Satisfaction theory of the atonement

The satisfaction theory of the atonement holds that Christ’s death satisfies the honor God is owed as sovereign, an honor human sin withholds from him. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) first set out the theory in Cur Deus Homo (“Why God Became Man”), arguing that God cannot simply forgive sin without an adequate restitution of the honor it takes away, and that only a being fully God and fully man can render satisfaction equal to an offense against infinite majesty. The theory is the medieval forerunner of penal substitutionary atonement, which relocated Christ’s satisfaction from God’s honor to God’s justice.

Historical Origin

Tertullian and Augustine had already stressed a juridical, satisfaction-shaped element in Christ’s sacrifice, but it was Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 until his death, who gave the doctrine its first fully reasoned statement, in the dialogue Cur Deus Homo.¹ A. A. Hodge credits the book with putting satisfaction language “in a scientific form” for the first time, judging that it “formed the basis of the Soteriological doctrines of all the creeds and classical theological literature of all the historical churches since his time.”²

Anselm’s argument answered two rivals at once. Herman Bavinck frames Anselm’s contribution as standing against Duns Scotus, who “saw it as an arbitrary act of God’s power,” and against Peter Abelard, who “found only exemplary significance in it”: Anselm instead argued for the “fitting necessity” of Christ’s atoning death, and in doing so was “the first to understand, and to understand most clearly, that the redemption accomplished by Christ was a deliverance…above all from sin itself and sin’s guilt.”¹

In the dialogue itself, Anselm has his interlocutor Boso press him on why Christ’s own obedience should not itself be sufficient payment for sin, without any need of his death. Anselm answers that every rational being already owes God complete obedience simply as a creature, so Christ’s obedience alone, however perfect, discharged only a debt he already owed for himself and could not also cover another’s. Boso presses further: did the Father not compel the Son’s death? Anselm answers, “God did not, therefore, compel Christ to die; but he suffered death of his own will, not yielding up his life as an act of obedience, but on account of his obedience in maintaining holiness.”³ Because Christ, as sinless, owed God no death of his own, his voluntary death supplied exactly the kind of surplus, beyond what duty required, that could be credited to others.³

Core Tenets

Charles Hodge lays out Anselm’s own reasoning in four connected propositions, translated directly from the Latin of Cur Deus Homo:

Humanity had to be redeemed.
Redemption could not occur without satisfaction.
That satisfaction had to be made by the God-man.
The fitting way for it to be made was through Christ’s suffering.⁴

Hodge locates the assumption behind these four steps in a single premise: “the pardon of sin required an infinite satisfaction, i.e., a satisfaction of infinite merit, which could only be rendered by a person of infinite dignity.”⁴ On Anselm’s own account, sin is not chiefly a violation of some rule standing over God, but a failure to render God the honor his infinite majesty is owed; withholding that honor is itself the offense that must be paid for. Because the offense is against an infinite Being, no finite creature’s obedience, however great, can supply satisfaction large enough to cover it, so only a being who is himself God, and therefore of infinite dignity, can offer a payment equal to the debt.

Variants

Thomas Aquinas took over Anselm’s basic framework but sharpened its terms, distinguishing satisfactio (paying a debt) from meritum (earning a reward), and using that distinction to ask whether Christ’s obedience to the law’s precepts, not only his death, could itself merit something for those in whose place he stood.⁵ The medieval church extended Anselm’s idea of Christ’s death as a surplus of merit beyond what duty required into the wider doctrine of supererogation: certain works, prayer and fasting, celibacy, martyrdom, were held to exceed what God’s law commands, and the merit of these works, together with Christ’s own infinite merit, was gathered into a “treasury of merit” that the church could dispense through indulgences.⁶ The Council of Trent stated the resulting doctrine of Christ’s own satisfaction in Anselm’s own vocabulary, that Christ “merited justification by his most holy passion on the wood of the cross, and made satisfaction to God the Father for us.”⁷

