Cur Deus Homo: Why God Became Man | Navigating the Classics

Welcome to Navigating the Classics. I'm John Snyder, and with me again is Chris Green and Steve Crampton. Guys, glad to have you. Thanks for having us, great to be here. And this is our third attempt to start this, so if Steve and Chris are laughing at me, that's why.

We're gonna be looking at a book that has come from Christian history that's had a major impact, has great value, has perhaps a lot of strengths, some weaknesses, and one that you wouldn't normally get.

You wouldn't pick it up in the Banner of Truth Puritan Paperback Series. We're gonna look at a book by Anselm of Canterbury, who lived at the end of the 11th century, beginning of the 12th, and he wrote, his most famous book is Cordeus Homo, Why the God-Man, dealing with questions of the atonement and why Christ must be God and man.

Before we get to that, let me say that Chris has, Chris, you've graduated from Princeton, Yale, and Notre Dame and yet you're still a believer, so that's a miracle. Degrees in politics, law, and philosophy, right?

That's right. Okay, and Steve, graduate from St. John's and New Mexico? University of New Mexico. All right, and with degrees in law. So my wife, as I left the house today, said have fun playing with the smart kids, so that's why they're here.

Biographical Sketch of Anselm

Let me give just a quick sketch of Anselm, and we're gonna do a really short sketch. Normally we kind of do a longer one, and then we'll look at an overview of the book, and then Chris is going to give us the context of the book.

What was the theological, philosophical context of this book? Why is it so significant? And run us through, Chris and Steve will run us through really the heart of the book, the main arguments, and we'll close it down with looking at what are some of the weaknesses?

What are the enduring impacts? Who is this book beneficial for? And Chris has some hints for us for maybe a shortcut to getting to the heart of the book if you're not prepared to read the whole thing.

Anselm of Canterbury, he's called that even though he was born in Aosta, which is up in the Italian Alps. Born in 1033 or 34, he dies in 1109. He leaves his home for France in 1056, so that puts him about age 23, and enters the monastic school at Becque in 1059.

He was directed there, mentored by a famous teacher, Lanfranc, and he eventually took monastic vows, succeeded Lanfranc as the prior, and then became the abbot of that monastery. He went on to follow Lanfranc as the Archbishop of Canterbury in England in 1093.

He published a number of important theological and philosophical works over the course of his career, but his masterpiece is this book, Why the God-Man, Cur Deus Homo. He's regarded by many as the father of scholasticism, so we're gonna shoot this to you, Steve.

How would you give a layman's definition of, well, what is scholasticism?

Yeah, it's the medieval approach to philosophy, mainly, using a pretty rigorous logical framework, argument, counter-argument, and they did it in an Aristotelian fashion. They used Aristotle's 10 categories of different topics to study, and so when we're looking at Anselm, you see here in this dialogue, dialectic sort of format, the beginning of what they would use, mostly in the monasteries.

You know, that's where all the learning was really preserved and advanced during those ages, so.

Anselm is also considered by most as the most important Christian philosopher-theologian between the great Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Well, let me give just a quick overview of the book before Chris walks us through its arguments.

Overview of Cur Deus Homo

Cordeus Homo was written between 1094 and 1098, and it was a response to two different challenges to the Christian faith. We have the criticism of the doctrine of the incarnation and the atonement through Christ's death, and that criticism being that God becoming man is so far beneath God, that how could you hold that as a fundamental doctrine in your faith?

The Jews were opposed to that, of course. Others argued that while God became man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the idea that his death on the cross was essential for our being rescued from sin is not logical, and so Anselm presses his arguments against both of those objections.

He, in his book, he lays out his arguments and the responses, he creates the whole paradigm for discussing these things in a discussion between himself and this pupil, Boso, and it's not unique to Anselm.

I remember reading in the 18th century, strangely still, a friend of George Whitefield's, a guy named Hervey. Hervey has a series of dialogues, they would call it, between, and they would make it quite obvious, between a godly Christian and a hypocrite, or between a godly Christian and a churchman.

One of the Welsh books during that time, Daniel Rowlands, the great preacher, wrote a book called, where he dealt with antinomianism, and he was attacking a person he worked with, and he said, you know, between a, basically between a true Christian and an antinomian.

And so, you could use this method to kind of set up your arguments. What questions do you feel should be answered? And so, you know, your pupil asks them, and then he comes around and says, wow, that makes sense.

