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

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Welcome to Navigating the Classics, I'm John Snyder, and with me again is Chris Green and Steve Crampton.

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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.

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We're going to 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.

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You wouldn't pick it up in the Banner of Truth Puritan Paperback Series. We're going to look at a book by Anselm of Canterbury, who lived at the end of the 11th century, beginning of the 12th.

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And he wrote, his most famous book is Courteous Homo, Why the

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God -Man, dealing with questions of the atonement and why

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Christ must be God and man. Before we get to that, let me say that Chris, you've graduated from Princeton, Yale, and Notre Dame, and yet you're still a believer, so that's a miracle.

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Degrees in politics, law, and philosophy, right? That's right.

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Okay. And Steve, graduate from St. John's and New Mexico?

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University of New Mexico. And with degrees in law. So my wife, as I left the house today, said, have fun playing with the smart kids.

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So that's why they're here. Let me give just a quick sketch of Anselm, and we're going to do a really short sketch.

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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.

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What was the theological, philosophical context of this book? Why is it so significant? And run us through,

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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.

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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.

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Anselm of Canterbury, he's called that, even though he was born in Aosta, which is up in the

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Italian Alps, born in 1033 or 1034.

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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.

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He was directed there, mentored by a famous teacher, Lanfranc. And he eventually took monastic vows, succeeded

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Lanfranc as the prior, and then became the abbot of that monastery. He went on to follow

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Lanfranc as the Archbishop of Canterbury in England in 1093.

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He published a number of important theological and philosophical works over the course of his career, but his masterpiece is this book,

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Why the God -Man, Cur Deus Homo. He's regarded by many as the father of scholasticism.

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So we're going to shoot this to you, Steve. How would you give a layman's definition of, well, what is scholasticism?

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Yeah, it's the medieval approach to philosophy, mainly, using a pretty rigorous logical framework, argument, counter -argument.

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And they did it in an Aristotelian fashion. They used Aristotle's 10 categories of different topics to study.

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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.

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That's where all the learning was really preserved and advanced during those ages. Anselm was also considered by most as the most important Christian philosopher -theologian between the great

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Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Well, let me give just a quick overview of the book before Chris walks us through its arguments.

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Cur Deus Homo was written between 1094 and 1098, and it was a response to two different challenges to the

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Christian faith. We have the criticism of the doctrine of the Incarnation and the

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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?

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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.

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And so Anselm presses his arguments against both of those objections. In his book, he lays out his arguments and the responses.

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He creates the whole paradigm for discussing these things. In a discussion between himself and this pupil,

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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

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Hervey. Hervey has a series of dialogues, they would call it, and they would make it quite obvious, between a godly

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Christian and a hypocrite, or between a godly Christian and a churchman.

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One of the Welsh books during that time, Daniel Rowlands, the great preacher, wrote a book where he dealt with antinomianism.

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He was attacking a person he worked with, and he said, basically, between a true Christian and an antinomian.

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And so you could use this method to kind of set up your arguments.

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What questions do you feel should be answered? And so your pupil asks them, and then he comes around and says, wow, that makes sense.

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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.

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And each book, each half, is subdivided into multiple chapters. The basic outline of his argument is as follows.

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God made man for eternal blessedness. Man fell from that original state, forfeiting his eternal blessedness, and ruined the entire human race through sin.

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The remission of sins is necessary if fallen man is to have that eternal blessedness restored.

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In order for sins to be remitted, satisfaction must be made.

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Only man ought to make, or is obligated to make satisfaction for his sin, but man cannot.

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Only God can, is able to make satisfaction, but God is not obligated.

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Since only man ought to make satisfaction, and only God can make satisfaction, it must be made by God -man.

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If man remains unredeemed, then God's purpose for humanity and creation would be frustrated, which is impossible for an omnipotent being.

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And finally, therefore, his conclusion, a God -man, Jesus of Nazareth, is necessary for the redemption of humanity.

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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.

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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.

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So, the first big, long treatment after the

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New Testament of trying to explain, trying to get a grasp on what the atonement was, was this fellow,

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Gregory of Nyssa. And his view, his explanation of what was going on when

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Christ died is, well, Satan had control out of humanity, he 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.

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So, this sort of view, I think it fits a little bit with how a lot of warfare was conducted in the ancient world.

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You're constantly worrying about whether you've taken a ransom, taken enough hostages to make sure people do what you need to do.

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

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By the way, that's still the case today, right? Israel and Hamas, they're receding as we speak. Yeah, still a huge part of how international relations happen.

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And they're thinking of the atonement through that kind of lens.

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So, I should say, spoiler alert for those, for any children who haven't read the ending of Lion, Witch, and the

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Wardrobe, the picture of Christ's death that you get, if you take a really hyper -literal understanding of Lion, Witch, and the

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Wardrobe as an allegory, is basically this sort of view. So, the

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White Witch, she's got control of Edmund, he's a traitor, and she says, well, don't you remember,

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Aslan, the deep magic from the dawn of time? All traitors are subject to me.

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I want to put this fellow to death. And Aslan says, well, maybe if you put me to death instead, you'll be willing to make a deal.

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Maybe we can make a deal. And the White Witch says, well, okay, yeah, I'd rather put you to death than put

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Edmund to death. But then Aslan says, ah, but then you have the deeper magic from before the dawn of time.

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If a willing substitute is put to death for a traitor, then death works in reverse.

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So this is the view, where Satan has this jurisdiction over mankind that God has to somehow outwit.

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And that's what's going on fundamentally with the Atonement. Anselm puts this tradition to death in kind of an amazing way.

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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.

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After that point, virtually everybody is thinking of the Atonement fundamentally as an inter -Trinitarian affair.

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

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God's justice demands our death. So you do have a lot of references, of course, to Satan being involved.

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Revelation 12, he's the accuser of the brethren. He's accusing the brethren day and night.

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But really, Satan has that role. The devil has that role because God the Father gives him that role.

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It's fundamentally God's justice that is our accuser. Our problem isn't that we have an accuser.

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The problem is that we're guilty. If we didn't have this accuser, it would only be proper to have another accuser.

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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

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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.

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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?

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My translation is only about 84 pages. You get it certainly under 100. When we talk about 47 different chapters, many of them are only a paragraph basically.

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So not in the modern context of 47 chapters is a very long book.

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It's actually a short book. Yeah, good. Thanks for pointing that out. So one first thing,

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I think we can look at a couple of the places where Anselm really makes telling criticisms of this ransom to Satan view.

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So it's actually one of the clearest ones is right toward the end.

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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.

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Rather, God demanded of man that he should defeat the devil and should pay recompense by means of righteousness, having previously offended

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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.

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But whatever was demanded from God, his debt was to God, not to the devil.

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

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May I just say, in defense of the ransom theory, Romans 6 -7 in particular lays out pretty clearly that we are in bondage to sin, maybe not the devil.

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So 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?

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And we do need to be freed. And ransom is a term that appears frequently in the descriptions of what

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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.

