Theories of Atonement

Even during all the political troubles that Anselm of Bec was having with William Rufus because of Anselm's role as Archbishop of Canterbury, he was proving himself to be one of the sharpest minds of his century regarding theological writing. The prime example of this is the treatise he called Cur Deus Homo, or "Why God Human?" (sometimes translated for clarity sake as "Why God Became a Man). In it, he finally came up with a satisfactory explanation for the "mechanics" of how Christ's crucifixion and resurrection wiped out the effect of Adam's original sin and provided salvation for all mankind.

The early Church fathers had struggled with the topic of atonement and how it worked theologically. Since Adam, no human being could go to Heaven; they were all trapped in Hell with the Devil/Satan/Lucifer (and those were three different entities who were conflated over time, but I'm not going to get into that).

One idea was the "ransom theory of atonement." Augustine of Hippo explained it thusly:

The Redeemer came and the deceiver was overcome. What did our Redeemer do to our Captor? In payment for us He set the trap, His Cross, with His blood for bait. He [Satan] could indeed shed that blood; but he deserved not to drink it. By shedding the blood of One who was not his debtor, he was forced to release his debtors

The idea was that Satan could hold God's creations as captives and they needed ransoming, suggesting that Satan therefore had "rights" of ownership that had to be satisfied. This understandably bothered some people. Why didn't God just overpower Satan and take His people?

Irenaeus in the 1st century talked about the "recapitulation theory of atonement." In it, Jesus was a second Adam, succeeding where Adam had fallen. So Christ's life is like a "do over" of some kind, and humanity is re-set back to the ability to achieve salvation through free will, not stuck because of Adam's failure. Why didn't God just forgive the original sin, if he was going to forgive it after Christ went through those motions?

There is also the "penal substitution theory." This is a much later development, and promoted by Martin Luther during the Reformation. The penal substitution theory of atonement says that Christ, having voluntarily given himself up as a sacrifice, "took the hit" in place of sinners. This treated Christ as a "whipping boy," which was a profession historically in which a boy would be raised alongside a prince and made to suffer corporal punishment when the prince was a bad boy, because it wasn't appropriate to beat a prince. (It was hoped that the prince, seeing the harsh punishment meted out, would feel bad and reform his ways.) "He died for your sins" is oft quoted in this context, especially by Protestant groups.

Anselm was not comfortable that the ideas of "ransom" or "recapitulation" were proper solutions, and so decided he needed to offer his own explanation. He was influenced by his time, specifically (as Irenaeus and Augustine would not have been) by the by-then-well-developed feudal system. Anselm's solution is called the "satisfaction theory of atonement." I'll explain it tomorrow.

Medieval Christian Vegetarianism

The modern Christian—any modern reader, in fact—might never have thought of vegetarianism as a practice with a Biblical or Classical history. When I think of a Christ-era menu, the story of the feeding of the 5000 with loaves and fishes (John 6:1-14) comes to mind, as well as lamb at a Seder.

Despite hanging out with fishermen, however, and the supposed ubiquity of a fish-based diet, there was a strong strain of vegetarianism in the early Church. It did not originate with Christianity:

As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love. [Pythagoras]

There is a passage in Luke, however, that says this:

34 “But watch yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a trap. [Luke 21:34, English Standard Version

Nothing unusual there. The King James Version uses the phrase "surfeiting, and drunkenness"; the New International Version calls it "Carousing, drunkenness and the anxieties of life."

If we go back further, however, we find something interesting in the Curetonian Gospels. William Cureton in 1848 published a set of manuscripts from a Syrian monastery in Lower Egypt. These Gospels were in Aramaic and the manuscript dated (it was theorized) from the 5th century CE, a copy of a 2nd century original. It is a version that was never translated to Greek. This very early version has a different reading of Luke 21:34, namely:

Be on guard, so that your hearts do not become heavy with the eating of flesh and with the intoxication of wine and with the anxiety of the world, and that day come upon you suddenly; for as a snare it will come upon all who dwell upon the surface of the earth.

Ebionites—early Judaeo-Christian Gnostics—maintained that Jesus, James the Just, and John the Baptist were vegetarians. Irenaeus and Eusebius, early Christian writers, discuss the feeding of the 5000 and mention bread but do not mention fish. Matthew 16:9 has Jesus saying to the Apostles "Do you not remember the five loaves for the five thousand, and how many baskets you gathered?" No fish are mentioned.

It would appear to some that fish were added to the original story, but less-than-meticulous editing forgot to change Jesus' later reference to the event.

What changed? Was there a deliberate attempt to suppress the idea of vegetarianism, and if so, why? I don't believe it was an economical decision to avoid upsetting some early Medieval butchers' guild. We will never know exactly why things were altered to add meat eating (maybe it would be more accurate to say "animal eating"?) to the Christian diet. Maybe it was an attempt to make conversion more palatable to the Roman world? Maybe the idea was to adapt Christian ideas to a European diet?

