Yesterday I was listening to an episode of Robin Pierson's History of Byzantium featuring a conversation between the host and Rev. John Strickland, an Orthodox priest and scholar, on some of the more common questions touching Orthodoxy as it is practised and understood by its faithful. Although I possess some general acquaintance with their beliefs and their liturgy — bearing in mind, of course, that for nearly a millennium the Orthodox and the Catholic shared the same apostolic faith, and judging moreover, if I may speak with candour, that the divergences which issued in schism appear, when viewed across the longer tract of time and from the remove of several centuries, to have depended more upon politics and the contingencies of history than upon theology; or at the very least, without downplaying whatever real theological differences arose and continue to separate the two churches, to have been exacerbated rather by geographical separation and by the politics of the age — I remain, alas, no more than this: an outsider, neither myself Orthodox nor a scholar of Orthodoxy.

1. Strickland’s thesis

Of that exchange there remain to me, in memory, two points above all, the first touching soteriology, inasmuch as, when he speaks of faith and salvation, Strickland contends that the Catholic West, by a gradual habituation, became increasingly disposed toward legalisms and toward those fine distinctions which arise, almost of necessity, when the matter is prosecuted in a juridical idiom, whereas the Orthodox, as he would have it, are more content to leave certain questions within the province of mystery; and thus it comes about, he says, that the polemical disputes of the Reformation, so commonly cast in the antithesis of “faith alone” and “faith plus works,” remain, for the Orthodox mind, largely alien, precisely because such disputes presuppose a forensic register which, on his account, developed in the West after the schism. The second point concerns purgatory, which the Orthodox reject; and in that connexion he mentions also the Orthodox notion of aerial toll-houses—something which I recall having heard before—while taking care to qualify it as not, strictly speaking, a doctrine in its own right, but rather a pious opinion, a θεολογούμενον.

The core of Strickland’s argument, however, is not an excursus upon post-mortem states, but a proposal touching the very grammar in which salvation is to be spoken of; for he maintains, first, that Orthodoxy does not, properly speaking, enter into that post-Reformation controversy so often prosecuted under the headings of “faith alone” and “faith and works,” and this for the plain reason that the controversy itself is born within a Western polemical field and tends, by its own internal logic, to be carried on in a forensic key, wherein justification is construed as verdict, salvation as acquittal, and penance and satisfaction as liabilities and remissions. Orthodoxy, he says, if pressed to speak into that debate, will indeed insist upon faith in Jesus Christ as central and indispensable, and yet it will resist any neat disjunction between faith and works, since the two are not competing currencies but inseparable aspects of a single life in Christ.

Accordingly, Strickland renders the Orthodox account of salvation, not in forensic categories, but under the rubric of theosis (deification), by which he intends, not that deification sometimes imputed to the Latter-day Saints, as though man were to become god in an autonomous or self-originating manner (a heresy, if there ever was one), but rather the creature’s gracious participation in the divine life, a participation flowing from, and rendered possible by, the Incarnation itself; for because the Word has assumed human nature, humanity can, by grace, be made a participant in God’s own life. Faith and works, therefore, do not admit of any clean separation, inasmuch as faith, precisely by its own nature, must disclose itself in works of love, not as though works were an additional mechanism set alongside faith, but as the enacted form in which faith subsists.

From this starting-point Strickland proceeds to draw a contrast of emphases, suggesting that Orthodoxy is more decisively centred upon the Incarnation as the foundation of salvation, whereas Western Christianity tends to gravitate toward the Crucifixion and, at times, to treat it in a comparatively isolated manner; and once the Cross is construed chiefly as a transaction intended to resolve a determinate liability—whether described as guilt, punishment, or debt—salvation is readily redescribed in legal categories, within which register the familiar question, “what secures the verdict?”, naturally forces its way to the fore, whether it be faith alone, or faith together with works, and, if works be introduced, whether they are meritorious, instrumental, merely evidential, and the like. It is within this horizon, he suggests, that the indulgence controversy and the Reformation disputes are best grasped, not merely as historical accidents, but as crystallizations of a deeper polemical tension generated by a narrowed, transactional frame.

