Christus Satisfactor: an Anselmian Approach to the Doctrine of Atonement

Southern Methodist University SMU Scholar Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations Religious Studies Spring 5-20-2017 Christus Satisfactor: An Anselmian Approach to the Doctrine of Atonement David M. Mahfood Southern Methodist University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.smu.edu/religious_studies_etds Part of the Christianity Commons, History of Christianity Commons, and the Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons Recommended Citation Mahfood, David M., "Christus Satisfactor: An Anselmian Approach to the Doctrine of Atonement" (2017). Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations. 1. https://scholar.smu.edu/religious_studies_etds/1 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Religious Studies at SMU Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of SMU Scholar. For more information, please visit http://digitalrepository.smu.edu. CHRISTUS SATISFACTOR: AN ANSELMIAN APPROACH TO THE DOCTRINE OF ATONEMENT Approved by: _______________________________________ William J. Abraham, D. Phil Albert C. Outler Professor of Wesley Studies ___________________________________ Bruce D. Marshall, Ph.D. Lehman Professor of Christian Doctrine ___________________________________ Natalia Marandiuc, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Christian Theology ___________________________________ Paul J. Griffiths, Ph.D. Warren Professor of Catholic Theology CHRISTUS SATISFACTOR: AN ANSELMIAN APPROACH TO THE DOCTRINE OF ATONEMENT A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Faculty of Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences Southern Methodist University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy with a Major in Religious Studies by David Mahfood (B.A., Physics, University of Florida) (M.A., History and Theology, Abilene Christian University) May 20th, 2017 Copyright (2017) David Mahfood All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without help and support from a number of people. I am grateful to my advisor, Billy Abraham, for his support, encouragement, and helpful comments at every stage of the project. I am also grateful to Bruce Marshall; I first began to interpret Cur Deus Homo in the way I develop here in a paper I wrote for his course in the history of Christian doctrine, and I pursued it further in no small part thanks to his encouragement. I am also grateful to the other members of my committee, Natalia Marandiuc and Paul Griffiths, for their thoughtful and encouraging comments. I am indebted to many of my colleagues at SMU who have read or discussed parts of this project, and have helped sharpen my thoughts as well as my expression of them in too many ways to list, including Justus Hunter, Nathan McLellan, Jared Maddox, Dallas Gingles, Adam Van Wart, Geoffrey Moore, Daniel Houck, William Glass, Mitchell Kennard, and Natalya Cherry. I am also grateful to Fred Aquino at Abilene Christian University, who first encouraged me to read Anselm. I want to thank the Christian Scholarship Foundation for granting me a dissertation fellowship during the 2015-16 academic year; their help allowed me to make more progress than I otherwise could have. Finally, and most importantly, I am grateful to my wife Johannah and my son Matthew, who without a doubt have given more generously than anyone else to this project. Without their love, patience, and support, it would not have been completed. iv Mahfood, David B.A., University of Florida, 2006 M.A., Abilene Christian University, 2010 Christus Satisfactor: An Anselmian Approach to the Doctrine of Atonement Advisor: Professor William J. Abraham Doctor of Philosophy conferred May 20, 2017 Dissertation completed April 17, 2017 In this dissertation, I develop and defend a revised satisfaction account of the Christian doctrine of atonement based primarily on the thought of St. Anselm of Canterbury. The project thus has both a historical and a normative dimension, since I offer an interpretation of Anselm, and then derive from it an account of the atonement as a candidate for how Christians ought to think about and understand what God has accomplished in Christ on our behalf. I begin, in Chapter 2, by examining the most common way of framing the doctrine of atonement today, which I call the “atonement theory paradigm”—a paradigm into which Anselm is supposed to fit neatly. The atonement theory paradigm assumes that a set of traditional concepts applied to Christ’s work stand for theories of atonement which are fundamentally alternatives to one another. According to this paradigm, at a face-value reading, either Christ saves by defeating oppressive forces and liberating us from them (Christus Victor), or he saves us by offering himself to the Father as a perfect sacrifice, or he saves us by providing a saving teaching and example of the proper love of God (moral exemplar), etc. What follows from this is that one either has to select one such theory or else interpret them more loosely and metaphorically, holding