Satisfying God’s honour and justice
Satisfying God’s honour and justice
If the early Greek Fathers represented the cross primarily as a ‘satisfaction’ of the devil, in the sense of being the ransom-price demanded by him and paid to him, and the early Latin Fathers saw it as a satisfaction of God’s law, a fresh approach was made by Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century, who in his Cur Deus Homo? made a systematic exposition of the cross as a satisfaction of God’s offended honour. His book was ‘epoch-making in the whole history of our doctrine’, wrote R. S. Franks, ‘in that it for the first time in a thoroughgoing and consistent way applies to the elucidation of the subject the conceptions of satisfaction and merit’.12 James Denney went further and called it ‘the truest and greatest book on the atonement that has ever been written’.13
Anselm was a godly Italian, who first settled in Normandy, and then in 1093 following the Norman Conquest was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. He has been described as the first representative of medieval ‘scholasticism’, which was an attempt to reconcile philosophy and theology, Aristotelian logic and biblical revelation. Although he included in his writings a number of biblical quotations, however, and referred to Holy Scripture as ‘a firm foundation’, his overriding concern was to be ‘agreeable to reason’ (ii.xi). As his imaginary interlocutor Boso put it, ‘the way by which you lead me is so walled in by reasoning on each side that I do not seem able to turn out of it either to the right hand or the left’ (ii.ix).
In Cur Deus Homo?, Anselm’s great treatise on the relationship between the incarnation and the atonement, he agrees that the devil needed to be overcome, but rejects the patristic ransom-theories on the ground that ‘God owed nothing to the devil but punishment’ (ii.xix). Instead, man owed something to God, and this is the debt which needed to be repaid. For Anselm defines sin as ‘not rendering to God what is his due’ (i.xi), namely the submission of our entire will to his. To sin is, therefore, to ‘take away from God what is his own’, which means to steal from him and so to dishonour him. If anybody imagines that God can simply forgive us in the same way that we are to forgive others, he has not yet considered the seriousness of sin (i.xxi). Being an inexcusable disobedience of God’s known will, sin dishonours and insults him, and ‘nothing is less tolerable...than that the creature should take away from the Creator the honour due to him, and not repay what he takes away’ (i.xiii). God cannot overlook this. ‘It is not proper for God to pass by sin thus unpunished’ (i.xii). It is more than improper; it is impossible. ‘If it is not becoming to God to do anything unjustly or irregularly, it is not within the scope of his liberty or kindness or will to let go unpunished the sinner who does not repay to God what he has taken away’ (i.xii). ‘God upholds nothing more justly than he doth the honour of his own dignity’ (i.xiii).
So what can be done? If we are ever to be forgiven, we must repay what we owe. Yet we are incapable of doing this, either for ourselves or for other people. Our present obedience and good works cannot make satisfaction for our sins, since these are required of us anyway. So we cannot save ourselves. Nor can any other human being save us, since ‘one who is a sinner cannot justify another sinner’ (i.xxiii). Hence the dilemma with which Book i ends: ‘man the sinner owes to God, on account of sin, what he cannot repay, and unless he repays it he cannot be saved’ (i.xxv).
Near the beginning of Book ii, the only possible way out of the human dilemma is unfolded: ‘there is no-one...who can make this satisfaction except God himself....But no-one ought to make it except man; otherwise man does not make satisfaction.’ Therefore, ‘it is necessary that one who is God-man should make it’ (ii.vi). A being who is God and not man, or man and not God, or a mixture of both and therefore neither man nor God, would not qualify. ‘It is needful that the very same Person who is to make this satisfaction be perfect God and perfect man, since no-one can do it except one who is truly God, and no-one ought to do it except one who is truly man’ (ii.vii). This leads Anselm to introduce Christ. He was (and is) a unique Person, since in him ‘God the Word and man meet’ (ii.ix). He also performed a unique work, for he gave himself up to death – not as a debt (since he was sinless and therefore under no obligation to die) but freely for the honour of God. It was also reasonable that man, ‘who by sinning stole himself away from God as completely as he possibly could do so, should, in making satisfaction, surrender himself to God as completely as he can do so’, namely by his voluntary self-offering unto death. Serious as human sin is, yet the life of the God-man was so good, so exalted and so precious that its offering in death ‘outweighs the number and greatness of all sins’ (ii.xiv), and due reparation has been made to the offended honour of God.
