Anselm on the Doctrine of Atonement

By John D. Hannah

[John D. Hannah, Associate Professor of Historical Theology, Dallas Theological Seminary.]

The spotlight of the biblical record unmistakably focuses on Mount Calvary where the Son of God was ignominiously placarded on a cruel Roman instrument of justice. The subject of the death of Christ has been the concern of Christian scholars repeatedly throughout the history of the church. A monumental treatise on the subject of Christ’s death has been given to the church through St. Anselm (1033–1109), the famed archbishop of Canterbury, in his Cur Deus Homo. Mozley states, “If any one Christian work, outside the canon of the New Testament, may be described as ‘epochmaking,’ it is Cur Deus Homo.”[1] However, the opinions scholars hold concerning Anselm’s concept of Christ’s death are widely discordant. James Denney calls the work “the truest and greatest book on the Atonement that has ever been written.”[2] Leitch stated that “somewhere, in and around Anselm’s solution, we must find our own solution.”[3] And yet Harnack feels free to say that “there are so many defects that this theory is entirely untenable.”[4] With such a wide disparity of opinion within the matrix of the meaning of the most important event in human history, it behooves Christians to study it with the utmost frequency and diligence.

Cur Deus Homo is a two-part dialogue between Anselm and a disciple named Boso. Anselm seeks to explain the rationale for the Incarnation which he finds in the Cross. It is not a treatise to prove the doctrine of the Atonement, for reason cannot attain to faith, but it is an attempt to show those who already accept it that it is properly rational. “They make this request, not to attain to faith by way of reason, but to find delight in the understanding and contemplation of what they already believe; and also to be, so far as possible, ready always to satisfy everyone that asks them a reason of that hope which is in us.”[5]

Anselm’s Concept of the Atonement

Using the scholastic method of dialogue, Anselm seeks to explain the rationale for the Incarnation of Christ. “By what necessity and for what reason did God, although He is almighty, take on the lowliness and weakness of human nature, to restore it?”[6] For Anselm and Boso the ultimate reason for the God-man is captured by a contemporary scholar: “The crucial significance of the cradle of Bethlehem lies in its place in the sequence of steps down that led the Son of God to the cross of Calvary, and we do not understand it till we see it in this context.”[7] Anselm’s soteriological interpretation of Christology can be set forth under the rubric of four questions.

What Is Man’s Ultimate Religious Duty?

Anselm, through the prompting of Boso, conceives that man’s religious duty is to “be subject to the will of God,”[8] the will of God being conformity to His character. “To sin, then, is nothing else than not to render to God His due…. A person who does not render God this honor due Him, takes from God what is His and dishonors God, and this is to commit sin.”[9] The violation of religious duty is a blatant disruption of the honor of His dignity which absolute justice demands that He maintain. Anselm is clear at this point. “Likewise, if there is nothing greater or better than God, there is nothing more just than for the supreme justice, which is the same as God Himself, to preserve His honor in the order of the universe.”[10]

Harnack summarizes this point:

Every rational creature owes to God entire subjection to His will. That is the only honor which God demands. He who pays it is righteous; he who pays it not sins; sin, indeed, is nothing else than the dishonoring of God by withholding from Him His own. This robbery God cannot tolerate; He must defend His honour.[11]

What Are the Consequences of Man’s Failure?

The failure of mankind to maintain uprightness of character and therefore his failure to honor God is traced to the account of the Fall in Genesis 3.[12] There man’s initial act of rebellion plunged the race into a humanly impossible case; man must either pay the debt for dishonoring God, which Anselm claims is impossible, or suffer the separation. Of man’s utter inability, Anselm writes:

Man, while strong and potentially immortal, easily gives in to the devil, so as to sin, for which reason he justly incurred the penalty of having to die. Now when he is weak and mortal by his own doing, he should overcome the devil by the hardship of death, so as to be without sin entirely. This he cannot do, as long as, due to the wound of the first sin, he is conceived and born in sin.[13]

