Saturday, September 30, 2023

A. M. Fairbairn’s critique of Anselm’s Satisfaction Theory of Atonement

  

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)