That, at least, is the thesis as I heard it, namely, that theosis and Incarnation are not merely topics within soteriology, but the proper point of departure, precisely because they set the whole matter within a participatory model—communion, transformation, healing—rather than within a courtroom model—verdict, payment, satisfaction; and from this, on his account, the Orthodox rejection of purgatory follows as a downstream implication, inasmuch as purgatory appears to belong to a juridical soteriology wherein salvation is construed as remission of penalties and post-mortem purification as the completion of a legal satisfaction.

2. The “forensic versus participatory” opposition is too simple

Strickland’s instinct at this point is not without real force, for anyone who has attended to popular forms of Western preaching, or who has lingered over certain late-medieval devotional materials, will readily perceive how easily the idiom of “debt,” “payment,” and “punishment” may degenerate into a quasi-commercial imagination of redemption; and once such a construal becomes habitual, the faith–works dispute can indeed assume an air of near-necessity, since, if salvation be primarily conceived as a verdict, one is at once constrained to ask what conditions are annexed to that verdict, how any remaining penalties are to be discharged, and by what means remission is to be obtained; so that Strickland’s critique is best understood, not as an objection to biblical language as such, but as an objection to reduction, namely, to the tendency whereby one metaphor, originally serviceable within its proper limits, is permitted to harden into a single controlling model. Yet the remedy cannot be to oppose “juridical” to “participatory” as though the former were intrinsically Western, late, or legalistic, and the latter uniquely Eastern, patristic, or spiritual, for the Christian sources themselves are already irreducibly pluriform, speaking at once in forensic terms (justification and condemnation, acquittal and judgment), in cultic terms (sacrifice, offering, priesthood), in familial terms (adoption and inheritance), in medicinal terms (healing and illumination), and in participatory terms (union with Christ, life in the Spirit, incorporation into the Body); nor is this plurality an embarrassment to be disciplined away by a tidying system, but rather a constitutive feature of the scriptural witness, since the economy of salvation is too vast to be exhausted by any single image.

The Apostle Paul, in particular, speaks without embarrassment in juridical accents, contrasting condemnation and justification, speaking of God as judge, and deploying the language of law and verdict; and yet the very same Pauline corpus is everywhere saturated with participatory and transformative claims, such that the Christian is “in Christ,” Christ lives in the believer, the old man dies and a new creation arises, believers are incorporated into one body and animated by one Spirit, and they are conformed to Christ, not merely pronounced his; whence it follows that the juridical and the participatory are not rival soteriologies in St. Paul, but concurrent registers within one and the same proclamation, as the Fathers themselves, when expounding the Pauline theses, commonly refuse to sever what the Apostle joins (e.g., St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans, X).

Precisely here a Catholic clarification is most needed, for the Catholic tradition does not deny, still less disdain, the participatory horizon which Strickland associates with theosis, but confesses divinisation and speaks of sanctifying grace as a true participation in the divine life (CCC 460; 1996–2000; Lumen gentium 2, 40), a confession already articulated in patristic form by St. Athanasius (De Incarnatione Verbi, 54.3) and echoed, in a cognate register, by St. Irenaeus of Lyons (Adversus Haereses V, Pref.); yet neither can it simply renounce forensic language, because such language is not a medieval invention but apostolic, so that the question is not whether juridical terminology may be employed, but whether it is permitted to become a self-sufficient and flattening scheme, whether verdict is made to exclude communion, or acquittal is made to replace new life. Put differently, the deepest problem is not juridical categories as such, but legalism; and legalism is not identical with the mere use of judicial metaphors, since a court may declare what is already the case, whereas God’s judgment, in the Christian proclamation, is not merely descriptive but efficacious, such that, when God justifies, he does not merely label but effects what he declares, because justification is not only remission of sins but also sanctification and renewal of the interior man (CCC 1989–1990, 1992; Council of Trent, Sess. VI, Decree on Justification, ch. 7), a point which St. Augustine states with characteristic directness when, distinguishing the righteousness whereby God is righteous from that righteousness which God bestows, he speaks of the righteousness “with which he endows man when he justifies the ungodly” (De Spiritu et Littera, ch. 15 [IX]); and thus the true target is any “transactional” construal that abstracts verdict from vitality, liability from communion, or satisfaction from sanctification, while simultaneously forgetting that the Church condemns, as legalism in the strict sense, any claim that man can be justified before God by his own works without divine grace through Jesus Christ (Council of Trent, Sess. VI, can. 1).

