The Past Holds Secrets To The Future
Grab a cup I want to tell you about one of the most influential preachers in Church history. Anselm of Canterbury goes back to the 1100’s, born in Italy, educated in France, and appointed by the Pope to England. Well traveled this theologian and preacher engaged the hot religious topic of his day: How does the life and death of Jesus save the world? Anselm’s new thinking not only made sense to his listeners but is still the most dominant theory in evangelical Christianity. The question for today is will this 900 year-old theory remain relevant for the 21st century?
In Anselm’s day there was a rigid social order. You were born into a social class that ranged from royalty to peasantry and that class determined your role in society. Behavior, respect and honor were given to the upper class and those below were expected to be gracious. If a peasant, slave or commoner were to offend someone above them there were certain retributions encountered in order to repay or re-balance this dishonor.
Anselm applied this common example to the logic of how Jesus saves. God being the pinnacle of royalty is dishonored by our sin, our lack of respect for God’s creation, and our immorality that takes creation in a direction God did not intend. Justice demands some form of re-balancing in the social order to restore the loss of honor caused by our sin.
The problem, like that in the rigid social order of his day, is if you are at the bottom of the social order you have no proper status to repay someone at the top of the social order. Someone of equal royal status must intercede for you.
Anselm proposed that the role of Jesus is to be the one who intercedes, sacrifices his life, and becomes our substitute for re-balancing the injustice and restoring the honor due God. Anselm’s theory is referred to today as “subsitutionary atonement”.
As in most concepts of how God works in relationship to creation, Anselm’s theory was not without critics. Less than a century later Peter Abelard raised a moral objection, “How cruel and wicked that anyone should demand the blood of an innocent person as the price for anything…still less that God should consider the death of his son so agreeable that by it he should be reconciled to the whole world!” In other words, how can God feel good about any innocent person suffering or count it as credit to another’s sin?
Though at the heart of what most of us hear taught, preached, and regularly sing in our hymns this moral objection seems to register with many today. The heroic suffering of Jesus has for centuries been used to perpetuate the suffering and injustice of the innocent when at times the Church has encouraged abuse of the innocent by declaring suffering to be honorably like that of Jesus and one of the ways we enter into Christ likeness.
In a new age of human rights Anselm’s theory has been losing respect. When the progressive world is on record objecting to the dehumanization and abuse of people on the basis of race, class, or gender, can we morally continue to interpret the saving act of Jesus along the lines of what some would say could be construed as divine child abuse?
Well, I guess no theory is absolutely perfect. The world is changing and Abelard’s objection to Anselm’s theory is more pertinent today than ever before. But first, I’m out of coffee; don’t go away. You’ll want to hear about Abelard’s theory for how Jesus saves that is making a comeback in our modern world.
In Anselm’s day there was a rigid social order. You were born into a social class that ranged from royalty to peasantry and that class determined your role in society. Behavior, respect and honor were given to the upper class and those below were expected to be gracious. If a peasant, slave or commoner were to offend someone above them there were certain retributions encountered in order to repay or re-balance this dishonor.
Anselm applied this common example to the logic of how Jesus saves. God being the pinnacle of royalty is dishonored by our sin, our lack of respect for God’s creation, and our immorality that takes creation in a direction God did not intend. Justice demands some form of re-balancing in the social order to restore the loss of honor caused by our sin.
The problem, like that in the rigid social order of his day, is if you are at the bottom of the social order you have no proper status to repay someone at the top of the social order. Someone of equal royal status must intercede for you.
Anselm proposed that the role of Jesus is to be the one who intercedes, sacrifices his life, and becomes our substitute for re-balancing the injustice and restoring the honor due God. Anselm’s theory is referred to today as “subsitutionary atonement”.
As in most concepts of how God works in relationship to creation, Anselm’s theory was not without critics. Less than a century later Peter Abelard raised a moral objection, “How cruel and wicked that anyone should demand the blood of an innocent person as the price for anything…still less that God should consider the death of his son so agreeable that by it he should be reconciled to the whole world!” In other words, how can God feel good about any innocent person suffering or count it as credit to another’s sin?
Though at the heart of what most of us hear taught, preached, and regularly sing in our hymns this moral objection seems to register with many today. The heroic suffering of Jesus has for centuries been used to perpetuate the suffering and injustice of the innocent when at times the Church has encouraged abuse of the innocent by declaring suffering to be honorably like that of Jesus and one of the ways we enter into Christ likeness.
In a new age of human rights Anselm’s theory has been losing respect. When the progressive world is on record objecting to the dehumanization and abuse of people on the basis of race, class, or gender, can we morally continue to interpret the saving act of Jesus along the lines of what some would say could be construed as divine child abuse?
Well, I guess no theory is absolutely perfect. The world is changing and Abelard’s objection to Anselm’s theory is more pertinent today than ever before. But first, I’m out of coffee; don’t go away. You’ll want to hear about Abelard’s theory for how Jesus saves that is making a comeback in our modern world.
just checking to see if this will go through
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