5th. The Anselmic, or Commercial Theory of the Atonement.This theory holds that sin is a violation of the divine honor or majesty, and, as committed against an infinite being, deserves an infinite punishment; that the majesty of God requires him to execute punishment, while the love of God pleads for the sparing of the guilty; that this conflict of divine attributes is eternally reconciled by the voluntary sacrifice of the God-man, who bears in virtue of the dignity of his person the intensively infinite punishment of sin, which must otherwise have been suffered extensively and eternally by sinners; that this suffering of the God-man presents to the divine majesty an exact equivalent for the deserved sufferings of the elect; and that, as the result of this satisfaction of the divine claims, the elect sinners are pardoned and regenerated. This view was first broached by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) as a substitute for the earlier patristic view that Christ's death was a ransom paid to Satan, to deliver sinners from his power. It is held by many Scotch theologians, and, in this country, by the Princeton School.The old patristic theory, which the Anselmic view superseded, has been called the Military theory of the Atonement. Satan, as a captor in war, had a right to his captives, which could be bought off only by ransom. It was Justin Martyr who first propounded this view that Christ paid a ransom to Satan. Gregory of Nyssa added that Christ's humanity was the bait with which Satan was attracted to the hidden hook of Christ's deity, and so was caught by artifice. Peter Lombard, Sent., 3:19—“What did the Redeemer to our captor? He held out to him his cross as a mouse-trap; in it he set, as a bait, his blood.”Even Luther compares Satan to the crocodile which swallows the ichneumon, only to find that the little animal eats its insides out.These metaphors show this, at least, that no age of the church has believed in a merely subjective atonement. Nor was this relation to Satan the only aspect in which the atonement was regarded even by the early church. So early as the fourth century, we find a great church Father maintaining that the death of Christ was required by the[pg 748]truth and goodness of God. See Crippen, History of Christian Doctrine, 129—“Athanasius (325-373) held that the death of Christ was the payment of a debt due to God. His argument is briefly this: God, having threatened death as the punishment of sin, would be untrue if he did not fulfil his threatening. But it would be equally unworthy of the divine goodness to permit rational beings, to whom he had imparted his own Spirit, to incur this death in consequence of an imposition practiced on them by the devil. Seeing then that nothing but death could solve this dilemma, the Word, who could not die, assumed a mortal body, and, offering his human nature a sacrifice for all, fulfilled the law by his death.”Gregory Nazianzen (390)“retained the figure of a ransom, but, clearly perceiving that the analogy was incomplete, he explained the death of Christ as an expedient to reconcile the divine attributes.”But, although many theologians had recognized a relation of atonement to God, none before Anselm had given any clear account of the nature of this relation. Anselm's acute, brief, and beautiful treatise entitled“Cur Deus Homo”constitutes the greatest single contribution to the discussion of this doctrine. He shows that“whatever man owes, he owes to God, not to the devil.... He who does not yield due honor to God, withholds from him what is his, and dishonors him; and this is sin.... It is necessary that either the stolen honor be restored, or that punishment follow.”Man, because of original sin, cannot make satisfaction for the dishonor done to God,—“a sinner cannot justify a sinner.”Neither could an angel make this satisfaction. None can make it but God.“If then none can make it but God, and none owes it but man, it must needs be wrought out by God, made man.”The God-man, to make satisfaction for the sins of all mankind, must“give to God, of his own, something that is more valuable than all that is under God.”Such a gift of infinite value was his death. The reward of his sacrifice turns to the advantage of man, and thus the justice and love of God are reconciled.The foregoing synopsis is mainly taken from Crippen, Hist. Christ. Doct., 134, 135. The Cur Deus Homo of Anselm is translated in Bib. Sac., 11:729; 12:52. A synopsis of it is given in Lichtenberger's Encyclopédie des Sciences Religieuses, vol. 1, art.: Anselm. The treatises on the Atonement by Symington, Candlish, Martin, Smeaton, in Great Britain, advocate for substance the view of Anselm, as indeed it was held by Calvin before them. In America, the theory is represented by Nathanael Emmons, A. Alexander, and Charles Hodge (Syst. Theol., 2:470-540).To this theory we make the following objections:(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, in its representation of the atonement as satisfying a principle of the divine nature, it conceives of this principle in too formal and external a manner,—making the idea of the divine honor or majesty more prominent than that of the divine holiness, in which the divine honor and majesty are grounded.The theory has been called the“Criminal theory”of the Atonement, as the old patristic theory of a ransom paid to Satan has been called the“Military theory.”It had its origin in a time when exaggerated ideas prevailed respecting the authority of popes and emperors, and when dishonor done to their majesty (crimen læsæ majestatis) was the highest offence known to law. See article by Cramer, in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:7, on Wurzeln des Anselm'schen Satisfactionsbegriffes.Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 88, 89—“From the point of view of Sovereignty, there could be no necessity for atonement. In Mohammedanism, where sovereignty is the supreme and sole theological principle, no need is felt for satisfying the divine justice. God may pardon whom he will, on whatever grounds his sovereign will may dictate. It therefore constituted a great advance in Latin theology, as also an evidence of its immeasurable superiority to Mohammedanism, when Anselm for the first time, in a clear and emphatic manner, had asserted an inward necessity in the being of God that his justice should receive satisfaction for the affront which had been offered to it by human sinfulness.”Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 481—“In the days of feudalism, men thought of heaven as organized on a feudal basis, and ranked the first and second Persons of the Trinity as Suzerain and Tenant-in-Chief.”William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 329, 830—“The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our forefathers, that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their Deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called[pg 749]the cruelty‘retributive justice,’and a God without it would certainly not have struck them as sovereign enough. But to-day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a‘delightful conviction,’as of a doctrine‘exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,’appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.”(b) In its eagerness to maintain the atoning efficacy of Christ's passive obedience, the active obedience, quite as clearly expressed in Scripture, is insufficiently emphasized and well nigh lost sight of.Neither Christ's active obedience alone, nor Christ's obedient passion alone, can save us. As we shall see hereafter, in our examination of the doctrine of Justification, the latter was needed as the ground upon which our penalty could be remitted; the former as the ground upon which we might be admitted to the divine favor. Calvin has reflected the passive element in Anselm's view, in the following passages of his Institutes: II, 17:3—“God, to whom we were hateful through sin, was appeased by the death of his Son, and was made propitious to us.”... II, 16:7—“It is necessary to consider how he substituted himself in order to pay the price of our redemption. Death held us under its yoke, but he, in our place, delivered himself into its power, that he might exempt us from it.”... II, 16:2—“Christ interposed and bore what, by the just judgment of God, was impending over sinners; with his own blood expiated the sin which rendered them hateful to God; by this expiation satisfied and duly propitiated the Father; by this intercession appeased his anger; on this basis founded peace between God and men; and by this tie secured the divine benevolence toward them.”It has been said that Anselm regarded Christ's death not as a vicarious punishment, but as a voluntary sacrifice in compensation for which the guilty were released and justified. So Neander, Hist. Christ. Dogmas (Bohn), 2:517, understands Anselm to teach“the necessity of a satisfactio vicaria activa,”and says:“We do not find in his writings the doctrine of a satisfactio passiva: he nowhere says that Christ had endured the punishment of men.”Shedd, Hist. Christ. Doctrine, 2:282, thinks this a misunderstanding of Anselm. The Encyclopædia Britannica takes the view of Shedd, when it speaks of Christ's sufferings as penalty:“The justice of man demands satisfaction; and as an insult to infinite honor is itself infinite, the satisfaction must be infinite,i. e., it must outweigh all that is not God. Such a penalty can only be paid by God himself, and, as a penalty for man, must be paid under the form of man. Satisfaction is only possible through the God-man. Now this God-man, as sinless, is exempt from the punishment of sin; his passion is therefore voluntary, not given as due. The merit of it is therefore infinite; God's justice is thus appeased, and his mercy may extend to man.”The truth then appears to be that Anselm held Christ's obedience to be passive, in that he satisfied God's justice by enduring punishment which the sinner deserved; but that he held this same obedience of Christ to be active, in that he endured this penalty voluntarily, when there was no obligation upon him so to do.Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:431, 461, 462—“Christ not only suffered the penalty, but obeyed the precept, of the law. In this case law and justice get their whole dues. But when lost man only suffers the penalty, but does not obey the precept, the law is defrauded of a part of its dues. No law is completely obeyed, if only its penalty is endured.... Consequently, a sinner can never completely and exhaustively satisfy the divine law, however much or long he may suffer, because he cannot at one and the same time endure the penalty and obey the precept. He owes‘ten thousand talents’and has‘not wherewith to pay’(Mat. 18:24, 25), But Christ did both, and therefore he‘magnified the law and made it honorable’(Is. 42:21), in an infinitely higher degree than the whole human family would have done, had they all personally suffered for their sins.”Cf.Edwards, Works, 1:406.(c) It allows disproportionate weight to those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement under commercial analogies, as the payment of a debt or ransom, to the exclusion of those which describe it as an ethical fact, whose value is to be estimated not quantitatively, but qualitatively.Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:209-212—“Die he, or justice must, unless for him Some other, able and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death.”The main text[pg 750]relied upon by the advocates of the Commercial theory isMat. 20:28—“give his life a ransom for many.”Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:257—“The work of Christ, as Anselm construed it, was in fact nothing else than the prototype of the meritorious performances and satisfactions of the ecclesiastical saints, and was therefore, from the point of view of the mediæval church, thought out quite logically. All the more remarkable is it that the churches of the Reformation could be satisfied with this theory, notwithstanding that it stood in complete contradiction to their deeper moral consciousness. If, according to Protestant principles generally, there are no supererogatory meritorious works, then one would suppose that such cannot be accepted even in the case of Jesus.”E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 258—“The Anselmic theory was rejected by Abelard for grounding the atonement in justice instead of benevolence, and for taking insufficient account of the power of Christ's sufferings and death in procuring a subjective change in man.”Encyc. Brit., 2:93 (art.: Anselm)—“This theory has exercised immense influence on the form of church doctrine. It is certainly an advance on the older patristic theory, in so far as it substitutes for a contest between God and Satan, a contest between the goodness and justice of God; but it puts the whole relation on a merely legal footing, gives it no ethical bearing, and neglects altogether the consciousness of the individual to be redeemed. In this respect it contrasts unfavorably with the later theory of Abelard.”(d) It represents the atonement as having reference only to the elect, and ignores the Scripture declarations that Christ died for all.Anselm, like Augustine, limited the atonement to the elect. Yet Leo the Great, in 461, had affirmed that“so precious is the shedding of Christ's blood for the unjust, that if the whole universe of captives would believe in the Redeemer, no chain of the devil could hold them”(Crippen, 132). Bishop Gailor, of the Episcopal Church, heard General Booth at Memphis say in 1903:“Friends, Jesus shed his blood to pay the price, and he bought from God enough salvation to go round.”The Bishop says:“I felt that his view of salvation was different from mine. Yet such teaching, partial as it is, lifts men by the thousand from the mire and vice of sin into the power and purity of a new life in Jesus Christ.”Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 221—“Anselm does not clearly connect the death of Christ with the punishment of sin, since he makes it a supererogatory work voluntarily done, in consequence of which it is‘fitting’that forgiveness should be bestowed on sinners.... Yet his theory served to hand down to later theologians the great idea of the objective atonement.”(e) It is defective in holding to a merely external transfer of the merit of Christ's work, while it does not clearly state the internal ground of that transfer, in the union of the believer with Christ.This needed supplement, namely, the doctrine of the Union of the Believer with Christ, was furnished by Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars 3, quæs. 8. The Anselmic theory is Romanist in its tendency, as the theory next to be mentioned is Protestant in its tendency. P. S. Moxom asserts that salvation is not by substitution, but by incorporation. We prefer to say that salvation is by substitution, but that the substitution is by incorporation. Incorporation involves substitution, and another's pain inures to my account. Christ being incorporate with humanity, all the exposures and liabilities of humanity fell upon him. Simon, Reconciliation by Incarnation, is an attempt to unite the two elements of the doctrine.Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 182-189—“As Anselm represents it, Christ's death is not ours in any such sense that we can enter into it. Bushnell justly charges that it leaves no moral dynamic in the Cross.”For criticism of Anselm, see John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:172-193: Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, III, 2:230-241; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:70 sq.; Baur, Dogmengeschichte, 2:416sq.; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 2:273-286; Dale, Atonement, 279-292; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 196-199; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 176-178.