And so, it's just a method that we're not so used to. The conversation in Anselm's work is divided into two major books, and each book, each half, is subdivided into multiple chapters. The basic outline of his argument is as follows.

God made man for eternal blessedness. Man fell from that original state, forfeiting his eternal blessedness, and ruined the entire human race through sin. The remission of sins is necessary, if fallen man is to have that eternal blessedness restored.

In order for sins to be remitted, satisfaction must be made. Only man ought to make, or is obligated to make satisfaction for his sin, but man cannot. Only God can, is able to make satisfaction, but God is not obligated.

Since only man ought to make satisfaction, and only God can make satisfaction, it must be made by God-man. If man remains unredeemed, then God's purpose for humanity and creation would be frustrated, which is impossible for an omnipotent being.

And finally, therefore, his conclusion, a God-man, Jesus of Nazareth, is necessary for the redemption of humanity. Well, Chris, why don't you give us the context of this work?

So Anselm's writing at the end of the 11th century, it is amazing to think about the context for hundreds of years at that point. The dominant way that people had thought about the atonement is this idea of a ransom to Satan.

So the first big, long treatment after the New Testament of trying to explain, trying to get a grasp on what the atonement was, was this fellow Gregory of Nyssa. And his view, his explanation of what's going on when Christ died is, well, Satan had control out of humanity, couldn't control of humanity, and Satan was willing to exchange all these people he had captive, as long as he could get a better captive.

So this sort of view, I think it fits a little bit with how a lot of warfare was conducted in the ancient world. You're constantly worrying about whether you've taken a ransom, taken enough hostages to make sure people do what you need to do.

So exchange of hostages was very much in how international relations were done.

By the way, that's still the case today, right? Israel and Hamas are proceeding as we speak.

Still a huge part of how international relations happen. And they're thinking of the atonement through that kind of lens. So I should say, spoiler alert for those, for any children who haven't read the ending of Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe, the picture of Christ's death that you get if you take a really hyper-literal understanding of Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe as an allegory is basically this sort of view.

So the White Witch, she's got control of Edmund, he's a traitor, and she says, well, don't you remember, Aslan, the deep magic from the dawn of time? All traitors are subject to me. I wanna put this fellow to death.

And Aslan says, well, well, maybe if you put me to death instead, you'll be willing to make a deal. Maybe we can make a deal. And the White Witch says, well, okay, yeah, I'd rather put you to death than put Edmund to death.

But then Aslan says, ah, but then you have the deeper magic from before the dawn of time. If a willing substitute is put to death for a traitor, then death works in reverse. So this is the view where Satan has this jurisdiction over mankind that God has to somehow outwit.

And that's what's going on fundamentally with the atonement. Anselm puts this tradition to death in kind of an amazing way. I mean, it has been the way people explain the atonement for hundreds of years.

But after Anselm really identifies the flaws of this way of thinking, virtually no one suggests this sort of view later on. After that point, virtually everybody is thinking of the atonement fundamentally as an inter-Trinitarian affair.

God the Father is putting Christ to death not because Satan has control over mankind, not because mankind has a problem with Satan, but because mankind has a problem with God himself. God's justice demands our death.

So you do have a lot of references, of course, to Satan being involved. And Revelation 12, he's the accuser of the brethren. He's accusing the brethren day and night. But really, Satan has that role. The devil has that role because God the Father gives him that role.

It's fundamentally God's justice that is our accuser. Our problem isn't that we have an accuser. The problem is that we're guilty. If we didn't have this accuser, it would only be proper to have another accuser.

So by reorienting the subject of the atonement in that way, Anselm, I think that's his most important lasting benefit to Western theology is really setting up the terms in which we can think about the atonement in a proper way.

All right, so why don't you run us through, let's look at the key arguments of the book and the real value of it and kind of try to bring it to apply to our day.

May I just say too, John, in light of what you laid out with the number of chapters and two books and so on, lest anybody think that it's overwhelming, like maybe the last one we did, the book itself is very thin, right?

My translation's only about 84 pages. You get it certainly under 100. So when we talk about like 47 different chapters, many of them are only a paragraph, basically. So not in the modern context of 47 chapters is a very long book.

It's actually a short book.

Yeah, yeah, good. Thanks for pointing that out. So one first thing, I think we can look at a couple of the places where Anselm really makes telling criticisms of this ransom to Satan view. So it's actually, one of the clearest ones is right toward the end.