The greatest merits of Anselm’s exposition are that he perceived clearly the extreme gravity of sin (as a wilful rebellion against God in which the creature affronts the majesty of his Creator), the unchanging holiness of God (as unable to condone any violation of his honour), and the unique perfections of Christ (as the God-man who voluntarily gave himself up to death for us). In some places, however, his scholastic reasoning took him beyond the boundaries of the biblical revelation, as when he speculated whether Christ’s payment was exactly what sinners owed or more, and whether the number of redeemed humans would exceed the number of fallen angels. Moreover, his whole presentation reflects the feudal culture of his age, in which society was rigidly stratified, each person stood on the dignity which had been accorded him, the ‘proper’ or ‘becoming’ conduct of inferiors to superiors (and especially to the king) was laid down, breaches of this code were punished, and all debts must be honourably discharged.
When God is portrayed, however, in terms reminiscent of a feudal overlord who demands honour and punishes dishonour, it is questionable whether this picture adequately expresses the ‘honour’ which is indeed due to God alone. We must certainly remain dissatisfied whenever the atonement is presented as a necessary satisfaction either of God’s ‘law’ or of God’s ‘honour’ in so far as these are objectified as existing in some way apart from him.
It was during the twelfth century that three distinct interpretations of the death of Christ were clarified. Anselm (died 1109), as we have seen, emphasized the objective satisfaction to the honour of God which had been paid by the God-man Jesus, while his younger contemporary Peter Abelard of Paris (died 1142) (Abelard’s teaching is considered in greater detail on pp.252ff.) emphasized the subjective moral influence which the cross has on believers. Meanwhile, Bernard of Clairvaux (died 1153), the mystic theologian, continued to teach that a ransom-price had been paid to the devil. It was the Anselmian view, however, which prevailed, for careful students of Scripture were unable to eliminate from it the notion of satisfaction. So the ‘scholastics’ or ‘schoolmen’ (so-called because they taught in the recently founded medieval European ‘schools’, i.e. universities) further developed Anselm’s position – both the ‘Thomists’ who were Dominicans looking to Thomas Aquinas (died 1274) and the ‘Scotists’ who were Franciscans looking to Duns Scotus (died 1308). Although these two groups of ‘schoolmen’ differed in details, they both taught that the demands of divine justice were satisfied by Christ’s cross.
With the Reformation, and the Reformers’ emphasis on justification, it is understandable that they stressed the justice of God and the impossibility of a way of salvation which did not satisfy his justice. For, as Calvin wrote in the Institutes, ‘there is a perpetual and irreconcilable disagreement between righteousness and unrighteousness’ (II.xvi.3). It was necessary therefore for Christ ‘to undergo the severity of God’s vengeance, to appease his wrath and satisfy his just judgment’.14 Thomas Cranmer in his ‘Homily of Salvation’ explained that three things had to go together in our justification: on God’s part ‘his great mercy and grace’, on Christ’s part ‘the satisfaction of God’s justice’, and on our part ‘true and lively faith’. He concluded the first part of the homily: ‘It pleased our heavenly Father, of his infinite mercy, without any our desert or deserving, to prepare for us the most precious jewels of Christ’s body and blood, whereby our ransom might be fully paid, the law fulfilled, and his justice fully satisfied.’15
This same teaching can be found in Luther’s works. After his death, however, the Protestant ‘scholastics’ systematized the doctrine of the death of Christ into a double satisfaction, namely of God’s law and of God’s justice. God’s law was satisfied by Christ’s perfect obedience in his life, and God’s justice by his perfect sacrifice for sin, bearing its penalty in his death. This is rather too neat a formulation, however. Since God’s law is an expression of his justice, the two cannot be precisely separated.
Then was God’s concern to satisfy the ‘moral order’? This concept, like that of ‘law’, is an expression of the justice or moral character of God. It is perhaps at once more general and more broad than ‘law’, since it embraces not only moral standards but a built-in system of sanctions. It rests on the belief that the holy God who rules the world rules it morally. He has established an order in which the good is to be approved and rewarded, while the evil is to be condemned and punished. To approve the evil or to condemn the good would subvert this moral order. In such a world the unprincipled forgiveness of sins would be equally subversive.