Once this is granted, the terrain shifts, for Strickland is right to warn against construing salvation as a ledger of debts and payments, yet it does not follow that forensic language is alien to the apostolic mind, nor that the West is doomed to legalism merely by speaking of justification and judgment; rather, the question becomes what the proper ordering of the biblical metaphors is, and what safeguards prevent any one of them from tyrannising the whole, since it is precisely that question—concerning the controlling grammar and the requisite guardrails—that will permit a clearer assessment of theosis and Incarnation on the one hand, and of faith, works, satisfaction, and purgatory on the other.

3. Theosis and the Incarnation

Although it has already been conceded that the opposition, as commonly framed, between the “forensic” and the “participatory” registers is too summary to sustain, without qualification, the whole burden of a theological diagnosis, it nevertheless remains necessary to underscore what is most sound and most fruitful in Strickland’s point of departure, namely, that theosis—participation in the divine life—is not a speculative embellishment appended at the margin of Eastern devotion, but rather a native and habitual manner in which many of the Eastern Fathers articulate salvation, precisely insofar as it draws immediately upon the apostolic promise that the faithful are made “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4), and thus cannot be reduced to a mere alteration of juridical status, as though God had only reclassified the sinner by an external decree, but must be understood as the bestowal of a new life, that is to say, communion with God, transformation by grace, and incorporation into Christ (CCC 1989–1990; CCC 1991; Council of Trent, Sess. VI, Decree on Justification, ch. 7).

From a Catholic standpoint this emphasis is not alien, since Catholic teaching not only permits but positively requires that salvation be expounded in participatory terms, the Catechism of the Catholic Church speaking without ambiguity of the Incarnation’s purpose in divinising language—“The Word became flesh to make us ‘partakers of the divine nature’” (CCC 460; cf. CCC 457–460)—and even adopting, with due qualification, the patristic idiom that God became man “so that we might become God,” namely by grace and participation and not by nature, autonomy, or any imagined transmutation of the creature into the Creator (CCC 460; CCC 1996–1997), in a manner consonant with the classic Fathers whose expressions the Catechism here receives, such as St. Athanasius (De Inc.) and St. Irenaeus (Adv. haer. 3.19.1), so that theosis is not to be treated as an “Orthodox distinctive” set over against Catholic soteriology, but as part of the common patristic inheritance, expressed with different accents and under different preferred vocabularies (CCC 460).

By this fact there is corrected, at the outset, a misimpression to which Strickland’s presentation might inadvertently give occasion, for if the question be whether Catholicism knows an account of salvation as participation, the answer is plainly affirmative (CCC 460; CCC 1989–1991), whereas if the question be rather why Eastern theology tends more habitually to lead with communion and transfiguration, while Western theology has often, especially in polemical seasons, given prominent place to juridical and sacrificial idioms, then what is at issue is less a contradiction of doctrine than a difference of rhetorical and theological prioritisation within the one faith, a diversity which may be legitimate so long as it remains ordered to the integrity of the apostolic deposit and does not collapse into reduction (Unitatis Redintegratio 4).

