A Comparison of Christ's Atonement in the Medieval Scholastic Period - Concluding Remarks

Concluding Remarks

     

 So, as I conclude I will make a summary comparison of the atonement theologies of the three men in question. We can say that Anslem approached the theory of substitutionary atonement as expressed in Reformed and Evangelical circles today: satisfaction for sins, the necessity of Christ’s death for our life, etc. The Abelardian view maintained that by God’s grace we are made lovers of God so as to prove our fellowship with him. Often loosely interpreted in our day as the moral theory of the atonement, it far more emphasized the idea of God’s love being shown through Christ’s passion than an answer to His justice. And Thomas’ view was worked out in the difference between the imputation of and the infusion of Christ’s righteousness to the believer; Thomas saw the atonement as a provision of the grace God used to make a sinner righteous before He called him just. His theory, like Anselm’s, counted on God’s grace, but where Anselm saw this in terms of God’s grace extended in mercy by forgiving the guilty because He punished the Innocent, Thomas saw it in more of what we would now consider Roman Catholic terms, that in order for God to call someone just that person must actually be just, thus God makes them so by infusing Christ’s righteousness thereby transmuting their soul from wickedness to righteousness.

Thus in the final assessment, even though their lives were separated by no more than 200 years, neither Anselm of Canterbury, nor Peter Abelard, nor Thomas Aquinas shared the same view of the atonement. Some of their ideas overlapped but the three of them drew rather different conclusions and therefore have influenced the world of theology in different ways: Anselm: penal substitution, Abelard: moral influence, and Aquinas: Roman Catholic Sacramentalism.