The enormous burden of personal dishonor is so great that Boso is forced to exclaim, “This thought is a very crushing one.”[14]

It might be logically argued at this point that God, being perfect in mercy and compassion, ought simply to forgive without reparation. This issue is raised by Boso who says, “Does God need to descend from heaven?”[15] Anselm replies that a forgiveness based on mercy alone (that is, to the neglect of justice) does injustice to the character of God. If God forgave apart from just cause, He would violate His character and cease to be God. Since that is utterly impossible, an absurd tautology, God cannot forgive through mercy alone, that is, He cannot forgive unconditionally and noninstrumentally. Anselm writes:

Let us go back and see whether it is fitting for God to remit sin out of mercy alone, without any payment for honor taken away from Him. To remit sin in such a way is the same as not to punish it. And since to deal justly with sin, without satisfaction, is the same as to punish it, then, if it is not punished, something inordinate is allowed to pass. It is, however, not seemly for God to let pass something inordinate in His kingdom. This incongruity even goes so far as to make injustice resemble God, for as God is subject to no law, neither would injustice be.[16]

Why Did God Provide Christ?

Anselm: What payment, then, will you make to God for your sin?

Boso: If, even when I am not in the state of sin, I owe Him myself and whatever I can do, in order to avoid sinning, I have nothing to offer Him in compensation for sin.

Anselm: What, then, will become of you? How can you be saved?[17]

Faced with the dilemma of satisfaction or punishment, with punishment being the only realistic consequence, Christ is put forth as the sinner’s substitute. Anselm begins by showing that God could not have miraculously created a sinless man after the similitude of Adam to be that satisfaction. Anselm argues the absolute necessity of the Incarnation: God could not spare “the ostensible ignominy of incarnation.”[18] If a man could effect the restoration of honor, mankind would be indebted to that creature, not God.

Do you not understand that, if any other person had redeemed man from eternal death, man would justly be considered his servant? But, if that were so, man would not at all have been restored to that dignity he would have had if he had not sinned. For he who was to be the servant of God alone and equal in all things to the good angels would be the servant of one who is not God and whom angels do not serve.[19]

Therefore, Anselm argues that the placation of wrath could only be effected by the God-man, and this would not be out of arbitrary choice but out of absolute necessity. The sinner’s substitute must be God in order to present a worthy sacrifice, and the substitute must be man in order to restore Adam’s fallen race since this was man’s obligation.

For anyone to be able to give something of his own to God which surpasses everything that is less than God, it is also necessary for him to be greater than everything that is not God. But there is nothing that surpasses everything that is not God but God Himself. But no one ought to make it but man. Otherwise it would not be man making the satisfaction. If then, as we agree, it is necessary that that heavenly city be completed from among men, and this cannot occur unless satisfaction we have spoken of before is made, and if no one but God can make that satisfaction and no one but man is obligated to make it, then it is necessary that a God-Man make it.[20]

Anselm then describes the needful sacrifice as the Chalcedonian Christ.

For no one can make the satisfaction unless he is truly God, and no one has the obligation unless he is truly man. While therefore, it is necessary to find a God-Man, with the integrity of both natures preserved, it is no less necessary that these two complete natures be united in one person—just as the body and rational soul are united in one man—because otherwise it is impossible for the same person to be perfect God and perfect man.[21]

How Could Christ’s Death Restore God’s Honor?

To Anselm, then, the obvious answer to this inquiry is that Christ came in His Incarnation to pay the sinner’s debt by dying the death of a substitute. “It is evident, then, that we have discovered Christ, whom we acknowledge as God and man, and as One who died for us.”[22] Boso then tells Anselm, “You very clearly established that the life of this man was so sublime, so precious, that it can suffice to pay what is owed for the sins of the whole world, and infinitely more.”[23]

How Does the Death of Christ Restore the Honor of God?