Accordingly, the contrast sometimes drawn between “Incarnation” and “Cross” is best received, not as a doctrinal diagnosis, but as a caution against imbalance, since Catholic doctrine is clear that the Incarnation is not a preliminary scene set before “the real work” of redemption begins, even while it teaches with equal clarity that redemption “comes to us above all through the blood of his cross,” holding together both affirmations when it states that “the mystery of Christ’s Redemption is at work in a hidden way throughout his entire life” and yet “comes to us above all through the blood of his cross” (CCC 517; cf. CCC 512–515; CCC 571–618), so that the point is not to attenuate the Cross, but to refuse to sever it from that one economy in which God unites humanity to himself and heals it from within, a logic which the Fathers express, in their own manner, when St. Gregory of Nazianzus insists that what is not assumed is not healed (Ep. 101.5), and when St. Leo the Great speaks of the believer’s elevation by grace to participation in divine life through the mystery of the Word made flesh (Sermo 21.2).

If this be granted, then what is strongest in Strickland’s argument may be retained without conceding what is overstated, for he is right to desire that salvation be understood as transformative union rather than as mere acquittal, and Catholics can agree, and indeed must insist, that salvation involves real incorporation into Christ and real sanctification by grace (CCC 1265–1266; CCC 1989–1991), the necessary clarification being only that the Church is not obliged to choose between registers which Scripture itself employs, since the juridical and sacrificial language is ordered to serve, and not to supplant, the participatory end for which humanity is created—communion with God—an end which justification itself, rightly understood, both presupposes and effects insofar as it is not only remission but also sanctification and interior renewal (Council of Trent, Sess. VI, Decretum de iustificatione, cap. 7; CCC 1990–1991; CCC 1999).

4. Faith, works, “transaction,” and purgatory

With these preliminaries in place, the perennial faith–works question may be treated with greater exactitude and with less polemical heat, for Rev. Strickland is correct that the popular contrast—“Protestants say faith alone, Catholics say faith plus works”—often operates as a serviceable caricature only by construing “works” as independent inputs by which one purchases justification, whereas the Council of Trent expressly condemns the claim that a man may be justified “by his own works … without the grace of God through Jesus Christ” (Council of Trent, Sess. VI, can. 1), and the Catechism of the Catholic Church likewise describes justification as the gratuitous gift of God’s sanctifying grace, which precedes, enables, and sustains any salutary human movement (CCC 1996–2001; cf. CCC 2001).

The more precise Catholic claim, therefore, is not that works compete with grace as a co-cause, but that faith is not meant to remain a bare and inert assent, since it is ordered to become living faith, that is, faith “working through love” (Gal 5:6), and the works that follow are not a rival principle set alongside grace but rather the fruit, manifestation, and cooperative expression of grace’s efficacy in the renewed person (CCC 1814–1816; CCC 2008–2011); hence the dispute becomes notably less confused once one distinguishes (i) the efficient cause of justification, which is the gratuitous mercy of God in Christ (CCC 1996–2000; Council of Trent, Sess. VI, can. 1–3), (ii) the nature of faith as a living adherence that tends intrinsically toward charity (Gal 5:6; Council of Trent, Sess. VI, ch. 7–8), and (iii) the place of works, not as purchase-money, but as participatory obedience and consequent cooperation—real, yet derivative—within a life already quickened by grace (Council of Trent, Sess. VI, can. 4; CCC 2001–2002).

At this juncture the term “merit” commonly becomes the stumbling-block, and it must be said with equal firmness that Catholic doctrine does employ the language of merit and reward while simultaneously excluding any Pelagian imagination of autonomous earning, precisely because it intends to safeguard two truths at once, namely, that God remains the sovereign author of salvation and that the human person is not saved as a stone is moved but as a living agent whose will is truly healed, elevated, and enabled to cooperate (Council of Trent, Sess. VI, can. 4; CCC 2001–2002); accordingly, when the Church speaks of “merit,” she means a reality grounded wholly in prior gift, so that even the reward promised to good works is itself the free completion of what grace has already begun (CCC 2006–2011; Council of Trent, Sess. VI, ch. 16), which is why St. Augustine can say, in the very locus most often invoked for this point, that when God “crowns our merits, He crowns nothing other than His own gifts” (St. Augustine, Epistula 194, 5.19 (to St. Sixtus); cf. CSEL 57:190).

