Christ Our Satisfaction: Satisfaction and Government

In today’s post in this series on the history of the doctrine of atonement in Christianity, we turn primarily to the thought of one man, St. Anselm of Canterbury, an eleventh-century theologian whose thought revolutionized Western ideas on the subject. For the first thousand years, Christians had always conceived the problem of sin in a way that made God ‘third party’ to it: God was coming to rescue a humanity that had turned away from its created intent, or been trapped and enslaved by the devil. Anselm flipped the script on this, framing the problem as being between humanity and God, and Western theology has never been the same. Yet for all his revolutionary importance, Anselm remains a controversial and ambiguous figure, more misunderstood than understood, by his proponents as much as his detractors. (As we saw in the last post, he was controversial in his own time, as it was perceived imbalances in his thought that Peter Abelard wrote to address.) Today I’d like to summarize his argument and talk a bit about the controversies surrounding him. I’ll also introduce a related theory, ‘Government’ theory, that emerged during the Reformation.

Born to a high status family in the Kingdom of Burgundy, Anselm moved to a monastery in Bec, Normandy in 1059, where his countryman Lanfranc of Pavia was abbot and had started a school quickly gaining in reputation across Europe. Upon arriving, Anselm discovered a passion for philosophy and rose quickly through the ranks, being elected prior in 1063 and later abbot in 1079, and under his leadership the fame of the school of Bec only increased. This made Anselm an important figure in Normandy at the time of the Norman Conquest of England, leading to his eventual elevation to Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093. This brief historical sketch informs two of the most important aspects of Anselm’s theological legacy: First, there is his highly philosophical approach, which sought to understand the mysteries of faith in ways that were logically coherent and rational; he was not content with the assortment of images and metaphors traditionally used to understand the atonement but wanted a rational, intellectually satisfying theory to explain it. And second, his family, cultural, and historical backgrounds explain his use of the language and relationships of the feudal system, with its strict hierarchy of responsibilities, duties, and privileges, to describe theological truths. Thus far in the series, every post has started by looking at how the early Christians came to understand their experience of Jesus through the images and language of their Jewish heritage and traditions. Anselm also found his images in the world around him, but his world was that of the medieval Western European nobility, not Second Temple Judaism.

Of the images Anselm found unsatisfying, the greatest offender was the idea of God paying off the devil to gain our freedom. It seems clear that he took the most fantastical expansions of the Christus Victor motif at face value, and he did not like it at all. It was unfathomable to him that Christ would pay anything to the devil, since that would imply that the devil had a legitimate claim over humanity. If there was a debt that needed to be paid, he argued, it was to God, for the right mess humanity has made of God’s masterpiece of creation. And this is the premise from which Anselm begins his explanation of the atonement. Now let’s see what he does from this premise.

God, according to Anselm, is the greatest good and created humanity to reflect that goodness in the world.* But sin disrupts this proper order of things, marring God’s good creation, and thereby dishonouring God. Repentance is not enough to fix this situation, because everyone who sins needs not only to repay the damage done but also provide God with additional compensation for the dishonour shown. Note that this is not punishment but satisfaction, or restitution; it’s not about penalizing wrongs but about righting them; Anselm is working within a framework of restorative justice, but, like lawsuits today, one in which ‘emotional damages’ (so to speak) are considered. But the problem is magnified because of the huge — infinite — gap in status between God and humanity; there is simply no way finite people can restore the damage to God’s infinite goodness. This is the reason for the incarnation (Indeed, Anselm titled his work which lays this out Cur Deus Homo, or ‘Why God Became Human’): In order for an infinite debt to be paid off, it had to be paid by an infinite being, that is, God. But it was only fitting that the debt be paid off by a human. Moreover, because this God-man was not himself a sinner, he would be under no obligation to die; and because he was omnipotent, neither could he be forced to die against his will. Jesus’ death was therefore voluntary, and an incomparably greater good than all of the sins in the world; therefore, God’s honour required that Jesus be given some compensation for his death, a reward of which he had no personal use and therefore willingly and happily offered to humanity.

As I noted in the introduction, Anselm forever changed the course of Western theology by shifting the nature of the problem of sin to be a rift between humanity and God. Or, in other words, the barrier between us and salvation is no longer in us but in God. Before the twentieth century’s reassessment of the older perspectives, even those who found Anselm’s approach to the atonement lacking kept his framing of the problem. During the Reformation, this developed in several ways, including the penal substitution model strongly associated with Reformed theology and which has become the default position for much of Protestantism, which we’ll look at in the next post. But penal substitution was not the only show in town. Before moving on to the assessment portion of the post, I’d like to briefly talk about another of developments within the broader satisfaction motif, the so-called Governmental Theory of Hugo Grotius, which strongly influenced Arminian Christianity (essentially, the branch of the Reformed tradition that broke away due to its rejection of Calvinism’s strong doctrines of predestination and election).

Like Anselm’s Satisfaction Theory, Governmental Theory is based on the presupposition that God has created a certain, good and holy order in the world, an order which is manifest in divine laws. Like any ruler, God has both the right and responsibility to enforce the laws of the land, but also the freedom to apply them as He sees fit. In this model, Christ’s death satisfies the demands of God’s moral government, not by paying off a debt (as in Anselm) or bearing the just punishment for sin (as in penal substitution), but by demonstrating that God takes the violation of divine law seriously; the spectacle of his death deters us from sin, a shift that allows God to forgive us while maintaining the rule of law and order. In a sense, Governmental Theory combines Anselm’s perspective and the Moral Influence ideas we looked at in the previous post: Satisfaction must be rendered to uphold good governance of the universe, but this can be accomplished by humanity learning our lesson from the spectacle of Christ’s death.