Anselm's Critique of the Ransom Theory

So book two, section 19. It is not the case that God needed to come down from heaven to conquer the devil or to take action against him in order to set mankind free. Rather, God demanded of man that he should defeat the devil and should pay recompense by means of righteousness, having previously offended God through sin.

Certainly God did not owe the devil anything but punishment, nor did man owe him anything but retribution to defeat in return him by whom he had been defeated. But whatever was demanded from God, his debt was to God, not to the devil.

The devil has no jurisdiction over mankind. That's one of the first important points that Anselm makes.

May I just say in defense of the ransom theory, I mean, Romans 6, 7 in particular, lays out pretty clearly that we are in bondage to sin, maybe not the devil. But so, you know, it's not like the theory just came out of nowhere, right?

There is scriptural suggestion and more than suggestion that posits we are enslaved, right? And we do need to be freed. And ransom is a term that appears frequently in the descriptions of what Christ has accomplished.

That's absolutely right.

And our helplessness, that we are captive, we are subject to chains that we can't get off. That's an extraordinarily important part of Anselm's own view, but certainly the way the New Testament explains the gospel.

So one thing, you know, you'll notice right away if you read through, there's not a huge amount of scripture getting addressed. One of the few places where he really goes through a bunch of scripture is in explaining the inner Trinitarian nature of the atonement.

So he goes through a bunch of places where it's very clear that Jesus is being sent by the Father and is submitting himself to the Father's will. He's not submitting himself to Satan because of some independent claim that Satan has.

It's an inner Trinitarian affair. So these are, you know, extraordinarily familiar passages. Philippians 2, 8, 9, Jesus humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Therefore God has highly exalted him. So it's submission to the Father. John 6, 38, I've come down from heaven not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. Romans 8, 32, talking about the Father, he did not spare his own sin, but gave him up for us all.

And of course, all of the synoptic gospels in the garden, one of them, Matthew 26, 39, my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will. So notice that Jesus is saying to the Father, if it's possible, if there's some other way, can't there be some other way we can do this?

Yeah. Why is there no other way? Because the Father, it's because it's fitting for the Father to do it this way. He's the one who's in charge of sending the Son. So all of the philosophizing that you get later are on this really fundamental, Anselm sort of nails this one point into the ground with the scriptures.

So it's nailed it down scripturally, and then there's a bunch of philosophizing and thinking about illustrations and counter-arguments on that basis.

Let me say a couple of things in that context, Chris. One is, as I understand both the context in which Anselm found himself here, we're looking at that timeframe where you're launching the first crusade, right?

The Muslim threat is very real and pervasive. And the address here to the infidels and the skeptics, right, seems to me that part of his purpose is to do more philosophy than theology in the sense of citing a lot of scripture.

So I might give him a pass, if you will, that he doesn't have a whole lot more scripture in there, in particular, Old Testament seems really lacking here, right?

That's right, that's right. And really, the way we would think about the atonement, you would, I mean, the first place you'd go, or at least high up on the list would be going through the book of Hebrews and really understanding what is the mercy seat in the tabernacle and in the temple and really digging into, I mean, there's a lot of phrases in Hebrews that are very, very compact and they've just got a lot in them.

Knowledge of Hebrew was not nearly as emphasized for a very, very long time. So Anselm, I think he puts together a view that when you look at certain passages in Hebrews and Romans, you can make a lot of sense of it, thinking it through those lens, but he's not really doing it exegetical work like that.

And it's, when we talk later about, you know, some of the most important virtues of the work and of Anselm in general, his motto is faith-seeking understanding. So it's very clear when, I mean, he says this at the very beginning of the work, he says, I'm not trying to use philosophy as a basis for your worldview or getting you to think of these things on the basis of these arguments.

Rather, and he mentions 1 Peter 3 .15, it's giving an answer to those who ask for a reason for the hope that you have. He's got faith based on, and he summarizes it as just the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.

He's not basing it on tradition. He's willing to overrule, overthrow a tradition that's hundreds of years long but he's giving an answer to people who literally ask, like, how could that be? A lot of them are these Muslim critics who say, God can't take unto himself a human form.

He can just forgive. There's no need to make any kind of recompense. So giving answers, there's a very literal conversations that are happening in part because just the European Western world is getting in a lot more contact with Muslim thought.

A lot of very, very sophisticated philosophy, but those kinds of conversations are happening. I want to say in that context too,.

It seems to me one of the things, I mean, we look back and we sometimes criticize them for we're going to get there in this book itself with regard to the number of folks to be redeemed, making up for the number of fallen angels and so forth that he kind of goes off on that tangent end, right?