It is also here that the “transactional” imagery which Strickland critiques ought to be treated with some discrimination, since there were indeed periods in which Western preaching and penitential practice, especially at the popular level and most evidently in connection with abuses, were expressed in ledger-like terms of debts, satisfactions, remissions, and indulgences spoken of as though they were spiritual commodities; yet the Church’s doctrinal guardrails, when stated in their proper form, are markedly non-commercial, for she defines an indulgence as the remission “before God” of temporal punishment due to sins already forgiven as to guilt, granted under prescribed conditions through the Church’s ministry (CCC 1471), insists that “temporal punishment” is not to be conceived as divine vengeance externally inflicted but as a consequence of sin’s intrinsic disorder that calls for purification, healing, and detachment (CCC 1472–1473), and, in her own authoritative reforms, both condemns “evil traffic” in indulgences and mandates correction of abuses (Council of Trent, Sess. XXV (4 Dec 1563), Decree Concerning Indulgences), while St. Paul VI states with particular clarity that indulgences “cannot be acquired without a sincere conversion of mentality (‘metanoia’) and unity with God” (St. Paul VI, Indulgentiarum doctrina (1 Jan 1967), 11).

Purgatory belongs to the same zone of frequent misunderstanding, and thus the distinction between medieval imaginative literature or popular representations and the doctrinal nucleus is indispensable, for the Catholic claim is neither that the saved are “in hell for a while” nor that purgatory constitutes a second damnation, but rather that those who die in God’s friendship while still imperfectly purified undergo a final purification, the purpose of which is precisely the holiness required for communion with God (CCC 1030–1032); in this sense the doctrine does not compete with theosis but, in a certain respect, protects the premise that salvation is real transformation, since if sanctification is not a legal fiction but a true healing and re-formation, then the logic of purification—whether completed in this life, or, by divine mercy, brought to completion beyond—follows as a corollary (CCC 1030–1031; cf. 1 Cor 3:15), and the Church, while warning against speculative curiosities, has given this claim determinate magisterial articulation, as in the Council of Florence (Council of Florence, Bull of Union with the Greeks Laetentur caeli (6 Jul 1439), DH 1304) and again in the sober disciplinary decree of Trent, which affirms purgatory and directs pastors to exclude what is “difficult and subtle” or unedifying from popular instruction (Council of Trent, Sess. XXV, Decree Concerning Purgatory).

It should further be observed that the instinct operative here is not wholly foreign to the Christian East, for the practice of praying for the departed and entrusting them to God’s mercy presupposes that what remains incomplete in us may yet be healed by God, and the Catholic Church herself appeals to this ancient practice when she speaks of “prayers in suffrage for them” (CCC 1032; cf. 2 Macc 12:46), a practice witnessed with particular explicitness by St. Cyril of Jerusalem, who teaches, within the eucharistic context, that the commemoration of the departed brings “a very great benefit to the souls” for whom supplication is offered (St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, 23.9–10), and likewise by St. John Chrysostom, who, while exhorting prayer and almsgiving on behalf of the dead, remarks that “not in vain did the Apostles order that remembrance should be made of the dead in the dreadful Mysteries” (St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Philippians, Homily 3, 65–66); therefore the disagreement, when stated with due care, is not simply “purification versus no purification,” but rather concerns how far one can or ought to define the manner of that purification, and how one prevents legitimate definition from degenerating into imagery of terror, payment, or commercial exchange.