them together without integrating them into a unified view. I argue that neither of these v approaches is ideal from the perspective of Christian theology; all things being equal, it would be preferable to hold together such deeply-entrenched theological claims with their full force. Thankfully, they do not actually contradict one another in any obvious way. In Chapter 3, I proceed to develop a detailed interpretation of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo which understands him not to be presenting an alternative theory to other supposed theories of atonement but to be identifying an underlying logic according to which all of the main traditional ways of talking Christ’s work can be understood as fitting and necessary. That is, I argue that Anselm does not fit the atonement theory paradigm, and that he presents us with a way of understanding Christ’s work that avoids the weaknesses of that paradigm. Attending to the details of Anselm’s text, as well as to several of his earlier treatises, it becomes apparent that many prominent criticisms of his theology of atonement hinge on fitting it into the atonement theory paradigm, and hence my reinterpretation helps to show where such critiques miss the mark. Moving from there, in Chapter 4 I develop a revised satisfaction account that moves beyond a reproduction of Anselm. I do this by attending to another medieval theologian who made use of Anselm’s concept of satisfaction, namely St. Thomas Aquinas. Thomas differs from Anselm on some important points, including especially the question of whether God made use of the means of satisfaction to bring about the salvation of human persons by necessity, or as a contingent choice from among other genuine alternatives. Thomas also provides a helpful elaboration to Anselm, since his account of Christ’s Passion in the Summa Theologiae is more systematic and comprehensive than Anselm’s treatise. Thomas thus helps to show more clearly than Anselm that satisfaction is compatible with other atonement concepts. Finally, Thomas’s vi concept of friendship with God, and his connection of satisfaction with the maintenance of such friendship (through the sacrament of penance) helps to make it more clear than it is in Cur Deus Homo how a satisfaction account of atonement relates to the spiritual life of a Christian striving to grow in holiness and in the love of God. By considering these differences and elaborations, I arrive at a revised satisfaction account that is based on Anselm but has a greater breadth than one could get from Anselm’s text by itself. Finally, with this revised account of the atonement in hand, in Chapter 5, I consider one prominent form of critique normally applied to satisfaction accounts by contemporary theologians. According to many feminist, womanist, and other liberationist thinkers, accounts like the one I develop here are harmful to oppressed persons, such as those undergoing spousal abuse, because they provide a motive for thinking that passively accepting such suffering is Christ-like. I examine how the inference involved in this critique works, and then argue that if we attend to the details of our satisfaction account, we can see that it does not hold. On this account of satisfaction, God does not value suffering for its own sake, but only for the sake of some good end, ultimately justice. On the contrary, our account suggests that whenever possible those who perpetrate injustice ought to try to make satisfaction, and that the satisfaction assigned ought to be of the sort which would teach wrongdoers to will what they ought to will towards the ones wronged. I consider two cases to elucidate this response: the case of spousal abuse, and the case of calls for reparations for slavery in the United States. In both cases, I argue that the logic of the satisfaction account developed here runs in the opposite way to that supposed by the critique, since it would entail that is either necessary or extremely fitting according to vii justice for the wrongdoers to perform an act of satisfaction rather than be forgiven without satisfaction. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1. A SKETCH OF THE ARGUMENT 1 The Question and its Answer 1 Background Assumptions and Desiderata 4 A Sketch of the Argument 8 2. THE ATONEMENT THEORY PARADIGM 14 Single-Theory Approaches 18 Gustaf Aulén’s Christus Victor 18 Kathryn Tanner’s Incarnational Approach 25 Assessing Single-Theory Approaches 37 Beyond Single-Theory Approaches 39 The Kaleidoscopic Approach 39 Scot McKnight’s Golf Bag Approach 54 Assessing the Atonement Theory Paradigm 63 3. ANSELM’S CUR DEUS HOMO 67 Cur Deus Homo According to the Atonement Theory Paradigm 68 Content 71 Method 76 Towards an Alternative Reading of CDH 78 Theological Background to CDH 80 The Divine Nature 81 The Word 87 Justice and Truth in Rational Creatures 92 ix A Better Reading of Cur Deus Homo 99 Anselm’s Explicit Relationship to the Fathers in CDH 99 Satisfaction, Honor, and Debt 101 Other ‘Theories’ of Atonement in CDH 110 i.

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