Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 481—“In the days of feudalism, men thought of heaven as organized on a feudal basis, and ranked the first and second Persons of the Trinity as Suzerain and Tenant-in-Chief.” William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 329, 830—“The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our forefathers, that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their Deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called [pg 749]the cruelty ‘retributive justice,’ and a God without it would certainly not have struck them as sovereign enough. But to-day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a ‘delightful conviction,’ as of a doctrine ‘exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,’ appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.”
(b) In its eagerness to maintain the atoning efficacy of Christ's passive obedience, the active obedience, quite as clearly expressed in Scripture, is insufficiently emphasized and well nigh lost sight of.
Neither Christ's active obedience alone, nor Christ's obedient passion alone, can save us. As we shall see hereafter, in our examination of the doctrine of Justification, the latter was needed as the ground upon which our penalty could be remitted; the former as the ground upon which we might be admitted to the divine favor. Calvin has reflected the passive element in Anselm's view, in the following passages of his Institutes: II, 17:3—“God, to whom we were hateful through sin, was appeased by the death of his Son, and was made propitious to us.”... II, 16:7—“It is necessary to consider how he substituted himself in order to pay the price of our redemption. Death held us under its yoke, but he, in our place, delivered himself into its power, that he might exempt us from it.”... II, 16:2—“Christ interposed and bore what, by the just judgment of God, was impending over sinners; with his own blood expiated the sin which rendered them hateful to God; by this expiation satisfied and duly propitiated the Father; by this intercession appeased his anger; on this basis founded peace between God and men; and by this tie secured the divine benevolence toward them.”
It has been said that Anselm regarded Christ's death not as a vicarious punishment, but as a voluntary sacrifice in compensation for which the guilty were released and justified. So Neander, Hist. Christ. Dogmas (Bohn), 2:517, understands Anselm to teach “the necessity of a satisfactio vicaria activa,” and says: “We do not find in his writings the doctrine of a satisfactio passiva: he nowhere says that Christ had endured the punishment of men.” Shedd, Hist. Christ. Doctrine, 2:282, thinks this a misunderstanding of Anselm. The Encyclopædia Britannica takes the view of Shedd, when it speaks of Christ's sufferings as penalty: “The justice of man demands satisfaction; and as an insult to infinite honor is itself infinite, the satisfaction must be infinite, i. e., it must outweigh all that is not God. Such a penalty can only be paid by God himself, and, as a penalty for man, must be paid under the form of man. Satisfaction is only possible through the God-man. Now this God-man, as sinless, is exempt from the punishment of sin; his passion is therefore voluntary, not given as due. The merit of it is therefore infinite; God's justice is thus appeased, and his mercy may extend to man.”The truth then appears to be that Anselm held Christ's obedience to be passive, in that he satisfied God's justice by enduring punishment which the sinner deserved; but that he held this same obedience of Christ to be active, in that he endured this penalty voluntarily, when there was no obligation upon him so to do.
Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:431, 461, 462—“Christ not only suffered the penalty, but obeyed the precept, of the law. In this case law and justice get their whole dues. But when lost man only suffers the penalty, but does not obey the precept, the law is defrauded of a part of its dues. No law is completely obeyed, if only its penalty is endured.... Consequently, a sinner can never completely and exhaustively satisfy the divine law, however much or long he may suffer, because he cannot at one and the same time endure the penalty and obey the precept. He owes ‘ten thousand talents’ and has ‘not wherewith to pay’ (Mat. 18:24, 25), But Christ did both, and therefore he ‘magnified the law and made it honorable’ (Is. 42:21), in an infinitely higher degree than the whole human family would have done, had they all personally suffered for their sins.” Cf. Edwards, Works, 1:406.
(c) It allows disproportionate weight to those passages of Scripture which represent the atonement under commercial analogies, as the payment of a debt or ransom, to the exclusion of those which describe it as an ethical fact, whose value is to be estimated not quantitatively, but qualitatively.
Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:209-212—“Die he, or justice must, unless for him Some other, able and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death.” The main text [pg 750]relied upon by the advocates of the Commercial theory is Mat. 20:28—“give his life a ransom for many.” Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:257—“The work of Christ, as Anselm construed it, was in fact nothing else than the prototype of the meritorious performances and satisfactions of the ecclesiastical saints, and was therefore, from the point of view of the mediæval church, thought out quite logically. All the more remarkable is it that the churches of the Reformation could be satisfied with this theory, notwithstanding that it stood in complete contradiction to their deeper moral consciousness. If, according to Protestant principles generally, there are no supererogatory meritorious works, then one would suppose that such cannot be accepted even in the case of Jesus.”
E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 258—“The Anselmic theory was rejected by Abelard for grounding the atonement in justice instead of benevolence, and for taking insufficient account of the power of Christ's sufferings and death in procuring a subjective change in man.” Encyc. Brit., 2:93 (art.: Anselm)—“This theory has exercised immense influence on the form of church doctrine. It is certainly an advance on the older patristic theory, in so far as it substitutes for a contest between God and Satan, a contest between the goodness and justice of God; but it puts the whole relation on a merely legal footing, gives it no ethical bearing, and neglects altogether the consciousness of the individual to be redeemed. In this respect it contrasts unfavorably with the later theory of Abelard.”
(d) It represents the atonement as having reference only to the elect, and ignores the Scripture declarations that Christ died for all.
Anselm, like Augustine, limited the atonement to the elect. Yet Leo the Great, in 461, had affirmed that “so precious is the shedding of Christ's blood for the unjust, that if the whole universe of captives would believe in the Redeemer, no chain of the devil could hold them” (Crippen, 132). Bishop Gailor, of the Episcopal Church, heard General Booth at Memphis say in 1903: “Friends, Jesus shed his blood to pay the price, and he bought from God enough salvation to go round.” The Bishop says: “I felt that his view of salvation was different from mine. Yet such teaching, partial as it is, lifts men by the thousand from the mire and vice of sin into the power and purity of a new life in Jesus Christ.”