Father Thomas Hopko, the former Dean of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, relates an unusual anecdote. He describes sitting in on the Lesbian Christology session at the American Academy of Religion, where he heard a scholar severely criticize the notion that God the Father would need to deliberately punish and beat God the Son to satisfy the Father’s own appetite for wrath. The presenter shouted: “This is absolute madness!” Hopko remarks how he wanted to shout out, “I agree with you!” The story can be heard at the eleven minute mark in Hopko’s characteristically forceful lecture (available for free though the indispensable AFR), entitled Understanding the Cross of Christ (ht: Siedell).
In the lecture, Hopko is careful to point out that the satisfaction theology he is criticizing is a debasement of St. Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo; but its vulgarized, popular form requires his addressing the caricature. Hopko admits there is an inescapably substitutionary aspect to the Atonement – but the East, he insists, never sees it in terms of punishment. As Hopko would surely admit, the lecture is only a beginning, and leaves many questions unanswered. For most American Christians, this is unfamiliar turf.
If only the Orthodox view of the Atonement could be explored further, say, in a symposium with some heavyweight theologians and Biblical scholars. But wait! Just such a symposium has been arranged, put on by Princeton’s vibrant Florovsky Society entitled On the Tree of the Cross: The Patristic Doctrine of the Atonement. Register soon, as it’s happening in Princeton next Friday and Saturday, Feb. 11 and 12th, 2011.
Needless to say, the Atonement is a mystery best viewed through multiple window panes. Try, for example, the theology window at the Princeton University Chapel which includes not only Aquinas, Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards, but Paul and Athanasius as well. If such local beauty is not enough to draw you to the symposium, remember that in Princeton, First Things readers always drink free. Just tell any bartender you’re a subscriber. I may be lying about that.
February 2nd, 2011 | 5:06 pm
Please read “The Infinite Atonement” by Tad R. Callister.
February 2nd, 2011 | 5:17 pm
And by only addressing the caricature, he leaves one with the impression that somehow Anselm started the whole punitive idea of atonement, when in fact he rejected punishment as an alternative in the Cur Deus Homo. He says that this is “the popular understanding of what he [Anselm] said,” but unfortunately leaves open what Anselm actually said, thus perpetuating the common theological slander against Anselm instead of correcting it.
February 2nd, 2011 | 5:32 pm
For those who cannot get to Princeton, Gary Anderson’s book “Sin, a History” has a few pages on Cardinal Ratzinger’s correction of misinterpretations of St Anselm’s teaching.
February 2nd, 2011 | 6:36 pm
The Infinite Atonement is a Mormon view of the atonement…just as an FYI
February 2nd, 2011 | 6:58 pm
The problems you’re identifying are exactly the questions I’m hoping the symposium might help clarify.
First Things readers will also be familiar with the Orthodox theologian David Hart. In The Beauty of the Infinite (p. 360 ff.), Hart convincingly defends Anselm at length.
Incidentally, I’ve foolishly attempted to harmonize Hart and the Protestant theologian Karl Barth back at the ranch.
February 2nd, 2011 | 9:42 pm
Not Your Grandmother’s Atonement. Maybe not, but the Orthodox view is the view of the ancient Fathers, preserved with alteration or embellishment. I haven’t read Hart’s “Beauty of the Infinite” (although I now intend to read it ASAP), but I can assure you that Anselm’s “innovations” are held in the deepest contempt by Orthodox Christianity. In his writings he clearly states that he is unsatisfied with the Patristic view of the Atonement and is therefore setting out to change it. We do not find it surprising that Anselm’s “improvements” fit the prejudices of his class and country perfectly.
February 2nd, 2011 | 9:42 pm
Forgive me, WITHOUT alteration or embellishment.
February 2nd, 2011 | 11:33 pm
If Orthodox theologians hold Anselm in contempt, that at least gives them something in common with most Protestant, and a few Catholic, theologians nowadays. Everyone hates Anselm.
Actually, Anselm only rejects the ransom theory of the atonement inasmuch as it assumes that the devil has rights over humans (which impugns the power of God), but there are multiple theories of atonement from the Patristic period and he doesn’t reject any of the other ones. He does not actually mention the ransom theory as a Patristic inheritance. In fact, he says at the very beginning (CDH I.1) “I grant that what has been said about the matter by the holy Fathers ought to be sufficient, but I will nevertheless undertake to make plain inquiries what God shall see fit to reveal to me about this subject.” As Hart points out, many of the elements of Anselm’s ideas have direct parallels in Athanasius; Hart also criticizes Lossky’s superficial interpretation of Anselm. Part of the problem is that we don’t know how much of the Patristic heritage Anselm directly encountered, versus bowdlerized versions, though Giles Gasper has made an attempt to reconstruct his sources. The problem with contempt is that it often leads to easy dismissals or superficial readings of things, as is often the case with Anselm, instead of delving deep into his logic and vision of God. Few theologians nowadays of any denomination have read the CDH with the care and attention it deserves.