Anselm’s answer to this question is that the God-man offered a gift which He did not personally owe nor was obligated to present. The gift was His voluntary submission to death for the sake of justice. “There is nothing…better or more difficult for man to suffer for the honor of God voluntarily and without obligation, than death, and man absolutely cannot give himself more fully to God than when he commits himself to death for God’s honor.”[24] In that Christ died voluntarily, that is, apart from obligation, the results can be meritorious. Anselm exclaims, “He Himself, by His own free choice, underwent death, to save man,”[25] and Boso responds, “the impression is given that Christ bore death by the compulsion of obedience rather than by the choice of His own free Will.”[26]

Hopkins explains, “The justice of this man’s death assures the restoration of honor to God and the availability of salvation to all men.”[27]

At this point in the discussion Boso is still uncertain how Christ’s death restores honor to God, that is, how the death of Christ can cancel the entirety of man’s debt. Anselm replies that the infinite injustice done to Christ by being the Sin-bearer results in infinite merit, so much so that forgiveness can be extended.

Anselm: How great do you think is the goodness of that person, whose murder would be so evil?

Boso: If the measure of goodness of every good thing is the evil of its destruction, this man represents a good incomparably greater than evil of all sins which His murder unmeasureably surpasses.[28]

Thus to Anselm Christ restored honor to God by meeting the qualifications of a proper sacrifice (the God-man) and then voluntarily giving up His infinitely precious life to death (the evil cancelled by the greater good). God is thus propitiated and is free to forgive sin for Christ’s sake. Mozley writes, “Thus, in the end, justice and mercy, which once seemed to be separated by a great gulf, are found to be harmonious, and even those who committed what is, strictly speaking, the ‘infinite’ sin of slaying Christ can be forgiven, because they did it in ignorance.”[29]

Criticism of Anselm’s View

Anselm’s concept of an absolutely necessary yet equally voluntary atonement has not escaped the careful scrutiny of both advocate and adversary. Selected major criticisms assist in bringing Anselm’s views into sharper focus.

Argument from the Neglect of Scripture

Some have argued that Anselm’s view is not scriptural since he does not cite any texts to sustain his argument.[30] The reply to this line of reasoning is that Anselm assumes his argument to be scriptural and seeks to sustain the rationality of his “by-faith” belief. Such a criticism eludes Anselm’s intent. However, Anselm frequently quotes the Scriptures in his arguments and accepts many scriptural premises.

Argument from Defective Feudalistic Concepts

Perhaps a more scholarly argument is that this “satisfaction theory” is based on an analogy with Germanic law and is colored by a feudal notion of honor that is not worthy of God.[31] Foley and Harnack[32] argue that Anselm’s usage of such terms as “honor” and “satisfaction” are medieval, not Christian. Colleran replies, “Whatever the derivation of the word, though, and whatever implications of feudalism it had in Anselm’s time, he uses it in a precise theological way. The notions of honor and satisfaction are thoroughly Christian, as Anselm uses them.”[33] Southern’s comment is instructive: “Everything of importance in Anselm’s argument can survive the removal of every trace of feudal imagery and the supposed contamination by elements of Germanic law.”[34]

Argument That Voluntarism and Necessity Are Incongruous

According to Foley, Anselm’s “theory is logically inconsistent as to what constituted the value of Christ’s death as satisfaction.”[35] At this point Foley argues that Anselm is contradictory. He understands Anselm to argue on the one hand that the value of Christ’s death was in its infiniteness and freeness, and yet on the other hand that it was an absolute necessity. If satisfaction is based on the freeness of the sacrifice, which is a pivotal point to Anselm, how can there be a satisfaction since it was absolutely necessary? Thus Foley says, “Hence, according to the theory, it was not a gift over and above what was due, and it was not priceless in value; it lacked the quality of either surplus or superlative merit which would make it a satisfaction that could be carried to the account of sinners.”[36] Harnack observes, “The assumption that Christ’s death was voluntary, in the sense that He could also have declined death, cannot be carried through without contradiction, and yet, as Anselm knew very well, everything in his theory depends on this point.”[37] The answer to Foley and Harnack is that the absoluteness is a divine necessity from the Father’s perspective while the voluntarism is a redemptive, Christ-oriented prerogative. Hence, the fact of the Atonement is necessary in order to satisfy the Father’s justice, while the procurement of the Atonement was freely provided by Christ. The two terms, necessity and voluntarism, are thus not contradictory. Christ’s voluntarism then became His duty, but only after His consent to the Father’s plan.