5th. The Anselmic, or Commercial Theory of the Atonement.This theory holds that sin is a violation of the divine honor or majesty, and, as committed against an infinite being, deserves an infinite punishment; that the majesty of God requires him to execute punishment, while the love of God pleads for the sparing of the guilty; that this conflict of divine attributes is eternally reconciled by the voluntary sacrifice of the God-man, who bears in virtue of the dignity of his person the intensively infinite punishment of sin, which must otherwise have been suffered extensively and eternally by sinners; that this suffering of the God-man presents to the divine majesty an exact equivalent for the deserved sufferings of the elect; and that, as the result of this satisfaction of the divine claims, the elect sinners are pardoned and regenerated. This view was first broached by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) as a substitute for the earlier patristic view that Christ's death was a ransom paid to Satan, to deliver sinners from his power. It is held by many Scotch theologians, and, in this country, by the Princeton School.The old patristic theory, which the Anselmic view superseded, has been called the Military theory of the Atonement. Satan, as a captor in war, had a right to his captives, which could be bought off only by ransom. It was Justin Martyr who first propounded this view that Christ paid a ransom to Satan. Gregory of Nyssa added that Christ's humanity was the bait with which Satan was attracted to the hidden hook of Christ's deity, and so was caught by artifice. Peter Lombard, Sent., 3:19—“What did the Redeemer to our captor? He held out to him his cross as a mouse-trap; in it he set, as a bait, his blood.”Even Luther compares Satan to the crocodile which swallows the ichneumon, only to find that the little animal eats its insides out.These metaphors show this, at least, that no age of the church has believed in a merely subjective atonement. Nor was this relation to Satan the only aspect in which the atonement was regarded even by the early church. So early as the fourth century, we find a great church Father maintaining that the death of Christ was required by the[pg 748]truth and goodness of God. See Crippen, History of Christian Doctrine, 129—“Athanasius (325-373) held that the death of Christ was the payment of a debt due to God. His argument is briefly this: God, having threatened death as the punishment of sin, would be untrue if he did not fulfil his threatening. But it would be equally unworthy of the divine goodness to permit rational beings, to whom he had imparted his own Spirit, to incur this death in consequence of an imposition practiced on them by the devil. Seeing then that nothing but death could solve this dilemma, the Word, who could not die, assumed a mortal body, and, offering his human nature a sacrifice for all, fulfilled the law by his death.”Gregory Nazianzen (390)“retained the figure of a ransom, but, clearly perceiving that the analogy was incomplete, he explained the death of Christ as an expedient to reconcile the divine attributes.”But, although many theologians had recognized a relation of atonement to God, none before Anselm had given any clear account of the nature of this relation. Anselm's acute, brief, and beautiful treatise entitled“Cur Deus Homo”constitutes the greatest single contribution to the discussion of this doctrine. He shows that“whatever man owes, he owes to God, not to the devil.... He who does not yield due honor to God, withholds from him what is his, and dishonors him; and this is sin.... It is necessary that either the stolen honor be restored, or that punishment follow.”Man, because of original sin, cannot make satisfaction for the dishonor done to God,—“a sinner cannot justify a sinner.”Neither could an angel make this satisfaction. None can make it but God.“If then none can make it but God, and none owes it but man, it must needs be wrought out by God, made man.”The God-man, to make satisfaction for the sins of all mankind, must“give to God, of his own, something that is more valuable than all that is under God.”Such a gift of infinite value was his death. The reward of his sacrifice turns to the advantage of man, and thus the justice and love of God are reconciled.The foregoing synopsis is mainly taken from Crippen, Hist. Christ. Doct., 134, 135. The Cur Deus Homo of Anselm is translated in Bib. Sac., 11:729; 12:52. A synopsis of it is given in Lichtenberger's Encyclopédie des Sciences Religieuses, vol. 1, art.: Anselm. The treatises on the Atonement by Symington, Candlish, Martin, Smeaton, in Great Britain, advocate for substance the view of Anselm, as indeed it was held by Calvin before them. In America, the theory is represented by Nathanael Emmons, A. Alexander, and Charles Hodge (Syst. Theol., 2:470-540).To this theory we make the following objections:(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, in its representation of the atonement as satisfying a principle of the divine nature, it conceives of this principle in too formal and external a manner,—making the idea of the divine honor or majesty more prominent than that of the divine holiness, in which the divine honor and majesty are grounded.The theory has been called the“Criminal theory”of the Atonement, as the old patristic theory of a ransom paid to Satan has been called the“Military theory.”It had its origin in a time when exaggerated ideas prevailed respecting the authority of popes and emperors, and when dishonor done to their majesty (crimen læsæ majestatis) was the highest offence known to law. See article by Cramer, in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:7, on Wurzeln des Anselm'schen Satisfactionsbegriffes.Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 88, 89—“From the point of view of Sovereignty, there could be no necessity for atonement. In Mohammedanism, where sovereignty is the supreme and sole theological principle, no need is felt for satisfying the divine justice. God may pardon whom he will, on whatever grounds his sovereign will may dictate. It therefore constituted a great advance in Latin theology, as also an evidence of its immeasurable superiority to Mohammedanism, when Anselm for the first time, in a clear and emphatic manner, had asserted an inward necessity in the being of God that his justice should receive satisfaction for the affront which had been offered to it by human sinfulness.”Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 481—“In the days of feudalism, men thought of heaven as organized on a feudal basis, and ranked the first and second Persons of the Trinity as Suzerain and Tenant-in-Chief.”William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 329, 830—“The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our forefathers, that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their Deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called[pg 749]the cruelty‘retributive justice,’and a God without it would certainly not have struck them as sovereign enough. But to-day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a‘delightful conviction,’as of a doctrine‘exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,’appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.”(b) In its eagerness to maintain the atoning efficacy of Christ's passive obedience, the active obedience, quite as clearly expressed in Scripture, is insufficiently emphasized and well nigh lost sight of.Neither Christ's active obedience alone, nor Christ's obedient passion alone, can save us. As we shall see hereafter, in our examination of the doctrine of Justification, the latter was needed as the ground upon which our penalty could be remitted; the former as the ground upon which we might be admitted to the divine favor. Calvin has reflected the passive element in Anselm's view, in the following passages of his Institutes: II, 17:3—“God, to whom we were hateful through sin, was appeased by the death of his Son, and was made propitious to us.”... II, 16:7—“It is necessary to consider how he substituted himself in order to pay the price of our redemption. Death held us under its yoke, but he, in our place, delivered himself into its power, that he might exempt us from it.”... II, 16:2—“Christ interposed and bore what, by the just judgment of God, was impending over sinners; with his own blood expiated the sin which rendered them hateful to God; by this expiation satisfied and duly propitiated the Father; by this intercession appeased his anger; on this basis founded peace between God and men; and by this tie secured the divine benevolence toward them.”It has been said that Anselm regarded Christ's death not as a vicarious punishment, but as a voluntary sacrifice in compensation for which the guilty were released and justified. So Neander, Hist. Christ. Dogmas (Bohn), 2:517, understands Anselm to teach“the necessity of a satisfactio vicaria activa,”and says:“We do not find in his writings the doctrine of a satisfactio passiva: he nowhere says that Christ had endured the punishment of men.”Shedd, Hist. Christ. Doctrine, 2:282, thinks this a misunderstanding of Anselm. The Encyclopædia Britannica takes the view of Shedd, when it speaks of Christ's sufferings as penalty:“The justice of man demands satisfaction; and as an insult to infinite honor is itself infinite, the satisfaction must be infinite,i. e., it must outweigh all that is not God. Such a penalty can only be paid by God himself, and, as a penalty for man, must be paid under the form of man. Satisfaction is only possible through the God-man. Now this God-man, as sinless, is exempt from the punishment of sin; his passion is therefore voluntary, not given as due. The merit of it is therefore infinite; God's justice is thus appeased, and his mercy may extend to man.”The truth then appears to be that Anselm held Christ's obedience to be passive, in that he satisfied God's justice by enduring punishment which the sinner deserved; but that he held this same obedience of Christ to be active, in that he endured this penalty voluntarily, when there was no obligation upon him so to do.Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:431, 461, 462—“Christ not only suffered the penalty, but obeyed the precept, of the law. In this case law and justice get their whole dues. But when lost man only suffers the penalty, but does not obey the precept, the law is defrauded of a part of its dues. No law is completely obeyed, if only its penalty is endured.... Consequently, a sinner can never completely and exhaustively satisfy the divine law, however much or long he may suffer, because he cannot at one and the same time endure the penalty and obey the precept. He owes‘ten thousand talents’and has‘not wherewith to pay’(Mat. 18:24, 25), But Christ did both, and therefore he‘magnified the law and made it honorable’(Is. 42:21), in an infinitely higher degree than the whole human family would have done, had they all personally suffered for their sins.”Cf.Edwards, Works, 1:406.(c) It allows disproportionate weight to those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement under commercial analogies, as the payment of a debt or ransom, to the exclusion of those which describe it as an ethical fact, whose value is to be estimated not quantitatively, but qualitatively.Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:209-212—“Die he, or justice must, unless for him Some other, able and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death.”The main text[pg 750]relied upon by the advocates of the Commercial theory isMat. 20:28—“give his life a ransom for many.”Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:257—“The work of Christ, as Anselm construed it, was in fact nothing else than the prototype of the meritorious performances and satisfactions of the ecclesiastical saints, and was therefore, from the point of view of the mediæval church, thought out quite logically. All the more remarkable is it that the churches of the Reformation could be satisfied with this theory, notwithstanding that it stood in complete contradiction to their deeper moral consciousness. If, according to Protestant principles generally, there are no supererogatory meritorious works, then one would suppose that such cannot be accepted even in the case of Jesus.”E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 258—“The Anselmic theory was rejected by Abelard for grounding the atonement in justice instead of benevolence, and for taking insufficient account of the power of Christ's sufferings and death in procuring a subjective change in man.”Encyc. Brit., 2:93 (art.: Anselm)—“This theory has exercised immense influence on the form of church doctrine. It is certainly an advance on the older patristic theory, in so far as it substitutes for a contest between God and Satan, a contest between the goodness and justice of God; but it puts the whole relation on a merely legal footing, gives it no ethical bearing, and neglects altogether the consciousness of the individual to be redeemed. In this respect it contrasts unfavorably with the later theory of Abelard.”(d) It represents the atonement as having reference only to the elect, and ignores the Scripture declarations that Christ died for all.Anselm, like Augustine, limited the atonement to the elect. Yet Leo the Great, in 461, had affirmed that“so precious is the shedding of Christ's blood for the unjust, that if the whole universe of captives would believe in the Redeemer, no chain of the devil could hold them”(Crippen, 132). Bishop Gailor, of the Episcopal Church, heard General Booth at Memphis say in 1903:“Friends, Jesus shed his blood to pay the price, and he bought from God enough salvation to go round.”The Bishop says:“I felt that his view of salvation was different from mine. Yet such teaching, partial as it is, lifts men by the thousand from the mire and vice of sin into the power and purity of a new life in Jesus Christ.”Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 221—“Anselm does not clearly connect the death of Christ with the punishment of sin, since he makes it a supererogatory work voluntarily done, in consequence of which it is‘fitting’that forgiveness should be bestowed on sinners.... Yet his theory served to hand down to later theologians the great idea of the objective atonement.”(e) It is defective in holding to a merely external transfer of the merit of Christ's work, while it does not clearly state the internal ground of that transfer, in the union of the believer with Christ.This needed supplement, namely, the doctrine of the Union of the Believer with Christ, was furnished by Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars 3, quæs. 8. The Anselmic theory is Romanist in its tendency, as the theory next to be mentioned is Protestant in its tendency. P. S. Moxom asserts that salvation is not by substitution, but by incorporation. We prefer to say that salvation is by substitution, but that the substitution is by incorporation. Incorporation involves substitution, and another's pain inures to my account. Christ being incorporate with humanity, all the exposures and liabilities of humanity fell upon him. Simon, Reconciliation by Incarnation, is an attempt to unite the two elements of the doctrine.Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 182-189—“As Anselm represents it, Christ's death is not ours in any such sense that we can enter into it. Bushnell justly charges that it leaves no moral dynamic in the Cross.”For criticism of Anselm, see John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:172-193: Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, III, 2:230-241; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:70 sq.; Baur, Dogmengeschichte, 2:416sq.; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 2:273-286; Dale, Atonement, 279-292; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 196-199; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 176-178.
5th. The Anselmic, or Commercial Theory of the Atonement.This theory holds that sin is a violation of the divine honor or majesty, and, as committed against an infinite being, deserves an infinite punishment; that the majesty of God requires him to execute punishment, while the love of God pleads for the sparing of the guilty; that this conflict of divine attributes is eternally reconciled by the voluntary sacrifice of the God-man, who bears in virtue of the dignity of his person the intensively infinite punishment of sin, which must otherwise have been suffered extensively and eternally by sinners; that this suffering of the God-man presents to the divine majesty an exact equivalent for the deserved sufferings of the elect; and that, as the result of this satisfaction of the divine claims, the elect sinners are pardoned and regenerated. This view was first broached by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) as a substitute for the earlier patristic view that Christ's death was a ransom paid to Satan, to deliver sinners from his power. It is held by many Scotch theologians, and, in this country, by the Princeton School.The old patristic theory, which the Anselmic view superseded, has been called the Military theory of the Atonement. Satan, as a captor in war, had a right to his captives, which could be bought off only by ransom. It was Justin Martyr who first propounded this view that Christ paid a ransom to Satan. Gregory of Nyssa added that Christ's humanity was the bait with which Satan was attracted to the hidden hook of Christ's deity, and so was caught by artifice. Peter Lombard, Sent., 3:19—“What did the Redeemer to our captor? He held out to him his cross as a mouse-trap; in it he set, as a bait, his blood.”Even Luther compares Satan to the crocodile which swallows the ichneumon, only to find that the little animal eats its insides out.These metaphors show this, at least, that no age of the church has believed in a merely subjective atonement. Nor was this relation to Satan the only aspect in which the atonement was regarded even by the early church. So early as the fourth century, we find a great church Father maintaining that the death of Christ was required by the[pg 748]truth and goodness of God. See Crippen, History of Christian Doctrine, 129—“Athanasius (325-373) held that the death of Christ was the payment of a debt due to God. His argument is briefly this: God, having threatened death as the punishment of sin, would be untrue if he did not fulfil his threatening. But it would be equally unworthy of the divine goodness to permit rational beings, to whom he had imparted his own Spirit, to incur this death in consequence of an imposition practiced on them by the devil. Seeing then that nothing but death could solve this dilemma, the Word, who could not die, assumed a mortal body, and, offering his human nature a sacrifice for all, fulfilled the law by his death.”Gregory Nazianzen (390)“retained the figure of a ransom, but, clearly perceiving that the analogy was incomplete, he explained the death of Christ as an expedient to reconcile the divine attributes.”But, although many theologians had recognized a relation of atonement to God, none before Anselm had given any clear account of the nature of this relation. Anselm's acute, brief, and beautiful treatise entitled“Cur Deus Homo”constitutes the greatest single contribution to the discussion of this doctrine. He shows that“whatever man owes, he owes to God, not to the devil.... He who does not yield due honor to God, withholds from him what is his, and dishonors him; and this is sin.... It is necessary that either the stolen honor be restored, or that punishment follow.”Man, because of original sin, cannot make satisfaction for the dishonor done to God,—“a sinner cannot justify a sinner.”Neither could an angel make this satisfaction. None can make it but God.“If then none can make it but God, and none owes it but man, it must needs be wrought out by God, made man.”The God-man, to make satisfaction for the sins of all mankind, must“give to God, of his own, something that is more valuable than all that is under God.”Such a gift of infinite value was his death. The reward of his sacrifice turns to the advantage of man, and thus the justice and love of God are reconciled.The foregoing synopsis is mainly taken from Crippen, Hist. Christ. Doct., 134, 135. The Cur Deus Homo of Anselm is translated in Bib. Sac., 11:729; 12:52. A synopsis of it is given in Lichtenberger's Encyclopédie des Sciences Religieuses, vol. 1, art.: Anselm. The treatises on the Atonement by Symington, Candlish, Martin, Smeaton, in Great Britain, advocate for substance the view of Anselm, as indeed it was held by Calvin before them. In America, the theory is represented by Nathanael Emmons, A. Alexander, and Charles Hodge (Syst. Theol., 2:470-540).To this theory we make the following objections:(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, in its representation of the atonement as satisfying a principle of the divine nature, it conceives of this principle in too formal and external a manner,—making the idea of the divine honor or majesty more prominent than that of the divine holiness, in which the divine honor and majesty are grounded.The theory has been called the“Criminal theory”of the Atonement, as the old patristic theory of a ransom paid to Satan has been called the“Military theory.”It had its origin in a time when exaggerated ideas prevailed respecting the authority of popes and emperors, and when dishonor done to their majesty (crimen læsæ majestatis) was the highest offence known to law. See article by Cramer, in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:7, on Wurzeln des Anselm'schen Satisfactionsbegriffes.Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 88, 89—“From the point of view of Sovereignty, there could be no necessity for atonement. In Mohammedanism, where sovereignty is the supreme and sole theological principle, no need is felt for satisfying the divine justice. God may pardon whom he will, on whatever grounds his sovereign will may dictate. It therefore constituted a great advance in Latin theology, as also an evidence of its immeasurable superiority to Mohammedanism, when Anselm for the first time, in a clear and emphatic manner, had asserted an inward necessity in the being of God that his justice should receive satisfaction for the affront which had been offered to it by human sinfulness.”Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 481—“In the days of feudalism, men thought of heaven as organized on a feudal basis, and ranked the first and second Persons of the Trinity as Suzerain and Tenant-in-Chief.”William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 329, 830—“The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our forefathers, that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their Deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called[pg 749]the cruelty‘retributive justice,’and a God without it would certainly not have struck them as sovereign enough. But to-day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a‘delightful conviction,’as of a doctrine‘exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,’appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.”(b) In its eagerness to maintain the atoning efficacy of Christ's passive obedience, the active obedience, quite as clearly expressed in Scripture, is insufficiently emphasized and well nigh lost sight of.Neither Christ's active obedience alone, nor Christ's obedient passion alone, can save us. As we shall see hereafter, in our examination of the doctrine of Justification, the latter was needed as the ground upon which our penalty could be remitted; the former as the ground upon which we might be admitted to the divine favor. Calvin has reflected the passive element in Anselm's view, in the following passages of his Institutes: II, 17:3—“God, to whom we were hateful through sin, was appeased by the death of his Son, and was made propitious to us.”... II, 16:7—“It is necessary to consider how he substituted himself in order to pay the price of our redemption. Death held us under its yoke, but he, in our place, delivered himself into its power, that he might exempt us from it.”... II, 16:2—“Christ interposed and bore what, by the just judgment of God, was impending over sinners; with his own blood expiated the sin which rendered them hateful to God; by this expiation satisfied and duly propitiated the Father; by this intercession appeased his anger; on this basis founded peace between God and men; and by this tie secured the divine benevolence toward them.”It has been said that Anselm regarded Christ's death not as a vicarious punishment, but as a voluntary sacrifice in compensation for which the guilty were released and justified. So Neander, Hist. Christ. Dogmas (Bohn), 2:517, understands Anselm to teach“the necessity of a satisfactio vicaria activa,”and says:“We do not find in his writings the doctrine of a satisfactio passiva: he nowhere says that Christ had endured the punishment of men.”Shedd, Hist. Christ. Doctrine, 2:282, thinks this a misunderstanding of Anselm. The Encyclopædia Britannica takes the view of Shedd, when it speaks of Christ's sufferings as penalty:“The justice of man demands satisfaction; and as an insult to infinite honor is itself infinite, the satisfaction must be infinite,i. e., it must outweigh all that is not God. Such a penalty can only be paid by God himself, and, as a penalty for man, must be paid under the form of man. Satisfaction is only possible through the God-man. Now this God-man, as sinless, is exempt from the punishment of sin; his passion is therefore voluntary, not given as due. The merit of it is therefore infinite; God's justice is thus appeased, and his mercy may extend to man.”The truth then appears to be that Anselm held Christ's obedience to be passive, in that he satisfied God's justice by enduring punishment which the sinner deserved; but that he held this same obedience of Christ to be active, in that he endured this penalty voluntarily, when there was no obligation upon him so to do.Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:431, 461, 462—“Christ not only suffered the penalty, but obeyed the precept, of the law. In this case law and justice get their whole dues. But when lost man only suffers the penalty, but does not obey the precept, the law is defrauded of a part of its dues. No law is completely obeyed, if only its penalty is endured.... Consequently, a sinner can never completely and exhaustively satisfy the divine law, however much or long he may suffer, because he cannot at one and the same time endure the penalty and obey the precept. He owes‘ten thousand talents’and has‘not wherewith to pay’(Mat. 18:24, 25), But Christ did both, and therefore he‘magnified the law and made it honorable’(Is. 42:21), in an infinitely higher degree than the whole human family would have done, had they all personally suffered for their sins.”Cf.Edwards, Works, 1:406.(c) It allows disproportionate weight to those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement under commercial analogies, as the payment of a debt or ransom, to the exclusion of those which describe it as an ethical fact, whose value is to be estimated not quantitatively, but qualitatively.Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:209-212—“Die he, or justice must, unless for him Some other, able and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death.”The main text[pg 750]relied upon by the advocates of the Commercial theory isMat. 20:28—“give his life a ransom for many.”Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:257—“The work of Christ, as Anselm construed it, was in fact nothing else than the prototype of the meritorious performances and satisfactions of the ecclesiastical saints, and was therefore, from the point of view of the mediæval church, thought out quite logically. All the more remarkable is it that the churches of the Reformation could be satisfied with this theory, notwithstanding that it stood in complete contradiction to their deeper moral consciousness. If, according to Protestant principles generally, there are no supererogatory meritorious works, then one would suppose that such cannot be accepted even in the case of Jesus.”E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 258—“The Anselmic theory was rejected by Abelard for grounding the atonement in justice instead of benevolence, and for taking insufficient account of the power of Christ's sufferings and death in procuring a subjective change in man.”Encyc. Brit., 2:93 (art.: Anselm)—“This theory has exercised immense influence on the form of church doctrine. It is certainly an advance on the older patristic theory, in so far as it substitutes for a contest between God and Satan, a contest between the goodness and justice of God; but it puts the whole relation on a merely legal footing, gives it no ethical bearing, and neglects altogether the consciousness of the individual to be redeemed. In this respect it contrasts unfavorably with the later theory of Abelard.”(d) It represents the atonement as having reference only to the elect, and ignores the Scripture declarations that Christ died for all.Anselm, like Augustine, limited the atonement to the elect. Yet Leo the Great, in 461, had affirmed that“so precious is the shedding of Christ's blood for the unjust, that if the whole universe of captives would believe in the Redeemer, no chain of the devil could hold them”(Crippen, 132). Bishop Gailor, of the Episcopal Church, heard General Booth at Memphis say in 1903:“Friends, Jesus shed his blood to pay the price, and he bought from God enough salvation to go round.”The Bishop says:“I felt that his view of salvation was different from mine. Yet such teaching, partial as it is, lifts men by the thousand from the mire and vice of sin into the power and purity of a new life in Jesus Christ.”Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 221—“Anselm does not clearly connect the death of Christ with the punishment of sin, since he makes it a supererogatory work voluntarily done, in consequence of which it is‘fitting’that forgiveness should be bestowed on sinners.... Yet his theory served to hand down to later theologians the great idea of the objective atonement.”(e) It is defective in holding to a merely external transfer of the merit of Christ's work, while it does not clearly state the internal ground of that transfer, in the union of the believer with Christ.This needed supplement, namely, the doctrine of the Union of the Believer with Christ, was furnished by Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars 3, quæs. 8. The Anselmic theory is Romanist in its tendency, as the theory next to be mentioned is Protestant in its tendency. P. S. Moxom asserts that salvation is not by substitution, but by incorporation. We prefer to say that salvation is by substitution, but that the substitution is by incorporation. Incorporation involves substitution, and another's pain inures to my account. Christ being incorporate with humanity, all the exposures and liabilities of humanity fell upon him. Simon, Reconciliation by Incarnation, is an attempt to unite the two elements of the doctrine.Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 182-189—“As Anselm represents it, Christ's death is not ours in any such sense that we can enter into it. Bushnell justly charges that it leaves no moral dynamic in the Cross.”For criticism of Anselm, see John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:172-193: Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, III, 2:230-241; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:70 sq.; Baur, Dogmengeschichte, 2:416sq.; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 2:273-286; Dale, Atonement, 279-292; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 196-199; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 176-178.
