Romans 5:7-9

For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.

Monday, March 29, 2010

A Comparison of Christ's Atonement in the Medieval Scholastic Period - Theological Comparisons: Anselm - 1


Theological Comparisons

 Anselm

     Anselm, being perhaps the first theologian in 800 years to say so, did not find propitious, this theory of atonement which had an exclusive emphasis on ransom, thus facilitating his proposition of another theory. Anselm’s pioneering ideas in general proved to have influenced a 1000 years of atonement theology since his death. 55 years ago one philosopher described Anselm in this way.
The theology of Anselm is so full of rational speculation that one of his historians has labeled it a “Christian rationalism,”[i] Its ambivalence is due to the fact that, expressing the inner life of faith that seeks understanding, it is both overflowing with a religious feeling which sometimes borders on mysticism and full of dialectical passion which translates faith into terms of rational necessity. Hence its twofold influence in the fields of theology and of philosophy.[ii]
Though this sounds somewhat critical, the influence can’t be denied. He went so far as to object to the contemporary trend of questioning the radical nature of the cross because of its abject violence—why would the God of the universe chose to show His love to His creatures in such a brutal way? Anselm was careful to point out that this God could only incarnate the way that He did and that incarnation could only lead to the end we observe through the narrative of the four Gospels. Anselm put to his readers this hypothetical objection to God’s death on a cross,
Therefore, if he was willing to save the human race only in the way you described when he could have done it by sheer will, to put it mildly, you really disparage his wisdom. For surely, if for no reason a man did by hard labor what he could have done with ease no one would regard him as wide. And you have no rational ground for saying that God showed in this way how much he loved us unless you can show that it was quite impossible for him to save man in some other way.[iii]
It’s not as though God was forced to restore the relationship of His creatures and creation to Himself after it had been broken by Adam’s sin, but when He chose to do so He chose to reconcile some of mankind to Himself by not imputing the consequence of Adam’s sin to them, thus forgiving them their debts and loving them instead. But it is not as though this sin and offense—one we know is infinite because it is an offense against an infinite God—no longer exists and God has simple shrugged it off the way we do when we are actually asked to forgive one another. On the contrary, the sins we have committed, the sin nature we have inherited from Adam must be dealt with even if it is not counted to our own debt. So Anselm postulated the representation of Christ as our sin bearer, converse to our representation in Adam as he sinned and stored up guilt for all his children to inherit. Christ on the other hand stored up positive merit for our inheritance which should be counted to us by the Father in place of our demerit.


[i] H. Bouchitte, Le rationalisme chretien de saint Anselme,—Anslem as “father of scholasticism”: M. Grabman, Geschichte der schol. Meth., I, (Paris, 1842), 58.
[ii] Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random House, 1955), 139.
[iii] Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, in A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham, trans. and ed. by Eugene R. Fairweather, M.A., B.D., Th.D, (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1956), 107
 

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