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That's an extraordinarily important part of Anselm's own view, but certainly the way the

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New Testament explains the gospel. So one thing you'll notice right away if you read through, there's not a huge amount of scripture getting addressed.

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One of the few places where he really goes through a bunch of scripture is in explaining the inner

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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

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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.

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It's an inner Trinitarian affair. So these are extraordinarily familiar passages.

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Philippians 2, 8, 9. Jesus humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

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Therefore God has highly exalted him. So it's submission to the Father. John 6, 38.

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I've come down from heaven not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. Romans 8, 32.

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Talking about the Father. He did not spare his own sin, but gave him up for us all.

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And of course, all of the synoptic gospels in the

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Garden. One of them, Matthew 26, 39. My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.

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Nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will. So notice that Jesus is saying to the

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Father, if it's possible, if there's some other way, can't there be some other way we can do this?

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Why is there no other way? It's because it's fitting for the Father to do it this way.

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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,

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Anselm sort of nails this one point into the ground with the

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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.

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Let me say a couple of things in that context, Chris. One is, as I understand both the context in which

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Anselm found himself here, we're looking at that time frame where you're launching the first crusade.

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

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So I might give him a pass, if you will, that he doesn't have a whole lot more Scripture in there.

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In particular, Old Testament seems really lacking here, right? That's right. Really, the way we would think about the atonement, 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 – there's a lot of phrases in Hebrews that are very, very compact, and they've just got a lot in them.

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Knowledge of Hebrew was not nearly as emphasized for a very, very long time.

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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.

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But he's not really doing exegetical work like that. And when we talk later about some of the most important virtues of the work and of Anselm in general, his motto is faith -seeking understanding.

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So it's very clear when – I mean, he says this at the very beginning of the work.

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He says, I am 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.

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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.

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He's got faith based on – and he summarizes it as just the scriptures of the

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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.

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But he's giving an answer to people who literally ask, like, how could that be?

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A lot of them are these Muslim critics who say, God can't take unto himself a human form.

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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

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European Western world is getting in a lot more contact with Muslim thought, a lot of very, very sophisticated philosophy.

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But those kind of conversations are happening. I want to say in that context too, it seems to me one of the things – 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?

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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.

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I'm afraid our modern Protestantism, many times we just want to go faith alone and forget reason, but they ought to be together.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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He's willing to have long philosophical conversations with people with really fundamentally different basic premises about the world.

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And I think without surrendering the scriptures as the fundamental basis for his own view.

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So I think as we look for earlier models that we can use to deal with just the really widespread descensus, just people don't agree about just really basic aspects of reality.

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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?

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What are the essential aspects of Christianship? Why do we see it so differently from other folks?

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And I think the process of going through those arguments and counter -arguments, it takes a while, but it can be really, really clarifying.

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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.

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He also orients it in terms of God's glory, God's honor. So one of the basic Reformation mottos,

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Soli Deo Glorio, why is all this happening at the cross? It's fundamentally for God's glory.

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So just some really lovely bits explaining why

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Christ's death honors God. So again, we start out with man's plight.

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God is creating people for eternal glory, but they're in this plight of being sinful.

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In 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.

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A couple 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.

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Either the honor which has been taken away should be repaid, or punishment should follow. Otherwise, either

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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.

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I want to say in that context too, I think another, forgive me for just bringing it back to the modern

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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.

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I know you 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.

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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,

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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

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God -man and what atonement really means for him. That's exactly right. So, I mean, the modern approach to sin, we just see it as very light.

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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.

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What are you going to do if you face God? And he says,

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Why have you been living this way? Oh, God will forgive. That's his job. So if you think of sin in terms of, well,

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God's obliged to help us out because we're so helpless. Our helplessness itself is the ground for our reconciliation with God.

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

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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

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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.

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Since these two consequences are as impossible as they are unfitting, it is inevitable that recompense or punishment follows upon every sin.

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Yeah, I think when we consider the atonement, the work of the cross, there are always two fundamental perspectives we have.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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?

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Maybe mankind can do something. Maybe we can make a deal. Maybe mankind can, by feeling really bad about sin, somehow get

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God to forgive him. But he says, in Book I, Section 20, this is, Tell me, what payment will you give to God in recompense for your sin?

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Penitence? A contrite and humbled heart? Fasting and many kinds of bodily labor? The showing of pity through giving and forgiveness and obedience?

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That's the answer that he's imagining the student giving. When you, and then

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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.

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So, Augustus' top lady has this beautiful line in the Rock of Ages hymn, Not the labor of my hands can fulfill thy laws of man's.

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Could my zeal no respite know? Could my tears forever flow? All for sin could not atone.

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Thou must save, and thou alone. And this is, you know, what

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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, you know, if we're unable to respond to God, it would be unjust for God to punish us for not responding.

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And Anselm has this, I think, quite compelling illustration right toward the end of book one.

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But section 24, he talks about our helplessness. He does our helplessness somehow.

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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.

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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.

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Do you think that his incapacity serves in the slightest as a valid excuse for him not to perform the task assigned to him?

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Not at all. It serves rather to increase his guilt, since he has brought the incapacity upon himself.

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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.

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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.

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As a result, he's unable to repay what he owed before his sin. That is an obligation not to sin.

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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.

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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.

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Jonathan Edwards' explanation of man's inability as not an excuse is very, very much an

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Anselmian idea, and really goes back to the same basic idea from Augustine.

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But in thinking about the cross in light of that, Anselm really makes an excellent application of that line of thought.

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And wouldn't you say that that's very far removed from the modern view, again, maybe of victimology?

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I think absolutely. You know, the bankruptcy laws in our nation are really made to give you a get -out -of -debtor's -prison -free pass, right?

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You accumulate all this debt, most often by your own choice, and yet when you come up to the end and you just say,

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I can't pay, you know, well, 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.

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And so that whole idea of who's the victim, maybe, ultimately, we have to look at it in the right perspective.

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It's God who is the victim here, not man. And so don't tell me about your inability as an excuse.

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Yeah, insolvency. Insolvency is not a way to get rid of a debt. It's the condition for filing bankruptcy.

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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.

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Blessed are the spiritually bankrupt. We have to declare spiritual bankruptcy so that we can see

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Christ's payment as absolutely essential. And I want to 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?

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That he creates us, everything we have, he has given us, right?

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Everything that we can do in any positive sort of meritorious sense, we'll go there,

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I suppose, is really God's own doing to begin with. And so what do you give

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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,

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I think, from the illusion that we really do have something we can give to God, right? And creates then that whole necessity.

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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.

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We are totally bankrupt spiritually, hence the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. That's right.

36:04

And we summarized the thought before about, well, what is the solution to this?

36:13

It has to be the God -man. So in Book 2,

36:19

I think, gets more into the incarnation as the solution. Book 1 is more about the atonement as such, the need for the atonement.

36:30

So you get Easter in Book 1 and Christmas in Book 2, but the relationship between them is what makes the book really so amazing.

