Why God Man?

The early Church fathers struggled to explain exactly how salvation worked; that is, what was the actual way that Christ's death and resurrection achieved atonement for Adam's Original Sin? There were different theories of atonement, but they were not satisfactory for various reasons.

It was Anselm of Bec (also called "of Canterbury" when he became archbishop there) who in the late 11th century provided an explanation of why God had to become a man for salvation in his treatise Cur Deus Homo (literally "Why God Man?"). His explanation came to be called the satisfaction theory of atonement.

Previous theories of atonement suggested that the souls that needed saving were out of reach because satan (who held them in hell) had some kind of right or authority to keep them because of Adam's transgression. This idea made no sense to Anselm; God could not "owe" anything to satan. Anselm's view was likely influenced by the contemporaneous feudal system. In it, loyalty and duty were owed to your lord. Transgressing against your lord was unthinkable, but in those cases where it happened, you owed restitution, the restoration of what has been taken from the lord.

Original Sin, therefore, was not an act that put man in satan's power; it was a transgression against the Lord, and restitution was owed to Him, not satan. We humans owed God a debt of honor. As Anselm writes in Chapter I of Cur Deus Homo:

This is the debt which man and angel owe to God, and no one who pays this debt commits sin; but every one who does not pay it sins. This is justice, or uprightness of will, which makes a being just or upright in heart, that is, in will; and this is the sole and complete debt of honor which we owe to God, and which God requires of us. [link to translation]

Adam had failed in "uprightness of will" and transgressed. Restitution needed to be made.

How was one to do that? Man is inadequate to make restitution to the divine; we did not have that capacity in us. What was needed for divine transgression was divine restitution. For that to happen, a man was needed who was more than a man; hence, the Incarnation.

Through the birth of Jesus, there now existed someone whose divine essence gave him the supererogatory ability to "pay back" to God more than a simple man could. His death is not the only part of the restitution, however. As Aquinas later stresses, the Passion—especially the suffering and scourging he experiences prior to Crucifixion—was especially needed to pay back the honor that was taken from God by Adam and even more.*

Anselm seems to apply this salvation universally, although some later writers suggested that it only applied to some individuals.

Anselm completed this c.1098, while in exile. Why was the Archbishop of Canterbury in exile? Well, England's King William "Rufus" was the reason. William had seized all his lands, and their differences of opinion on lay investiture and the church's independence made England unsafe for Anselm, even though he retained his title. William was about to die in a suspicious hunting accident, however, and Anselm's situation could change. Could. We'll talk about that tomorrow.

*In the film Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), immediately after the 39 lashes, the scene changes and the actor is seen all cleaned up in a radiant white robe with the triumphant strains of the title song playing. This moment reveals him truly as divine. It seems to me the director was familiar with the idea that it was this particular suffering that was the "turning point" in Christ's role in guaranteeing salvation.

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.