Argument from Neglect of the Subjective

This criticism suggests that Anselm’s theory of the Atonement is not complete in that it deals with the objective Godward aspects of the Atonement, but neglects to deal with the manward aspects of reception and results of the benefits of the Atonement. This is similar to other arguments that suggest that he neglects to stress the love of God or to emphasize the life of Christ. Harnack argues that “for Anselm the question of personal certitude of salvation, the fundamental question of religion, is simply not yet raised at all.”[38] The response is found, however, within Anselm’s scope and purpose. He is seeking to give a rationale for the Incarnation which in his mind focuses on Calvary. Hence the subjective features of the Atonement are not within his purpose.

Argument That Justice and Grace Are Incongruous

Somewhat related to the previous criticism is the argument set forth by Colleran that suggests a tension between necessity and grace. If to God the Atonement was of absolute necessity, how can it be of grace or a gracious gift? “He does not argue however to a sort of necessity arising out of God’s nature, which tends to blur the generous gratuitousness of the redemption of the human race.”[39] Harnack makes this criticism most strongly when he writes:

And this brings us to the worst things in Anselm’s theory: the mythological conception of God as a mighty private man, who is incensed at the injury done to His honour and does not forego His wrath till He has received an at least adequately great equivalent; the quite Gnostic antagonism between justice and goodness, the Father being the just one, and the Son the good: the frightful idea that mankind are [sic] delivered from a wrathful God.[40]

The answer is that God in His nature is many-faceted, with seemingly, though not actually, contradictory attributes (cf., e.g., His love, wrath, mercy, holiness, righteousness). He is absolute justice and grace; each have their perspective spheres. Also, in order for God to bring men to Himself, His absolute justice necessitated a specific method of procurement, but since He was under no necessity to redeem men, what He did was of unprompted unconditioned mercy and grace. Justice looks to the nature of the Atonement, and grace looks to a motivating cause in the nature of God. Not one of the attributes is neglected or set aside in the justification of a sinner; all are equally satisfied. While God has many characteristics, He is a single essence who cannot contradict Himself.

Argument That the Incarnation Is Separated from the Atonement

Aulen argues that Anselm does not organically connect together the Incarnation and the Atonement since satisfaction came by a man.

All this goes to show that the doctrine of the Incarnation is no longer with him a fully living idea, as it was to the Father. It was a fixed dogma, which takes for granted as beyond dispute…. It is an inheritance from the past which is not altogether at home in its new environment. They show how God became incarnate that He might redeem; he teaches a human work of satisfaction, accomplished by Christ.[41]

The reply to this argument is twofold. First, Anselm, unlike the Fathers and later Calvin, sees the focus of Christ’s redemption only in His death and not in His life and death. The stress in Anselm and the answer to “Why the God-man?” focuses on Calvary. Second and more important, Anselm sees not a man but the God-man rendering satisfaction; Christ is not Nestorian, but is Chalcedonian. The God-man is one person; therefore, the Incarnation cannot be divided from the Atonement.

Argument That the Satisfaction Is Not Penal

Harnack argues that Anselm’s focus is not on the suffering of a penalty in the sinner’s place but rather the procuring of a benefit that is merited through death. Christ’s death was more of a payment for the debt of collective human nature than a punishment for the sins of individuals. His death was conceived by Anselm to restore honor without a stress on the mode through which the honor was paid.