5th. The Anselmic, or Commercial Theory of the Atonement.This theory holds that sin is a violation of the divine honor or majesty, and, as committed against an infinite being, deserves an infinite punishment; that the majesty of God requires him to execute punishment, while the love of God pleads for the sparing of the guilty; that this conflict of divine attributes is eternally reconciled by the voluntary sacrifice of the God-man, who bears in virtue of the dignity of his person the intensively infinite punishment of sin, which must otherwise have been suffered extensively and eternally by sinners; that this suffering of the God-man presents to the divine majesty an exact equivalent for the deserved sufferings of the elect; and that, as the result of this satisfaction of the divine claims, the elect sinners are pardoned and regenerated. This view was first broached by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) as a substitute for the earlier patristic view that Christ's death was a ransom paid to Satan, to deliver sinners from his power. It is held by many Scotch theologians, and, in this country, by the Princeton School.The old patristic theory, which the Anselmic view superseded, has been called the Military theory of the Atonement. Satan, as a captor in war, had a right to his captives, which could be bought off only by ransom. It was Justin Martyr who first propounded this view that Christ paid a ransom to Satan. Gregory of Nyssa added that Christ's humanity was the bait with which Satan was attracted to the hidden hook of Christ's deity, and so was caught by artifice. Peter Lombard, Sent., 3:19—“What did the Redeemer to our captor? He held out to him his cross as a mouse-trap; in it he set, as a bait, his blood.”Even Luther compares Satan to the crocodile which swallows the ichneumon, only to find that the little animal eats its insides out.These metaphors show this, at least, that no age of the church has believed in a merely subjective atonement. Nor was this relation to Satan the only aspect in which the atonement was regarded even by the early church. So early as the fourth century, we find a great church Father maintaining that the death of Christ was required by the[pg 748]truth and goodness of God. See Crippen, History of Christian Doctrine, 129—“Athanasius (325-373) held that the death of Christ was the payment of a debt due to God. His argument is briefly this: God, having threatened death as the punishment of sin, would be untrue if he did not fulfil his threatening. But it would be equally unworthy of the divine goodness to permit rational beings, to whom he had imparted his own Spirit, to incur this death in consequence of an imposition practiced on them by the devil. Seeing then that nothing but death could solve this dilemma, the Word, who could not die, assumed a mortal body, and, offering his human nature a sacrifice for all, fulfilled the law by his death.”Gregory Nazianzen (390)“retained the figure of a ransom, but, clearly perceiving that the analogy was incomplete, he explained the death of Christ as an expedient to reconcile the divine attributes.”But, although many theologians had recognized a relation of atonement to God, none before Anselm had given any clear account of the nature of this relation. Anselm's acute, brief, and beautiful treatise entitled“Cur Deus Homo”constitutes the greatest single contribution to the discussion of this doctrine. He shows that“whatever man owes, he owes to God, not to the devil.... He who does not yield due honor to God, withholds from him what is his, and dishonors him; and this is sin.... It is necessary that either the stolen honor be restored, or that punishment follow.”Man, because of original sin, cannot make satisfaction for the dishonor done to God,—“a sinner cannot justify a sinner.”Neither could an angel make this satisfaction. None can make it but God.“If then none can make it but God, and none owes it but man, it must needs be wrought out by God, made man.”The God-man, to make satisfaction for the sins of all mankind, must“give to God, of his own, something that is more valuable than all that is under God.”Such a gift of infinite value was his death. The reward of his sacrifice turns to the advantage of man, and thus the justice and love of God are reconciled.The foregoing synopsis is mainly taken from Crippen, Hist. Christ. Doct., 134, 135. The Cur Deus Homo of Anselm is translated in Bib. Sac., 11:729; 12:52. A synopsis of it is given in Lichtenberger's Encyclopédie des Sciences Religieuses, vol. 1, art.: Anselm. The treatises on the Atonement by Symington, Candlish, Martin, Smeaton, in Great Britain, advocate for substance the view of Anselm, as indeed it was held by Calvin before them. In America, the theory is represented by Nathanael Emmons, A. Alexander, and Charles Hodge (Syst. Theol., 2:470-540).To this theory we make the following objections:(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, in its representation of the atonement as satisfying a principle of the divine nature, it conceives of this principle in too formal and external a manner,—making the idea of the divine honor or majesty more prominent than that of the divine holiness, in which the divine honor and majesty are grounded.The theory has been called the“Criminal theory”of the Atonement, as the old patristic theory of a ransom paid to Satan has been called the“Military theory.”It had its origin in a time when exaggerated ideas prevailed respecting the authority of popes and emperors, and when dishonor done to their majesty (crimen læsæ majestatis) was the highest offence known to law. See article by Cramer, in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:7, on Wurzeln des Anselm'schen Satisfactionsbegriffes.Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 88, 89—“From the point of view of Sovereignty, there could be no necessity for atonement. In Mohammedanism, where sovereignty is the supreme and sole theological principle, no need is felt for satisfying the divine justice. God may pardon whom he will, on whatever grounds his sovereign will may dictate. It therefore constituted a great advance in Latin theology, as also an evidence of its immeasurable superiority to Mohammedanism, when Anselm for the first time, in a clear and emphatic manner, had asserted an inward necessity in the being of God that his justice should receive satisfaction for the affront which had been offered to it by human sinfulness.”Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 481—“In the days of feudalism, men thought of heaven as organized on a feudal basis, and ranked the first and second Persons of the Trinity as Suzerain and Tenant-in-Chief.”William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 329, 830—“The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our forefathers, that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their Deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called[pg 749]the cruelty‘retributive justice,’and a God without it would certainly not have struck them as sovereign enough. But to-day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a‘delightful conviction,’as of a doctrine‘exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,’appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.”(b) In its eagerness to maintain the atoning efficacy of Christ's passive obedience, the active obedience, quite as clearly expressed in Scripture, is insufficiently emphasized and well nigh lost sight of.Neither Christ's active obedience alone, nor Christ's obedient passion alone, can save us. As we shall see hereafter, in our examination of the doctrine of Justification, the latter was needed as the ground upon which our penalty could be remitted; the former as the ground upon which we might be admitted to the divine favor. Calvin has reflected the passive element in Anselm's view, in the following passages of his Institutes: II, 17:3—“God, to whom we were hateful through sin, was appeased by the death of his Son, and was made propitious to us.”... II, 16:7—“It is necessary to consider how he substituted himself in order to pay the price of our redemption. Death held us under its yoke, but he, in our place, delivered himself into its power, that he might exempt us from it.”... II, 16:2—“Christ interposed and bore what, by the just judgment of God, was impending over sinners; with his own blood expiated the sin which rendered them hateful to God; by this expiation satisfied and duly propitiated the Father; by this intercession appeased his anger; on this basis founded peace between God and men; and by this tie secured the divine benevolence toward them.”It has been said that Anselm regarded Christ's death not as a vicarious punishment, but as a voluntary sacrifice in compensation for which the guilty were released and justified. So Neander, Hist. Christ. Dogmas (Bohn), 2:517, understands Anselm to teach“the necessity of a satisfactio vicaria activa,”and says:“We do not find in his writings the doctrine of a satisfactio passiva: he nowhere says that Christ had endured the punishment of men.”Shedd, Hist. Christ. Doctrine, 2:282, thinks this a misunderstanding of Anselm. The Encyclopædia Britannica takes the view of Shedd, when it speaks of Christ's sufferings as penalty:“The justice of man demands satisfaction; and as an insult to infinite honor is itself infinite, the satisfaction must be infinite,i. e., it must outweigh all that is not God. Such a penalty can only be paid by God himself, and, as a penalty for man, must be paid under the form of man. Satisfaction is only possible through the God-man. Now this God-man, as sinless, is exempt from the punishment of sin; his passion is therefore voluntary, not given as due. The merit of it is therefore infinite; God's justice is thus appeased, and his mercy may extend to man.”The truth then appears to be that Anselm held Christ's obedience to be passive, in that he satisfied God's justice by enduring punishment which the sinner deserved; but that he held this same obedience of Christ to be active, in that he endured this penalty voluntarily, when there was no obligation upon him so to do.Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:431, 461, 462—“Christ not only suffered the penalty, but obeyed the precept, of the law. In this case law and justice get their whole dues. But when lost man only suffers the penalty, but does not obey the precept, the law is defrauded of a part of its dues. No law is completely obeyed, if only its penalty is endured.... Consequently, a sinner can never completely and exhaustively satisfy the divine law, however much or long he may suffer, because he cannot at one and the same time endure the penalty and obey the precept. He owes‘ten thousand talents’and has‘not wherewith to pay’(Mat. 18:24, 25), But Christ did both, and therefore he‘magnified the law and made it honorable’(Is. 42:21), in an infinitely higher degree than the whole human family would have done, had they all personally suffered for their sins.”Cf.Edwards, Works, 1:406.(c) It allows disproportionate weight to those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement under commercial analogies, as the payment of a debt or ransom, to the exclusion of those which describe it as an ethical fact, whose value is to be estimated not quantitatively, but qualitatively.Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:209-212—“Die he, or justice must, unless for him Some other, able and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death.”The main text[pg 750]relied upon by the advocates of the Commercial theory isMat. 20:28—“give his life a ransom for many.”Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:257—“The work of Christ, as Anselm construed it, was in fact nothing else than the prototype of the meritorious performances and satisfactions of the ecclesiastical saints, and was therefore, from the point of view of the mediæval church, thought out quite logically. All the more remarkable is it that the churches of the Reformation could be satisfied with this theory, notwithstanding that it stood in complete contradiction to their deeper moral consciousness. If, according to Protestant principles generally, there are no supererogatory meritorious works, then one would suppose that such cannot be accepted even in the case of Jesus.”E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 258—“The Anselmic theory was rejected by Abelard for grounding the atonement in justice instead of benevolence, and for taking insufficient account of the power of Christ's sufferings and death in procuring a subjective change in man.”Encyc. Brit., 2:93 (art.: Anselm)—“This theory has exercised immense influence on the form of church doctrine. It is certainly an advance on the older patristic theory, in so far as it substitutes for a contest between God and Satan, a contest between the goodness and justice of God; but it puts the whole relation on a merely legal footing, gives it no ethical bearing, and neglects altogether the consciousness of the individual to be redeemed. In this respect it contrasts unfavorably with the later theory of Abelard.”(d) It represents the atonement as having reference only to the elect, and ignores the Scripture declarations that Christ died for all.Anselm, like Augustine, limited the atonement to the elect. Yet Leo the Great, in 461, had affirmed that“so precious is the shedding of Christ's blood for the unjust, that if the whole universe of captives would believe in the Redeemer, no chain of the devil could hold them”(Crippen, 132). Bishop Gailor, of the Episcopal Church, heard General Booth at Memphis say in 1903:“Friends, Jesus shed his blood to pay the price, and he bought from God enough salvation to go round.”The Bishop says:“I felt that his view of salvation was different from mine. Yet such teaching, partial as it is, lifts men by the thousand from the mire and vice of sin into the power and purity of a new life in Jesus Christ.”Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 221—“Anselm does not clearly connect the death of Christ with the punishment of sin, since he makes it a supererogatory work voluntarily done, in consequence of which it is‘fitting’that forgiveness should be bestowed on sinners.... Yet his theory served to hand down to later theologians the great idea of the objective atonement.”(e) It is defective in holding to a merely external transfer of the merit of Christ's work, while it does not clearly state the internal ground of that transfer, in the union of the believer with Christ.This needed supplement, namely, the doctrine of the Union of the Believer with Christ, was furnished by Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars 3, quæs. 8. The Anselmic theory is Romanist in its tendency, as the theory next to be mentioned is Protestant in its tendency. P. S. Moxom asserts that salvation is not by substitution, but by incorporation. We prefer to say that salvation is by substitution, but that the substitution is by incorporation. Incorporation involves substitution, and another's pain inures to my account. Christ being incorporate with humanity, all the exposures and liabilities of humanity fell upon him. Simon, Reconciliation by Incarnation, is an attempt to unite the two elements of the doctrine.Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 182-189—“As Anselm represents it, Christ's death is not ours in any such sense that we can enter into it. Bushnell justly charges that it leaves no moral dynamic in the Cross.”For criticism of Anselm, see John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:172-193: Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, III, 2:230-241; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:70 sq.; Baur, Dogmengeschichte, 2:416sq.; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 2:273-286; Dale, Atonement, 279-292; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 196-199; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 176-178.