But I got to give him a lot of credit for bringing to bear a really intense and careful logical look and analysis of the issue. I'm afraid our modern Protestantism, many times we just want to go faith alone and forget reason, you know, but they ought to be together.

I mean, God calls us, does he not? Let come, let us reason together. And these guys maybe overdid it in some instances, but Anselm, I think really represents a positive example of one who is willing to wrestle with a very difficult, look at all of the doctrines that are at play here too.

I mean, we already mentioned the atonement. You mentioned the Trinity, right? We've got the virgin birth. We're going to touch on the incarnation. And I mean, these are weighty, weighty issues with very difficult paradoxes presented for us, but he doesn't just shy away and say, well, you just have to believe it.

I mean, he's willing to wrestle and try to get to the bottom of it. Yeah, and it's striking.

He's willing to have conversations. He's willing to have long philosophical conversations with people with really fundamentally different basic premises about the world. And I think without surrendering the scriptures as the fundamental basis for his own view.

So I think as we look for earlier models that we can use to deal with just the, you know, really widespread dissensus, just people don't agree about just really basic aspects of reality. I think it is a good model for how to do it.

Try to commend, try to think about different premises as carefully as you can and boil them down to what are the essential aspects of the gospel? What are the essential aspects of Christianship? Why do we see it so differently from other folks?

And I think the process of going through those arguments and counter arguments, it takes a while, but it can be really, really clarifying. So his argument, so why does Christ have to die? One thing that Anselm does, he really, he orients it in terms of the father and the son, the relationship.

The Necessity of the God-Man and Divine Honor

He also orients it in terms of God's glory, God's honor. So one of the basic Reformation mottos, soli deo gloria, why is all this happening at the cross? It's fundamentally for God's glory. So just some really lovely bits explaining why Christ's death honors God.

So again, we start out with man's plight. God is creating people for eternal glory. But they're in this plight of being sinful. Book one, section 11, everyone who sins is under an obligation to repay to God the honor which he has violently taken from him.

And this is the satisfaction which every sinner is obliged to give to God. A couple of chapters later, he elaborates, there is nothing more intolerable in the universal order than that a creature should take away the honor from the creator and not repay what he takes away.

Either the honor which has been taken away should be repaid or punishment should follow. Otherwise, either God will not be just to himself or he will be without the power to enforce either of the two options.

And it is an abominable sin even to consider this possibility.

I wanna say in that context too, I think another, forgive me for just bringing it back to the modern Christian, but it does seem to me we live in a day when our view of sin, we talk about this a lot in our own church family, has been so degraded and lessened that we overlook the enormity of the matter and Anselm really hits it hard.

I think about, I know y 'all covered some time ago, John, the salvation in full color. And one of the most impactful sermons that I recall reading in that one is the one by Joseph Bellamy called the heinousness of sin.

And it just really hit me maybe in a way for the first time in reading that. And obviously he wasn't the first to think of it. I mean, we know from Adam's fall that it polluted the entire race, but we sometimes forget about our own little sins and so forth.

And Chris, you've highlighted, I think, in our pre-show notes, one of the passages that Anselm uses to highlight the fact that one little offense to God is of infinite abomination, really. And so it seems to me if you don't get that part right, it's very difficult to understand the need for the God-man and what atonement really means for it.

That's exactly right. So, I mean, the modern approach to sin, we just see it as very light. There's a story, I think it's about Voltaire. I'm not sure it's terribly reliable, but on his deathbed, he's this famous infidel.

What are you gonna do if you face God? And he says, why have you been living this way? God will forgive, that's his job. So if you think of sin in terms of, well, God's obliged to help us out because we're so helpless.

Our helplessness itself is the ground for our reconciliation with God. If you think of it that way, you're just not gonna understand. I mean, the New Testament's gonna make no sense at all to you, and you really have to see it with these ideas of God's glory in mind.

So here's another bit where Anselm explains the argument. If the divine wisdom did not impose these forms of recompense in cases where wrongdoing is endeavoring to upset the right order of things, there would be in the universe, which God ought to be regulating, a certain ugliness resulting from the violation of the beauty of order, and God would appear to be failing in his governance since these two consequences are as impossible as they are unfitting. It is inevitable that recompense or punishment follows upon every sin.

Every, yeah.

