The legal system knows only external relations and does not care about the internal content hidden behind these relations. Without asking about the internal structure of the thing, he wants to know its value, and when he finds out, he considers his work finished. If, according to Christian teaching, a person is saved only through Jesus Christ and only in the case when he does the works commanded by Christ; then for the mind of the scholastics, this means that Christ and man, each in his own right, present to the truth of God a quite sufficient price for the promised eternal life. But if the work of Christ is the work. They are mutually exclusive: the more the value of human merit increases, the merit of Christ becomes unnecessary; Christ came because man could not be saved on his own. And yet the Word of God and conscience require both, and precisely together, and precisely as indispensable causes of man's salvation. This is the basic lie of Western Christianity, which leads it to all sorts of tricks: its basic premise requires one conclusion, and the life and the direct teaching of the Word of God, with which it does not want to break ties, require another. In their essence, both Catholicism and Protestantism teach and say the same thing: both are sick with the same incurable disease, the only difference is in the coverings with which each of them tries to calm itself. Both admit (Protestants openly, and Catholics under the line) that strictly speaking, human deeds are not necessary, should not have justifying force. Both of them, in order not to go directly against the truth and at the same time not to depart from their reasoning, must recognize the making of man involuntary (Protestant sanctification and Catholic conversion – infusio gratiae). The only difference is that the Protestants, not forgetting or concealing their thoughts, think only of somehow making up for its disagreement with life, pointing to its safety: deeds, they say, will necessarily follow, and there is no need, therefore, to worry about their absence when justified. Catholics, on the other hand, try to cloud the very thought and, forgetting their basic premises, only try to shut their eyes to say that deeds are still necessary, that they still deserve salvation, not being able to explain how these deeds deserve it.

From what has been said, it is clear which path should be taken in the scientific study of the Orthodox teaching on salvation. It would be wrong and useless to take the writings or symbolic books of Protestants and Catholics and try only to destroy their extremes, for such a path, as we see, will never lead us to anything clear and definite, stable. The extremes in the West are not accidental, they are a natural deduction from a false basic principle. It is necessary, therefore, first of all to reject this basic principle (the legal understanding of life) and then, independently of it, to begin the study of truth, drawing information not from ready-made Western writings, but from the Holy Scriptures. Scriptures and Works of the Holy Fathers. In this way, only we can clarify for ourselves the basic principle of the Orthodox understanding of life. Having clarified this principle, it will not be difficult to reveal the very teaching about salvation. Therefore, in the following chapters, we must first of all decide how the Holy Scriptures relate to the Holy Scriptures. Scripture and Tradition to the legal understanding of life, do they recognize it? After answering this basic question, let us reveal the doctrine of the eternal; life, and the beginning of Orthodox theology will become clear to us. From this teaching there will necessarily follow the teaching about the meaning of retribution and, further, about salvation and its conditions.

CHAPTER ONE

Legal Understanding of Life before the Court of St. Scriptures and Traditions

We believe that we are saved by Jesus Christ alone, that only "through Christ alone can we be received by God",[95] but we also believe (and in this we find a constant witness in our conscience) that God vouchsafes a part of each one according to his good works,"[96] that "there is no other way (to receive remission of sins and hope of inheriting the promised blessings) than to receive the remission of sins. so that, having come to know our Christ and been washed by that baptism for the remission of sins of which Isaiah proclaimed, you may then live without sin" [97]; that "after the grace of God, the hope of salvation must be placed only in one's own deeds (oiceioi cator Jwmasi)" [98]. The Kingdom of God is wanting" and only "needy," i.e., those who use effort, who labor "rapture it" (Matt. XI, 12). I. Christ came not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it (Matt. V, 17). A person who is justified and sanctified does not do good out of necessity, but must do good, because "everyone will receive from the Lord according to the measure of the good he has done" (Eph. VI, 8). Good, therefore, is not the fruit or the testimony of salvation alone, but one of the direct culprits of the latter, by which "the free entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is opened to man" (2 Pet. I,11).

Therefore, the life of a person after baptism is by no means a state of inactive bliss and involuntary good deeds (as it should be presented in the West), but on the contrary, an active following of Christ (Col. III, I – 14). Earthly life is sowing, and the afterlife is harvest, and therefore man must sow good in order to inherit bliss later (Gal. YI, 7-10), he must, like a diligent ant, accumulate fruits for the future life [99]), he must gather for himself that "unfading wealth, the gathering of which is not only not a vice, but also a great virtue and reward" [100].

