A. M. FAIRBAIRN (1893).—“The
[Anselmic] theory was throughout a piece of forensic speculation; it was the
relations of God and man interpreted in the terms of Roman law, though as
modified by Teutonic, and as applied in the penitential discipline of the
Church As such it was fatal to the kingdom of God as a reign of grace. The
satisfaction which compensated the offended secured the legal quittance of the
offender; the debt paid could not be a debt forgiven; to deny salvation or
reward to any man so needed was to deny him his most manifest rights. If grace
was saved by God being made to provide the person who satisfied, then the whole
became a preconcerted transaction a sort of commercial drama, a legal fiction
sanctioned by the offended for the good of the offender. Or if the notion of
forgiveness was retained by the act being transferred from the satisfied Father
to the satisfying Son, then the ethical union of the Godhead was endangered and
the most serious of all heresies endorsed. (The Place of Christ in Modern Theology,
pp. 123 sq, in George Cadwalader Foley, Anselm’s Theory of the
Atonement: The Bohlen Lectures, 1908 [New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.,
1909], 296)