36:40

But Book 2, Section 6, just very briefly summarizes what no one can pay, can pay except God, and no one ought to pay except man.

36:50

It is necessary that a God -man should pay it. And then right toward the end,

36:56

Book 2, Section 18, so we're talking about reconciliation, could not have been brought about unless man repaid what he owed to God.

37:07

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.

37:17

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.

37:35

So that's an essential ingredient of the gospel. And how is it that Christ is able?

37:43

I mean, I'll ask the question as I'll be bozo here today. How is it that Christ is able to pay it?

37:48

Because if he's become a man, isn't he then afflicted with the same inabilities of the rest of us?

37:57

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

38:10

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.

38:23

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.

38:55

His ability is fundamentally, his ability to do these things is fundamentally based on the fact that he's

39:01

God, and yet he's doing it in a body. So the crucifixion of the

39:08

Lord of Glory, if the Jews and Romans had known they would not have crucified the

39:16

Lord of Glory, well, how can you crucify the Lord of Glory? It's fundamentally something the

39:21

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.

39:31

Hear, hear. I mean, one of Anselm's arguments is that as the

39:39

Son of God and as a sinless man, he didn't have the duty to pay that man has, right?

39:49

And he had, forgive me, I'm going to use the phrase treasury of merit. We don't mean it in the

39:55

Roman Catholic sense. He had merit of his own, which he could voluntarily lay down, right?

40:02

And 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.

40:25

So in Christ's case, he brings this infinite treasure to bear and can pay more even than our sin required.

40:36

That's right. So he has basically, I mean, it's not just a commercial aspect where you're kind of exchanging merit or honor.

40:47

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.

41:15

So it has a fundamentally commercial vibe, the metaphor that he's using.

41:21

And that is a very helpful aspect to the atonement. Fundamentally, we're only going to understand it fully if we get ahead to some substitutionary punishment.

41:36

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.

41:57

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.

42:06

Looking through Hebrews 2, I think, is extremely useful.

42:12

And maybe we can just kind of mention some of these biblical arguments. Anselm himself isn't going into the details here, but later, especially the

42:24

Reformers, when they look back on trying to understand the gospel in Romans, they think, ah, yeah, a lot of those ideas that Anselm had kind of make sense of just some of the really compact phrases.

42:35

So, I mean, we all know this is just super central to the gospel.

42:41

Paul, in Romans 3, 21 -26, Now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.

42:56

For there's no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom

43:06

God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith.

43:14

This was to show God's righteousness because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.

43:23

It was to show his righteousness at the present time so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

43:33

So this idea of the divine forbearance in the past, God is not inflicting punishment for sin, and yet he's forgiving people.

43:43

How can that be possible? That's only because God would demonstrate his righteousness through the propitiation at the cross.

43:54

So if you see just in that little bit in 325 -26, that's the place where Anselm can really help you understand what's going on,

44:05

I think. Hebrews 2, I think there's another place. So we have these four places where the word propitiation shows up in the good translations.

44:21

One of the first things you ask when you see a new translation, well, what are they saying in Romans 3 and Hebrews 2?

44:29

Are they sticking with propitiation? But Hebrews 2, at the end of the chapter, since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself, talking about Christ of course, likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.

44:59

For surely it's not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham.

45:06

Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God to make propitiation for the sins of the people.

45:19

For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

45:26

So the necessity of it goes by very, very quick, but he had to be made like his brothers.

45:35

You had to have a God -man in order to rescue people and reconcile them to God.

45:46

So that is, I think, largely the argument of Curdeus Homo.

45:55

Lots of later people have come in and explained scriptural passages in terms of that thinking.

46:04

I think it's Anselm's Curdeus Homo and Reformed penal substitution ideas.

46:11

They're two great tastes that taste great together. I don't think that's ever been said, Chris. Yes. Somebody should try to advertise.

46:19

You could have maybe even advertised a tasty snack with that sort of phrase. But these are two really fundamental aspects of the atonement that reinforce each other when you understand them particularly well.

46:33

It's interesting, isn't it, at this point in history, you've got roughly a thousand years of church history, and Anselm is not citing the early church fathers as an authority for his arguments.

46:47

He cites Scripture, and he zeros in on rigorous logic, mostly.

46:55

That's right. And that is significant. At the very end, he says, well, we've shown that the

47:03

Old and New Testaments are a proper standard for faith.

47:09

It is interesting. So we can talk into some of the particular strengths and weaknesses.

47:18

There are these three chapters early on. It's interesting.

47:24

He takes them from Augustine, apparently. He doesn't cite him, though.

47:30

So he looks at Augustine, and he thinks, yeah, that sounds like a good idea.

47:36

I think I can give a philosophical explanation of it. And it's this idea. Part of it is based on a sort of mistranslation of,

47:45

I think, a verse from Ezekiel somewhere. It's hard to track down. You've got to go back and see what the

47:52

Vulgate said and how these various Latin terms were understood at different times. But he has this whole argument why the number of fallen angels is precisely equal.

48:04

And we don't know how many fallen angels there are. But it's precisely equal to the number of redeemed humans.

48:09

And we don't know that number either. So those three chapters are one way to think of this as a cautionary tale about overconfidence in philosophizing.

48:22

They're also a kind of cautionary tale in taking even great thinkers like Augustine and thinking, oh, yeah, we can just take every jot and tittle.

48:32

We take every jot and tittle of the scriptures. And we always have to be willing and demanding the reformation of our traditions and our own thoughts in light of the scriptures.

48:45

By the way, you're talking Book 1, Chapters 16, 17, and 18. That's right. That's right. And the other irony there for me was, as he's interacting theoretically with Boso along the way, he's always careful to bring

49:00

Boso back. He's like, no, we're only talking about this subject of the God -man. And then he goes off anyway on this.

49:06

At the end of the thing about the angels, he very explicitly says, well, that was a tangent.

49:13

He concedes. You have got that right. And yet, let me say again in this context,

49:18

I have always loved numbers. And I have a particular book on the numerology through scripture, not just going with Philo and some of the mysticism.

49:29

But we know that the number 40, the number 12, the number 7, there are numbers that are very significant in scripture.

49:37

And to even posit, well, there must be a perfect number of the redeemed at some point, it's not illogical to assume that about our perfect God.

49:48

And yet, as you point out, Chris, we have no basis for trying to say, aha, here's the number.

49:54

We have some people who look at the stuff in Revelation and take it overly.

50:02

What's the New Jerusalem? It's this really, really big cube. Who are the 144 ,000?

50:09

Those sorts of things. He's not the only one. He is not the only one to have gone off on these sorts of flights.

50:17

As with all thinkers, we want to take the good and be discerning.

50:24

And discerning our filter is, of course, the scriptures themselves. Okay, let me also go to the other point that we had talked about before the show, which is

50:34

Anselm's treatment of the Virgin Mary. It is very interesting.