Confessional Contrast

The Second London Baptist Confession states that Christ, in his mediatorial office, “did most willingly undertake” his work, and that in discharging it “he was made under the law, and did perfectly fulfil it, and underwent the punishment due to us, which we should have borne and suffered, being made sin and a curse for us.”⁸ By his “perfect obedience and sacrifice,” Christ “hath fully satisfied the justice of God, procured reconciliation, and purchased an everlasting inheritance in the kingdom of heaven, for all those whom the Father hath given unto Him.”⁹ Herman Bavinck frames the Reformation’s own shift in these same terms: sin “aroused God’s wrath, and only the atoning death of the God-man could satisfy God’s justice and still that wrath,” with Christ acting “as the guarantor of the covenant, taking on himself the full guilt and punishment of sin, and submitting to the total demand of God’s law.”¹⁰

Two differences from Anselm’s own theory follow directly from this confessional language. First, the confession refers Christ’s work to God’s justice and law rather than his honor: Christ pays a specific penalty sin’s guilt incurs, not an indeterminate debt of honor. Second, and unlike Anselm’s own account, the confession credits both halves of Christ’s work, his perfect fulfilling of the law as well as his bearing of its punishment, as the ground of the reconciliation and inheritance believers receive. Where Anselm’s own logic could credit only Christ’s death, since his lifelong obedience discharged no more than the debt every creature already owes, the confession’s “made under the law, and did perfectly fulfil it” places Christ’s obedient life itself among the grounds of the believer’s justification.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t excluding Christ’s own obedience from having redemptive value contradict the confession’s own teaching that he was “made under the law, and did perfectly fulfil it”? Reformed theologians have pressed this same point against Anselm directly. Louis Berkhof writes, “According to Anselm Christ’s life of obedience had no redemptive significance, since He owed this to God for himself,” and A. R. Whately makes the same point from within Anselm’s own logic: “His own obedience Christ cannot give for this purpose to God, for, as in the case of human creatures, it belongs by right to God already.”¹¹ The confession’s crediting of Christ’s whole obedience, active as well as passive, corrects exactly this gap in Anselm’s own account.

If Christ’s death produced a surplus of merit beyond what he owed for himself, doesn’t crediting that surplus to those who “live according to the gospel” make salvation depend on human works rather than grace? This is the direction the medieval church actually took Anselm’s own category, extending his surplus of merit into a treasury the church could dispense through indulgences to the meritorious. Bavinck describes the Reformation’s response as a wholesale rejection of that scheme: “The Reformation repudiated this entire scheme and took its position on the doctrine of justification by faith alone…it is through faith that the believer receives Christ the Savior.”⁶ On the Reformed account, Christ’s merit is imputed to believers through faith as a gift of grace, not dispensed to the meritorious in proportion to their own works of supererogation.

Doesn’t Duns Scotus’s objection, that satisfaction need not have any intrinsic worth of its own but is valid simply because God accepts it, undermine Anselm’s whole argument for why a God-man was necessary? Charles Hodge answers no, defending the premise Anselm and the later Reformed tradition share against Scotus and the Remonstrants who followed him: if a thing’s worth as satisfaction depended purely on God’s arbitrary acceptance, “God may…take anything for anything,” a result Hodge calls impossible given God’s own “immutable reason, truth, and goodness.” Scripture, moreover, teaches the death of Christ was necessary, not merely accepted by divine convention: “if the righteousness necessary for the salvation of men could have been secured in any other way the whole work of Christ is a matter of supererogation, an unnecessary expenditure of what was beyond all price.”¹² Reformed theology therefore keeps Anselm’s own insight that Christ’s satisfaction has real, intrinsic worth, even while correcting the category, from honor to justice, in which that worth is paid.

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 15, “The Servant Savior: Christ’s Humiliation.” ↩ ↩²
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 423. ↩
Micah John McCormick, “Historical Survey,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 36-37. ↩ ↩²
Charles Hodge, “Chapter VII. Satisfaction of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 484. ↩ ↩²
McCormick, “Historical Survey,” 38. ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance.” ↩ ↩²
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 424. ↩
Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), 8.4. ↩
Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), 8.5. ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 15, “The Servant Savior: Christ’s Humiliation.” ↩
McCormick, “Historical Survey,” 38n30. ↩
Hodge, “Chapter VII. Satisfaction of Christ,” 484-487. ↩