entanglingbriars:

sighinastorm:

entanglingbriars:

It’s odd, but despite the centrality of soteriology in modern Western Protestant thought, it doesn’t seem to have been of much importance to the early Church. The creeds and conciliar documents of the Chalcedonian Church outline an extensive Christology, cosmology, and ecclesiology, but devote almost no attention to eschatology or soteriology.

So was primeval sin not a formal doctrine, then?

Original Sin was most… elaborately fleshed (if you will)-out by Augustine of Hippo (though other theologians had outlined similar ideas prior to him) and was never accepted by the Eastern Church, but theologies about what exactly happened on the Cross to cure/reverse sin (original or otherwise) are fairly sparse until the Middle Ages. The early Church seems to have widely accepted some form of ransom soteriology or Christus Victor, but it just… wasn’t that important to most early theologians in the way that it would be in millennial Protestantism.