

Man, according to the scriptures, is created in the “likeness” and “image” of God (Gen 1:26-27).

To be like God, through the action of God in us, is the essence of man’s being and life. In the scriptures we read that God breathed into man, the “breath (or spirit) of life” (Gen 2:7). This teaching has given rise to the understanding in the Orthodox Church that man cannot be truly human, truly himself, without the Spirit of God.

The image of God signifies man’s free will, his reason, his sense of moral responsibility, everything, which marks man out from the animal creation and makes him a person. But the image means more than that. It means that we are God’s ‘offspring’ (Acts 27:28), his kin; it means that between us and him there is a point of contact, an essential similarity. Because of the incarnation of Christ our God into our race, the gulf between creature and Creator is bridged. Because the image of God has been restored in the human race, we can know God and have communion with him.

Fall of man

The story of creation, and specifically of Adam and Eve, illustrates that the world was created good; there is no place for a duality of spirit versus matter. The Eden account asserts that the origin of evil does not lie in God but in his creatures, whose free act of sin brought suffering and death to the world. It describes how man, though still in God’s image, lost his likeness to God and came to need restoration.

When we do not respond to God’s love, we are diminished as human beings. The act of faith that he asks of us is not so very different from the faith and trust we place in those people who surround us. When we do not respond to the love given us by the people who love us, we become shallow and hardened.

Incarnation

Because of man’s loss of likeness to God, the Incarnation is not only an act of love but an act of salvation. Jesus Christ, by uniting man and God in his own person, reopened for man the possibility of union with God. In his own person Christ showed what the true ‘likeness of God’ is, and through his incarnation, his teaching, his victory over death on the Cross, and his resurrection and ascension, he hasset that likeness once again within man’s reach. Christ, the Second Adam, came to earth and reversed the effects of the first Adam’s disobedience.

The Church

The Church is the Body of Christ (1 Cor 12:27), a divine-human communion of Jesus Christ with his people. The sole head of the Church is Christ. Because the Church, it is the Body of Christ, it is also the temple and dwelling place of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 3:16-17). It is a continued Pentecost.

Archbishop Paul of Finland, in This Faith We Hold, writes: “The Eastern Orthodox Church is organically the same congregation (or ecclesia) which was born at the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Jerusalem on Pentecost, a direct continuation from the Apostles by laying on of hands from each generation of priests to the next. The Orthodox Christian recognizes the rich Christian heritage and proclaims that he belongs to this Church, which corresponds to the Church of the Apostles as does a grown-up person correspond to a picture taken of him as a child.”

Father Boris Bobrinskoy writes: “This ‘Body’ contains not only the eucharistic assembly ‘here and now,’ but the Church of all times, of all places – the communion of saints. This point is crucial to our understanding of theology. My theology is not my theology, not even that of the group to which I belong. Rather, my theology has been formulated through living experience: the life and suffering of the saints since Pentecost – and even before Pentecost by the patriarchs and prophets – in communion. This communion of the saints implies a communion of faith. This explains why the Orthodox Church does not accept intercommunion, which would make light of this profound unity, what Fr Florovsky calls ‘ecumenism in time.’ Communion of faith entails not only attempts to create unity with the dispersed members of churches in our world today, but also constancy in maintaining unity with our church fathers.” — in The Compassion of the Father

In the Church is the community where man is what he is created to be and can grow for eternity in divine life in communion with God through Christ in the Holy Spirit. The unity of the Church is not broken by time or space and is not limited merely to those alive upon the earth. The unity of the Church is the unity of the Blessed Trinity and of all of those who live with God: the holy angels, the righteous dead, and those who live upon the earth according to the commandments of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit.

The community of the Church is the locus of salvation for mankind; it is the Ark in which mankind may be saved from the flood of corruption and sin. In it, Christians sacramentally work out their salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12), worshipping the Holy Trinity in spirit and in truth. The Church is the pillar and ground of truth (I Tim. 3:15) and thus may be relied upon in the Christian’s struggle to apprehend the one truth for himself. The Church is eternal, and the gates of Hell will never prevail against it (Matt. 16:18).

May they all be one

‘May they all be one,’ Christ prayed at the Last Supper; “As Thou, Father, art in me and I in Thee, so also may they be in us” (John 17:21). Just as the three persons of the Trinity abide in one another in an unceasing movement of love, so man, made in the image of the Trinity, is called to abide in Christ, in whom dwells the fullness of the triune Godhead.