February 3rd, 2011 | 2:22 am
I think you make a good point in wondering how much of the Patristic writings Anselm actually encountered. He was, after all, basically in the middle of nowhere. Indeed, a similar defense can be made for the errors of Pelagius, another Briton whose contact with the Fathers was limited by an accident of geography. That being said, Amselm’s notion of God’s honor being offended can be found nowhere in the writings of the Fathers (and certainly not in the writings of Saint Athanasius). He was faced with a heritage of Christian thinking focused squarely on a vision of Christ as a victor over Satan and death, the two enemies no man can conquer on their own. The difference between these two views is critical my friend, and goes to the very heart of the chasm between East and West. We see God as a loving Father who sent His Son to rescue us. To our way of thinking the Western view (Protestant as well as Roman- they’re your children after all) is a vision of an angry, offended God demanding satisfaction for a series of infractions lest He condemn us all to an eternity in Hades.
February 3rd, 2011 | 11:50 am
Peter, I appreciate the friendliness of your reply. Fortunately, there is no angry God in Anselm, which is a calumny advanced by later 19th and early 20th century German theologians (mostly Harnack). Instead, the controlling image of the treatise is that of a craftsman whose most important creation (humanity) has gone awry and has to be restored (CDH I.4). The question that Anselm seeks to answer is how God can restore the beauty of his creation while letting humans participate in its restoration. Anselm worries that God’s justice may leave no room for God’s mercy, but by the end of the argument he believes that he has shown that God’s mercy and justice are both greater than anything we can imagine (CDH II.20). Anselm rejects any notion that God’s punishment would restore creation, since that would leave us short of what God created us for – life with God. Instead, the notion of satisfaction is meant to restore our obedience to God and thus the order of the universe. Anselm is also clear that nothing we can do can actually change God’s honor (CDH I.15), instead the real honor that we have denied is that of our own honor, by disobeying God we have lost our exalted status in heaven.
So, no angry God, just one who wants to restore us (or rescue us, to use your helpful language) to our rightful place in heaven.
February 3rd, 2011 | 2:41 pm
Fortunately, there are ways to reconcile Western and Eastern views of the atonement without abandoning divine anger and punishment or the restoration of creation.
February 4th, 2011 | 12:36 am
So much to be said on this topic, but just a couple of comments:
We need an account of the atonement that reflects the reality of God as both love and light, that is, in which the atonement expresses both the love and wrath of God, rather than playing them off against each other as some commenters have above.
Isaiah 53 certainly portrays the Servant as bearing the sins of the people and being punished by God for them, and this passage certainly informs the NT writers’ understanding of the meaning of Jesus death.
February 7th, 2011 | 1:39 pm
Whenever one assumes that salvation was not possible without a sacrificial killing of the innocent Messiah, one cannot help but set “the love and wrath of God” against each other. So even people who approach atonement with the best of intentions (like Anselm) end up with some version of the love of God paying off the wrath of God. He uses a judicial device from his society, satisfactio, which is the suffering of some public dishonor as a way of paying a penalty or restoring the honor of someone who had been offended (Gorringe, God’s Just Vengeance, 88). Anselm says “the honor taken away must be repaid” (CDH 1.13). This cannot help but be understood as a kind of pay-off: love pays what justice requires, and so, two aspects of God are set against each other.
February 7th, 2011 | 10:15 pm
We are fortunate to have an expert on atonement theory join the discussion in the person of Dr. Finlan and I am grateful for his comments. However, I would suggest that if we read into the CDH an idea that Anselm is playing God’s mercy and justice off of each other, then we are probably wrong (and if my comments gave this impression, that was my mistake). When he gives his concept of God in the Proslogion (1.9) he is quite clear that God’s mercy and justice are the same thing, “You are merciful precisely because You are supremely just.” A reading of the CDH that violates this tenet is likely to be wrong. And the concord between justice and mercy is the judgment that he comes up with at the end of CDH at 2.20. If he appears to be playing them off against each other, it is an appearance for the sake of the argument; in the end they are the same.
Additionally, I think Gorringe has the wrong model of satisfaction in mind. Guy Mansini (Revue Benedictine, vol. 97) has, quite expertly, demonstrated that the source of Anselm’s concept of satisfaction is the Rule of St. Benedict (people often forget that Anselm was a Benedictine monk for 30 years before he became archbishop at Canterbury). The goal of satisfaction is not to appease anyone’s wrath, but rather to allow the one who has done wrong to restore the order of things; it is not a passive means of atonement, but an active means by which one, to use contemporary language, makes things right.
I am grateful for this discussion!
February 9th, 2011 | 2:10 pm
Baconboy, thanks for your challenging and dignified rejoinder. You know Anselm very well. Again I would say that Anselm is unaware of his own contradictory assumptions. Several times he says that we can’t REALLY damage God’s honor, yet his reasoning about how the death of Christ saves people is entirely based on it being a transaction that restores God’s honor, and it certainly looks like the judicial penalty of _satisfactio_, found in his society. “Everyone who sins ought to render back to God the honour he has taken away” CDH 1.11. “. . . by making satisfaction for sin; or else God subdues him, though unwilling, by tormenting him. . . . man, by sinning, steals what is God’s” CDH 1.14.
Yes, it is making good again . . . by paying a penalty. This is not really forgiveness, by the way. Real forgiveness does not demand payment of any penalty.
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