5th. The Anselmic, or Commercial Theory of the Atonement.This theory holds that sin is a violation of the divine honor or majesty, and, as committed against an infinite being, deserves an infinite punishment; that the majesty of God requires him to execute punishment, while the love of God pleads for the sparing of the guilty; that this conflict of divine attributes is eternally reconciled by the voluntary sacrifice of the God-man, who bears in virtue of the dignity of his person the intensively infinite punishment of sin, which must otherwise have been suffered extensively and eternally by sinners; that this suffering of the God-man presents to the divine majesty an exact equivalent for the deserved sufferings of the elect; and that, as the result of this satisfaction of the divine claims, the elect sinners are pardoned and regenerated. This view was first broached by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) as a substitute for the earlier patristic view that Christ's death was a ransom paid to Satan, to deliver sinners from his power. It is held by many Scotch theologians, and, in this country, by the Princeton School.The old patristic theory, which the Anselmic view superseded, has been called the Military theory of the Atonement. Satan, as a captor in war, had a right to his captives, which could be bought off only by ransom. It was Justin Martyr who first propounded this view that Christ paid a ransom to Satan. Gregory of Nyssa added that Christ's humanity was the bait with which Satan was attracted to the hidden hook of Christ's deity, and so was caught by artifice. Peter Lombard, Sent., 3:19—“What did the Redeemer to our captor? He held out to him his cross as a mouse-trap; in it he set, as a bait, his blood.”Even Luther compares Satan to the crocodile which swallows the ichneumon, only to find that the little animal eats its insides out.These metaphors show this, at least, that no age of the church has believed in a merely subjective atonement. Nor was this relation to Satan the only aspect in which the atonement was regarded even by the early church. So early as the fourth century, we find a great church Father maintaining that the death of Christ was required by the[pg 748]truth and goodness of God. See Crippen, History of Christian Doctrine, 129—“Athanasius (325-373) held that the death of Christ was the payment of a debt due to God. His argument is briefly this: God, having threatened death as the punishment of sin, would be untrue if he did not fulfil his threatening. But it would be equally unworthy of the divine goodness to permit rational beings, to whom he had imparted his own Spirit, to incur this death in consequence of an imposition practiced on them by the devil. Seeing then that nothing but death could solve this dilemma, the Word, who could not die, assumed a mortal body, and, offering his human nature a sacrifice for all, fulfilled the law by his death.”Gregory Nazianzen (390)“retained the figure of a ransom, but, clearly perceiving that the analogy was incomplete, he explained the death of Christ as an expedient to reconcile the divine attributes.”But, although many theologians had recognized a relation of atonement to God, none before Anselm had given any clear account of the nature of this relation. Anselm's acute, brief, and beautiful treatise entitled“Cur Deus Homo”constitutes the greatest single contribution to the discussion of this doctrine. He shows that“whatever man owes, he owes to God, not to the devil.... He who does not yield due honor to God, withholds from him what is his, and dishonors him; and this is sin.... It is necessary that either the stolen honor be restored, or that punishment follow.”Man, because of original sin, cannot make satisfaction for the dishonor done to God,—“a sinner cannot justify a sinner.”Neither could an angel make this satisfaction. None can make it but God.“If then none can make it but God, and none owes it but man, it must needs be wrought out by God, made man.”The God-man, to make satisfaction for the sins of all mankind, must“give to God, of his own, something that is more valuable than all that is under God.”Such a gift of infinite value was his death. The reward of his sacrifice turns to the advantage of man, and thus the justice and love of God are reconciled.The foregoing synopsis is mainly taken from Crippen, Hist. Christ. Doct., 134, 135. The Cur Deus Homo of Anselm is translated in Bib. Sac., 11:729; 12:52. A synopsis of it is given in Lichtenberger's Encyclopédie des Sciences Religieuses, vol. 1, art.: Anselm. The treatises on the Atonement by Symington, Candlish, Martin, Smeaton, in Great Britain, advocate for substance the view of Anselm, as indeed it was held by Calvin before them. In America, the theory is represented by Nathanael Emmons, A. Alexander, and Charles Hodge (Syst. Theol., 2:470-540).To this theory we make the following objections:(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, in its representation of the atonement as satisfying a principle of the divine nature, it conceives of this principle in too formal and external a manner,—making the idea of the divine honor or majesty more prominent than that of the divine holiness, in which the divine honor and majesty are grounded.The theory has been called the“Criminal theory”of the Atonement, as the old patristic theory of a ransom paid to Satan has been called the“Military theory.”It had its origin in a time when exaggerated ideas prevailed respecting the authority of popes and emperors, and when dishonor done to their majesty (crimen læsæ majestatis) was the highest offence known to law. See article by Cramer, in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:7, on Wurzeln des Anselm'schen Satisfactionsbegriffes.Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 88, 89—“From the point of view of Sovereignty, there could be no necessity for atonement. In Mohammedanism, where sovereignty is the supreme and sole theological principle, no need is felt for satisfying the divine justice. God may pardon whom he will, on whatever grounds his sovereign will may dictate. It therefore constituted a great advance in Latin theology, as also an evidence of its immeasurable superiority to Mohammedanism, when Anselm for the first time, in a clear and emphatic manner, had asserted an inward necessity in the being of God that his justice should receive satisfaction for the affront which had been offered to it by human sinfulness.”Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 481—“In the days of feudalism, men thought of heaven as organized on a feudal basis, and ranked the first and second Persons of the Trinity as Suzerain and Tenant-in-Chief.”William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 329, 830—“The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our forefathers, that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their Deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called[pg 749]the cruelty‘retributive justice,’and a God without it would certainly not have struck them as sovereign enough. But to-day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a‘delightful conviction,’as of a doctrine‘exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,’appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.”(b) In its eagerness to maintain the atoning efficacy of Christ's passive obedience, the active obedience, quite as clearly expressed in Scripture, is insufficiently emphasized and well nigh lost sight of.Neither Christ's active obedience alone, nor Christ's obedient passion alone, can save us. As we shall see hereafter, in our examination of the doctrine of Justification, the latter was needed as the ground upon which our penalty could be remitted; the former as the ground upon which we might be admitted to the divine favor. Calvin has reflected the passive element in Anselm's view, in the following passages of his Institutes: II, 17:3—“God, to whom we were hateful through sin, was appeased by the death of his Son, and was made propitious to us.”... II, 16:7—“It is necessary to consider how he substituted himself in order to pay the price of our redemption. Death held us under its yoke, but he, in our place, delivered himself into its power, that he might exempt us from it.”... II, 16:2—“Christ interposed and bore what, by the just judgment of God, was impending over sinners; with his own blood expiated the sin which rendered them hateful to God; by this expiation satisfied and duly propitiated the Father; by this intercession appeased his anger; on this basis founded peace between God and men; and by this tie secured the divine benevolence toward them.”It has been said that Anselm regarded Christ's death not as a vicarious punishment, but as a voluntary sacrifice in compensation for which the guilty were released and justified. So Neander, Hist. Christ. Dogmas (Bohn), 2:517, understands Anselm to teach“the necessity of a satisfactio vicaria activa,”and says:“We do not find in his writings the doctrine of a satisfactio passiva: he nowhere says that Christ had endured the punishment of men.”Shedd, Hist. Christ. Doctrine, 2:282, thinks this a misunderstanding of Anselm. The Encyclopædia Britannica takes the view of Shedd, when it speaks of Christ's sufferings as penalty:“The justice of man demands satisfaction; and as an insult to infinite honor is itself infinite, the satisfaction must be infinite,i. e., it must outweigh all that is not God. Such a penalty can only be paid by God himself, and, as a penalty for man, must be paid under the form of man. Satisfaction is only possible through the God-man. Now this God-man, as sinless, is exempt from the punishment of sin; his passion is therefore voluntary, not given as due. The merit of it is therefore infinite; God's justice is thus appeased, and his mercy may extend to man.”The truth then appears to be that Anselm held Christ's obedience to be passive, in that he satisfied God's justice by enduring punishment which the sinner deserved; but that he held this same obedience of Christ to be active, in that he endured this penalty voluntarily, when there was no obligation upon him so to do.Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:431, 461, 462—“Christ not only suffered the penalty, but obeyed the precept, of the law. In this case law and justice get their whole dues. But when lost man only suffers the penalty, but does not obey the precept, the law is defrauded of a part of its dues. No law is completely obeyed, if only its penalty is endured.... Consequently, a sinner can never completely and exhaustively satisfy the divine law, however much or long he may suffer, because he cannot at one and the same time endure the penalty and obey the precept. He owes‘ten thousand talents’and has‘not wherewith to pay’(Mat. 18:24, 25), But Christ did both, and therefore he‘magnified the law and made it honorable’(Is. 42:21), in an infinitely higher degree than the whole human family would have done, had they all personally suffered for their sins.”Cf.Edwards, Works, 1:406.(c) It allows disproportionate weight to those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement under commercial analogies, as the payment of a debt or ransom, to the exclusion of those which describe it as an ethical fact, whose value is to be estimated not quantitatively, but qualitatively.Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:209-212—“Die he, or justice must, unless for him Some other, able and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death.”The main text[pg 750]relied upon by the advocates of the Commercial theory isMat. 20:28—“give his life a ransom for many.”Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:257—“The work of Christ, as Anselm construed it, was in fact nothing else than the prototype of the meritorious performances and satisfactions of the ecclesiastical saints, and was therefore, from the point of view of the mediæval church, thought out quite logically. All the more remarkable is it that the churches of the Reformation could be satisfied with this theory, notwithstanding that it stood in complete contradiction to their deeper moral consciousness. If, according to Protestant principles generally, there are no supererogatory meritorious works, then one would suppose that such cannot be accepted even in the case of Jesus.”E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 258—“The Anselmic theory was rejected by Abelard for grounding the atonement in justice instead of benevolence, and for taking insufficient account of the power of Christ's sufferings and death in procuring a subjective change in man.”Encyc. Brit., 2:93 (art.: Anselm)—“This theory has exercised immense influence on the form of church doctrine. It is certainly an advance on the older patristic theory, in so far as it substitutes for a contest between God and Satan, a contest between the goodness and justice of God; but it puts the whole relation on a merely legal footing, gives it no ethical bearing, and neglects altogether the consciousness of the individual to be redeemed. In this respect it contrasts unfavorably with the later theory of Abelard.”(d) It represents the atonement as having reference only to the elect, and ignores the Scripture declarations that Christ died for all.Anselm, like Augustine, limited the atonement to the elect. Yet Leo the Great, in 461, had affirmed that“so precious is the shedding of Christ's blood for the unjust, that if the whole universe of captives would believe in the Redeemer, no chain of the devil could hold them”(Crippen, 132). Bishop Gailor, of the Episcopal Church, heard General Booth at Memphis say in 1903:“Friends, Jesus shed his blood to pay the price, and he bought from God enough salvation to go round.”The Bishop says:“I felt that his view of salvation was different from mine. Yet such teaching, partial as it is, lifts men by the thousand from the mire and vice of sin into the power and purity of a new life in Jesus Christ.”Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 221—“Anselm does not clearly connect the death of Christ with the punishment of sin, since he makes it a supererogatory work voluntarily done, in consequence of which it is‘fitting’that forgiveness should be bestowed on sinners.... Yet his theory served to hand down to later theologians the great idea of the objective atonement.”(e) It is defective in holding to a merely external transfer of the merit of Christ's work, while it does not clearly state the internal ground of that transfer, in the union of the believer with Christ.This needed supplement, namely, the doctrine of the Union of the Believer with Christ, was furnished by Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars 3, quæs. 8. The Anselmic theory is Romanist in its tendency, as the theory next to be mentioned is Protestant in its tendency. P. S. Moxom asserts that salvation is not by substitution, but by incorporation. We prefer to say that salvation is by substitution, but that the substitution is by incorporation. Incorporation involves substitution, and another's pain inures to my account. Christ being incorporate with humanity, all the exposures and liabilities of humanity fell upon him. Simon, Reconciliation by Incarnation, is an attempt to unite the two elements of the doctrine.Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 182-189—“As Anselm represents it, Christ's death is not ours in any such sense that we can enter into it. Bushnell justly charges that it leaves no moral dynamic in the Cross.”For criticism of Anselm, see John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:172-193: Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, III, 2:230-241; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:70 sq.; Baur, Dogmengeschichte, 2:416sq.; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 2:273-286; Dale, Atonement, 279-292; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 196-199; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 176-178.
5th. The Anselmic, or Commercial Theory of the Atonement.This theory holds that sin is a violation of the divine honor or majesty, and, as committed against an infinite being, deserves an infinite punishment; that the majesty of God requires him to execute punishment, while the love of God pleads for the sparing of the guilty; that this conflict of divine attributes is eternally reconciled by the voluntary sacrifice of the God-man, who bears in virtue of the dignity of his person the intensively infinite punishment of sin, which must otherwise have been suffered extensively and eternally by sinners; that this suffering of the God-man presents to the divine majesty an exact equivalent for the deserved sufferings of the elect; and that, as the result of this satisfaction of the divine claims, the elect sinners are pardoned and regenerated. This view was first broached by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) as a substitute for the earlier patristic view that Christ's death was a ransom paid to Satan, to deliver sinners from his power. It is held by many Scotch theologians, and, in this country, by the Princeton School.The old patristic theory, which the Anselmic view superseded, has been called the Military theory of the Atonement. Satan, as a captor in war, had a right to his captives, which could be bought off only by ransom. It was Justin Martyr who first propounded this view that Christ paid a ransom to Satan. Gregory of Nyssa added that Christ's humanity was the bait with which Satan was attracted to the hidden hook of Christ's deity, and so was caught by artifice. Peter Lombard, Sent., 3:19—“What did the Redeemer to our captor? He held out to him his cross as a mouse-trap; in it he set, as a bait, his blood.”Even Luther compares Satan to the crocodile which swallows the ichneumon, only to find that the little animal eats its insides out.These metaphors show this, at least, that no age of the church has believed in a merely subjective atonement. Nor was this relation to Satan the only aspect in which the atonement was regarded even by the early church. So early as the fourth century, we find a great church Father maintaining that the death of Christ was required by the[pg 748]truth and goodness of God. See Crippen, History of Christian Doctrine, 129—“Athanasius (325-373) held that the death of Christ was the payment of a debt due to God. His argument is briefly this: God, having threatened death as the punishment of sin, would be untrue if he did not fulfil his threatening. But it would be equally unworthy of the divine goodness to permit rational beings, to whom he had imparted his own Spirit, to incur this death in consequence of an imposition practiced on them by the devil. Seeing then that nothing but death could solve this dilemma, the Word, who could not die, assumed a mortal body, and, offering his human nature a sacrifice for all, fulfilled the law by his death.”Gregory Nazianzen (390)“retained the figure of a ransom, but, clearly perceiving that the analogy was incomplete, he explained the death of Christ as an expedient to reconcile the divine attributes.”But, although many theologians had recognized a relation of atonement to God, none before Anselm had given any clear account of the nature of this relation. Anselm's acute, brief, and beautiful treatise entitled“Cur Deus Homo”constitutes the greatest single contribution to the discussion of this doctrine. He shows that“whatever man owes, he owes to God, not to the devil.... He who does not yield due honor to God, withholds from him what is his, and dishonors him; and this is sin.... It is necessary that either the stolen honor be restored, or that punishment follow.”Man, because of original sin, cannot make satisfaction for the dishonor done to God,—“a sinner cannot justify a sinner.”Neither could an angel make this satisfaction. None can make it but God.“If then none can make it but God, and none owes it but man, it must needs be wrought out by God, made man.”The God-man, to make satisfaction for the sins of all mankind, must“give to God, of his own, something that is more valuable than all that is under God.”Such a gift of infinite value was his death. The reward of his sacrifice turns to the advantage of man, and thus the justice and love of God are reconciled.The foregoing synopsis is mainly taken from Crippen, Hist. Christ. Doct., 134, 135. The Cur Deus Homo of Anselm is translated in Bib. Sac., 11:729; 12:52. A synopsis of it is given in Lichtenberger's Encyclopédie des Sciences Religieuses, vol. 1, art.: Anselm. The treatises on the Atonement by Symington, Candlish, Martin, Smeaton, in Great Britain, advocate for substance the view of Anselm, as indeed it was held by Calvin before them. In America, the theory is represented by Nathanael Emmons, A. Alexander, and Charles Hodge (Syst. Theol., 2:470-540).To this theory we make the following objections:(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, in its representation of the atonement as satisfying a principle of the divine nature, it conceives of this principle in too formal and external a manner,—making the idea of the divine honor or majesty more prominent than that of the divine holiness, in which the divine honor and majesty are grounded.The theory has been called the“Criminal theory”of the Atonement, as the old patristic theory of a ransom paid to Satan has been called the“Military theory.”It had its origin in a time when exaggerated ideas prevailed respecting the authority of popes and emperors, and when dishonor done to their majesty (crimen læsæ majestatis) was the highest offence known to law. See article by Cramer, in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:7, on Wurzeln des Anselm'schen Satisfactionsbegriffes.Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 88, 89—“From the point of view of Sovereignty, there could be no necessity for atonement. In Mohammedanism, where sovereignty is the supreme and sole theological principle, no need is felt for satisfying the divine justice. God may pardon whom he will, on whatever grounds his sovereign will may dictate. It therefore constituted a great advance in Latin theology, as also an evidence of its immeasurable superiority to Mohammedanism, when Anselm for the first time, in a clear and emphatic manner, had asserted an inward necessity in the being of God that his justice should receive satisfaction for the affront which had been offered to it by human sinfulness.”Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 481—“In the days of feudalism, men thought of heaven as organized on a feudal basis, and ranked the first and second Persons of the Trinity as Suzerain and Tenant-in-Chief.”William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 329, 830—“The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our forefathers, that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their Deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called[pg 749]the cruelty‘retributive justice,’and a God without it would certainly not have struck them as sovereign enough. But to-day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a‘delightful conviction,’as of a doctrine‘exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,’appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.”(b) In its eagerness to maintain the atoning efficacy of Christ's passive obedience, the active obedience, quite as clearly expressed in Scripture, is insufficiently emphasized and well nigh lost sight of.Neither Christ's active obedience alone, nor Christ's obedient passion alone, can save us. As we shall see hereafter, in our examination of the doctrine of Justification, the latter was needed as the ground upon which our penalty could be remitted; the former as the ground upon which we might be admitted to the divine favor. Calvin has reflected the passive element in Anselm's view, in the following passages of his Institutes: II, 17:3—“God, to whom we were hateful through sin, was appeased by the death of his Son, and was made propitious to us.”