Before assessing these ideas, let’s see how they fit into the big questions we’re tracking for all of the perspectives in the series. The below will mostly apply to Anselm’s theory, since it’s had a far greater impact on later thought.

What are we to make of all this? Anselm continued the long history of understanding Jesus’ atoning work as a kind of payment or transaction. But, he took this image that was so popular in ancient and early medieval thought, and transferred it out of the bondage/redemption/freedom metaphor and placed it instead in a debt metaphor. He did this because, as we saw above, he believed that the ransom metaphor legitimated the devil’s claims. To be honest, I find this claim rather absurd: Ransoms are never paid to ‘legitimate’ claimants; they’re paid to kidnappers, slavers, pirates, and the like — those who have no legitimate claim but still hold power over someone. The very illegitimacy is what makes it a ransom! He also slides between the two metaphors as though they were the same thing; but again, this doesn’t hold water since paying a ransom to free a hostage and paying to manumit an enslaved person are conceptually very different from repaying a debt. And even if we don’t like all of the implications of the redemption imagery when it’s pressed too far, it was commonly used in the Scriptures of both the Old and New Testaments, so we cannot say it’s unfitting or dishonoring to God. So, from the start, Anselm’s argument misses the mark for me.

But, be that as it may, we need to look at how Anselm uses his debt metaphor. The advantage of this metaphor is that it emphasizes personal responsibility for sin. In most of the other perspectives we’ve seen so far, humanity is pretty passive, caught up in the consequences of Adam’s sin or enslaved to evil. The debt metaphor more readily deals with sins, the specific things we do that break faith with God and each other, instead of sin as a general state. And since the Scriptures talk about both, it’s helpful to have metaphors that emphasize this aspect of the problem. But that said, I’m not sure Anselm’s theory is actually all that helpful with this. It explains very well how our past debt is paid off, but it says nothing about how we might stay out of debt in the future. And since debt is often a habit (and in the case of this metaphor, sinning is definitely habitual), this is a glaring hole in the theory for me. But it isn’t the fatal problem .

There’s also a problem in how Anselm uses the ideas of human finitude and divine infinity. His argument is that finite humanity is capable of causing infinite harm to God’s honour but incapable of providing infinite restitution. But this is internally inconsistent: It’s logically impossible for finite beings to do anything infinite, far less do infinite damage to an infinite God. If we’re arguing from divine infinity, we’d have to say that finite humanity is completely incapable of in any way harming God’s infinite honour, goodness, and love, since infinity can never be diminished. So, I think Anselm’s argument is faulty. But once again, this isn’t the fatal problem.

The fatal problem is that he talks about debt in a very different way from how the Bible talks about it. As we saw a couple years ago in the series on various metaphors for sin and salvation in the Bible, debt imagery was only rarely used to describe sin in the Old Testament — found really only in the instructions for the Guilt Offering (Leviticus 6.4-5: “When you have sinned and realize your guilt, and would restore what you took … you shall repay the principal amount and shall add one-fifth to it.”). It doesn’t really come into its own until the teaching of Jesus. He used it in many of his parables (two important ones being Luke 7.41f and Matthew 18), and deployed it when instructing his disciples how to pray: “…Forgive us our debts…” (Matthew 6.12). The problem for Anselm is that in the New Testament use of the metaphor, the solution to the problem of debt is never repayment, but simply forgiveness. But, for Anselm, God cannot simply forgive without repayment in full (with interest, no less) because it would not be proper. In saying this, he’s reading his own cultural values into the Scriptural evidence, and thereby misses the point completely: Debt forgiveness is always shocking — that’s what makes it such a powerful metaphor for the grace of God.

But even in this critical assessment, Anselm is far from the boogeyman he’s often been made out to be. For example, Adolf von Harnack, a nineteenth-century German theologian, accused Anselm of portraying “God as the mighty private man, who is incensed at the injury done to His honour and does not forego His wrath till He has received an at least adequately great alternative” (History of Dogma 6:70-78). This is not quite fair on Anselm. His God was not “incensed” at a violation of his personal honour, but good and righteous and thereby unable to let the injustice of a marred created order stand without being restored. Now this is still far from the image of God revealed in Jesus’ teaching, but this God is more of a stickler for the rules than an incensed aristocrat demanding satisfaction for slights to his honour. Indeed, most of the criticisms of Anselm and his supposedly unhinged God are more appropriate for the next perspective we’ll look at, substitutionary atonement.

In conclusion, I think there are good and bad legacies to Anselm’s satisfaction theory. On the positive side, it provided a helpful corrective in shifting the focus away from sin as a state from which humanity needed to be rescued, to something in which we participate in and are responsible for. He, I think rightly, understood that we aren’t passive damsels in distress, but stand before God responsible for actions: Even if we’re caught up in systems, structures, and forces beyond our control, we still participate in them. But on the negative side, he introduced a distortion into Western theology that remains to this day, making the problem of sin between us and God, instead of between us and sin. In other words, while they would not accept this criticism, Anselm and those who have followed in his footsteps understand introduce a division within God: God’s love and grace come up against God’s honour and justice. Love wins, but only in some kind of compromise where God’s justice gets its due. I don’t think there is any evidence of this kind of division in the God revealed in Jesus. Finally, the most fundamental problem with Anselm’s approach is that in developing the biblical metaphor of debt into a full theory of atonement, he missed the mark entirely of what Jesus taught about debt: Far from a banker needing every last penny of a loan paid back with interest, the God revealed in Jesus is both willing and able to forgive debt. So, while I think the debt metaphor is helpful, I don’t think Anselm’s theory is faithful to how the metaphor is actually used in the Scriptures.

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* This summary is heavily indebted to the discussion in William G. Witt’s book Mapping Atonement: The Doctrine of Reconciliation in Christian History and Theology.