Belief in The Doctrine
Many but by no means all ancient and modern branches of Christianity embrace substitutionary atonement as the central meaning of Jesus' death on the cross. These branches however have developed different theories of atonement. The Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholics do not incorporate substitutionary atonement in their doctrine of the Cross and Resurrection. The Roman Catholic Church incorporates it into Aquinas' Satisfaction doctrine rooted in the idea of penance. Most Evangelical Protestants interpret it largely in terms of penal substitution.
Many of the Church Fathers, including Justin Martyr, Athanasius and Augustine incorporate a theory of substitutionary atonement into their writings. However, the specific interpretation as to what this suffering for sinners meant differed to some extent. It is widely held that the early Church Fathers, including Athanasius and Augustine, taught that through Christ's vicarious suffering in humanity's place, he overcame and liberated humanity from sin, death, and the devil. Thus, while the idea of substitutionary atonement is present in nearly all atonement theories, the specific idea of satisfaction and penal substitution are later developments in the Roman Catholic church and in Calvinism.
Read more about this topic: Substitutionary Atonement
Famous quotes containing the words belief in the, belief in, belief and/or doctrine:
“Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (18391914)
“Some fear that if parents start listening to their own wants and needs they will neglect their children. It is our belief that children are in fact far less likely to be neglected when their parents needsfor support, for friendship, for decent work, for health care, for learning, for play, for time aloneare being met.”
—Wendy Coppedge Sanford. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Womens Health Book Collective, introduction (1978)
“We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)