50:40

It is quite fascinating. Most of the biographical—we have a pretty full biography of Anselm because of one of his students, a

50:51

British monk named Edmer. And so he wrote this Life of Anselm.

50:57

But Edmer is actually, in church history, the first one to promote this idea of the

51:03

Immaculate Conception. Explain exactly what we mean.

51:09

If you talk to Protestants, you think the Immaculate Conception, that's when the angel

51:15

Gabriel told Mary that she was going to have Jesus. No, no, no. It's not that. It's about Mary's conception.

51:24

So Edmer had this idea, and this is the Catholic Church in 1854, actually anathematizes anybody who disagrees with them on this subject.

51:35

Which would include Anselm. Which would include Anselm. So when you go from Anselm to his immediate successor,

51:42

Edmer, you can see very, very clearly the development of this doctrine happening before your eyes.

51:51

In Book II, Section 16, Anselm says, Granted that the actual conception of this man,

51:58

Jesus, was untainted and devoid of the sin of carnal pleasure, the virgin from whom he was taken was conceived amid iniquities, and her mother conceived her in sin.

52:10

He's quoting Psalm 51. And he adds a couple sections later, Jesus was taken sinless out of sinful matter.

52:20

And Edmer, his reaction was, Oh, I love you, but let's make a tweak on that point.

52:28

Again, it's a cautionary tale. John, I know you're always worrying,

52:36

Oh my goodness, these young folks, what of my idiosyncrasies are they going to take and think is the absolute most important thing about me?

52:45

What are we going to take and completely goof off? What idiosyncrasies could you possibly be thinking?

52:52

We're going to become the church of the energy drink or something. I don't really want you to list them.

52:59

That's right. But what am I saying about that?

53:07

That Anselm was very clear. Anselm was very clear. Romans 3 applies to Mary.

53:13

Romans 3 applies to Mary. And frankly, once you start saying, Oh, there was this one other sinless person.

53:22

Maybe it wasn't that we had to have a God man. We need to have the merits of the saints given to us.

53:30

So a lot of us later thinking about the treasury of merit that Christ has extra.

53:37

So he's got a bunch of merit, his death to get us out of hell. But then this extra merit to get us out of temporal punishments.

53:44

The saints have merit too. And let's take some of that. The introduction of purgatory in that context.

53:51

Purgatory, the treasury of merit and indulgences to get out of the treasury of merit, to get out of purgatory, all of this stuff.

54:01

It's amazingly late how it really develops. It's only in the 12th century. And it's kind of taking some of Anselm's ideas and really twisting them in certain ways.

54:11

In ways that are at best a complete distraction from the gospel. And at worst just encouraging people to just trust in something other than Christ and his death in our place.

54:23

So it is extremely sad just how this develops in the next few centuries. But the ingredients of the proper understanding of Christ's death are there.

54:35

And they come back when the reformers embrace them in the 16th century. And so I give

54:41

Anselm a great deal of credit for his real focus on Christ.

54:47

And the absolute necessity of his sacrifice. And not getting lost in the weeds, in those side issues and so forth.

54:56

That's right. That's right. And again, he doesn't have the Reformation slogans.

55:02

But you can definitely see, you see, I mean, salvation is only through Christ.

55:09

You see something like sola scriptura. I mean, he's willing to disagree with hundreds of years of tradition.

55:16

He defines his view in terms of the scriptures, not tradition itself. I mean, you really have a lot of the ingredients that come to full flower 400 years later.

55:25

And by the way, let me just say too, with respect to his biography and what he went through, even to become the archbishop and come into Canterbury, he fought a great deal of contentious battles all along the way in his path to Canterbury.

55:46

And even as he's writing this, we know he was exiled a couple of different times. And he's wrestling with the emperor on the one hand, but also with church authorities.

55:56

And it just seems to me one takeaway I have just kind of as a personal matter is Anselm's having gone through so many of those trials,

56:05

I think really hardened him in a way to independent thinking. And he took it saying, you know,

56:11

I'm not taking anybody's word for anything other than scripture. And so to do the heavy lifting of rethinking, for instance, the whole ransom theory, it just seems to me how the

56:22

Lord prepared him through those circumstances of his life and the trials that he endured. It brought him to the point where he was fearless, really, with regard to where his thought would take him.

56:35

That's right. He had a toughness of mind that is one of the big things that we need.

56:41

One thing I do want to mention, just the former philosopher in me, or somewhat current philosopher, former philosopher, grad student.

56:49

OK, I'm definitely not a grad student anymore. He also is extraordinarily important for how we think about necessity and contingency in general.

57:01

So when we're talking about the atonement, you know, one of the big questions is, well, did it have to be this way? Is it this way in all possible worlds or is it just sort of a contingent thing?

57:10

True in some. It's true, but didn't have to be this way. And his other big work, which some philosophers, lots and lots of philosophy 101 classes will begin.

57:22

OK, let's have a philosophy of religion section. We'll talk about his proslogion, which presents the ontological argument for God's existence.

57:31

It is still the subject of a lot of discussion among philosophers today.

57:37

I'm sure this year there will be several papers published about the ontological argument and the picture he gives of God.

57:45

We've alluded to it a little bit before, but God has to exist. To be

57:51

God means not to be thanking somebody else for his existence.

57:58

God exists in all possible worlds. So a being who, if he exists, has to exist, the argument goes, is a greater being than one who merely could exist, merely does exist but doesn't have to.

58:14

And because, he says, it's possible that God exists, a

58:20

God of this nature that exists necessarily if he exists at all, if it's possible to exist, then he has to exist.

58:26

And this argument, you actually can, one of the whole streams of ontological argument literature goes into formal logic and shows that actually this argument is formally valid if you understand necessity in certain kinds of ways.

58:45

There's a lot of people responding like, there's got to be some trick. What are you doing with this?

58:52

I think a lot of people say, well, actually, maybe it's not as obvious that it's possible that God exists as it might initially seem.

59:00

But the general picture that God, to be God, has to be necessary really has driven an awful lot of thinking just about God's attributes.

59:11

What are God's attributes when we talk about them in the studies, in the Psalm 146 series about God's attributes?

59:18

A lot of them are fundamentally the thing that's different between God and us.

59:23

We don't have to exist, but God has to exist. We're limited. Anything that's limited, that has a size, is contingent because it could be a little longer.

59:33

It could be a little shorter. It could be a little heavier, but God isn't like that at all. The ability of our minds to grasp these kinds of concepts is kind of amazing, given that we don't actually encounter any sensory things that are anything other than contingent.

59:51

Everything we look around is just contingent, contingent, contingent. But you've got to have an explanation for all of this that explains why those things exist and not something else.

01:00:00

That explanation has to be a necessarily existed being. That is God. Well, Chris and Steve, thanks for walking us through the main parts of the book with our applications.

01:00:12

Some of these things that I want to bring up now, we've mentioned them, but it might be helpful for our listeners for us to kind of summarize them.