... II, 16:7—“It is necessary to consider how he substituted himself in order to pay the price of our redemption. Death held us under its yoke, but he, in our place, delivered himself into its power, that he might exempt us from it.”... II, 16:2—“Christ interposed and bore what, by the just judgment of God, was impending over sinners; with his own blood expiated the sin which rendered them hateful to God; by this expiation satisfied and duly propitiated the Father; by this intercession appeased his anger; on this basis founded peace between God and men; and by this tie secured the divine benevolence toward them.”It has been said that Anselm regarded Christ's death not as a vicarious punishment, but as a voluntary sacrifice in compensation for which the guilty were released and justified. So Neander, Hist. Christ. Dogmas (Bohn), 2:517, understands Anselm to teach“the necessity of a satisfactio vicaria activa,”and says:“We do not find in his writings the doctrine of a satisfactio passiva: he nowhere says that Christ had endured the punishment of men.”Shedd, Hist. Christ. Doctrine, 2:282, thinks this a misunderstanding of Anselm. The Encyclopædia Britannica takes the view of Shedd, when it speaks of Christ's sufferings as penalty:“The justice of man demands satisfaction; and as an insult to infinite honor is itself infinite, the satisfaction must be infinite,i. e., it must outweigh all that is not God. Such a penalty can only be paid by God himself, and, as a penalty for man, must be paid under the form of man. Satisfaction is only possible through the God-man. Now this God-man, as sinless, is exempt from the punishment of sin; his passion is therefore voluntary, not given as due. The merit of it is therefore infinite; God's justice is thus appeased, and his mercy may extend to man.”The truth then appears to be that Anselm held Christ's obedience to be passive, in that he satisfied God's justice by enduring punishment which the sinner deserved; but that he held this same obedience of Christ to be active, in that he endured this penalty voluntarily, when there was no obligation upon him so to do.Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:431, 461, 462—“Christ not only suffered the penalty, but obeyed the precept, of the law. In this case law and justice get their whole dues. But when lost man only suffers the penalty, but does not obey the precept, the law is defrauded of a part of its dues. No law is completely obeyed, if only its penalty is endured.... Consequently, a sinner can never completely and exhaustively satisfy the divine law, however much or long he may suffer, because he cannot at one and the same time endure the penalty and obey the precept. He owes‘ten thousand talents’and has‘not wherewith to pay’(Mat. 18:24, 25), But Christ did both, and therefore he‘magnified the law and made it honorable’(Is. 42:21), in an infinitely higher degree than the whole human family would have done, had they all personally suffered for their sins.”Cf.Edwards, Works, 1:406.(c) It allows disproportionate weight to those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement under commercial analogies, as the payment of a debt or ransom, to the exclusion of those which describe it as an ethical fact, whose value is to be estimated not quantitatively, but qualitatively.Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:209-212—“Die he, or justice must, unless for him Some other, able and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death.”The main text[pg 750]relied upon by the advocates of the Commercial theory isMat. 20:28—“give his life a ransom for many.”Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:257—“The work of Christ, as Anselm construed it, was in fact nothing else than the prototype of the meritorious performances and satisfactions of the ecclesiastical saints, and was therefore, from the point of view of the mediæval church, thought out quite logically. All the more remarkable is it that the churches of the Reformation could be satisfied with this theory, notwithstanding that it stood in complete contradiction to their deeper moral consciousness. If, according to Protestant principles generally, there are no supererogatory meritorious works, then one would suppose that such cannot be accepted even in the case of Jesus.”E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 258—“The Anselmic theory was rejected by Abelard for grounding the atonement in justice instead of benevolence, and for taking insufficient account of the power of Christ's sufferings and death in procuring a subjective change in man.”Encyc. Brit., 2:93 (art.: Anselm)—“This theory has exercised immense influence on the form of church doctrine. It is certainly an advance on the older patristic theory, in so far as it substitutes for a contest between God and Satan, a contest between the goodness and justice of God; but it puts the whole relation on a merely legal footing, gives it no ethical bearing, and neglects altogether the consciousness of the individual to be redeemed. In this respect it contrasts unfavorably with the later theory of Abelard.”(d) It represents the atonement as having reference only to the elect, and ignores the Scripture declarations that Christ died for all.Anselm, like Augustine, limited the atonement to the elect. Yet Leo the Great, in 461, had affirmed that“so precious is the shedding of Christ's blood for the unjust, that if the whole universe of captives would believe in the Redeemer, no chain of the devil could hold them”(Crippen, 132). Bishop Gailor, of the Episcopal Church, heard General Booth at Memphis say in 1903:“Friends, Jesus shed his blood to pay the price, and he bought from God enough salvation to go round.”The Bishop says:“I felt that his view of salvation was different from mine. Yet such teaching, partial as it is, lifts men by the thousand from the mire and vice of sin into the power and purity of a new life in Jesus Christ.”Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 221—“Anselm does not clearly connect the death of Christ with the punishment of sin, since he makes it a supererogatory work voluntarily done, in consequence of which it is‘fitting’that forgiveness should be bestowed on sinners.... Yet his theory served to hand down to later theologians the great idea of the objective atonement.”(e) It is defective in holding to a merely external transfer of the merit of Christ's work, while it does not clearly state the internal ground of that transfer, in the union of the believer with Christ.This needed supplement, namely, the doctrine of the Union of the Believer with Christ, was furnished by Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars 3, quæs. 8. The Anselmic theory is Romanist in its tendency, as the theory next to be mentioned is Protestant in its tendency. P. S. Moxom asserts that salvation is not by substitution, but by incorporation. We prefer to say that salvation is by substitution, but that the substitution is by incorporation. Incorporation involves substitution, and another's pain inures to my account. Christ being incorporate with humanity, all the exposures and liabilities of humanity fell upon him. Simon, Reconciliation by Incarnation, is an attempt to unite the two elements of the doctrine.Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 182-189—“As Anselm represents it, Christ's death is not ours in any such sense that we can enter into it. Bushnell justly charges that it leaves no moral dynamic in the Cross.”For criticism of Anselm, see John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:172-193: Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, III, 2:230-241; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:70 sq.; Baur, Dogmengeschichte, 2:416sq.; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 2:273-286; Dale, Atonement, 279-292; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 196-199; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 176-178.
5th. The Anselmic, or Commercial Theory of the Atonement.This theory holds that sin is a violation of the divine honor or majesty, and, as committed against an infinite being, deserves an infinite punishment; that the majesty of God requires him to execute punishment, while the love of God pleads for the sparing of the guilty; that this conflict of divine attributes is eternally reconciled by the voluntary sacrifice of the God-man, who bears in virtue of the dignity of his person the intensively infinite punishment of sin, which must otherwise have been suffered extensively and eternally by sinners; that this suffering of the God-man presents to the divine majesty an exact equivalent for the deserved sufferings of the elect; and that, as the result of this satisfaction of the divine claims, the elect sinners are pardoned and regenerated. This view was first broached by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) as a substitute for the earlier patristic view that Christ's death was a ransom paid to Satan, to deliver sinners from his power. It is held by many Scotch theologians, and, in this country, by the Princeton School.The old patristic theory, which the Anselmic view superseded, has been called the Military theory of the Atonement. Satan, as a captor in war, had a right to his captives, which could be bought off only by ransom. It was Justin Martyr who first propounded this view that Christ paid a ransom to Satan. Gregory of Nyssa added that Christ's humanity was the bait with which Satan was attracted to the hidden hook of Christ's deity, and so was caught by artifice. Peter Lombard, Sent., 3:19—“What did the Redeemer to our captor? He held out to him his cross as a mouse-trap; in it he set, as a bait, his blood.”Even Luther compares Satan to the crocodile which swallows the ichneumon, only to find that the little animal eats its insides out.These metaphors show this, at least, that no age of the church has believed in a merely subjective atonement. Nor was this relation to Satan the only aspect in which the atonement was regarded even by the early church. So early as the fourth century, we find a great church Father maintaining that the death of Christ was required by the[pg 748]truth and goodness of God. See Crippen, History of Christian Doctrine, 129—“Athanasius (325-373) held that the death of Christ was the payment of a debt due to God. His argument is briefly this: God, having threatened death as the punishment of sin, would be untrue if he did not fulfil his threatening. But it would be equally unworthy of the divine goodness to permit rational beings, to whom he had imparted his own Spirit, to incur this death in consequence of an imposition practiced on them by the devil. Seeing then that nothing but death could solve this dilemma, the Word, who could not die, assumed a mortal body, and, offering his human nature a sacrifice for all, fulfilled the law by his death.”Gregory Nazianzen (390)“retained the figure of a ransom, but, clearly perceiving that the analogy was incomplete, he explained the death of Christ as an expedient to reconcile the divine attributes.”But, although many theologians had recognized a relation of atonement to God, none before Anselm had given any clear account of the nature of this relation. Anselm's acute, brief, and beautiful treatise entitled“Cur Deus Homo”constitutes the greatest single contribution to the discussion of this doctrine. He shows that“whatever man owes, he owes to God, not to the devil.... He who does not yield due honor to God, withholds from him what is his, and dishonors him; and this is sin.... It is necessary that either the stolen honor be restored, or that punishment follow.”Man, because of original sin, cannot make satisfaction for the dishonor done to God,—“a sinner cannot justify a sinner.”Neither could an angel make this satisfaction. None can make it but God.“If then none can make it but God, and none owes it but man, it must needs be wrought out by God, made man.”The God-man, to make satisfaction for the sins of all mankind, must“give to God, of his own, something that is more valuable than all that is under God.”Such a gift of infinite value was his death. The reward of his sacrifice turns to the advantage of man, and thus the justice and love of God are reconciled.The foregoing synopsis is mainly taken from Crippen, Hist. Christ. Doct., 134, 135. The Cur Deus Homo of Anselm is translated in Bib. Sac., 11:729; 12:52. A synopsis of it is given in Lichtenberger's Encyclopédie des Sciences Religieuses, vol. 1, art.: Anselm. The treatises on the Atonement by Symington, Candlish, Martin, Smeaton, in Great Britain, advocate for substance the view of Anselm, as indeed it was held by Calvin before them. In America, the theory is represented by Nathanael Emmons, A. Alexander, and Charles Hodge (Syst. Theol., 2:470-540).To this theory we make the following objections:(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, in its representation of the atonement as satisfying a principle of the divine nature, it conceives of this principle in too formal and external a manner,—making the idea of the divine honor or majesty more prominent than that of the divine holiness, in which the divine honor and majesty are grounded.The theory has been called the“Criminal theory”of the Atonement, as the old patristic theory of a ransom paid to Satan has been called the“Military theory.”It had its origin in a time when exaggerated ideas prevailed respecting the authority of popes and emperors, and when dishonor done to their majesty (crimen læsæ majestatis) was the highest offence known to law. See article by Cramer, in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:7, on Wurzeln des Anselm'schen Satisfactionsbegriffes.Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 88, 89—“From the point of view of Sovereignty, there could be no necessity for atonement. In Mohammedanism, where sovereignty is the supreme and sole theological principle, no need is felt for satisfying the divine justice. God may pardon whom he will, on whatever grounds his sovereign will may dictate. It therefore constituted a great advance in Latin theology, as also an evidence of its immeasurable superiority to Mohammedanism, when Anselm for the first time, in a clear and emphatic manner, had asserted an inward necessity in the being of God that his justice should receive satisfaction for the affront which had been offered to it by human sinfulness.”Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 481—“In the days of feudalism, men thought of heaven as organized on a feudal basis, and ranked the first and second Persons of the Trinity as Suzerain and Tenant-in-Chief.”William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 329, 830—“The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our forefathers, that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their Deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called[pg 749]the cruelty‘retributive justice,’and a God without it would certainly not have struck them as sovereign enough. But to-day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a‘delightful conviction,’as of a doctrine‘exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,’appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.”(b) In its eagerness to maintain the atoning efficacy of Christ's passive obedience, the active obedience, quite as clearly expressed in Scripture, is insufficiently emphasized and well nigh lost sight of.Neither Christ's active obedience alone, nor Christ's obedient passion alone, can save us. As we shall see hereafter, in our examination of the doctrine of Justification, the latter was needed as the ground upon which our penalty could be remitted; the former as the ground upon which we might be admitted to the divine favor. Calvin has reflected the passive element in Anselm's view, in the following passages of his Institutes: II, 17:3—“God, to whom we were hateful through sin, was appeased by the death of his Son, and was made propitious to us.”... II, 16:7—“It is necessary to consider how he substituted himself in order to pay the price of our redemption. Death held us under its yoke, but he, in our place, delivered himself into its power, that he might exempt us from it.”... II, 16:2—“Christ interposed and bore what, by the just judgment of God, was impending over sinners; with his own blood expiated the sin which rendered them hateful to God; by this expiation satisfied and duly propitiated the Father; by this intercession appeased his anger; on this basis founded peace between God and men; and by this tie secured the divine benevolence toward them.”It has been said that Anselm regarded Christ's death not as a vicarious punishment, but as a voluntary sacrifice in compensation for which the guilty were released and justified. So Neander, Hist. Christ. Dogmas (Bohn), 2:517, understands Anselm to teach“the necessity of a satisfactio vicaria activa,”and says:“We do not find in his writings the doctrine of a satisfactio passiva: he nowhere says that Christ had endured the punishment of men.”Shedd, Hist. Christ. Doctrine, 2:282, thinks this a misunderstanding of Anselm. The Encyclopædia Britannica takes the view of Shedd, when it speaks of Christ's sufferings as penalty:“The justice of man demands satisfaction; and as an insult to infinite honor is itself infinite, the satisfaction must be infinite,i. e., it must outweigh all that is not God. Such a penalty can only be paid by God himself, and, as a penalty for man, must be paid under the form of man. Satisfaction is only possible through the God-man. Now this God-man, as sinless, is exempt from the punishment of sin; his passion is therefore voluntary, not given as due. The merit of it is therefore infinite; God's justice is thus appeased, and his mercy may extend to man.”The truth then appears to be that Anselm held Christ's obedience to be passive, in that he satisfied God's justice by enduring punishment which the sinner deserved; but that he held this same obedience of Christ to be active, in that he endured this penalty voluntarily, when there was no obligation upon him so to do.Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:431, 461, 462—“Christ not only suffered the penalty, but obeyed the precept, of the law. In this case law and justice get their whole dues. But when lost man only suffers the penalty, but does not obey the precept, the law is defrauded of a part of its dues. No law is completely obeyed, if only its penalty is endured.... Consequently, a sinner can never completely and exhaustively satisfy the divine law, however much or long he may suffer, because he cannot at one and the same time endure the penalty and obey the precept. He owes‘ten thousand talents’and has‘not wherewith to pay’(Mat. 18:24, 25), But Christ did both, and therefore he‘magnified the law and made it honorable’(Is. 42:21), in an infinitely higher degree than the whole human family would have done, had they all personally suffered for their sins.”Cf.Edwards, Works, 1:406.(c) It allows disproportionate weight to those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement under commercial analogies, as the payment of a debt or ransom, to the exclusion of those which describe it as an ethical fact, whose value is to be estimated not quantitatively, but qualitatively.Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:209-212—“Die he, or justice must, unless for him Some other, able and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death.”The main text[pg 750]relied upon by the advocates of the Commercial theory isMat. 20:28—“give his life a ransom for many.”Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:257—“The work of Christ, as Anselm construed it, was in fact nothing else than the prototype of the meritorious performances and satisfactions of the ecclesiastical saints, and was therefore, from the point of view of the mediæval church, thought out quite logically. All the more remarkable is it that the churches of the Reformation could be satisfied with this theory, notwithstanding that it stood in complete contradiction to their deeper moral consciousness. If, according to Protestant principles generally, there are no supererogatory meritorious works, then one would suppose that such cannot be accepted even in the case of Jesus.”E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 258—“The Anselmic theory was rejected by Abelard for grounding the atonement in justice instead of benevolence, and for taking insufficient account of the power of Christ's sufferings and death in procuring a subjective change in man.”Encyc. Brit., 2:93 (art.: Anselm)—“This theory has exercised immense influence on the form of church doctrine. It is certainly an advance on the older patristic theory, in so far as it substitutes for a contest between God and Satan, a contest between the goodness and justice of God; but it puts the whole relation on a merely legal footing, gives it no ethical bearing, and neglects altogether the consciousness of the individual to be redeemed. In this respect it contrasts unfavorably with the later theory of Abelard.”(d) It represents the atonement as having reference only to the elect, and ignores the Scripture declarations that Christ died for all.Anselm, like Augustine, limited the atonement to the elect. Yet Leo the Great, in 461, had affirmed that“so precious is the shedding of Christ's blood for the unjust, that if the whole universe of captives would believe in the Redeemer, no chain of the devil could hold them”(Crippen, 132). Bishop Gailor, of the Episcopal Church, heard General Booth at Memphis say in 1903:“Friends, Jesus shed his blood to pay the price, and he bought from God enough salvation to go round.”The Bishop says:“I felt that his view of salvation was different from mine. Yet such teaching, partial as it is, lifts men by the thousand from the mire and vice of sin into the power and purity of a new life in Jesus Christ.”Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 221—“Anselm does not clearly connect the death of Christ with the punishment of sin, since he makes it a supererogatory work voluntarily done, in consequence of which it is‘fitting’that forgiveness should be bestowed on sinners.... Yet his theory served to hand down to later theologians the great idea of the objective atonement.”(e) It is defective in holding to a merely external transfer of the merit of Christ's work, while it does not clearly state the internal ground of that transfer, in the union of the believer with Christ.This needed supplement, namely, the doctrine of the Union of the Believer with Christ, was furnished by Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars 3, quæs. 8. The Anselmic theory is Romanist in its tendency, as the theory next to be mentioned is Protestant in its tendency. P. S. Moxom asserts that salvation is not by substitution, but by incorporation. We prefer to say that salvation is by substitution, but that the substitution is by incorporation. Incorporation involves substitution, and another's pain inures to my account. Christ being incorporate with humanity, all the exposures and liabilities of humanity fell upon him. Simon, Reconciliation by Incarnation, is an attempt to unite the two elements of the doctrine.Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 182-189—“As Anselm represents it, Christ's death is not ours in any such sense that we can enter into it. Bushnell justly charges that it leaves no moral dynamic in the Cross.”For criticism of Anselm, see John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:172-193: Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, III, 2:230-241; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:70 sq.; Baur, Dogmengeschichte, 2:416sq.; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 2:273-286; Dale, Atonement, 279-292; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 196-199; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 176-178.