Yeah, I think when we consider the atonement, the work of the cross, there are always two fundamental perspectives we have. We can have the perspective of benefit, so reconciliation, ransom, washing, conquering our enemy, or we can think of the divine perspective that God's justice has been satisfied, that God's honor has been put right, and both are clearly in the scripture, but one must come first.

One ought to come first, and that is the rights of God come first, and the rights of God as the focus of the Son in putting right what sin has twisted and bent or stolen, and then flowing from that the benefits to the ungodly, which is the amazing part.

It's not amazing to us that the eternal Son united to our humanity would be focused on doing all that pleases and honors the lawmaker, but that God would have devised a means of restoring the honor of the offended lawmaker, yet in a way that rescues the offenders.

So, as we've been talking about, the modern preoccupation with our worth or our happiness, or maybe even we would be so bold as to say, as Voltaire, what God owes the pitiable, and forgetting the blameworthiness of our situation, we really miss the magnitude of the cross because we think all it is is a quick payment or a get-out-of-jail-free card for people like us.

Or a way to make us feel bad about our sin. So, one of the points that Ansel makes is the fact that we feel bad about our sin, that doesn't pay for our sin. That's just having the proper attitude toward it.

So, at one point, he's going through, well, is there anything that can rescue us out of it? Maybe mankind can do something. Maybe we can make a deal. Maybe mankind can, by feeling really bad about sin, somehow get God to forgive him.

But he says, book one, section 20, that says, tell me, what payment will you give to God in recompense for your sin? Penitence, a contrite and humbled heart, fasting, and many kinds of bodily labor, the showing of pity through giving and forgiveness and obedience?

When you are, that's the answer he's imagining the student giving, when you, and then Anselm's answer, when you are rendering to God something which you owe him, even if you had not sinned, you ought not to reckon this to be recompense for what you owe him to sin, owe him for sin, for you owe to God all the things to which you refer.

So, Augustus' top lady has this beautiful line in the Rock of Ages hymn, not the labor of my hands can fulfill thy laws and man's. Could my zeal no respite know? Could my tears forever flow? All for sin could not atone.

Thou must save, and thou alone. And this is what Anselm's focusing on. On this theme of our neediness as somehow making a demand upon God, this is very much a line of thought that a lot of people make, that if we're unable to respond to God, it would be unjust for God to punish us for not responding.

And Anselm has this, I think, quite compelling illustration right toward the end of book one. But section 24, he talks about our helplessness. He does our helplessness somehow, just by being helpless.

Does that help deal with our sin? He said, well, suppose someone assigns his bond slave a task and tells him not to leap into a pit from which he cannot by any means climb out. And that bond slave, despising the command in advance of his master, leaps into the pit, which has been pointed out to him so that he is completely unable to carry out the task assigned to him.

Do you think that his incapacity serves in the slightest as a valid excuse for him not to perform the task assigned to him? Not at all. It serves rather to increase his guilt. Since he has brought the incapacity upon himself.

For indeed he has sinned in two ways. In having not done what he was told to do and having done that which he has been told not to do. Thus a person who has of his own accord bound himself by a debt which he cannot repay has thrown himself into the state of incapacity by his guilt.

As a result, he's unable to repay what he owed before his sin. That is an obligation not to sin. And the fact that he is in debt as a consequence of sin is inexcusable. For the very fact of his incapacity is blameworthy because it is something he ought not to have.

No, indeed he is under an obligation not to have it. Very, very similar to later ideas that we'll see in the reform thinkers. Jonathan Edwards' explanation of man's inability as not an excuse. Very, very much an Anselmian idea.

And really goes back to the same basic idea from Augustine. But in thinking about the cross in light of that, Anselm really makes an excellent application of that line of thought.

And wouldn't you say that that's very far removed from the modern view, again, maybe of like victimology? I think absolutely, yes. You know, the bankruptcy laws in our nation are really made to give you a get out of debtor's prison, at least free pass, right?

You accumulate all this debt, most often by your own choice. And yet when you come up to the end and you just say, I can't pay, you know, we'll just wipe it clean. And we call it, okay, you get a fresh start kind of thing.

We have billboards all around our part of the country advertising bankruptcy firms. And so that whole idea of who's the victim, maybe ultimately, we have to look at it in the right perspective. It's God who is the victim here, not man.

And so don't tell me about your inability as an excuse.

Yeah, insolvency. Insolvency is not a way to get rid of a debt. It's the condition for filing bankruptcy. And I think it is a beautiful, it's an illustration we use a lot when we look at, you know, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the spiritually bankrupt.

