Last week we celebrated the feast day of St. Anselm. He was the 11th century (1033-1109) Bishop of Canterbury. He is one of only 37 people in Christian history that the Catholic church has named “Doctor of the Church.” He was granted this title because of his significant theological and philosophical work which had a massive influence over the theology regarding why Jesus died on the cross. And in this Easter season, I think it’s helpful to spend time reflecting on the death and resurrection of Jesus, in particular, what Anselm contributed to that theology.
For the first 1000 years of church history, most people believed in what’s called the Ransom Theory. In this perspective, because of original sin, all people are inherently corrupt. Anything corrupt belongs to the devil. Humanity was considered the devil’s property and so he could do with people what he wanted. But Jesus, as the Son of God, offered to pay the devil a ransom to set them free. And that ransom was his life. He died to pay the devil off to save humanity. But what the devil didn’t know, was that Jesus would come back to life three days later. So the ransom was paid and the devil got tricked.
Well Anselm, in the middle of the 11th century, did not like this theory. It gave the devil too much power and made God appear weak. So he proposed a new theory called the Satisfaction Atonement Theory. In his view, Jesus death wasn’t made to pay the devil but rather to pay God the Father.
In this new theory he proposes that sin is a direct assault on God’s honor, an offense that demands recompense. God, as the supreme king, must be honored, but sin violates this requirement. Because of the gravity of sin and the need to restore God’s honor, a “satisfaction” is required, a repayment that is greater than any created being could offer. In Anselm’s view, only Jesus, both God and human, is capable of making this necessary satisfaction. Through Jesus’s obedient death on the cross, God’s honor is restored, and humanity is reconciled with God.
So unlike the Ransom theory where the devil is paid, in Satisfaction Atonement theory, God the Father is being paid a debt of honor. In Anselm’s view, God’s honor required a blood sacrifice to be satisfied.
He wrote this all in a letter called Cur Deus Homo and it became very popular. It radically influenced the theological trajectory of the church in the West.
His theory would later, through John Calvin and others, evolve into Penal Substitutionary Atonement theory. This perspective continues the primitive idea that before God could love us God needed and demanded Jesus to be a blood sacrifice to atone for our sin. In this view, God’s righteousness is violated by our sin, and His white hot wrath must be poured out on us. Jesus substitutes himself for us on the cross and absorbs the wrath of God on our behalf. If we believe in Jesus, we are given his perfect righteous record and so we are reconciled to God. This is the perspective that continues to believed by conservative and evangelical Christians to this day. And it’s a relatively new kid on the block in terms of theories, dating from the 16th century.
Now to be honest, I am not a big fan of Anselm’s theory, and certainly not substitutionary atonement.
I find the notion of a deity requiring a blood sacrifice for appeasement to be primitive at best. Yet so many folks continue to prop up this ancient scapegoating perspective thousands of years later. In fact, Richard Rohr called Anselm’s letter “the most unfortunately successful piece of theology ever written.” I am more drawn to the perspective of a Franciscan philosopher and theologian who was born in the 13th century, named John Duns Scotus (1266-1308).
For Scotus, the incarnation of God and the redemption of the world could never be a mere mop-up exercise in response to human sinfulness, but the proactive work of God from the very beginning. God is not a fragile deity whose honor or righteousness is so offended that he requires blood sacrifice.
As Richard Rohr writes, “We were “chosen in Christ before the world was made,” as the hymn in Ephesians puts it (1:4). Our sin could not possibly be the motive for the divine incarnation, but only perfect love and divine self-revelation! For Scotus, God never merely reacts, but always supremely and freely acts, and always acts totally out of love. The best way I can summarize how Scotus tried to change the old notion of retributive justice is this: Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity (it did not need changing)! Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.”
Jesus of Nazareth reveals to humanity the heart of God. One that embraces the untouchable leper, that heals the sick, that loves the outcast. In Jesus we see the heart of God on full display. So Scotus shifts us from “atonement” to “at-one-ment.”
Scotus proposes that it’s all about your starting point. Since Anselm, we usually start our reading of the Bible with Adam and Eve eating the apple resulting in what St. Augustine called original sin. But Scotus invites us to look before original sin, to original blessing. His starting point is when creation lived in total harmony and unity with itself and with God.
If we begin with sin as our starting point, we will continue to focus on sin. In other words, when we begin focused on the problem, we never get off the problem. To this day we begin with and continue to focus on sin, when Jesus, in his death, was pointing us toward our already existing connection with God, creation and one another. This changes everything. Anslem proposed that by changing the starting point (from original sin to original blessing) we discover the true heart of God!
We all need to know that “God does not love us because we are good; God loves us because God is good” (Rohr). Nothing we can do will ever decrease or increase God’s infinite love.
stlukesdurham.org 