01:00:22

There are some questions that throughout the centuries following Anselm's book, there are questions that have been raised, spiritual questions, about perhaps weaknesses of the book or incompleteness, which we would expect every book has, except for Scripture, has incompleteness.

01:00:37

Some of the questions that have been raised or the criticisms might be an overstatement, not really understanding the emphasis, asking questions of the book that it's not attempting to answer.

01:00:49

That's always a popular way to get a wrong answer. Then there are some really good points that we can leave with devotionally, some questions to ask ourselves.

01:01:00

If we could be as critical in our own thinking of ourselves as we are of Anselm, we'd probably be doing well.

01:01:08

So let me throw a couple of these at you. Chris, one of the objections is that Anselm is reflecting some

01:01:18

Nestorian tendencies, and I'll get you to explain that in a second, by focusing on the work of the humanity of Christ on the cross, but maybe de -emphasizing the deity on the cross.

01:01:34

So the statement that one man in an article, Daniel Saunders, he wrote an article pointing out some of the weaknesses and strengths, and I think it was a really helpful article.

01:01:46

Saunders points out that it could be viewed that the deity is the object of the atonement, so he's the one that's being responded toward, it's giving something given to, but not the subject, not the actor, just the humanity.

01:02:05

How would you answer that criticism? So one thing, just to kind of set the basic terms, what are we talking about?

01:02:17

We're talking about Nestorianism. So in 451, we get the Council of Chalcedon, we get the

01:02:23

Chalcedonian formulation, and they're responding basically to two different kinds of errors.

01:02:29

One is the idea that God, or Christ, only has one nature.

01:02:37

So sometimes this is the Apollinarian mistake, which is to say that Jesus is really up in heaven, and he's just kind of going around in a man suit, and he really only has one nature, and the one nature is divine.

01:02:51

Another way of doing that is Jesus is kind of a Superman. He's half

01:02:57

God, half man. So in that sense, a whole new category. He's not really

01:03:02

God and man, he's this third thing, this blending. Right, a blending. So a single nature and a single person.

01:03:10

Nestorius, and again, there's a bunch of questions about whether Nestorius was a Nestorian, but at least he's associated with the idea that, oh no,

01:03:20

Jesus does have two natures, but that's because he's two persons. And this is the objection that at least this

01:03:27

Saunders fellow has made against Anselm, that in talking about Christ accomplishing atonement at the cross, he seems to be talking about Jesus' humanity as if it's a separate person from his divinity.

01:03:45

There are some expressions that, if you take them hyper -literally,

01:03:51

I think could head that way. Early on, though, in Chordaeus Omo, it is just absolutely clear that he's a

01:04:01

Chalcedonian. He's thinking about this in terms that reflect how the

01:04:06

Christians of 451 were thinking about it. Steve, you had that?

01:04:11

Yeah, I got that quote here, book one, chapter eight. It says, but we say that the Lord Jesus Christ is very

01:04:18

God and very man, one person in two natures and two natures in one person.

01:04:23

I mean, he just nails it. Yeah, so then later on, I mean, I think if you looked at all of our prayers, our extemporaneous prayers, you'd probably find all kinds of Christological infelicities, at least, creeping into our language.

01:04:42

Some of the later stuff, I think maybe he leaves the door open a little further ajar than it should be.

01:04:48

If all you had was the later statement, it's not bonkers to say that he might seem a little more of a historian than he should.

01:04:59

As a whole, I think it's not a fair criticism. I agree. And I think we've all acknowledged that discussing that two natures and one person at any point is just enormously difficult because there is so much about it that we can't really understand.

01:05:15

So it seems to me a little bit excessive to criticize him on that point. I think, you know, with the

01:05:21

Christological arguments, we're always, you know, in a sense, because of the mystery, we have what the

01:05:27

Scripture has given us, and then we hold our, in a sense, we have to discipline our intellect to not go further than what is clearly implied in Scripture.

01:05:37

So we have to put these two fence rows up. And one fence row, we know if we go past this, we know we're in error.

01:05:44

We know if we go past the other fence on this side, we know we're in error. So if we're between the two fences,

01:05:50

I believe I'm as close as I can get right now to the biblical truth.

01:05:56

But one error is the confusion of two natures, and one error is the complete separation of these, you know.

01:06:04

So you have a blending, and then you have the Nestorian view, like two totally different people.

01:06:11

So those are always dangers that we try to hold ourselves between.

01:06:17

Well, let me ask you this. The emphasis on satisfaction of God's honor being essential, and God being the only one who is capable of doing a work of that magnitude, and man needing to also be the vehicle through which that is done, because man has dishonored

01:06:38

God. And so the second person of the Trinity takes on human nature instead of angelic nature, as Hebrews points out.

01:06:50

When we think of that, that is a significant truth in the doctrine, in the greater doctrine of the atonement.

01:06:57

But we also feel that following, years following, the Reformers were able to add clarity to that.

01:07:06

Luther took that, and instead of—he didn't jettison it, but somewhat, you know, took it as a starting point to move further along.

01:07:16

And especially in Calvin and others, we find a movement toward another statement about the atonement, which we feel is very clear and biblical, and we want to take in tandem with the others.

01:07:30

So, how would you guys—Steve, if someone said, well, the Reformers, did they completely agree with Anselm?

01:07:37

You know, what was their emphasis? How did they improve on, or what did they add to Anselm's satisfaction?

01:07:45

Yeah, I mean, it seems to me—I like the way you put that. I mean, I think they would agree with Anselm in one aspect of the atonement, that there is satisfaction in recognizing and honoring

01:07:58

God in God's honor, right? That's the focus of Anselm's theory of satisfaction.

01:08:06

I'd say Calvin, in particular, took it a little further, building also on Luther, with regard to the notion of penal substitution and satisfaction.

01:08:17

I think we've touched on it in our discussion here, but the focus on God's justice, and as Chris read the passage there in Hebrews, and we have

01:08:29

God as both the just and the justifier, and the idea of the penalty of sin being so enormous, because we've talked about the enormity of the sin itself, that that penalty has to be paid, and God's justice satisfied.

01:08:48

As the lawyer, I am particularly partial to this element of Christ's work in the atonement, because, again,

01:08:59

I think we spoke about the modern and our tendency toward victimization, that we focus on self instead of on God, and so forth.

01:09:08

I think we've also done a tremendous disservice to the whole concept of biblical justice.

01:09:13

We want to believe, I think, in our weakness, that God could just forget, like the kindly grandfather, our egregious sin against him, and no one ever pay that penalty.

01:09:30

And yet, as Anselm touches on it, I think, too, what a dishonor that would be, and really a twisting of the fundamental characteristics of God himself to wink at dishonor and of a sin that merits the punishment of death, an eternal death at that.

01:09:52

So, the satisfaction of God's justice, to me, is absolutely a profound and necessary component of our understanding of atonement, and that's what the

01:10:03

Reformers brought to the table for us. Chris, you said something in our break.

01:10:09

The way the Reformers deal with Anselm, the explanation they give of Christ's death, it's more than satisfaction, but it's not less.