5th. The Anselmic, or Commercial Theory of the Atonement.This theory holds that sin is a violation of the divine honor or majesty, and, as committed against an infinite being, deserves an infinite punishment; that the majesty of God requires him to execute punishment, while the love of God pleads for the sparing of the guilty; that this conflict of divine attributes is eternally reconciled by the voluntary sacrifice of the God-man, who bears in virtue of the dignity of his person the intensively infinite punishment of sin, which must otherwise have been suffered extensively and eternally by sinners; that this suffering of the God-man presents to the divine majesty an exact equivalent for the deserved sufferings of the elect; and that, as the result of this satisfaction of the divine claims, the elect sinners are pardoned and regenerated. This view was first broached by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) as a substitute for the earlier patristic view that Christ's death was a ransom paid to Satan, to deliver sinners from his power. It is held by many Scotch theologians, and, in this country, by the Princeton School.The old patristic theory, which the Anselmic view superseded, has been called the Military theory of the Atonement. Satan, as a captor in war, had a right to his captives, which could be bought off only by ransom. It was Justin Martyr who first propounded this view that Christ paid a ransom to Satan. Gregory of Nyssa added that Christ's humanity was the bait with which Satan was attracted to the hidden hook of Christ's deity, and so was caught by artifice. Peter Lombard, Sent., 3:19—“What did the Redeemer to our captor? He held out to him his cross as a mouse-trap; in it he set, as a bait, his blood.”Even Luther compares Satan to the crocodile which swallows the ichneumon, only to find that the little animal eats its insides out.These metaphors show this, at least, that no age of the church has believed in a merely subjective atonement. Nor was this relation to Satan the only aspect in which the atonement was regarded even by the early church. So early as the fourth century, we find a great church Father maintaining that the death of Christ was required by the[pg 748]truth and goodness of God. See Crippen, History of Christian Doctrine, 129—“Athanasius (325-373) held that the death of Christ was the payment of a debt due to God. His argument is briefly this: God, having threatened death as the punishment of sin, would be untrue if he did not fulfil his threatening. But it would be equally unworthy of the divine goodness to permit rational beings, to whom he had imparted his own Spirit, to incur this death in consequence of an imposition practiced on them by the devil. Seeing then that nothing but death could solve this dilemma, the Word, who could not die, assumed a mortal body, and, offering his human nature a sacrifice for all, fulfilled the law by his death.”Gregory Nazianzen (390)“retained the figure of a ransom, but, clearly perceiving that the analogy was incomplete, he explained the death of Christ as an expedient to reconcile the divine attributes.”But, although many theologians had recognized a relation of atonement to God, none before Anselm had given any clear account of the nature of this relation. Anselm's acute, brief, and beautiful treatise entitled“Cur Deus Homo”constitutes the greatest single contribution to the discussion of this doctrine. He shows that“whatever man owes, he owes to God, not to the devil.... He who does not yield due honor to God, withholds from him what is his, and dishonors him; and this is sin.... It is necessary that either the stolen honor be restored, or that punishment follow.”Man, because of original sin, cannot make satisfaction for the dishonor done to God,—“a sinner cannot justify a sinner.”Neither could an angel make this satisfaction. None can make it but God.“If then none can make it but God, and none owes it but man, it must needs be wrought out by God, made man.”The God-man, to make satisfaction for the sins of all mankind, must“give to God, of his own, something that is more valuable than all that is under God.”Such a gift of infinite value was his death. The reward of his sacrifice turns to the advantage of man, and thus the justice and love of God are reconciled.The foregoing synopsis is mainly taken from Crippen, Hist. Christ. Doct., 134, 135. The Cur Deus Homo of Anselm is translated in Bib. Sac., 11:729; 12:52. A synopsis of it is given in Lichtenberger's Encyclopédie des Sciences Religieuses, vol. 1, art.: Anselm. The treatises on the Atonement by Symington, Candlish, Martin, Smeaton, in Great Britain, advocate for substance the view of Anselm, as indeed it was held by Calvin before them. In America, the theory is represented by Nathanael Emmons, A. Alexander, and Charles Hodge (Syst. Theol., 2:470-540).To this theory we make the following objections:(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, in its representation of the atonement as satisfying a principle of the divine nature, it conceives of this principle in too formal and external a manner,—making the idea of the divine honor or majesty more prominent than that of the divine holiness, in which the divine honor and majesty are grounded.The theory has been called the“Criminal theory”of the Atonement, as the old patristic theory of a ransom paid to Satan has been called the“Military theory.”It had its origin in a time when exaggerated ideas prevailed respecting the authority of popes and emperors, and when dishonor done to their majesty (crimen læsæ majestatis) was the highest offence known to law. See article by Cramer, in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:7, on Wurzeln des Anselm'schen Satisfactionsbegriffes.Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 88, 89—“From the point of view of Sovereignty, there could be no necessity for atonement. In Mohammedanism, where sovereignty is the supreme and sole theological principle, no need is felt for satisfying the divine justice. God may pardon whom he will, on whatever grounds his sovereign will may dictate. It therefore constituted a great advance in Latin theology, as also an evidence of its immeasurable superiority to Mohammedanism, when Anselm for the first time, in a clear and emphatic manner, had asserted an inward necessity in the being of God that his justice should receive satisfaction for the affront which had been offered to it by human sinfulness.”Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 481—“In the days of feudalism, men thought of heaven as organized on a feudal basis, and ranked the first and second Persons of the Trinity as Suzerain and Tenant-in-Chief.”William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 329, 830—“The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our forefathers, that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their Deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called[pg 749]the cruelty‘retributive justice,’and a God without it would certainly not have struck them as sovereign enough. But to-day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a‘delightful conviction,’as of a doctrine‘exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,’appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.”(b) In its eagerness to maintain the atoning efficacy of Christ's passive obedience, the active obedience, quite as clearly expressed in Scripture, is insufficiently emphasized and well nigh lost sight of.Neither Christ's active obedience alone, nor Christ's obedient passion alone, can save us. As we shall see hereafter, in our examination of the doctrine of Justification, the latter was needed as the ground upon which our penalty could be remitted; the former as the ground upon which we might be admitted to the divine favor. Calvin has reflected the passive element in Anselm's view, in the following passages of his Institutes: II, 17:3—“God, to whom we were hateful through sin, was appeased by the death of his Son, and was made propitious to us.”... II, 16:7—“It is necessary to consider how he substituted himself in order to pay the price of our redemption. Death held us under its yoke, but he, in our place, delivered himself into its power, that he might exempt us from it.”... II, 16:2—“Christ interposed and bore what, by the just judgment of God, was impending over sinners; with his own blood expiated the sin which rendered them hateful to God; by this expiation satisfied and duly propitiated the Father; by this intercession appeased his anger; on this basis founded peace between God and men; and by this tie secured the divine benevolence toward them.”It has been said that Anselm regarded Christ's death not as a vicarious punishment, but as a voluntary sacrifice in compensation for which the guilty were released and justified. So Neander, Hist. Christ. Dogmas (Bohn), 2:517, understands Anselm to teach“the necessity of a satisfactio vicaria activa,”and says:“We do not find in his writings the doctrine of a satisfactio passiva: he nowhere says that Christ had endured the punishment of men.”Shedd, Hist. Christ. Doctrine, 2:282, thinks this a misunderstanding of Anselm. The Encyclopædia Britannica takes the view of Shedd, when it speaks of Christ's sufferings as penalty:“The justice of man demands satisfaction; and as an insult to infinite honor is itself infinite, the satisfaction must be infinite,i. e., it must outweigh all that is not God. Such a penalty can only be paid by God himself, and, as a penalty for man, must be paid under the form of man. Satisfaction is only possible through the God-man. Now this God-man, as sinless, is exempt from the punishment of sin; his passion is therefore voluntary, not given as due. The merit of it is therefore infinite; God's justice is thus appeased, and his mercy may extend to man.”The truth then appears to be that Anselm held Christ's obedience to be passive, in that he satisfied God's justice by enduring punishment which the sinner deserved; but that he held this same obedience of Christ to be active, in that he endured this penalty voluntarily, when there was no obligation upon him so to do.Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:431, 461, 462—“Christ not only suffered the penalty, but obeyed the precept, of the law. In this case law and justice get their whole dues. But when lost man only suffers the penalty, but does not obey the precept, the law is defrauded of a part of its dues. No law is completely obeyed, if only its penalty is endured.... Consequently, a sinner can never completely and exhaustively satisfy the divine law, however much or long he may suffer, because he cannot at one and the same time endure the penalty and obey the precept. He owes‘ten thousand talents’and has‘not wherewith to pay’(Mat. 18:24, 25), But Christ did both, and therefore he‘magnified the law and made it honorable’(Is. 42:21), in an infinitely higher degree than the whole human family would have done, had they all personally suffered for their sins.”Cf.Edwards, Works, 1:406.(c) It allows disproportionate weight to those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement under commercial analogies, as the payment of a debt or ransom, to the exclusion of those which describe it as an ethical fact, whose value is to be estimated not quantitatively, but qualitatively.Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:209-212—“Die he, or justice must, unless for him Some other, able and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death.”The main text[pg 750]relied upon by the advocates of the Commercial theory isMat. 20:28—“give his life a ransom for many.”Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:257—“The work of Christ, as Anselm construed it, was in fact nothing else than the prototype of the meritorious performances and satisfactions of the ecclesiastical saints, and was therefore, from the point of view of the mediæval church, thought out quite logically. All the more remarkable is it that the churches of the Reformation could be satisfied with this theory, notwithstanding that it stood in complete contradiction to their deeper moral consciousness. If, according to Protestant principles generally, there are no supererogatory meritorious works, then one would suppose that such cannot be accepted even in the case of Jesus.”E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 258—“The Anselmic theory was rejected by Abelard for grounding the atonement in justice instead of benevolence, and for taking insufficient account of the power of Christ's sufferings and death in procuring a subjective change in man.”Encyc. Brit., 2:93 (art.: Anselm)—“This theory has exercised immense influence on the form of church doctrine. It is certainly an advance on the older patristic theory, in so far as it substitutes for a contest between God and Satan, a contest between the goodness and justice of God; but it puts the whole relation on a merely legal footing, gives it no ethical bearing, and neglects altogether the consciousness of the individual to be redeemed. In this respect it contrasts unfavorably with the later theory of Abelard.”(d) It represents the atonement as having reference only to the elect, and ignores the Scripture declarations that Christ died for all.Anselm, like Augustine, limited the atonement to the elect. Yet Leo the Great, in 461, had affirmed that“so precious is the shedding of Christ's blood for the unjust, that if the whole universe of captives would believe in the Redeemer, no chain of the devil could hold them”(Crippen, 132). Bishop Gailor, of the Episcopal Church, heard General Booth at Memphis say in 1903:“Friends, Jesus shed his blood to pay the price, and he bought from God enough salvation to go round.”The Bishop says:“I felt that his view of salvation was different from mine. Yet such teaching, partial as it is, lifts men by the thousand from the mire and vice of sin into the power and purity of a new life in Jesus Christ.”Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 221—“Anselm does not clearly connect the death of Christ with the punishment of sin, since he makes it a supererogatory work voluntarily done, in consequence of which it is‘fitting’that forgiveness should be bestowed on sinners.... Yet his theory served to hand down to later theologians the great idea of the objective atonement.”(e) It is defective in holding to a merely external transfer of the merit of Christ's work, while it does not clearly state the internal ground of that transfer, in the union of the believer with Christ.This needed supplement, namely, the doctrine of the Union of the Believer with Christ, was furnished by Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars 3, quæs. 8. The Anselmic theory is Romanist in its tendency, as the theory next to be mentioned is Protestant in its tendency. P. S. Moxom asserts that salvation is not by substitution, but by incorporation. We prefer to say that salvation is by substitution, but that the substitution is by incorporation. Incorporation involves substitution, and another's pain inures to my account. Christ being incorporate with humanity, all the exposures and liabilities of humanity fell upon him. Simon, Reconciliation by Incarnation, is an attempt to unite the two elements of the doctrine.Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 182-189—“As Anselm represents it, Christ's death is not ours in any such sense that we can enter into it. Bushnell justly charges that it leaves no moral dynamic in the Cross.”For criticism of Anselm, see John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:172-193: Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, III, 2:230-241; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:70 sq.; Baur, Dogmengeschichte, 2:416sq.; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 2:273-286; Dale, Atonement, 279-292; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 196-199; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 176-178.
