From a netfriend:

In his book "Eastern Orthodox mission theology today" James Stamoulis (a Baptist) observes:

The East was not influenced by Augustine: its anthropology is different from that of the West.

The East was not influenced by Anselm: its soteriology is different from that of the West

The East was not influenced by Aquinas: its methodology is different from that of the West.

Concerning Anselm, Stamoulis (1986:8) says:

"A third figure who shaped Western theology but whose concept of soteriology was never accepted in the East is Anselm of Canterbury. He maintained that the purpose of Christ's death was to pay satisfaction to the honor of God, which had been injured by human sin. Again the theme is the legal relationship between human beings and God. Humankind is in debt to God, and the debt cannot simply be dismiassed; adequate satisfaction must be tendered. Since humankind is unable to provide this required satisfaction, God supplies it in the death of Christ In the words of Justo Gonzales:

'This treatise by Anselm was epoch-making. Although they did not follow it at every time, most later medieval theologians interpreted the work of Christ in the light of this treatise. After them, most Western theologians have followed the same path, although this manner of understanding the work of Christ for mankind is not the most ancient in the writings of the Fathers, nor does it appear in the main thrust of the New Testament'.

"With this judgement the Orthodox Church agrees and charges the West with deviating from the original concept of salvation. '... in contrast to the Western Church's legalistic concept of salvation, formulated by Anselm of Canterbury and continued down to the present day, in the Orthodox Church under the leadership of such men as Irenaeus and Athanasius, the mystical concept of salvation, as held by St Paul and Apostles, was ever faithfully retained' (Lossky, Mystical theology)"

I've quoted Stamoulis, a Baptist, to try to avoid my own Orthodox bias in describing Western soteriology, at least to begin with.

It is not just Orthodox Christians who regard Anselm's soteriology as "epoch-making".

For 1000 years Christianss shared common basic assumptions about what constituted salvation. For the next thousand years, Orthodox Christians continued with the original assumptions, while Western Christians began to operate with an entirely new set of assumptions, originally formulated by Anselm, but developed by others, most notably Calvin.

One reason for for the East's not being influenced by Anselm was that at the time Anselm's treatise "Cur Deus homo" was published (1097) there had been a schism between the ancient churches of Constantinople and Rome for the previous 40 years. Anselm's treatise did not *cause* the schism, but it made it very difficult to heal, because it moved the parties much further apart. It was not what drove them apart, but it was what kept them apart, because it changed the fundamental presuppositions about salvation for Western Christians, so that they no longer shared these fundamental presuppositions with Eastern Christians.

One of the first Western theologians to take this difference seriously and to try to come to grips with it was Gustav Aulen, a Swedish Lutheran, in his book "Christus victor". In it he argues, not altogether convincingly, that Lutherans had never really accepted Anselm's "satisfaction" theory of the atonement, but had retained much of the earlier view, which he called the "classic" or "dramatic" theory.