01:10:20

Satisfaction is absolutely an essential ingredient for understanding Christ's death.

01:10:26

We sing songs that get written today. At the cross, the wrath of God was satisfied.

01:10:35

Till on the cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied. The emphasis on the word satisfaction is really due to Anselm.

01:10:46

And you can go back and find it in Isaiah 53. I will see the anguish of his soul and be satisfied.

01:10:53

But really, the biblical language, if it hadn't been highlighted by this kind of traditional thinking, wouldn't have made as big an impact on Western culture.

01:11:04

Yeah, and again, in this article by Saunders, he just points out that, while satisfaction is a significant and beautiful picture of atonement, it's always safe to back up and see the biggest picture.

01:11:17

So we get into trouble if we perhaps emphasize one aspect of atonement, or any aspect of the work of God, one aspect to the neglect of others.

01:11:28

So we could add to satisfaction the legal metaphor of justification, the commerce metaphor of redemption, the relational metaphor of reconciliation, the worship metaphor of sacrifice, the battlefield metaphor of victory.

01:11:50

And each of these is to be included in a full biblical understanding of what the cross accomplished for us.

01:11:59

And I think any believer would be greatly benefited when I'm reading over these things.

01:12:05

I think, man, I can't wait till we get the next break in this sermon series, so that we could stop and just say, let's look at all the biblical metaphors of atonement, so that for the believer, we have an appropriately biblical view of the foundation of our hope, and the measure of our obligation of love, and the height of our joy in Christ.

01:12:34

So, all those metaphors kept together. When we think about,

01:12:43

Chris, you mentioned that Anselm really helps bring to the forefront the inter -Trinitarian nature of the atonement, which people might, if we just ran through that quickly, might think, well,

01:12:56

I'm not exactly sure what that's talking about. But one phrase we hear a lot today, post -John

01:13:02

Piper's influence in the early days, John Piper very helpfully reminded us that Christianity is fundamentally a

01:13:11

God -centered thing, not man -centered. So, that phrase,

01:13:17

God -centered, has become popular, but perhaps it's not so easy as we wish it were. It's not as easy to be

01:13:23

God -centered as it is to say God -centeredness is a great concept. But really, what we're talking about in Anselm's emphasis on the satisfaction of God in the atonement, or as you said, the inter -Trinitarian nature of it, we really are talking about a

01:13:40

God -centered atonement. God is the object, the receiver of the atoning work.

01:13:48

God is also the presenter. He's the priest in the God -man, and the

01:13:54

God -man is the sacrifice. It is all of God, accomplished by God for those outside of God.

01:14:05

He needs none of it. So, really, a very satisfaction in the work of the atonement is one way that brings us back to a truly

01:14:16

God -centered view of the atonement. That's right, a diagram that James Boyce sometimes used.

01:14:24

You can kind of imagine a triangle with Christ, the Father, and us, and you can think of three aspects of the atonement in terms of arrows between these.

01:14:35

Christ redeems us, so Christ pays the purchase price to get us.

01:14:45

God the Father justifies us, so we are the object.

01:14:52

We're not doing anything for our salvation. Christ is redeeming us, and the Father is justifying us, but the basis of those two things is the relationship between Christ and the

01:15:04

Father, which is Christ propitiating or Christ satisfying the Father.

01:15:09

Because Christ does that, that's why He can purchase us.

01:15:15

That's why the Father can justify us. Seeing all of those at once is the key to seeing our own place in the universe, seeing really how small we are, and seeing how

01:15:26

God glorifies Himself in the work of redemption. Let me throw in the third person of the

01:15:32

Trinity here with the Spirit. One of the passages I've highlighted—I don't underline everything in the book here— is in Book 2,

01:15:39

Chapter 16, when Anselm points out, For the restoring of human nature by God via the vehicle of the

01:15:48

Holy Spirit is more wonderful than its creation, for either was equally easy for God. But before man was made, he had not sinned, so that he ought not to be denied existence.

01:15:58

But after man was made, he deserved by his sin to lose his existence together with its design, though he never has wholly lost this.

01:16:08

Therefore, God's restoring man is more wonderful than his creating man, inasmuch as it is done for the sinner contrary to his deserts, while the act of creation was not for the sinner and was not in opposition to man's deserts.

01:16:22

So that work of the Spirit in restoring and giving us new birth is really just a wonderful thing to contemplate and meditate on.

01:16:35

What is the Holy Spirit's job? His job is to glorify Christ. So anytime we're looking at Christ and seeing how beautiful He is, how amazing the gospel is, we only do that because the

01:16:48

Holy Spirit is operating in our minds and our hearts. One of the criticisms of Enzelm's theology is based really more in how it was taken and we feel clearly misapplied, dissected perhaps from the glory of the person of Christ in His labor and atonement, and perhaps maybe focusing only on the concept of satisfaction.

01:17:19

That becomes almost a separate concept in itself and a whole theology of satisfaction develops from that within the

01:17:28

Roman Catholic Church. So Chris, you've mentioned this in the first hour, but why don't you give us, if you were to give just a summary of how have his views been misapplied in the

01:17:40

Roman Catholic ecclesiology? Right. So in Enzelm's view, you have this satisfaction happening because Christ is suffering the penalty for sin.

01:17:55

This is very similar to the kind of thing that people just a generation, a couple generations later, that medieval folks say is happening in Purgatory.

01:18:07

So, satis passio, very similar to satisfaction, but actually really it's just diametrically opposed,

01:18:16

Enzelm's view, where Christ is the one. Christ alone is the one who makes satisfaction.

01:18:21

The idea that, oh, God is really concerned with His honor and we have to make recompense somehow.

01:18:28

Well, maybe we should make recompense too somehow in Purgatory. We have to work off some of our own debt of honor that we have to repay.

01:18:40

Similarly, so all this idea of satisfaction wrought by Christ getting twisted into somehow human beings able to satisfy

01:18:50

God's honor. The notion of Christ's merit gets twisted into the idea that Christ, instead of having

01:19:00

His merit given to His people and thereby able to give them salvation, the merit is given to the treasury of merit and somehow put in the custody of the

01:19:13

Vicar of Christ in Rome so that you can get withdrawals from the treasury of merit to deal with Purgatory.

01:19:22

So both of these aspects of medieval theology are almost parodies, frankly, of Enzelm.

01:19:30

You're taking the word and the idea and just assigning these tasks that only Christ performs and giving it to either the church and then doling out indulgences from the treasury of merit or giving it to human beings suffering in Purgatory.

01:19:47

Again, it underlines the need for the Reformers to come along and say, it's not just that Christ accomplishes salvation, accomplishes satisfaction, it's

01:19:57

Christ alone. So that one of the solas is really quite important.

01:20:03

It's Christ alone that saves us, that accomplishes the salvation.

01:20:09

He doesn't just make us savable. He does the work Himself. And if we add other elements to that work, we're going to not just distract ourselves, distract other people from the gospel, we're going to be putting our trust in something other than Christ, and that is eternally dangerous.