5th. The Anselmic, or Commercial Theory of the Atonement.This theory holds that sin is a violation of the divine honor or majesty, and, as committed against an infinite being, deserves an infinite punishment; that the majesty of God requires him to execute punishment, while the love of God pleads for the sparing of the guilty; that this conflict of divine attributes is eternally reconciled by the voluntary sacrifice of the God-man, who bears in virtue of the dignity of his person the intensively infinite punishment of sin, which must otherwise have been suffered extensively and eternally by sinners; that this suffering of the God-man presents to the divine majesty an exact equivalent for the deserved sufferings of the elect; and that, as the result of this satisfaction of the divine claims, the elect sinners are pardoned and regenerated. This view was first broached by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) as a substitute for the earlier patristic view that Christ's death was a ransom paid to Satan, to deliver sinners from his power. It is held by many Scotch theologians, and, in this country, by the Princeton School.The old patristic theory, which the Anselmic view superseded, has been called the Military theory of the Atonement. Satan, as a captor in war, had a right to his captives, which could be bought off only by ransom. It was Justin Martyr who first propounded this view that Christ paid a ransom to Satan. Gregory of Nyssa added that Christ's humanity was the bait with which Satan was attracted to the hidden hook of Christ's deity, and so was caught by artifice. Peter Lombard, Sent., 3:19—“What did the Redeemer to our captor? He held out to him his cross as a mouse-trap; in it he set, as a bait, his blood.”Even Luther compares Satan to the crocodile which swallows the ichneumon, only to find that the little animal eats its insides out.These metaphors show this, at least, that no age of the church has believed in a merely subjective atonement. Nor was this relation to Satan the only aspect in which the atonement was regarded even by the early church. So early as the fourth century, we find a great church Father maintaining that the death of Christ was required by the[pg 748]truth and goodness of God. See Crippen, History of Christian Doctrine, 129—“Athanasius (325-373) held that the death of Christ was the payment of a debt due to God. His argument is briefly this: God, having threatened death as the punishment of sin, would be untrue if he did not fulfil his threatening. But it would be equally unworthy of the divine goodness to permit rational beings, to whom he had imparted his own Spirit, to incur this death in consequence of an imposition practiced on them by the devil. Seeing then that nothing but death could solve this dilemma, the Word, who could not die, assumed a mortal body, and, offering his human nature a sacrifice for all, fulfilled the law by his death.”Gregory Nazianzen (390)“retained the figure of a ransom, but, clearly perceiving that the analogy was incomplete, he explained the death of Christ as an expedient to reconcile the divine attributes.”But, although many theologians had recognized a relation of atonement to God, none before Anselm had given any clear account of the nature of this relation. Anselm's acute, brief, and beautiful treatise entitled“Cur Deus Homo”constitutes the greatest single contribution to the discussion of this doctrine. He shows that“whatever man owes, he owes to God, not to the devil.... He who does not yield due honor to God, withholds from him what is his, and dishonors him; and this is sin.... It is necessary that either the stolen honor be restored, or that punishment follow.”Man, because of original sin, cannot make satisfaction for the dishonor done to God,—“a sinner cannot justify a sinner.”Neither could an angel make this satisfaction. None can make it but God.“If then none can make it but God, and none owes it but man, it must needs be wrought out by God, made man.”The God-man, to make satisfaction for the sins of all mankind, must“give to God, of his own, something that is more valuable than all that is under God.”Such a gift of infinite value was his death. The reward of his sacrifice turns to the advantage of man, and thus the justice and love of God are reconciled.The foregoing synopsis is mainly taken from Crippen, Hist. Christ. Doct., 134, 135. The Cur Deus Homo of Anselm is translated in Bib. Sac., 11:729; 12:52. A synopsis of it is given in Lichtenberger's Encyclopédie des Sciences Religieuses, vol. 1, art.: Anselm. The treatises on the Atonement by Symington, Candlish, Martin, Smeaton, in Great Britain, advocate for substance the view of Anselm, as indeed it was held by Calvin before them. In America, the theory is represented by Nathanael Emmons, A. Alexander, and Charles Hodge (Syst. Theol., 2:470-540).To this theory we make the following objections:(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, in its representation of the atonement as satisfying a principle of the divine nature, it conceives of this principle in too formal and external a manner,—making the idea of the divine honor or majesty more prominent than that of the divine holiness, in which the divine honor and majesty are grounded.The theory has been called the“Criminal theory”of the Atonement, as the old patristic theory of a ransom paid to Satan has been called the“Military theory.”It had its origin in a time when exaggerated ideas prevailed respecting the authority of popes and emperors, and when dishonor done to their majesty (crimen læsæ majestatis) was the highest offence known to law. See article by Cramer, in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:7, on Wurzeln des Anselm'schen Satisfactionsbegriffes.Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 88, 89—“From the point of view of Sovereignty, there could be no necessity for atonement. In Mohammedanism, where sovereignty is the supreme and sole theological principle, no need is felt for satisfying the divine justice. God may pardon whom he will, on whatever grounds his sovereign will may dictate. It therefore constituted a great advance in Latin theology, as also an evidence of its immeasurable superiority to Mohammedanism, when Anselm for the first time, in a clear and emphatic manner, had asserted an inward necessity in the being of God that his justice should receive satisfaction for the affront which had been offered to it by human sinfulness.”Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 481—“In the days of feudalism, men thought of heaven as organized on a feudal basis, and ranked the first and second Persons of the Trinity as Suzerain and Tenant-in-Chief.”William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 329, 830—“The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our forefathers, that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their Deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called[pg 749]the cruelty‘retributive justice,’and a God without it would certainly not have struck them as sovereign enough. But to-day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a‘delightful conviction,’as of a doctrine‘exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,’appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.”(b) In its eagerness to maintain the atoning efficacy of Christ's passive obedience, the active obedience, quite as clearly expressed in Scripture, is insufficiently emphasized and well nigh lost sight of.Neither Christ's active obedience alone, nor Christ's obedient passion alone, can save us. As we shall see hereafter, in our examination of the doctrine of Justification, the latter was needed as the ground upon which our penalty could be remitted; the former as the ground upon which we might be admitted to the divine favor. Calvin has reflected the passive element in Anselm's view, in the following passages of his Institutes: II, 17:3—“God, to whom we were hateful through sin, was appeased by the death of his Son, and was made propitious to us.”... II, 16:7—“It is necessary to consider how he substituted himself in order to pay the price of our redemption. Death held us under its yoke, but he, in our place, delivered himself into its power, that he might exempt us from it.”... II, 16:2—“Christ interposed and bore what, by the just judgment of God, was impending over sinners; with his own blood expiated the sin which rendered them hateful to God; by this expiation satisfied and duly propitiated the Father; by this intercession appeased his anger; on this basis founded peace between God and men; and by this tie secured the divine benevolence toward them.”It has been said that Anselm regarded Christ's death not as a vicarious punishment, but as a voluntary sacrifice in compensation for which the guilty were released and justified. So Neander, Hist. Christ. Dogmas (Bohn), 2:517, understands Anselm to teach“the necessity of a satisfactio vicaria activa,”and says:“We do not find in his writings the doctrine of a satisfactio passiva: he nowhere says that Christ had endured the punishment of men.”Shedd, Hist. Christ. Doctrine, 2:282, thinks this a misunderstanding of Anselm. The Encyclopædia Britannica takes the view of Shedd, when it speaks of Christ's sufferings as penalty:“The justice of man demands satisfaction; and as an insult to infinite honor is itself infinite, the satisfaction must be infinite,i. e., it must outweigh all that is not God. Such a penalty can only be paid by God himself, and, as a penalty for man, must be paid under the form of man. Satisfaction is only possible through the God-man. Now this God-man, as sinless, is exempt from the punishment of sin; his passion is therefore voluntary, not given as due. The merit of it is therefore infinite; God's justice is thus appeased, and his mercy may extend to man.”The truth then appears to be that Anselm held Christ's obedience to be passive, in that he satisfied God's justice by enduring punishment which the sinner deserved; but that he held this same obedience of Christ to be active, in that he endured this penalty voluntarily, when there was no obligation upon him so to do.Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:431, 461, 462—“Christ not only suffered the penalty, but obeyed the precept, of the law. In this case law and justice get their whole dues. But when lost man only suffers the penalty, but does not obey the precept, the law is defrauded of a part of its dues. No law is completely obeyed, if only its penalty is endured.... Consequently, a sinner can never completely and exhaustively satisfy the divine law, however much or long he may suffer, because he cannot at one and the same time endure the penalty and obey the precept. He owes‘ten thousand talents’and has‘not wherewith to pay’(Mat. 18:24, 25), But Christ did both, and therefore he‘magnified the law and made it honorable’(Is. 42:21), in an infinitely higher degree than the whole human family would have done, had they all personally suffered for their sins.”Cf.Edwards, Works, 1:406.(c) It allows disproportionate weight to those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement under commercial analogies, as the payment of a debt or ransom, to the exclusion of those which describe it as an ethical fact, whose value is to be estimated not quantitatively, but qualitatively.Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:209-212—“Die he, or justice must, unless for him Some other, able and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death.”The main text[pg 750]relied upon by the advocates of the Commercial theory isMat. 20:28—“give his life a ransom for many.”Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:257—“The work of Christ, as Anselm construed it, was in fact nothing else than the prototype of the meritorious performances and satisfactions of the ecclesiastical saints, and was therefore, from the point of view of the mediæval church, thought out quite logically. All the more remarkable is it that the churches of the Reformation could be satisfied with this theory, notwithstanding that it stood in complete contradiction to their deeper moral consciousness. If, according to Protestant principles generally, there are no supererogatory meritorious works, then one would suppose that such cannot be accepted even in the case of Jesus.”E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 258—“The Anselmic theory was rejected by Abelard for grounding the atonement in justice instead of benevolence, and for taking insufficient account of the power of Christ's sufferings and death in procuring a subjective change in man.”Encyc. Brit., 2:93 (art.: Anselm)—“This theory has exercised immense influence on the form of church doctrine. It is certainly an advance on the older patristic theory, in so far as it substitutes for a contest between God and Satan, a contest between the goodness and justice of God; but it puts the whole relation on a merely legal footing, gives it no ethical bearing, and neglects altogether the consciousness of the individual to be redeemed. In this respect it contrasts unfavorably with the later theory of Abelard.”(d) It represents the atonement as having reference only to the elect, and ignores the Scripture declarations that Christ died for all.Anselm, like Augustine, limited the atonement to the elect. Yet Leo the Great, in 461, had affirmed that“so precious is the shedding of Christ's blood for the unjust, that if the whole universe of captives would believe in the Redeemer, no chain of the devil could hold them”(Crippen, 132). Bishop Gailor, of the Episcopal Church, heard General Booth at Memphis say in 1903:“Friends, Jesus shed his blood to pay the price, and he bought from God enough salvation to go round.”The Bishop says:“I felt that his view of salvation was different from mine. Yet such teaching, partial as it is, lifts men by the thousand from the mire and vice of sin into the power and purity of a new life in Jesus Christ.”Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 221—“Anselm does not clearly connect the death of Christ with the punishment of sin, since he makes it a supererogatory work voluntarily done, in consequence of which it is‘fitting’that forgiveness should be bestowed on sinners.... Yet his theory served to hand down to later theologians the great idea of the objective atonement.”(e) It is defective in holding to a merely external transfer of the merit of Christ's work, while it does not clearly state the internal ground of that transfer, in the union of the believer with Christ.This needed supplement, namely, the doctrine of the Union of the Believer with Christ, was furnished by Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars 3, quæs. 8. The Anselmic theory is Romanist in its tendency, as the theory next to be mentioned is Protestant in its tendency. P. S. Moxom asserts that salvation is not by substitution, but by incorporation. We prefer to say that salvation is by substitution, but that the substitution is by incorporation. Incorporation involves substitution, and another's pain inures to my account. Christ being incorporate with humanity, all the exposures and liabilities of humanity fell upon him. Simon, Reconciliation by Incarnation, is an attempt to unite the two elements of the doctrine.Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 182-189—“As Anselm represents it, Christ's death is not ours in any such sense that we can enter into it. Bushnell justly charges that it leaves no moral dynamic in the Cross.”For criticism of Anselm, see John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:172-193: Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, III, 2:230-241; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:70 sq.; Baur, Dogmengeschichte, 2:416sq.; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 2:273-286; Dale, Atonement, 279-292; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 196-199; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 176-178.
5th. The Anselmic, or Commercial Theory of the Atonement.
This theory holds that sin is a violation of the divine honor or majesty, and, as committed against an infinite being, deserves an infinite punishment; that the majesty of God requires him to execute punishment, while the love of God pleads for the sparing of the guilty; that this conflict of divine attributes is eternally reconciled by the voluntary sacrifice of the God-man, who bears in virtue of the dignity of his person the intensively infinite punishment of sin, which must otherwise have been suffered extensively and eternally by sinners; that this suffering of the God-man presents to the divine majesty an exact equivalent for the deserved sufferings of the elect; and that, as the result of this satisfaction of the divine claims, the elect sinners are pardoned and regenerated. This view was first broached by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) as a substitute for the earlier patristic view that Christ's death was a ransom paid to Satan, to deliver sinners from his power. It is held by many Scotch theologians, and, in this country, by the Princeton School.
The old patristic theory, which the Anselmic view superseded, has been called the Military theory of the Atonement. Satan, as a captor in war, had a right to his captives, which could be bought off only by ransom. It was Justin Martyr who first propounded this view that Christ paid a ransom to Satan. Gregory of Nyssa added that Christ's humanity was the bait with which Satan was attracted to the hidden hook of Christ's deity, and so was caught by artifice. Peter Lombard, Sent., 3:19—“What did the Redeemer to our captor? He held out to him his cross as a mouse-trap; in it he set, as a bait, his blood.”Even Luther compares Satan to the crocodile which swallows the ichneumon, only to find that the little animal eats its insides out.These metaphors show this, at least, that no age of the church has believed in a merely subjective atonement. Nor was this relation to Satan the only aspect in which the atonement was regarded even by the early church. So early as the fourth century, we find a great church Father maintaining that the death of Christ was required by the[pg 748]truth and goodness of God. See Crippen, History of Christian Doctrine, 129—“Athanasius (325-373) held that the death of Christ was the payment of a debt due to God. His argument is briefly this: God, having threatened death as the punishment of sin, would be untrue if he did not fulfil his threatening. But it would be equally unworthy of the divine goodness to permit rational beings, to whom he had imparted his own Spirit, to incur this death in consequence of an imposition practiced on them by the devil. Seeing then that nothing but death could solve this dilemma, the Word, who could not die, assumed a mortal body, and, offering his human nature a sacrifice for all, fulfilled the law by his death.”Gregory Nazianzen (390)“retained the figure of a ransom, but, clearly perceiving that the analogy was incomplete, he explained the death of Christ as an expedient to reconcile the divine attributes.”But, although many theologians had recognized a relation of atonement to God, none before Anselm had given any clear account of the nature of this relation. Anselm's acute, brief, and beautiful treatise entitled“Cur Deus Homo”constitutes the greatest single contribution to the discussion of this doctrine. He shows that“whatever man owes, he owes to God, not to the devil.... He who does not yield due honor to God, withholds from him what is his, and dishonors him; and this is sin.... It is necessary that either the stolen honor be restored, or that punishment follow.”Man, because of original sin, cannot make satisfaction for the dishonor done to God,—“a sinner cannot justify a sinner.”Neither could an angel make this satisfaction. None can make it but God.“If then none can make it but God, and none owes it but man, it must needs be wrought out by God, made man.”The God-man, to make satisfaction for the sins of all mankind, must“give to God, of his own, something that is more valuable than all that is under God.”Such a gift of infinite value was his death. The reward of his sacrifice turns to the advantage of man, and thus the justice and love of God are reconciled.The foregoing synopsis is mainly taken from Crippen, Hist. Christ. Doct., 134, 135. The Cur Deus Homo of Anselm is translated in Bib. Sac., 11:729; 12:52. A synopsis of it is given in Lichtenberger's Encyclopédie des Sciences Religieuses, vol. 1, art.: Anselm. The treatises on the Atonement by Symington, Candlish, Martin, Smeaton, in Great Britain, advocate for substance the view of Anselm, as indeed it was held by Calvin before them. In America, the theory is represented by Nathanael Emmons, A. Alexander, and Charles Hodge (Syst. Theol., 2:470-540).
The old patristic theory, which the Anselmic view superseded, has been called the Military theory of the Atonement. Satan, as a captor in war, had a right to his captives, which could be bought off only by ransom. It was Justin Martyr who first propounded this view that Christ paid a ransom to Satan. Gregory of Nyssa added that Christ's humanity was the bait with which Satan was attracted to the hidden hook of Christ's deity, and so was caught by artifice. Peter Lombard, Sent., 3:19—“What did the Redeemer to our captor? He held out to him his cross as a mouse-trap; in it he set, as a bait, his blood.”Even Luther compares Satan to the crocodile which swallows the ichneumon, only to find that the little animal eats its insides out.
These metaphors show this, at least, that no age of the church has believed in a merely subjective atonement. Nor was this relation to Satan the only aspect in which the atonement was regarded even by the early church. So early as the fourth century, we find a great church Father maintaining that the death of Christ was required by the[pg 748]truth and goodness of God. See Crippen, History of Christian Doctrine, 129—“Athanasius (325-373) held that the death of Christ was the payment of a debt due to God. His argument is briefly this: God, having threatened death as the punishment of sin, would be untrue if he did not fulfil his threatening. But it would be equally unworthy of the divine goodness to permit rational beings, to whom he had imparted his own Spirit, to incur this death in consequence of an imposition practiced on them by the devil. Seeing then that nothing but death could solve this dilemma, the Word, who could not die, assumed a mortal body, and, offering his human nature a sacrifice for all, fulfilled the law by his death.”Gregory Nazianzen (390)“retained the figure of a ransom, but, clearly perceiving that the analogy was incomplete, he explained the death of Christ as an expedient to reconcile the divine attributes.”
But, although many theologians had recognized a relation of atonement to God, none before Anselm had given any clear account of the nature of this relation. Anselm's acute, brief, and beautiful treatise entitled“Cur Deus Homo”constitutes the greatest single contribution to the discussion of this doctrine. He shows that“whatever man owes, he owes to God, not to the devil.... He who does not yield due honor to God, withholds from him what is his, and dishonors him; and this is sin.... It is necessary that either the stolen honor be restored, or that punishment follow.”Man, because of original sin, cannot make satisfaction for the dishonor done to God,—“a sinner cannot justify a sinner.”Neither could an angel make this satisfaction. None can make it but God.“If then none can make it but God, and none owes it but man, it must needs be wrought out by God, made man.”The God-man, to make satisfaction for the sins of all mankind, must“give to God, of his own, something that is more valuable than all that is under God.”Such a gift of infinite value was his death. The reward of his sacrifice turns to the advantage of man, and thus the justice and love of God are reconciled.
