A comparison of the Evangelical Protestant substitutionary view of the Atonement and the Orthodox view of salvation – illustrated with chairs.
It is worth saying that the Evangelical position derives from St Anselm, doctor magnificus of the Latin Church, and is one of a number of explanations of the Atonement to be found in the Latin West, including those similar to that presented in the video as Orthodox.
But the insistence on holding this view as the normative or even exclusive theological truth marks out Evangelical Christians and their churches from others and lies at the heart of Protestant-Catholic and Protestant-Orthodox separation. In the West, this is little realised for two reasons: the tendency of English-speaking Protestants to move from an Augustinian view of salvation which marks the Reformed, Anglican and Latin Catholic traditions, towards a more universalist, Arminian position often associated with Wesleyan Methodism; secondly the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification between the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation resolving after dialogue one of the great theological differences in the 16th century that caused the Protestant-Catholic split that led to the rise of separate confessional churches and denominations (The World Methodist Council has subscribed this Declaration as its own faith, but the World Communion of Reformed Churches and the Anglican Communion, with its Reformed roots, and have not).
Thus the tendency is to assume that the Catholic-Protestant disagreement over the doctrines of grace and atonement have been resolved, or are at least no longer to be seen as necessarily Church-dividing, whereas the dogmatic declaration of (eg in Britain) the Evangelical Alliance that the Anselmian position must primarily be maintained and taught by members excludes other Protestants, including the main post-Reformation Church in England, the Anglican Church, and of course the Catholic Church (whatever the current vogue for Catholics to self-describe as Catholic Evangelicals). In practice, however, many Protestants, including Evangelicals, would tend to preach the Atonement using any of the classic theologies, including that described in the film as “Orthodox”, or indeed a combination of them. Indeed all have their roots in the Fathers, in the Scriptures and the teaching of the Church when East and West were not in disunion – whether Chalcedonian and Non-Chalcedonian, Latin-Byzantine, or Catholic-Protestant.