01:20:27

Something we haven't really touched on but sort of prompted by what Chris was just saying there for me is the doctrine of limited atonement, which remains, of course, very controversial.

01:20:37

But Anselm doesn't really address it head on, right? But it's implicit in his work that there are some for whom

01:20:47

Christ's work on the cross will not deliver them from hell. And that concept to me is one that it's just a hard truth, as they say.

01:20:59

And I think it's that sort of discomfort that gives rise to notions of universalism to begin with on the one hand, or the idea of purgatory.

01:21:09

Well, yeah, he didn't quite get there to faith in Christ while he was alive, but there's still hope because he's not fully into hell yet.

01:21:17

The idea that we'll make up, basically, for the loss of his lack of faith while living, it just continues, it seems to me, to drive a lot of heresy.

01:21:30

And again, the Reformers, I give great credit for hitting it head on and addressing that issue.

01:21:36

The part we were sort of cringing about, about the exact number of the elect being exactly, the number of fallen angels, it's perfectly clear, absolutely crystal clear in that section that God has a definite number of people that he's sending

01:21:55

Christ to save. And I think this idea is most helpfully elucidated by Owen's Death of Death and the

01:22:02

Death of Cross, this commercial view where God can't demand payment twice, once at my bleeding, serious hand and then again at mine, as one of the hymns sort of says.

01:22:17

But there's no idea that Christ is setting up a system through which everybody gets something and then we have to add a little bit to it.

01:22:26

That's just completely foreign to the gospel as Anselm explains it. Well, while I think that we've mentioned specific areas of error that can come from a misapplication of Anselm, what really what we're looking at is the danger of religion and it's continual, every generation, the danger of religion when men do not hold or maybe we should say are not held by a biblical view of God.

01:23:01

So men who do not know the God of the Bible or do not know him as they ought to know him then have studied doctrines that are attached to this

01:23:14

God, so the atonement or election or whatever. So they study doctrines that have to do with this

01:23:23

God. They discuss these doctrines and they apply these doctrines but not having themselves grounded by a biblical view of God, those doctrines become isolated from an appropriately immense, infinite

01:23:43

God and they always take on error. You could not go from what

01:23:50

Anselm says to purgatory and me helping paying and my priest or my pope or the saints helping to satisfy if you kept the doctrine of satisfaction in the atonement connected to the unique solitary glory of the

01:24:10

God man. That would protect you from that. It's the same thing with any other doctrinal error, especially in dealing with soteriology in the activity of God.

01:24:19

If we take the sovereignty of God but we disconnect it from all the other perfections of God, then we can discuss this, study it and write about it and apply it and we end up having this kind of isolated, harsh, cold fatalism and something's missing from the biblical picture.

01:24:42

What's missing is the other perfections of God that hold that sovereignty in its right, it's a diamond in the right setting now.

01:24:53

It's always, I think, one way for ourselves that we can cultivate the kind of life that, let's say, a garden, a heart compared to a garden, that just does not have much room for the weeds of heresy.

01:25:09

One thing we can do is cultivate a continual reintroduction to the God of the

01:25:14

Bible and ever -increasing grasp of His immensity and His goodness so that every doctrine is held, anchored to Him.

01:25:27

While we will be imperfect, our imperfections do not being untethered from God, they don't grow into this whole system that is increasingly erroneous as it gets further from God.

01:25:42

The gardening metaphor, I think, is great about heresy. We have, of course, a friend who's into farming and he's a big critic of the overuse of pesticides and you think, like, what are you trying to do with a garden if your main concern is just killing the weeds?

01:25:59

We're just gonna bomb the whole thing with pesticides. The important thing is getting proper plants to be growing, and so getting a proper theology rather than just avoiding errors.

01:26:10

So actually being enraptured with God's glory is far more important for having a

01:26:15

God -centered, God's glory -centered theology than memorizing

01:26:21

Shorter Catechism, Question 1, living and enjoying God's glory, seeing our own end the way

01:26:28

Anselm saw it, as based on God's glory, is far more important. Perhaps we could say some devotional questions we might ask ourselves as we bring this to a close.

01:26:44

In light of Anselm's emphasis, and really contrary to much of the church tradition he grew up with, and we talked about the courage of that and his determination to be as biblical as he could understand, that emphasis on the honor of God in redeeming us through an atoning death,

01:27:08

I think there are some questions that come to my mind, for me, so perhaps it might help others.

01:27:16

Am I so aware of the God of the Bible that I am asking the questions that Anselm asked and wrestled with that led to writing about the centrality of satisfaction of the deity and his honor in the rescue of the sinner?

01:27:37

In other words, if I am thinking only of myself, then if I am the large issue in salvation, and God is the smaller, he's the rescuer, but I'm really the hero of the story,

01:27:54

I'm the protagonist, and God, of course, is really appreciated because he comes and saves the most important person, me.

01:28:00

But if I'm the center of the cross instead of God, then

01:28:07

I don't ask the questions that Anselm asked. It does not bother me whether God is honored or not.

01:28:13

I just need to know, what people often ask preachers, are you saying if I do such and such,

01:28:19

I'm going to hell? And if you say, well, I'm not, and they go, okay, that's all

01:28:26

I need to know. Just tell me, is this sending me to hell or not? Can I do this and ask forgiveness and still get to heaven?

01:28:32

And you have to say to them, you have the absolutely wrong question in mind.

01:28:39

So, are we the kind of people who view God in some ways, like Anselm did, a biblical perspective that makes me agonize over this question?

01:28:54

Of course, it wasn't just Anselm. Paul, in Romans 3, which you guys have already raised the issue, that Paul is in earnest to answer an accusation against God which the gospel causes.

01:29:09

And the accusation which the gospel causes and then answers is this, how can a just God, a perfectly fair and righteous

01:29:16

God who doesn't bend the rules ever, how can he apparently bend the rules to look at a sinner with all the sin in front of God's all -seeing eye, and God says, he is perfect with me, he is not guilty, or he is made right, and I declare him right.

01:29:34

And Paul answers that the apparent unjustness of the judge is not unjustice.

01:29:43

It is actually the highest form of justice at the most amazing cost, and through the atoning death of Christ, God is both just and he can justify those who hope in him.

01:29:56

So, Paul agonizes that. So, just a simple question. What things, when

01:30:02

I read the fullness of the gospel and the amazing provisions there, and it seems too good to be true, am

01:30:10

I wrestling with things that other men have wrestled with in previous ages because I see

01:30:17

God for who he is? Let me give you another one. When you think of redemption, what is it that thrills you other than the fact that you are forgiven, that you are washed?

01:30:36

And we talked about this in one of our breaks, that there is the issue that for a true believer, the heart has been renewed, the eyes have been opened, the chains on the will have been broken, and we hope, we run to Christ and grab hold of all that he is and hand over all that we understand of ourselves and through this act of faith, which

01:31:04

God is working in us all the while, being united to Christ, alive in Christ, we turn and look at God with very different eyes.