5. An aside on “mystery” and the Latin Church

One further consideration, commonly remaining tacit beneath these comparisons yet requiring, if the comparison is to be conducted with intellectual fairness, to be articulated with some explicitness, is that when Strickland opposes an Orthodox ease before mystery to certain Western habits of juridical distinction, he does, at least at the level of theological idiom and customary rhetorical register, lay hold of something not wholly unreal, inasmuch as many of the East’s more characteristic voices exhibit an apophatic reticence and a preference for liturgical and doxological utterance, whereas the Latin inheritance has often shown a marked inclination toward analytic precision and conceptual differentiation; yet it would be a palpable non sequitur, drawn merely from this divergence of verbal temper, to infer either that the West is therefore “mystery-averse,” or that the very act of distinguishing, as such, is already tantamount to rationalism, as though intellectual clarity were, by its nature, inimical to contemplation (cf. Fides et Ratio).

For the Western tradition also is penetrated by an apophatic sensibility precisely insofar as, while confessing God truly, it insists no less firmly upon divine incomprehensibility, upon the strict limits of creaturely language, and upon the necessity of analogical predication: God “transcends all creatures,” so that speech concerning him must undergo continual purification, and even where such speech does, by grace, attain to God, it does so without circumscribing him (CCC 42–43), indeed under that rule which Catechism of the Catholic Church itself, by appeal to Fourth Lateran Council, renders in lapidary form, namely, that “between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude” (CCC 43; Lateran IV, DS 806). Its scholastic method—when exercised according to its proper intention and not in a spirit of arid disputation—was not ordered to the dissipation of mystery into explanation, but to the removal of confusions which impede contemplation; and thus, in that same spirit, the Church’s development of technical terminology is not a capitulation of faith to “human wisdom,” but an instrument by which an ineffable mystery may be signified as mystery, “infinitely beyond all that we can humanly understand” (CCC 251). Accordingly, when the most careful scholastics distinguish, they do so—at least in principle—not in order to domesticate the divine, but in order to prevent crude literalism and thereby to safeguard what cannot be comprehended, since, as St. Thomas Aquinas writes in the Summa theologiae, “His essence is above all that we understand about God, and signify in word” (ST I, q. 13, a. 1, ad 1). Nor is this restraint absent from the broader Western inheritance, since the confession of God as “immense” and “incomprehensible” belongs to the Church’s dogmatic lexicon as such in First Vatican Council’s Dei Filius; and the same reverent inhibition is voiced with memorable directness by St. Augustine, who, in Sermo 117, warns: “If you comprehend, it is not God.”

Accordingly, the point may most charitably be stated as a difference of habitual temperaments of expression, rather than as a difference between “mystery” and “clarity” as such, for the danger attendant upon the Western temperament is reduction—when metaphor is treated as mechanism, or when juridical language, taken out of its proper theological subordination, is permitted to eclipse communion—whereas the danger attendant upon the Eastern temperament, when caricatured or misapplied, can be a suspicion of precision as such, as though clarity were always a betrayal of mystery; yet mystery and clarity are not enemies, because Christian doctrine does not presume to comprehend God exhaustively, but seeks to confess truly what God has revealed, and it does so in such a manner that worship is guarded from distortion and the Gospel proclaimed without confusion, a task which—precisely because it is ministerial rather than domineering—belongs to the Church’s living teaching office, which, as Second Vatican Council teaches in Dei Verbum, is “not above the word of God, but serv[ing] it” (DV 10; cf. CCC 86). In this same register, the Church’s sacramental life—Latin no less than Byzantine—remains a continual pedagogy of the visible bearing the invisible, since the sacraments are “efficacious signs of grace” whose visible rites “signify and make present” what they confer (CCC 1131).

6. Conclusion

Strickland’s proem—Incarnation, then theosis—is plainly intended to displace, as the controlling grammar of redemption, a narrowed courtroom model in which verdict, payment, and satisfaction are permitted to function as the principal explanatory keys, and to restore, as the governing horizon, that communion-and-transformation model in which participation and healing are determinative; upon that fundamental point a Catholic may readily concur, since the Word did truly become flesh in order that man might become “a partaker of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4; CCC 460; St. Athanasius, De Incarnatione 54.3), and since grace is not to be conceived as a bare remission external to the subject, but as an efficacious gift whereby man is inwardly renewed and made capable of a new life in Christ (CCC 1987–1995; CCC 1996–2005; 2 Cor 5:17; Rom 6:4). If, moreover, certain strands of Western preaching or devotional habit have, at times, given the impression that salvation is chiefly a matter of spiritual accounting, and that the drama of redemption is to be narrated as though it were principally a transaction, the critique is not without a real object, and Catholics need not deny those historical pathologies by which such caricatures have sometimes been rendered plausible.