We have to declare spiritual bankruptcy so that we can see Christ's payment as absolutely essential.

And I wanna also go back to, we sort of brushed over it. You read the part and, you know, the idea that there is absolutely nothing that we bring to the table in dealing with God, right? That he creates us, everything we have, he has given us, right?

Everything that we can do in any positive sort of meritorious sense, we'll go there, I suppose, is really God's own doing to begin with. And so what do you give God? And I think that's another one of those aspects to this argument that needs to be unpacked for us moderns, because we do, again, suffer, I think, from the illusion that we really do have something we can give to God, right?

And creates then that whole necessity. That's kind of the essence, isn't it, of the argument here? It is absolutely essential if there's to be any reconciliation with God, that God has to do it, because man has nothing to bring to the table.

We are totally bankrupt spiritually, hence the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount.

That's right. And we summarized the thought before about, well, what is the solution to this? It has to be the God-man. So book two, I think, gets more into the incarnation as the solution. Book one is more about the atonement as such the need for the atonement.

The Incarnation as the Solution

And then so it's sort of you get Easter in book one and Christmas in book two, but the relationship between them is what makes the book really so amazing. But book two, section six, this very briefly summarizes what no one can pay except God, and no one ought to pay except man.

It is necessary that a God-man should pay it. And then right toward the end, book two, section 18, so he's talking about reconciliation could not have been brought about unless man repaid what he owed to God.

This debt was so large that although no one but man owed it, only God was capable of repaying it, assuming that there should be a man identical with God. Hence, it was a necessity that God should take man into the unity of his person so that one who ought by virtuous nature to make the repayment and was not capable of doing so should be one who by virtue of his person was capable of it.

So that's an essential ingredient of the gospel.

And how is it that Christ is able, I mean, I'll ask the question as I'll be bozo here today. How is it that Christ is able to pay it? Because if he's become a man, isn't he then afflicted with the same inabilities of the rest of us?

Well, and the details of how exactly this works out, I think are not something we want to be overly confident about in terms of understanding how Christ has two natures and two sets of attributes. So I think it's very easy to slip into one or the other of the various Christological heresies.

The early thinking about the Trinity, I think sets up guardrails that don't really tell us exactly what it means for God to be, for Christ to be both omnipotent and yet powerless in certain respects, to be omnipresent and yet to be confined in a particular place, to be all powerful and yet subject to the cross.

His ability is fundamentally, his ability to do these things is fundamentally based on the fact that he's God, and yet he's doing it in a body. So the crucifixion of the Lord of glory, if these things, if the Jews and Romans had known they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

Well, how can you crucify the Lord of glory? It's fundamentally something the New Testament reveals to us as something that happened, and we can do our best to try to understand it, but there's just a limit to our ability to understand.

Hear, hear.

I mean, one of Anselm's arguments is that as the son of God and as a sinless man, he didn't have the duty to pay that man has, right? And he had, forgive me, I'm gonna use the phrase treasury of merit.

We don't mean it in that Roman Catholic sense. He had merit of his own, which he could voluntarily lay down, right? And the other, one of the principles Anselm brings to bear here, relying on Old Testament law, but he doesn't cite it, is the notion that when you have stolen something, in this case, the honor of God from God, not only must you repay the original amount taken, but it must then include a premium on top of that, right?

In order to make it right, because you've deprived him of it for a time. So in Christ's case, he brings this infinite treasure to bear and can pay more even than our sin required.

That's right. So he has a basically, I mean, it's not just a commercial aspect where you're kind of exchanging merit or honor. A lot of people who look back at Anselm think, it explains aspects of the father's relationship to the son and father's relationship to humanity that really are illuminated by feudal understandings of, you have lords and vassals, and the lord gives you protection in exchange for having certain things repaid to you.

So it has a fundamentally commercial vibe, the metaphor that he's using. And that is a very helpful aspect to the atonement. Fundamentally, we're only gonna understand it fully if we get ahead to some substitutionary punishment.

So you start thinking of it, not just as commercial, not less than commercial, not less than repayment, but in terms of a structure of punishment where Christ is a substitute, not merely somebody who has a lot of money and can pay, but somebody who can actually be in our place.

So certain texts, I think this is, Anselm is really good to have in the back of your mind when you're looking through Romans 3. Looking through Hebrews 2, I think, is extremely useful. And maybe we can just kind of mention some of these biblical arguments.