01:31:14

He is Father now and not just judge or not just king. He is our, you know, the

01:31:20

Savior is my elder brother. He is our life, Paul says. So, it would be an eternal grief to us if in the ages to come, in the new creation, we wear the beauty of Christ's righteousness as his people, but we look at him and realize

01:31:43

God was degraded for us to be exalted. I don't mean that God humbled himself because God did humble himself or express that humility in the sending of the

01:31:53

Son. The Son gladly humbled himself, but that's a beautiful thing. But God's honor was not sullied in our rescue.

01:32:03

It was exalted. So, the law was not swept under the carpet but lifted to its highest form of fulfillment.

01:32:13

You know, the honor of God, the justice of God, the truthfulness of God, all those things were exalted much more clearly in the life and death of Jesus and in saving us than even they would have been in damning us.

01:32:29

So, it is a source of everlasting happiness that the one that we now love more than we love life has been exalted perfectly in rescuing us.

01:32:47

One more question. When we look at Anselm and the issue of his focus on God's satisfaction, so a

01:32:57

God -centered cross, one question that that raises in my mind is, you know, how do you...

01:33:06

why is he that way? And one reason we could say is that his allegiance, his focus, you know, the magnet of his soul is being constantly pulled away from self toward another.

01:33:19

His allegiance is with deity, not with fallen humanity. And so, even if you never read

01:33:27

Anselm's book, you can come away with the realization that the sweetest, safest, most

01:33:36

Christ -like path is to wake up in the morning and the whole of my mind and my affections and my will to be, to incline, to be inclined, for me to bend them willingly to a superior object.

01:33:54

My allegiance is with him. And it guards us from a thousand unnecessary, you know, traps, slippery spots, you know, dangerous pits.

01:34:08

Chris, as Steve mentioned, this is not a 900 -page book. This is not

01:34:13

Augustine's Confessions. This isn't the City of God, which we hope to look at one day. This is not something that someone looks at and thinks, if I live to 100, maybe

01:34:22

I could get through it. But, while it's 100 pages or less, depending on the way your book is laid out, it is a book that has some pretty tightly -knit thought.

01:34:35

And if you're not used to thinking in the way that Anselm's speaking, it might be a hard slog.

01:34:42

So, in our notes that you sent us, you had a suggestion, maybe we could say,

01:34:48

Chris's cliff notes for Anselm's book. So, how would you suggest maybe a shortcut? So, the sections that I would read would be the same ones, actually, that I read many years ago when

01:35:00

I read George Smeaton's book on the Atonement. So, in Book 1, Sections 11 to 15, and then 19 to 24.

01:35:09

So, the little bit about the angels is the stuff in between.

01:35:15

You can read it for perhaps entertainment value, but those are the heart of his explanation of the

01:35:22

Atonement, and really, really just the core of the core of the beautiful thoughts about Christ's death for His people.

01:35:30

And the book you just mentioned was George Smeaton, S -M -E -A -T -O -N.

01:35:35

We'll put that in the show notes. Banner of Truth has published that for many years. I hope it's still in print. It is really a wonderful treatment of the

01:35:45

Atonement. Smeaton was, I think, a contemporary with McShane, I believe, and a

01:35:50

Scotsman at the same time as Robert and Mary McShane was alive. And his theology is, therefore, very readable and trustworthy.

01:35:58

Two volumes, Christ's Doctrine of the Atonement and the Apostles' Doctrine of the Atonement. All right.

01:36:04

Anything you guys want to add? Any parting thoughts for our crowd as we think about Anselm?

01:36:10

Well, who should read it? Who should read it? Good. Well, if you're interested in the best of medieval theology, you should read him.

01:36:20

He's a lot better than the people who came before, and I think a good bit better than the people who come immediately after.

01:36:26

He really is a high point of medieval theology. People interested in philosophy, his arguments are really very careful.

01:36:34

He's very careful to set out counterarguments and respond to them. He gives space to counterarguments.

01:36:41

Sometimes in a way that makes it hard to quote him and exactly capture his thought.

01:36:47

But if you're interested in philosophy, give him a try. And you might say, oh, my goodness,

01:36:52

I've had enough of that. People interested in apologetics, his basic outlook, faith -seeking understanding, is extraordinarily influential, and I think exactly right.

01:37:03

So in terms of the presuppositional view that a lot of reformed people have, traces back, traces earlier than Anselm, but he makes a very big point of making clear what he's doing.

01:37:15

He's not trying to reason to faith, but reasoning from faith, trying to understand on the basis of faith.

01:37:21

People interested in thinking about necessity and contingency, things that have to be that way, things that don't have to be that way.

01:37:31

It can be tricky, heavy waters, but Anselm really takes those ideas and thinks about them a lot.

01:37:39

Trying to understand the atonement, people trying to understand the atonement, people trying to understand the incarnation, trying to understand the relationship between those.

01:37:49

A great book to read. Broadly speaking, the relationship between Christmas and Easter.

01:37:54

So at Christmas time, sometimes people will say, well, you know, we do really need to be thinking, not just about a baby in the manger, but about the cross.

01:38:03

And at Easter, we do need to remember, okay, Christ's death, it's been led to through all this time,

01:38:11

Christ became a man for this purpose. People preaching on Hebrews 2, 14 to 18,

01:38:21

Romans 3, 21 to 26. If you're going through those passages, you might want to give

01:38:26

Anselm a look to see if some of those compact phrases get, you see a little more light in the perspective of his thinking.

01:38:35

And then finally, people who are just interested in the history of some of these Catholic dogmas.

01:38:41

I think the Marian dogma, you see it developing almost in real time with Anselm and Edmer.

01:38:47

And certainly the stuff about satisfaction turning into satispassio and some of the developments.

01:38:54

If you want to tell the story of medieval theology and its kind of rise and sometimes fall, you have to know

01:39:02

Anselm as your data point. I would just add, I think those are really good categories that the common churchman wanting to know, if you're not going to read a lot of classics and ancient literature, it is short.

01:39:16

It's actually very readable for a philosophical work, I would suggest. My daughter, she's done

01:39:21

Latin for a while. She says, it is readable Latin. So medieval Latin, a lot easier than reading the

01:39:27

Aeneid. But the language is pretty readable. The translations, there's not a whole lot of controversy.

01:39:34

I think it's pretty translatable language. So it's stuff that you can read. It's not super...

01:39:41

We didn't go back, you have to go back and think about, well, what is he really saying with this word? You can tell the flow of his thought pretty excessively.

01:39:50

To know where we came from, this is one on whose shoulders we stand today. Helps us to understand where we are and where we're going.

01:39:58

I mean, he's just in the flow of great Christian and Western philosophical thought.

01:40:05

Great. Well, Chris, Steve, appreciate the time that you guys dedicated to come and be with us today.

01:40:12

And we will be back in about four months and we'll look at another one of the great classics in our special podcast,