Deification through the Cross: An Eastern Christian Theology of Salvation by Khaled Anatolios

Abstract

Reviewed by: Deification through the Cross: An Eastern Christian Theology of Salvation by Khaled Anatolios Daniel Galadza Khaled Anatolios. Deification through the Cross: An Eastern Christian Theology of Salvation. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020. 464 pp. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed explains that the Incarnation was “for our salvation.” What the essence of this salvation is, and how it comes about, is the focus of Father Khaled Anatolios’s Deification through the Cross, which examines the implications of Christian doctrine regarding the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ for academic theology and for Christian life. The centrality of salvation to theological discourse should be apparent, but in his introduction Anatolios shows how certain theologians have overemphasized or avoided one or another prominent aspect of the Gospel in their construction of soteriological “models” (i.e., ransom, atonement, [End Page 150] penal substitution, satisfaction, etc.), often without elaborating upon any experiential access to salvation (23). Instead of adding yet another model to the “cafeteria buffet,” Anatolios proposes deification as the content and goal of salvation, made possible by the Son of God becoming a human being who suffers the Passion, dies on the cross, and rises from the dead, granting victory over death and freedom from disordered passions; this inspires repentance and rejection of sin in light of the joyous news of Christ’s already accomplished salvation, leading to human deification, which consists of the glorification of God. The thread running through the whole book is the “dramatic synthesis of the dialectic of sorrow over sins and the celebration of divine glory” (81), which Anatolios calls “doxological contrition.” The soteriology of doxological contrition is constructed in the first part of the book on the basis of liturgical experience, Scripture (with a critique of the historical-critical method), and conciliar Trinitarian and Christological statements from the seven ecumenical councils, before building a systematic theology of doxological contrition in the second part, which examines sin and reintegration into the life of the Trinity. His main thesis is that “Christ’s salvific work includes a representative and vicarious repentance on our behalf that has as its points of departure and destination the communion with divine glory” (141). The starting point for his theology of salvation is the Byzantine Liturgy. Anatolios begins with an analysis of what the prayers (more precisely hymns) from Great Lent, Holy Week, Pascha, and Pentecost say about repentance and salvation, using the lens of a “worshipper-response” approach. Doxological contrition expressed in first-person voice hymns, sung by the “ideal worshipper” (68), conveys the paradoxical experience and “dialectical simultaneity of lost and found glory” (84), so that “the Byzantine liturgy does not prescribe doxology along with contrition; it leads one into a contrition that is doxological through and through” (92), joyfully intertwining the salvific efficacy of Christ’s death and Resurrection in its soteriology of exchange. The lens of “doxological contrition” through which Anatolios views the liturgical hymns offers a constructive development and perhaps unintentional synthesis of recent studies in liturgy not referenced in this book—for example, the “penitential self” in Derek Krueger’s Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), and the human person’s “doxological vocation” in Brian A. Butcher’s Liturgical Theology after Schme-mann: An Orthodox Reading of Paul Ricoeur (Fordham University Press, 2018). This book’s rich presentation of doxo-logical contrition offers the reader immense satisfaction but nevertheless leaves avenues of investigation open in the realm of liturgy and contemporary Eastern Orthodox theology. Anatolios points to discoveries of explicit correlations in a variety of patristic authors between contrition, doxology, and Christ’s salvific work that become obvious once the reader knows to look for them (222–23), but he sets aside the task of unpacking these discoveries for a future book. The correspondence between the content of Byzantine hymns and soteriological themes throughout the book are instructive; an examination of the liturgical and biblical sources in part 1 using, for example, the recently published thesis of Hieromonk Macarius (Gerard Bonnet) of Simonopetra, in Mystagogie du Grand Carême: Essai de théologie du temps liturgique (Monastère de Simonos Pétra, 2018...