Vladimir Moss * is a profound intellect and his writings, especially those which deal with history, are mostly enjoyable and highly informative.  His papers may be found at Academia.com.  Today I read his paper,  MERCY AND JUDGMENT,   and felt compelled to respond to him, which is, as usual, an act of hubris since I am nowhere near his educational or intellectual level.  My response is follows:

I read, with considerable dismay, your paper on God’s Justice. From everything in it, it appears that you are deeply influenced by the Western idea of justice as promoted by Roman Catholicism, that is, that everything about salvation is a legal matter rather than a matter of healing of the soul, the inner man.

Furthermore, in reading your paper, it appears that you do not even listen to what you are writing. You appear to be in the camp of those who promote and relish the idea of eternal and unending torment for sinners, therefore, I will challenge you by your own words to prove this is true.

You state “In any case, according to the new law, too, evil must be balanced by an equal and opposite good – justice must be done.” What you appear to propose here is nothing less than lex talionis – the punishment must fit the offense. How then does any sin done on earth, no matter how heinous, find equal and opposite punishment in suffering eternally, both without purpose and without end? Is such a response truly “just” of God? By what means would you defend that such a response is just?

You appeal to justice on the basis of giving one that to which he is due. But is man really due eternal punishment? I suppose if you accept Augustine’s utterly warped anthropology, then you could make the epistemological case that Luther made when he said that all mankind is dung – that is, utterly without any redeeming quality or value and utterly repulsive. But this is not the description we find in Scripture. We bear the Imagio Deo, even the most depraved, and no matter under how many layers of deep depravity this image is buried, it is still there. Therefore, there is something of value in each and every person which is worth saving. This is why I accept the Orthodox understanding of salvation as healing rather than raw justice. God is not the Merciless Judge, looking to find the sin by which He can condemn loathsome insects (to borrow a descriptive phrase from Screwtape) in a misery which will bring to the redeemed great joy (Aquinas). He is the loving Father (a point most muted in the Western Church) who is the Great Physician desiring to heal His children, no matter how painful it is to them.

Your description of the sufferings of Christ on the Cross reinforce my thoughts on this, for it is quite clear that you hold to the idea of penal substitution, which is distinctly Western, rather than the Orthodox understanding of Christ defeating death by death. In His Passion, Christ took human nature to the Cross and healed it. He did not pay some sort of penalty to God, to the Devil, or to whoever, as you infer. The mercy of God is not Christ taking our punishment, which I learned repetitiously as an American Baptist Fundamentalist, but that He took our sin nature and made it whole again.

In addition, you state “And the self-sacrificial love of this sacrifice was so great in the eyes of Divine justice that it blotted out the sins of the whole world – of all men, that is, who respond to this free gift with gratitude and repentance.”

I wonder if you see the lexical corner into which you have painted yourself. If the Sacrifice blotted out all sins, then it has to also include the sin of turning from Christ in this life, doesn’t it? According to your statement, God sees no more sins- but wait! there still remains sin because men turn from God to their passions, which is sin. Therefore, both of these statements cannot be true, and in essence, the Calvinist heretics are correct – that Christ’s death was a payment for sin for only a limited number of “the elect” and the rest – well, too bad for you. Now either Christ took on the sins of the whole world or He didn’t. You believe the first and you can stay Orthodox. If you don’t, and believe that there are some sins which will merit an eternity in fire, then at least have the intellectual integrity to convert to Calvinism.

You go on to say, “When people say that God is loving but not just, or that his justice demonstrates a lack of love, they do not know what they are saying. For His love is aimed precisely towards the restoration of justice, the restoration of ‘the nature of each in its own proper order and power.’”

You have written this without really considering what you are saying. If justice is concerned with the restoration of the nature of each in its own proper order and power, then Universal Salvation must be true, unless you believe that in creatio ex nihlo, the proper order and power for the vast majority of souls was not deification but damnation. Did God create with the intent of damning, or of creating, as St. Athanasius said, an innumerable multitude of little gods, all fully bearing the image of God and participating in the divine love of the Trinity? If the former, then all is well with the doctrine of eternal unending torment, but if the latter, then true justice comes from giving to each that which is proper to it, and in this case, that means the restoration of the image of God, the healing of the nature, and a place at the banquet of the Marriage Feast of the Lamb.

I will not speak on the issue of Divine Revelation, for what I would have to say would take up pages. The issue with this train of thought is that the so-called “Divine Revelation,” meaning the Scriptures, comes from translations which are not faithful to the Greek nor the context of the statements. In addition, to believe in eternal torment is to bring conflict into the Scriptures, which in more thanone place state that God will have mercy on all. Not a few or some “elect of God” – ALL! (1 Timothy 2:4; Romans 5: 15-21; Romans 11:32; Colossians 1:20, etc) I was taught that Scripture cannot contradict Scripture back in my Fundamentalist days.

Further on down the pages of your paper, you quote Lossky:

“God’s justice is that man should no longer be separated from God. It is the restoration of humanity in Christ, the true Adam.”

This is specifically what I have said in my response – that justice is giving that which is due to a person. Justice means that yes, there will be recompense for evil deeds. This is Scripture, which states that we shall all receive for what we have done in our bodies. But as I said before, in God’s justice – lex talionis – there is no sin that demands never-ending punishment. Even the worst of mankind, every tyrant who murdered millions in cold blood, shall fill the requirements of justice after ages of scourging, the scourging of divine love, according to St. Isaac of Syria. Once justice is satisfied, there is an end to the punishments. To do more than that is completely unjust, and would be out of character with the just God!

As a final aside to this issue, you speak of and quote those who refer to man “choosing sin of their own free will.” Let’s see: we are born with a corrupted nature, which Scripture says is “dead in sins,” we have false teachers and false religions everywhere, brainwashing people into worshiping demonic elephant idols and strange conceptions of God, we have spiritual beings who desire our ruin and who are, for some reason in God’s unknowable providence, allowed to tempt us, trick us, and lie to us, and yet you claim that we somehow through all this make a “free-will decision” to turn from God. This description of free-will is akin to taking a world-class runner, strapping ten pound weights on each ankle, and then telling him that either he win the race or you will kill him and his family. He doesn’t have the chance of a snowball on a hot July sidewalk, and neither do we have any chance to turn to Christ in our natural state. (Council of Orange). Free will? Pfffffft! In your dreams.

This means that either God takes the initiative and saves all mankind, which He has most graciously done according to Romans 5:12-18, and then works with each of us to get us to Him, or we are left to our own devices (our so-called “free-will”) and for the great majority of us, wind up suffering forever.

I don’t particularly find anything either loving or just in putting such a burden on poor, sinful souls.

* Vladimir Moss is the son of a British diplomat, born in London in 1949, educated at Charterhouse (1962-66), Oxford University (1967-70) and Surrey University (1972-28). Degrees in philosophy and psychology (B.A., Ph.D). Languages: French, Russian, ancient Greek and Latin. Research interests: Orthodox Christian Theology and History, World History, Russia since the Revolution. Religion: Orthodox Christian (since 1976). Widower, no children.