By Newman Nahas
In the spring of 1157, the Patriarch-elect of Antioch, Soterichos Panteugenos, subjected the Divine Liturgy to Aristotelian scrutiny and found it wanting. The prayer addressed to Christ—"For it is Thou who offerest and art offered, who receivest and art Thyself distributed"—struck him as a logical contradiction. A true sacrifice requires a distinct payer and payee. To preserve the intelligibility of the Cross, Soterichos proposed a correction: the Son offers as High Priest, but the Father alone receives.
Soterichos was not entirely wrong: if the Atonement is a transaction, the Liturgy is incoherent. You cannot pay yourself. But the Council of Blachernae reversed his logic. Rather than correcting the Liturgy to fit the transaction, they denied the transaction to save the Liturgy.
Guided by Nicholas of Methone, the Council affirmed the paradox of the Liturgy: Christ is both the Offerer (ho prospheron) and the Receiver (ho prosdechomenos), and this was a feature, not a bug; a safeguard protecting the Church from imagining atonement as a transaction.
In place of transaction, the Council affirmed union: the Incarnation is not a precondition for some later payment but the the same saving mechanism that would be at work on the Cross: union with Christ. The Cross is the Incarnation at its fullest application: it extends that union into death, defeating sin, death, and the Devil. The Ascension extends it into the sanctuary—humanity arriving where it had never been. One causal logic, multiple applications.
Five of the six autocephalous churches participated in this Council and agreed (Alexandria was absent solely for geopolitical reasons, and it would later receive the council); the Metropolitan of Kiev was actively involved, apparently delaying his departure until the matter was resolved. Soterichos himself in the end capitulated and signed the anathema. The definition was inscribed on the walls of Hagia Sophia and incorporated into the Synodikon of Orthodoxy—the doctrinal charter read aloud every year on the Sunday of Orthodoxy.
| Doctrine | Transactional View (Soterichos) | Conciliar View (Blachernae) |
|---|---|---|
| The Problem | Debt. A legal claim against us. | Disease. A deficit of life within us. |
| The Mechanism | Exchange. Payment satisfies the claim. | Union. Divinity heals humanity. |
| The Recipient | Father Alone. The Son pays the Father. | The Trinity. The Son offers and receives. |
| The Eucharist | Memorial. Remembering a closed deal. | Entrance. Joining an eternal offering. |
Thesis: Transactional models get the nature of God wrong. God is not a being who can participate in a transaction.
Soterichos framed the Cross as a quid pro quo exchange—a "counter-giving" (anticharisasthai) where the Son pays the Father a "pleasing propitiation" (kalliērēma) to buy back humanity. Thus, he assumed that the liturgical language precluding the possibility of a transaction must be wrong.
Nicholas objected that this reasoning confused reconciliation (katallagē) with transaction (antallagē). Exchange is a trade where I give X and you give Y. Reconciliation is the healing of a broken relationship. A transaction ends when the ledger balances; reconciliation ends when the parties are reunited. You can transact with a stranger and remain strangers. You cannot reconcile and remain estranged.
"For it is the custom not of those reconciling (katallassomenon), but of those transacting (antallassonton), to receive something from one another."
— Nicholas of Methone, Refutation, p. 338
Thus, according to Nicholas the liturgical language was doing what it was supposed to: precluding the possibility of a transactional way of thinking about atonement.