Sin & Salvation: An Orthodox Understanding of Redemption

by HARRY BOOSALIS

77 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2021

Reviews

[Stephen Self · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a thin book that perhaps doesn't cover much ground that's all that new and, in fact, takes verbatim from the author's own prior work "Orthodox Spiritual Life according to Saint Silouan the Athonite." That said, it's still an instructive read in parts, especially for anyone not already familiar with the doctrines of sin and salvation from an Eastern Orthodox perspective contrasted with those of Roman Catholic and Protestant Christianities. Given my bent toward matters linguistic and textual, the most intriguing part of the book for me personally was the discussion in chapter 1 of the series of articles by David Weaver published in the St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly between 1983 and 1985 that trace Augustine's notion of inherited guilt (not just sinfulness) from the Original Sin of Adam to the fact that the Latin translation tradition rendered the Greek ἐφ᾽ ᾧ (literally "on which/that," probably causal: "because of the fact that") as "in quo," which can be (and perhaps naturally is) interpreted as personal with anaphoric reference to the "one man" the verse is talking about being the occasion for death entering the world through sin: Adam. If Weaver's arguments convince, this would be one of those moments where the tradition of Bible translation significantly altered the subsequent course of doctrinal and theological history.