That last theory, of course, assumes that the European diet was meat-based, which is a good thought to set up the next post ... tomorrow.

Predestination

Ephesians 1:11 says "In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will." The Old and New Testaments as well have other passages that declare God's will as the driving force behind all actions and events.

Augustine of Hippo (354 - 430 CE) was fine with this. He maintained that God had foreknowledge of whether individuals would deserve heaven or hell. If God is omniscient, and omniscience includes knowledge of what is to come, then God knows what people will do. He also explained the sin of Pride as thinking that we are the ones who choose God rather than God's grace that empowers the initial act of faith. Some scholars claim that Augustine believed in "double predestination," the term that is used to explain that God chooses those who will be saved and those who will be damned.

(This seems to argue against the doctrine of Free Will, that human beings choose to do good or do bad, and hence are responsible for the ultimate fate of their souls. In my (Roman Catholic) youth, we were taught that God's knowledge does not "lock us in" to a certain path. It was explained as foreordination: God simply knows ahead of time the choices we will make.)

Of the three main Jewish sects in the 1st century CE, the Romano-Jewish historian Josephus (c.37 - c.100) wrote that the Sadducees did not have any thoughts on predestination, but the Essenes and Pharisees felt God's providence ordered all human events. The Pharisees still believed that man could choose between right and wrong. We don't know how scholarly an interpretation this was by Josephus.

Pope Clement I (d.99 CE) wrote a letter to the Corinthians in which he appeared to express a predestinarian view of salvation.

Valentinus (c.100 - c.180 CE) believed it depended on what kind of nature you were born with, either good or bad or a mix of the two. A person born with good nature will be saved, with a bad nature will never be saved, with a mixture can go either way.

St. Irenaeus believed Valentinus' view was unfair, and that humans were free to choose salvation or not.

After Augustine, most arguments for or against predestination were based on agreeing with or refuting his explanations.

When the Middle Ages got well and truly underway, people like Gottschalk of Orbais (c.808 - 868) believed in the above mentioned double predestination. (I will say more about him tomorrow.)

Thomas Aquinas believed in free will, but also taught that God predestines certain people to a special closeness to God (called the beatific vision) based solely on God's own goodness.

William of Ockham (c.1287 - 1347) taught free will, but God predestines based on people's good works that He foresees.

The Cathars denied free will.

This is a subject on which there is likely never to be universal agreement.

That Gottschalk of Orbais really stirred things up when he weighed in. Stay tuned.

Quartodecimans & Easter

This blog has touched on the debate over the date of Easter in the past, but the truth is that the early Church went through different phases before settling on the date of Easter.

Because the Last Supper was a seder, commemorating Passover, early celebrations of Easter coincided with that date. Passover took place on the 14th of the month. The early Church historian Eusebius tells us that the dioceses of Asia at the time of Pope Victor (pope from 189-199) celebrated Easter on the 14th day of the moon, regardless of the day of the week on which it fell.

This bothered some ecclesiastics and Christian scholars. Synods were held (Eusebius says) that agreed and decreed that the Easter celebration should be held on the Lord's Day, a Sunday. Some, however, refused to give up the tradition of celebrating on the 14th. They were called Quartodecimans [fourteenth-ers]. St. Polycarp (69-155), for example, came to Rome to discuss his preference for the date that he believed had been established by St. John the Apostle; he refused the command of Pope Anicetus (pope c.153-168) to change to Sunday.

Quartodecimans were tolerated for awhile,  by popes like Anicetus at least. Pope Victor excommunicated the Asiatic dioceses, an action that got him criticism for unnecessary harshness from St. Irenæus.

Agreeing that Easter should be celebrated on a Sunday did not settle any debate; which Sunday was crucial. The Council of Nicaea (already mentioned several times in DM) tackled this issue. Syrian Christians always celebrated Easter on the Sunday following the 14th of the month, but other Christian dioceses calculated the date in their own ways. Antioch, for instance, based their date on the local Jewish observances, but had let slide a guideline that the 14th should be the month after the vernal equinox. Alexandria, however, demanded Easter Sunday be after the equinox—March 21st at the time.

Most native English speakers, if they know about the controversy of the Easter date debate, have heard of the Synod of Whitby in 664, at which Roman Christianity and Celtic/Irish Christianity fought it out over topics such as the date of Easter and the style of monastic tonsures. Whitby established for the English-speaking world that Easter would fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon (the 14th of the lunar month) after the vernal equinox. If the full moon is a Sunday, Easter takes place on the following Sunday. Easter can be as early as March 22 or as late as April 25.

The Eastern Orthodox Church calculates differently. They had been using March 21st as their starting point, but followed a guideline that prevented Easter from ever falling on or preceding the same day as Passover. Orthodox Easter can fall between April 5 and May 8. In the 21st century, the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches tried to reconcile their different dates using more recent astronomical data for their calculations. They still calculate in different ways, but there is greater chance that the dates will coincide, such as in 2001 when April 15th was Easter for both Churches.

There. That was easy.