It is no theory of vicarious representation in the strict sense of the term, for Christ does not suffer penalty in our stead, but rather provides a benefit, the value of which is not measured by the greatness of sin and sin’s penalty but the value of His life and which God accepts, as it weighs more for Him than the loss which He has suffered through sin.[42]

On another occasion, Harnack pointedly says of the Anselmic view that “nothing is said of a penal suffering.”[43] In the strictest sense Harnack’s criticism is accurate. Anselm is clear that satisfaction is rendered through a payment in death, but the exact legal transaction of the guilt and punishment of each individual is not broached. He simply does not develop the method of satisfaction beyond the generality of death.

Anselm and the Reformers

The nature and implications of the death of Christ was the major religious issue in the sixteenth century. Christ by His death substituted for the sinner’s guilt. “God is propitiated,” cried the Reformers! The Roman Catholic Church replied, “No, Christ’s death so infuses us with grace that through the sacraments we might merit the merit of Christ.” As the Reformers turned to a minute examination of dogma, they saw the Atonement of Christ, so vital to the Reformation, in essentially Anselmic terms. Shedd, however, adds, “the Protestant soteriology was an advance upon the Anselmic by being more comprehensive and complete.”[44]

The Reformers and the Subjective Element in the Atonement

The Anselmic view primarily focuses on the objective or God-ward aspects of the Atonement, on the act of God in the procurement of forgiveness. The Reformers built on the objective work of Christ but extended the discussion to the subjective experience or the manward aspects of Christ’s death. According to Shedd, “The soteriology of the Reformation, while adopting with equal heartiness this objective view of the Anselmic theory, unites with it in a greater degree than did this latter, the subjective element of faith.”[45]

The Reformers and the Attribute of Righteousness

Whereas Anselm argued that offended honor called loudly for the Atonement, the Reformers changed the focus to offended righteousness. For example, Luther predicates the Atonement on the character of God in light of His offended righteousness. The stress on righteousness evidences a stronger alignment with the terminology and focus of the Bible. The Reformers’ concept of the Atonement is clearly Anselmic with the advance of clarification and refinement.

The Reformers and Penal Substitution

While Anselm stressed satisfaction or the alternative wrath of God, the Reformers stressed satisfaction through either the punishment of Christ (penal, vicarious substitution) or punishment on man. Althaus makes a remarkable comparison between Luther and Anselm:

For Anselm there were only two possibilities, either punishment or satisfaction. For Luther, satisfaction takes place through punishment, not of the sinner but Christ. The punishment of sin consists in God’s wrath together with all that this wrath brings upon men. So Christ stands under God’s wrath. He suffers it in his passion. He dies the death of a sinner. But, unlike us sinners, he suffers and dies an “innocent and pure death.” Thereby he has “paid God” and brought it about that God takes his wrath and his eternal punishment away from us.[46]

Calvin clearly expounds this clarification and refinement of the Anselmic theory by appealing to such passages as Isaiah 53:6; Romans 8:3; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Galatians 3:13–14; and 1 Peter 2:24. “For the Son of God, though spotlessly pure, took upon Him the disgrace and ignominy of our iniquities, and in return clothed us with His purity.”[47]

The Reformers and Active-Passive Obedience

While Anselm saw the Atonement based solely in Christ’s death, Calvin saw Christ providing the Atonement through His life and death. Shedd explains, “Hence not only that obedience to God His Father which He exhibited in His passion and death but also that obedience which He exhibited in voluntarily subjecting Himself to the law and fulfilling it for our sakes is imputed to us for righteousness.”[48] Calvin comments, “In short, from the moment when He assumed the form of a servant, He began, in order to redeem us, to pay the price of deliverance. Scripture, however, the more certainly to define the mode of salvation, ascribes it peculiarly and specifically to the death of Christ.”[49]

Conclusion

The death of Jesus Christ is important; indeed, it is the focal message of the Christian gospel. It is the proclamation that the eternal God came into the cursed world and as the God-man became the sinner’s penalty-bearing Substitute, suffering an accursed death, the quality of that death verified by the Resurrection. His death is not an idle word for the complacent dreamer or the stoic scholar, but the hope of the world and the joy of the saint.

