It is sometimes asserted that we need
to modify the Greek theology by the ideas developed in the Latin theology,
especially with reference to the conception of sin. It is admitted that the
Latins contributed much that was valuable to Christian thought; but they added
very little in the department of Soteriology, and whatever was original with
them was generally mischievous. Their theological concept were to commonly cast
in legal phraseology, in which they seem to have entirely misunderstood the
difference between the νομος of St. Paul’s Epistles and the lex
of Roman jurisprudence. The paternal idea of the relation between God and man
was displaced by the juridical. The “divine kinsmanship” between Creator and
creature was rejected in favour of a profound unlikeness and disjunction
between them, that could be remedied only by a series of forensic transactions.
Sin was not essentially spiritual, the substitution of self-will for the will
of God, a missing of the end for which man was made; it was a “crimen,” a
“delictum interdictum.” Penalty was no longer the natural and inevitable
consequence of sin, the separation of the life from God, the deterioration of
the spiritual nature; it was a judicial imposition from without, extrinsic and
contingent. Forgiveness was not so much the remission of sins as a legal
quittance from penalty; redemption was transformed from the deliverance
of man at the cost of a loving sacrifice, by figures that reduced it to the
payment of costs imposed by the judgment of a court; the ruling motive in the
work of Christ was not so much a divine and righteous love as divine punitive
justice. The legal morality of merit and good works, which St. Paul so
vehemently opposed, was the appropriate correlative of this forensic theology.
(In many respects, Augustin was a noble exception to this representation; but I
speak of the theology that was generally wrought out in the Western Church)
It is true that no Greek ever uttered
such intense and passionate confessions of sin as did some of the Latins, in
which they went far beyond St. Paul in Romans vii. But that was because sin
could not bulk so large to the consciousness of men who dwelt upon the
Incarnation as the evidence of an affinity between divine and human nature, as
it did to that of men who denied or at least underestimated this affinity. The
Greek were not insensitive to the “exceeding sinfulness of sin”; but they were
splendidly alive to the truth that, “where sin abounded, grace did much more
abound.” It is mainly a matter of emphasis. The Greeks placed it upon God in
Christ in man; the Latins placed it upon human sin. There can be very little
doubt as to which of these thoughts is the more spiritually fruitful. (George
Cadwalader Foley, Anselm’s Theory of the Atonement: The Bohlen Lectures,
1908 [New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909], 262-63 n. 1)