Where clarification is required is in the implied opposition between a “participatory East” and a “juridical West,” as though the latter were intrinsically legalistic, or as though its juridical idiom were essentially post-schism; for the Christian sources themselves speak in multiple registers, and Holy Scripture—St. Paul above all—employs judicial metaphors without embarrassment, while simultaneously proclaiming a salvation that is, in its substance, participatory and transformative, consisting in incorporation into Christ, life in the Spirit, and conformity to the Son (Rom 3:21–26; Rom 5:1; Gal 2:16; Rom 8:1–17; 1 Cor 12:12–13). The issue, therefore, is not whether forensic language may be used, but whether any one register is permitted to tyrannise the whole—whether verdict is abstracted from communion, whether satisfaction is detached from sanctification, and whether “punishment” language is severed from its proper end in purification and healing (CCC 1691–1698; CCC 1990–1991).

Read with those guardrails in view, much of Strickland’s critique can be received as a warning against reduction rather than as a verdict against Catholic doctrine itself; for Catholic teaching, taken on its own terms, is not “faith plus works” in the sense of a competitive addition, nor is it a denial of theosis, but rather a confession that justification is sheer gift, effected by grace through Christ (CCC 1987–1995; Eph 2:8–10; Council of Trent, Sess. VI [1547], Decree on Justification, cap. 8), that faith, if genuine, becomes living faith through charity (Gal 5:6; CCC 1814–1816; CCC 1822–1829), that works are the fruit and the graced cooperation of the renewed person rather than an independent currency (CCC 2008–2011), and that whatever “merit” there is is first God’s gift and only secondarily man’s response (CCC 2006–2011; Council of Trent, Sess. VI [1547], Decree on Justification, cap. 16). Even the disputed loci—indulgences, purgatory—are, in their doctrinal core, not mechanisms for purchasing salvation but claims concerning the Church’s intercession and the final purification of those already saved, however much their historical administration has sometimes obscured that intent (CCC 1030–1032; CCC 1471–1479; Council of Trent, Sess. XXV [1563], Decree concerning Purgatory; Council of Trent, Sess. XXV [1563], Decree concerning Indulgences; Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification [1999], §§15–17).

The remaining disagreements, then, are best located not in a crude “Incarnation versus Cross” contrast, nor in the suggestion that one tradition has mystery while the other has legalism, but in questions of emphasis and governance: which conceptual grammar ought to lead; how far dogmatic definition should proceed; how later Latin terms (justification, satisfaction, merit, purgatory, indulgences) are to be interpreted and hedged; and—beyond the scope of this note—how questions of ecclesial authority and conciliarity are to be adjudicated. If the aim is genuine understanding rather than polemical victory, it seems wiser to grant what is shared (participation in divine life, grace, real transformation: 2 Pet 1:4; CCC 460; CCC 1987–1995) and thereafter to dispute, with patience and precision, where the traditions diverge in articulation.

One might even say that Strickland’s argument, when purified of its sharper contrasts, can serve as a salutary reminder to Catholics: to speak of justification and satisfaction only in a manner transparently ordered to participation, sanctification, and union with God (CCC 1987–1995; CCC 1996–2005); to ensure that juridical metaphors remain servants rather than masters; and to present the Cross not as an isolated transaction but as the climactic moment of the one economy in which the Incarnate Son heals human nature by assuming it, offering it, and raising it into divine life (CCC 515–518; CCC 599–618; St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Ep. 101.32). If that is the horizon, then the conversation with Orthodoxy becomes less a contest between rival soteriologies and more a sustained effort to confess, in complementary idioms, the one salvation given in Christ.