Questions
Copy these questions into an email, provide brief answers, and send to Fr Charles who will comment on them. After you have received you comments, then you can go onto the next lesson.
Questions for Lesson 9: Path to Salvation
This chapter explores how God lovingly prepares humanity for salvation, culminating in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. In becoming fully human while remaining fully divine, Christ restores what was broken by the Fall and opens the way for our healing and transformation. Salvation in Orthodoxy is not merely forgiveness, but participation in God’s life—a lifelong journey of theosis lived through grace, free cooperation, and life in the Church. These questions invite reflection on Christ’s saving work and our personal response through faith, sacramental life, and spiritual struggle.
I. God Prepares the Way
1. How does God prepare humanity for salvation throughout the Old Testament, and how do figures such as Noah, Abraham, Moses, and the prophets foreshadow the coming of Christ?
2. How do events such as the Passover, the Exodus, and God’s covenant promises reveal Christ as the fulfillment of God’s plan of salvation?
II. The Incarnation
3. Why is the Incarnation central to the Christian faith, and how does Christ’s union of divine and human natures make salvation possible?
4. How does Christ’s life of obedience and love show us how human beings are meant to live, and how does the Holy Spirit, received in Baptism, help us grow into His likeness?
III. How Christ Saves Us
5. How does Orthodoxy understand Christ’s self-offering as an act of love that heals humanity, and how does this differ from viewing salvation primarily in legal terms?
6. Why is salvation understood as a lifelong journey of theosis rather than a one-time event, and how do Baptism and Chrismation begin this new life in Christ?
7. How does Christ’s Resurrection give hope and meaning to daily life?
IV. Salvation as Participation
8. What is synergia, and how do God’s grace and human freedom work together in the process of salvation?
9. Why is personal participation—through prayer, repentance, ascetic effort, and the sacramental life of the Church—essential to spiritual growth?
V. Life in the Church
10. Why did Christ establish the Church, and how does life in the Church nurture healing, transformation, and communion with God?
Integrative Reflection Question
11. How does the Orthodox understanding of salvation—rooted in the Incarnation, fulfilled through Christ’s death and Resurrection, and lived through synergy within the Church—reshape the way we understand our purpose and daily spiritual life?