Anselm labored much to understand the death of Christ and although his “form of thought is inadequate,”[50] he is a milestone in the development of its true meaning. To Anselm, sin makes a difference to God, a real difference that cannot be dismissed. Anselm’s work is truly significant because he grounds the Atonement in divine necessity, not satanic liberation as taught by so many before him.

It behooves the child of God to reflect not only on the sign of the Savior’s suffering, but to meditate on the nature and meaning of His death. It is the prayer of this writer that believers would boldly proclaim the penal, vicarious substitution of their wonderful Lord. Nothing less than that is the “good news” of the faith.

Before thy cross I kneel and see
the heinousness of my sin,
my iniquity that caused thee to be “made a curse,”
the evil that excites the severity of divine wrath.

Show me the enormity of my guilt by
the crown of thorns,
the pierced hands and feet,
the bruised body,
the dying cries.

Yet thy compassions yearn over me,
thy heart hastens to my rescue,
thy love endured my curse,
thy mercy bore my deserved stripes.[51]

Notes

1. J. K. Mozley, The Doctrine of the Atonement (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1915), p. 124.
2. James Denney, The Atonement and Modern Mind (New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1903), p. 116.
3. Addison H. Leitch, Interpreting Basic Theology (New York: Channel Press, 1961), p. 105.
4. Adolph Harnack, History of Dogma, trans. Neil Buchanan, 7 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1961), 6:70.
5. Anselm Why God Became Man (trans. Joseph M. Colleran) 1.1.
6. Ibid.
7. James I. Packer, Knowing God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973), p. 51.
8. Anselm Why God Became Man 1.11.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 1.13. This dishonoring of God is not the negating to any degree of God’s being; it is not a directly personal attack, but it is the taking lightly of His established order. God cannot be diminished to any degree, but His creation which reflects His being can be marred. This God cannot permit.
11. Harnack, History of Dogma, 6:60.
12. Anselm Why God Became Man 1.22.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 1.21.
15. Ibid., 1.6.
16. Ibid., 1.12.
17. Ibid., 1.20.
18. Jasper Hopkins, A Companion to the Study of St. Anselm (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972), p. 190.
19. Anselm Why God Became Man 1.5.
20. Ibid., 2.6.
21. Ibid., 2.7.
22. Ibid., 2.15.
23. Ibid., 2.17.
24. Ibid., 2.11.
25. Ibid., 1.8.
26. Ibid.
27. Hopkins, A Companion to the Study of St. Anselm, p. 195.
28. Anselm Why God Became Man 2.14.
29. Mozley, The Doctrine of the Atonement, p. 128.
30. David Smith, The Atonement in Light of History and the Modern Spirit (London: Hodder and Stoughton, n.d.), p. 85.
31. George Cadwalader Foley, Anselm’s Theory of the Atonement (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), pp. 109-15.
32. Harnack, History of Dogma, 6:56.
33. Anselm Why God Became Man 2.46.
34. R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 108.
35. Foley, Anselm’s Theory of the Atonement, p. 150.
36. Ibid., p. 151.
37. Harnack, History of Dogma, 6:72.
38. Ibid., p. 69.
39. Anselm Why God Became Man 2.47.
40. Harnack, History of Dogma, 6:76 (italics his).
41. Gustaf Aulen, Christus Victor (New York: Macmillan Co., 1951), pp. 87-88.
42. Harnack, History of Dogma, 6:68.
43. Ibid., p. 69.
44. William G. T. Shedd, A History of Christian Doctrines, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1877), 2:340.
45. Ibid., p. 336.
46. Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), p. 203.
47. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1970), 2.16.6.
48. Shedd, A History of Christian Doctrines, 2:343.
49. Calvin, Institutes, 2.16.5. At this point many would more readily agree with Anselm. The Scriptures place imparted righteousness as emanating from the Cross. Active obedience is crucial, and without it there could be no Calvary. The life He lived qualified Him to die the death He died, but the life itself was not of itself propitious.
50. Denney, The Atonement and Modern Mind, p. 116.
51. Arthur Bennett, ed., The Valley of Vision: A Collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1975), p. 41.