The beginnings of this concept in relation to the death of Christ may be seen in Hugo Grotius (died 1645), the Dutch lawyer and statesman, who deplored Christian controversies and divisions, and dreamt of a reunited, reformed Christendom. His understanding of the atonement was something of a compromise between Anselm and Abelard. Sometimes he taught an almost Abelardian view of the subjective influence of the cross, which leads sinners to repentance and so enables God to forgive them. Usually, however, he preserved the objectivity of the cross, and saw it as a satisfaction of God’s justice. In addition, he had a jurist’s concern for public morality, both the preventing of crime and the upholding of law. He saw God neither as the offended party, nor as creditor, nor even as judge, but as the Supreme Moral Governor of the world. So public justice was more important to him than retributive justice, and it was this in particular which he believed was satisfied at the cross. To be sure, Christ died for our sins in our place. But what part or office did God occupy in this? he asked. ‘The right of inflicting punishment does not belong to the injured party as injured’ but rather ‘to the ruler as ruler’.16 Again, ‘to inflict punishment...is only the prerogative of the ruler as such,...for example, of a father in a family, of a king in a state, of God in the universe’ (p.51). So Grotius developed his ‘rectoral’ or ‘governmental’ interpretation of the cross. He taught that God ordained it ‘for the order of things and for the authority of his own law’ (p.137). He was preoccupied with the public vindication of God’s justice. ‘God was unwilling to pass over so many sins, and so great sins, without a distinguished example’, that is, of his serious displeasure with sin (p.106). ‘God has...most weighty reasons for punishing’, but chief among them in Grotius’ mind was the resolve to uphold the established order of law, so that we might ‘estimate the magnitude and multitude of sins’ (p.107).
Several twentieth-century theologians have taken up Grotius’ vision of God as ‘the moral governor of the world’ and developed it further in relation to the atonement. P. T. Forsyth, for example, wrote of ‘this cosmic order of holiness’, and added: ‘God’s moral order demands atonement wherever moral ideas are taken with final seriousness, and man’s conscience re-echoes the demand.’17
Another example is B. B. Warfield, who drew attention to the universal sense of guilt among human beings. It is a ‘deep moral self-condemnation which is present as a primary factor in all truly religious experience. It cries out for satisfaction. No moral deduction can persuade it that forgiveness of sins is a necessary element in the moral order of the world. It knows on the contrary that indiscriminate forgiveness of sin would be precisely the subversion of the moral order of the world....It cries out for expiation.’18
But the most striking statement of the inviolability of the moral order has been made by Emil Brunner in his famous book The Mediator. Sin is more than ‘an attack on God’s honour’, he wrote (p.444); it is an assault on the moral world order which is an expression of God’s moral will.
The law of his divine Being, on which all the law and order in the world is based,...the logical and reliable character of all that happens, the validity of all standards, of all intellectual, legal and moral order, the Law itself, in its most profound meaning, demands the divine reaction, the divine concern about sin, the divine resistance to this rebellion and this breach of order....If this were not true, then there would be no seriousness in the world at all; there would be no meaning in anything, no order, no stability; the world order would fall into ruins; chaos and desolation would be supreme. All order in the world depends upon the inviolability of his (sc. God’s) honour, upon the certitude that those who rebel against him will be punished (pp.444–445).
Later Brunner drew an analogy between natural law and moral law, asserting that neither can be infringed with impunity. Forgiveness without atonement would be a contravention of logic, law and order more serious and vast ‘than the suspension of the laws of nature’ (p.447). How is forgiveness possible, then, if ‘punishment is the expression of the divine law and order, of the inviolability of the divine order of the world’ (p.449)? Since law is ‘the expression of the will of the Lawgiver, of the personal God’ (p.459), then, if it is broken, it cannot and does not heal by itself. Sin has caused a ‘break in the world order’, a disorder so deep-seated that reparation or restitution is necessary, that is, ‘Atonement’ (p.485).