The foregoing synopsis is mainly taken from Crippen, Hist. Christ. Doct., 134, 135. The Cur Deus Homo of Anselm is translated in Bib. Sac., 11:729; 12:52. A synopsis of it is given in Lichtenberger's Encyclopédie des Sciences Religieuses, vol. 1, art.: Anselm. The treatises on the Atonement by Symington, Candlish, Martin, Smeaton, in Great Britain, advocate for substance the view of Anselm, as indeed it was held by Calvin before them. In America, the theory is represented by Nathanael Emmons, A. Alexander, and Charles Hodge (Syst. Theol., 2:470-540).
To this theory we make the following objections:
(a) While it contains a valuable element of truth, in its representation of the atonement as satisfying a principle of the divine nature, it conceives of this principle in too formal and external a manner,—making the idea of the divine honor or majesty more prominent than that of the divine holiness, in which the divine honor and majesty are grounded.
The theory has been called the“Criminal theory”of the Atonement, as the old patristic theory of a ransom paid to Satan has been called the“Military theory.”It had its origin in a time when exaggerated ideas prevailed respecting the authority of popes and emperors, and when dishonor done to their majesty (crimen læsæ majestatis) was the highest offence known to law. See article by Cramer, in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:7, on Wurzeln des Anselm'schen Satisfactionsbegriffes.Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 88, 89—“From the point of view of Sovereignty, there could be no necessity for atonement. In Mohammedanism, where sovereignty is the supreme and sole theological principle, no need is felt for satisfying the divine justice. God may pardon whom he will, on whatever grounds his sovereign will may dictate. It therefore constituted a great advance in Latin theology, as also an evidence of its immeasurable superiority to Mohammedanism, when Anselm for the first time, in a clear and emphatic manner, had asserted an inward necessity in the being of God that his justice should receive satisfaction for the affront which had been offered to it by human sinfulness.”Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 481—“In the days of feudalism, men thought of heaven as organized on a feudal basis, and ranked the first and second Persons of the Trinity as Suzerain and Tenant-in-Chief.”William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 329, 830—“The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our forefathers, that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their Deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called[pg 749]the cruelty‘retributive justice,’and a God without it would certainly not have struck them as sovereign enough. But to-day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a‘delightful conviction,’as of a doctrine‘exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,’appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.”
The theory has been called the“Criminal theory”of the Atonement, as the old patristic theory of a ransom paid to Satan has been called the“Military theory.”It had its origin in a time when exaggerated ideas prevailed respecting the authority of popes and emperors, and when dishonor done to their majesty (crimen læsæ majestatis) was the highest offence known to law. See article by Cramer, in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:7, on Wurzeln des Anselm'schen Satisfactionsbegriffes.
Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 88, 89—“From the point of view of Sovereignty, there could be no necessity for atonement. In Mohammedanism, where sovereignty is the supreme and sole theological principle, no need is felt for satisfying the divine justice. God may pardon whom he will, on whatever grounds his sovereign will may dictate. It therefore constituted a great advance in Latin theology, as also an evidence of its immeasurable superiority to Mohammedanism, when Anselm for the first time, in a clear and emphatic manner, had asserted an inward necessity in the being of God that his justice should receive satisfaction for the affront which had been offered to it by human sinfulness.”
Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 481—“In the days of feudalism, men thought of heaven as organized on a feudal basis, and ranked the first and second Persons of the Trinity as Suzerain and Tenant-in-Chief.”William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 329, 830—“The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our forefathers, that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their Deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called[pg 749]the cruelty‘retributive justice,’and a God without it would certainly not have struck them as sovereign enough. But to-day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a‘delightful conviction,’as of a doctrine‘exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,’appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.”
(b) In its eagerness to maintain the atoning efficacy of Christ's passive obedience, the active obedience, quite as clearly expressed in Scripture, is insufficiently emphasized and well nigh lost sight of.
Neither Christ's active obedience alone, nor Christ's obedient passion alone, can save us. As we shall see hereafter, in our examination of the doctrine of Justification, the latter was needed as the ground upon which our penalty could be remitted; the former as the ground upon which we might be admitted to the divine favor. Calvin has reflected the passive element in Anselm's view, in the following passages of his Institutes: II, 17:3—“God, to whom we were hateful through sin, was appeased by the death of his Son, and was made propitious to us.”... II, 16:7—“It is necessary to consider how he substituted himself in order to pay the price of our redemption. Death held us under its yoke, but he, in our place, delivered himself into its power, that he might exempt us from it.”... II, 16:2—“Christ interposed and bore what, by the just judgment of God, was impending over sinners; with his own blood expiated the sin which rendered them hateful to God; by this expiation satisfied and duly propitiated the Father; by this intercession appeased his anger; on this basis founded peace between God and men; and by this tie secured the divine benevolence toward them.”It has been said that Anselm regarded Christ's death not as a vicarious punishment, but as a voluntary sacrifice in compensation for which the guilty were released and justified. So Neander, Hist. Christ. Dogmas (Bohn), 2:517, understands Anselm to teach“the necessity of a satisfactio vicaria activa,”and says:“We do not find in his writings the doctrine of a satisfactio passiva: he nowhere says that Christ had endured the punishment of men.”Shedd, Hist. Christ. Doctrine, 2:282, thinks this a misunderstanding of Anselm. The Encyclopædia Britannica takes the view of Shedd, when it speaks of Christ's sufferings as penalty:“The justice of man demands satisfaction; and as an insult to infinite honor is itself infinite, the satisfaction must be infinite,i. e., it must outweigh all that is not God. Such a penalty can only be paid by God himself, and, as a penalty for man, must be paid under the form of man. Satisfaction is only possible through the God-man. Now this God-man, as sinless, is exempt from the punishment of sin; his passion is therefore voluntary, not given as due. The merit of it is therefore infinite; God's justice is thus appeased, and his mercy may extend to man.”The truth then appears to be that Anselm held Christ's obedience to be passive, in that he satisfied God's justice by enduring punishment which the sinner deserved; but that he held this same obedience of Christ to be active, in that he endured this penalty voluntarily, when there was no obligation upon him so to do.Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:431, 461, 462—“Christ not only suffered the penalty, but obeyed the precept, of the law. In this case law and justice get their whole dues. But when lost man only suffers the penalty, but does not obey the precept, the law is defrauded of a part of its dues. No law is completely obeyed, if only its penalty is endured.... Consequently, a sinner can never completely and exhaustively satisfy the divine law, however much or long he may suffer, because he cannot at one and the same time endure the penalty and obey the precept. He owes‘ten thousand talents’and has‘not wherewith to pay’(Mat. 18:24, 25), But Christ did both, and therefore he‘magnified the law and made it honorable’(Is. 42:21), in an infinitely higher degree than the whole human family would have done, had they all personally suffered for their sins.”Cf.Edwards, Works, 1:406.
Neither Christ's active obedience alone, nor Christ's obedient passion alone, can save us. As we shall see hereafter, in our examination of the doctrine of Justification, the latter was needed as the ground upon which our penalty could be remitted; the former as the ground upon which we might be admitted to the divine favor. Calvin has reflected the passive element in Anselm's view, in the following passages of his Institutes: II, 17:3—“God, to whom we were hateful through sin, was appeased by the death of his Son, and was made propitious to us.”... II, 16:7—“It is necessary to consider how he substituted himself in order to pay the price of our redemption. Death held us under its yoke, but he, in our place, delivered himself into its power, that he might exempt us from it.”... II, 16:2—“Christ interposed and bore what, by the just judgment of God, was impending over sinners; with his own blood expiated the sin which rendered them hateful to God; by this expiation satisfied and duly propitiated the Father; by this intercession appeased his anger; on this basis founded peace between God and men; and by this tie secured the divine benevolence toward them.”
It has been said that Anselm regarded Christ's death not as a vicarious punishment, but as a voluntary sacrifice in compensation for which the guilty were released and justified. So Neander, Hist. Christ. Dogmas (Bohn), 2:517, understands Anselm to teach“the necessity of a satisfactio vicaria activa,”and says:“We do not find in his writings the doctrine of a satisfactio passiva: he nowhere says that Christ had endured the punishment of men.”Shedd, Hist. Christ. Doctrine, 2:282, thinks this a misunderstanding of Anselm. The Encyclopædia Britannica takes the view of Shedd, when it speaks of Christ's sufferings as penalty:“The justice of man demands satisfaction; and as an insult to infinite honor is itself infinite, the satisfaction must be infinite,i. e., it must outweigh all that is not God. Such a penalty can only be paid by God himself, and, as a penalty for man, must be paid under the form of man. Satisfaction is only possible through the God-man. Now this God-man, as sinless, is exempt from the punishment of sin; his passion is therefore voluntary, not given as due. The merit of it is therefore infinite; God's justice is thus appeased, and his mercy may extend to man.”The truth then appears to be that Anselm held Christ's obedience to be passive, in that he satisfied God's justice by enduring punishment which the sinner deserved; but that he held this same obedience of Christ to be active, in that he endured this penalty voluntarily, when there was no obligation upon him so to do.
Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:431, 461, 462—“Christ not only suffered the penalty, but obeyed the precept, of the law. In this case law and justice get their whole dues. But when lost man only suffers the penalty, but does not obey the precept, the law is defrauded of a part of its dues. No law is completely obeyed, if only its penalty is endured.... Consequently, a sinner can never completely and exhaustively satisfy the divine law, however much or long he may suffer, because he cannot at one and the same time endure the penalty and obey the precept. He owes‘ten thousand talents’and has‘not wherewith to pay’(Mat. 18:24, 25), But Christ did both, and therefore he‘magnified the law and made it honorable’(Is. 42:21), in an infinitely higher degree than the whole human family would have done, had they all personally suffered for their sins.”Cf.Edwards, Works, 1:406.
(c) It allows disproportionate weight to those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement under commercial analogies, as the payment of a debt or ransom, to the exclusion of those which describe it as an ethical fact, whose value is to be estimated not quantitatively, but qualitatively.
Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:209-212—“Die he, or justice must, unless for him Some other, able and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death.”The main text[pg 750]relied upon by the advocates of the Commercial theory isMat. 20:28—“give his life a ransom for many.”Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:257—“The work of Christ, as Anselm construed it, was in fact nothing else than the prototype of the meritorious performances and satisfactions of the ecclesiastical saints, and was therefore, from the point of view of the mediæval church, thought out quite logically. All the more remarkable is it that the churches of the Reformation could be satisfied with this theory, notwithstanding that it stood in complete contradiction to their deeper moral consciousness. If, according to Protestant principles generally, there are no supererogatory meritorious works, then one would suppose that such cannot be accepted even in the case of Jesus.”E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 258—“The Anselmic theory was rejected by Abelard for grounding the atonement in justice instead of benevolence, and for taking insufficient account of the power of Christ's sufferings and death in procuring a subjective change in man.”Encyc. Brit., 2:93 (art.: Anselm)—“This theory has exercised immense influence on the form of church doctrine. It is certainly an advance on the older patristic theory, in so far as it substitutes for a contest between God and Satan, a contest between the goodness and justice of God; but it puts the whole relation on a merely legal footing, gives it no ethical bearing, and neglects altogether the consciousness of the individual to be redeemed. In this respect it contrasts unfavorably with the later theory of Abelard.”
Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:209-212—“Die he, or justice must, unless for him Some other, able and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death.”The main text[pg 750]relied upon by the advocates of the Commercial theory isMat. 20:28—“give his life a ransom for many.”Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:257—“The work of Christ, as Anselm construed it, was in fact nothing else than the prototype of the meritorious performances and satisfactions of the ecclesiastical saints, and was therefore, from the point of view of the mediæval church, thought out quite logically. All the more remarkable is it that the churches of the Reformation could be satisfied with this theory, notwithstanding that it stood in complete contradiction to their deeper moral consciousness. If, according to Protestant principles generally, there are no supererogatory meritorious works, then one would suppose that such cannot be accepted even in the case of Jesus.”
E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 258—“The Anselmic theory was rejected by Abelard for grounding the atonement in justice instead of benevolence, and for taking insufficient account of the power of Christ's sufferings and death in procuring a subjective change in man.”Encyc. Brit., 2:93 (art.: Anselm)—“This theory has exercised immense influence on the form of church doctrine. It is certainly an advance on the older patristic theory, in so far as it substitutes for a contest between God and Satan, a contest between the goodness and justice of God; but it puts the whole relation on a merely legal footing, gives it no ethical bearing, and neglects altogether the consciousness of the individual to be redeemed. In this respect it contrasts unfavorably with the later theory of Abelard.”
(d) It represents the atonement as having reference only to the elect, and ignores the Scripture declarations that Christ died for all.
Anselm, like Augustine, limited the atonement to the elect. Yet Leo the Great, in 461, had affirmed that“so precious is the shedding of Christ's blood for the unjust, that if the whole universe of captives would believe in the Redeemer, no chain of the devil could hold them”(Crippen, 132). Bishop Gailor, of the Episcopal Church, heard General Booth at Memphis say in 1903:“Friends, Jesus shed his blood to pay the price, and he bought from God enough salvation to go round.”The Bishop says:“I felt that his view of salvation was different from mine. Yet such teaching, partial as it is, lifts men by the thousand from the mire and vice of sin into the power and purity of a new life in Jesus Christ.”Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 221—“Anselm does not clearly connect the death of Christ with the punishment of sin, since he makes it a supererogatory work voluntarily done, in consequence of which it is‘fitting’that forgiveness should be bestowed on sinners.... Yet his theory served to hand down to later theologians the great idea of the objective atonement.”
Anselm, like Augustine, limited the atonement to the elect. Yet Leo the Great, in 461, had affirmed that“so precious is the shedding of Christ's blood for the unjust, that if the whole universe of captives would believe in the Redeemer, no chain of the devil could hold them”(Crippen, 132). Bishop Gailor, of the Episcopal Church, heard General Booth at Memphis say in 1903:“Friends, Jesus shed his blood to pay the price, and he bought from God enough salvation to go round.”The Bishop says:“I felt that his view of salvation was different from mine. Yet such teaching, partial as it is, lifts men by the thousand from the mire and vice of sin into the power and purity of a new life in Jesus Christ.”
Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 221—“Anselm does not clearly connect the death of Christ with the punishment of sin, since he makes it a supererogatory work voluntarily done, in consequence of which it is‘fitting’that forgiveness should be bestowed on sinners.... Yet his theory served to hand down to later theologians the great idea of the objective atonement.”
(e) It is defective in holding to a merely external transfer of the merit of Christ's work, while it does not clearly state the internal ground of that transfer, in the union of the believer with Christ.
This needed supplement, namely, the doctrine of the Union of the Believer with Christ, was furnished by Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars 3, quæs. 8. The Anselmic theory is Romanist in its tendency, as the theory next to be mentioned is Protestant in its tendency. P. S. Moxom asserts that salvation is not by substitution, but by incorporation. We prefer to say that salvation is by substitution, but that the substitution is by incorporation. Incorporation involves substitution, and another's pain inures to my account. Christ being incorporate with humanity, all the exposures and liabilities of humanity fell upon him. Simon, Reconciliation by Incarnation, is an attempt to unite the two elements of the doctrine.Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 182-189—“As Anselm represents it, Christ's death is not ours in any such sense that we can enter into it. Bushnell justly charges that it leaves no moral dynamic in the Cross.”For criticism of Anselm, see John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:172-193: Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, III, 2:230-241; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:70 sq.; Baur, Dogmengeschichte, 2:416sq.; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 2:273-286; Dale, Atonement, 279-292; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 196-199; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 176-178.
This needed supplement, namely, the doctrine of the Union of the Believer with Christ, was furnished by Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars 3, quæs. 8. The Anselmic theory is Romanist in its tendency, as the theory next to be mentioned is Protestant in its tendency. P. S. Moxom asserts that salvation is not by substitution, but by incorporation. We prefer to say that salvation is by substitution, but that the substitution is by incorporation. Incorporation involves substitution, and another's pain inures to my account. Christ being incorporate with humanity, all the exposures and liabilities of humanity fell upon him. Simon, Reconciliation by Incarnation, is an attempt to unite the two elements of the doctrine.
Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 182-189—“As Anselm represents it, Christ's death is not ours in any such sense that we can enter into it. Bushnell justly charges that it leaves no moral dynamic in the Cross.”For criticism of Anselm, see John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:172-193: Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, III, 2:230-241; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:70 sq.; Baur, Dogmengeschichte, 2:416sq.; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 2:273-286; Dale, Atonement, 279-292; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 196-199; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 176-178.