Thus, the justified man does good voluntarily and is constantly aware and convinced of what he does "for the sake of honor in the kingdom of heaven," in order that he may "deserve the praise of God as a good servant, and be worthy of some honors" [101]; so that if there were no such conviction, if man did not expect this reward in heaven, then a virtuous life would be meaningless and therefore impossible. "Who would want to take upon himself such bitter labors, if he did not have a sweet hope in Christ?" [102]. "Would we keep ourselves so pure if we did not acknowledge that God watches over the human race? Of course not. But since we believe that we shall give an account of all our present life to God, Who created both us and the world, we choose a life of abstinence, philanthropy, and humiliation, knowing that here we cannot tolerate, even if we are deprived of life, any evil that would be equal to the blessings prepared for us by the Great Judge for a meek, philanthropic, and humble life" [103]. Good works, therefore, are a necessary condition for salvation.

But here again one can ask in what sense good deeds are recognized as a condition of salvation: it can only be an external basis for receiving salvation, but it can also be a condition in the proper sense, a producer of salvation. Both answers, being very close to each other in form, are very, not to say fundamentally different from each other in terms of their content: they can serve as expressions of two completely opposite, mutually exclusive conceptions of life: worldly, pagan, and Christian.

The self-lover lives for himself, places his "I" as the center of the world, from the point of view of this "I" he evaluates everything that happens both in his own life and in the life of the world. His goal is his own well-being, the highest good is pleasure, whether in the form of sensual pleasures, or in some kind of nirvana, and so on.

Now, sin (the essence of which is self-love), while giving man pleasure in this life, at the same time brings him immeasurably greater suffering in the life beyond the grave: the world order established by God turns out to be detrimental to self-love and necessarily leads it to punishment. The self-lover, as such, of course, does not care about the truth or falsehood of this world order, moreover, he is ready with all his being to revolt against the latter, with all his being he is ready to protest against this limitation of his "I", the desire of which is law for him – but he, as a self-lover, cannot but wish to avoid the bitter fate to which the unrepentant contradiction of the world order hostile to him leads. And so the self-lover begins, as he says, to be saved, i.e., with extreme regret cutting off his favorite and still dear desires, he begins to fulfill the law laid down by God – to fulfill it precisely because the lawlessness in its final conclusion turns out to be extremely disadvantageous for the self-lover, although it does not cease to be desirable and pleasant for him. The self-lover in his soul is an enemy of God (Rom. YIII, 7) and wants to listen to his father, the murderer (J. YIII, 44), he is ready to bite the Hand that has mercy on him (let us remember the Jews, "who slew the prophets and stoned those who were sent to them", let us remember the crucified Jesus Christ), but he trembles at God, because he knows that He is omnipotent, that everything, even the self-lover himself, is in the hands of God, that one cannot escape from God. The self-lover has to submit to the will of God for his own benefit. He submits, but as a slave, with inner disgust, with a murmur, driven by a whip, or as a mercenary who needs profit, a reward.

A person who is so inclined, of course, cannot understand the "freedom of the children of God" that Jesus Christ brought, the "reconciliation" with God that the Apostles proclaimed to us: "The natural man cannot 'serve God in spirit and in truth' (Jn. IV, 23), he judges everything according to his soul (Cor. II, 14). Coming to Christ, he does not so much want to learn from Him how to live in order to live a true life, as he wants to know what benefit he will be given by following Christ. Therefore, when he hears about the salvation of Christ, he assimilates from this good news mainly its external side: deliverance from calamity, from final perdition, and the receipt of supreme blessedness, and does not notice the other, more essential side of this salvation, does not notice that the calamity here is not suffering, not torment, but sin, that the highest good here is placed in the very will of God. against which his selfish nature is so jealously indignant. He thinks only about what he will enjoy, but what? "He doesn't ask about that.

But if it is only a matter of bliss, as it is in the benefit of man, then it is natural to ask, for what does man receive this benefit? Would it not be unjust to give him blessedness when he did not deserve it in any way? Christ taught that only those who do good are saved. Consequently, the man concludes, the good is that payment, that concession to God, for which He grants man eternal life. The self-lover cannot understand why God pleases this and not other behavior: he himself, fulfilling the desires of his "I" only because it pleases him, is desirable, he is inclined to imagine the law of God as the same causeless desire of the Lord. Of course, man cannot love such a causeless will, just as he cannot love the Lord Himself: he only fears the latter, and fulfills the former only against his will. Hence, his labors, which he endured in fulfilling the will of God, cannot have the force and significance of a self-sacrificing sacrifice to God, a sacrifice of love and thanksgiving. For a person, they are a craving, a slave yoke. Therefore, he is not able to sacrifice them and demands a reward for himself, like any mercenary. Deeds in the eyes of a person acquire the meaning of merit.

Thus, the legal concept of salvation could not be more understandable and convenient precisely for the selfish mood. We have seen the weaknesses of this conception – we have seen how they have a free entrance to all kinds of transactions and direct distortions of Christ's truth in Western Christianity. Now we must reveal how the sacred sources of our faith relate to this idea: Holy Scripture and Tradition.

If we approach these sources with a preconceived thought, and if we tear out from them only individual words and sayings, not coping with their basic thought, then we; perhaps we can find not a few grounds for legal representation in the Holy Scriptures itself. Scripture or Tradition.