Clarion

Augustine’s Atonement: God’s Self-Appeasing Love Prior to Incarnation as Cure – Brad Jersak with responses B Myers, G Power & D Guretzki

Nov 6, 2017 | Author - Brad Jersak | 4 comments

Saint_Augustine_PortraitI am fascinated to read Augustine on the nature and necessity of Christ's incarnation and death. I am reading from Augustine, On the Trinity, ch. 10. The chapter numbers I focused on were 10-18, while the paragraph numbers were actually 13-23. Readers can and I'd say should read it firsthand HERE:   

Augustine focuses on why Jesus died. Was it necessary? Why was it necessary? What did it accomplish? And how does this differ from the Satisfaction theory of Anselm and Penal Substitution theory of John Calvin. [David Guretzki, thanks for putting me on this question].

Here is what I believe I discovered:

1. Like other early church fathers (such as St Athanasius), soteriology begins with the Incarnation, in which God assumes human nature so he can endure the human condition, including death, in order that his righteousness and unobligated death should free us from our misery of bondage to death and the devil, 
 
2. He explicitly and vehemently denies any sense that the Son's death was required to appease the Father. He argues that the Father did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, and so was already appeased beforehand. This, along with the fact that while we were enemies, God loved us, means for Augustine that Father and Son together were already both appeased by their own superabundant love, prior even to (and resulting in) the Incarnation. On this point, forgive me for reproducing most of chapter 11, but this is central to the claim that the death of Christ, for Augustine, does not appease the Father in order that the Father might re-orient himself toward us. 
 
But what is meant by justified in His blood? What power is there in this blood, I beseech you, that they who believe should be justified in it? And what is meant by being reconciled by the death of His Son? Was it indeed so, that when God the Father was angry with us, He saw the death of His Son for us, and was appeased towards us? Was then His Son already so far appeased towards us, that He even deigned to die for us; while the Father was still so far angry, that except His Son died for us, He would not be appeased? And what, then, is that which the same teacher of the Gentiles himself says in another place: What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us? He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all; how has He not with Him also freely given us all things? Pray, unless the Father had been already appeased, would He have delivered up His own Son, not sparing Him for us? Does not this opinion seem to be as it were contrary to that? In the one, the Son dies for us, and the Father is reconciled to us by His death; in the other, as though the Father first loved us, He Himself on our account does not spare the Son, He Himself for us delivers Him up to death. But I see that the Father lovedus also before, not only before the Son died for us, but before He created the world; the apostlehimself being witness, who says, According as He has chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world. Nor was the Son delivered up for us as it were unwillingly, the Father Himself not sparing Him; for it is said also concerning Him, Who loved me, and delivered up Himself for me.Therefore together both the Father and the Son, and the Spirit of both, work all things equally and harmoniously; yet we are justified in the blood of Christ, and we are reconciled to God by the death of His Son.
 
3. In Augustine, there is a Christus Victor over the devil, and specifically not by power, but through the righteousness of Christ in both his life and death. The merits of Christ's righteousness are more than enough to save us, especially since his death was completely voluntary and 'unobligated,' since the devil had 'nothing in Him.'
 
4. And yet there is a sense for Augustine in which we are saved in this way from the wrath of God. However, he explains that God's wrath is impassible, which is to say, the retribution due sin (eternal death). He says:
Therefore we shall be saved from wrath through Him; from the wrath certainly of God, which is nothing else but just retribution. For the wrath of God is not, as is that of man, a perturbation of the mind; but it is the wrath of Him to whom Holy Scripture says in another place, But You, O Lord, mastering Your power, judgest with calmness.  
Thus, this wrath is not a literal anger, but simply the natural or just consequences of sin that God sends Christ to remove. Sin condemns you to death, which is God's wrath or retribution only in the sense of what is due for sin, not what is demanded in God. 
 
5. Christ does not die in order to appease God's wrath through punishment (not at all), so that God is freed to forgive us. Rather, God in his love, graciously spares not his own Son in order that through Christ's unobligated, voluntary death, we are saved from the consequences of sin (bondage to the devil / fitting eternal death). God is not obligated to the law of retribution, but as in C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, overcomes the devil's legal demand for retribution with the far greater reality of self-giving love.
 
The important thing is that God (Father, Son and Spirit in undivided harmony), in his own *self-appeasing love* and reconciling grace, which precedes and initiates the Incarnation, sends the Son to assume human nature to bear the human condition and to free us from the just consequences of sin (i.e. that is, to justify us), by overcoming the devil's claim on us with his righteousness.
 
**In Augustine's totalizing view of grace, nothing can be required to appease God, reconcile God to us, or free God to forgive us … or salvation would not be by grace alone! Rather, the reconciling grace of God acts first to free us via the Incarnation. There's no penal key that unlocks God's ability to forgive, but Christ is the grace-given key that unlocks us from the prison of human misery, eternal death and diabolical bondage.
 
In this sense, Calvin and even Anselm are not simply extending Augustinian retribution, but rather, they depart from Augustine by implying that Christ's Incarnation and/or death must satisfy something that frees God to enact grace. Rather, for Augustine, grace enacts the means by which we are freed. The necessity of Christ's Incarnation / Crucifixion is about what God must himself do to free us from Satan, sin and death, which are the consequences of sin (and metaphorically, what he means by impassible wrath). 
 
As I understand St Augustine, his departure from the other fathers is not on this point. Instead, it begins with his misread of Romans 5 on original sin as inherited guilt; his doctrine of massa damnata, which founds and funds his monergism of unconditional grace; and thus his unilateral/unconditional election/predestination. And it is these elements which later Augustinian Reformers (such as Luther and Calvin) will employ to teach 'bondage of the will,' total depravity and double-predestination. 

Response by Ben Myers

Nice work, Brad. Just a couple of thoughts to add: in my observation, Augustine's most common way of talking about 'atonement' seems to be with metaphors of healing and medicine. Christ is a medicine that heals our nature. What do we need to be healed from? Aug's usual answer (repeated hundreds of times through his works) is pride. It's specifically the humility of the Son (in both incarnation and crucifixion) that functions as a medicine to heal our pride. (But don't think of pride as just a false attitude – it has a kind of ontological weight; it's a disorder of the soul that pulls us away from God and toward ourselves, i.e. toward nothingness.) Anyway I don't have all the details totally clear in my mind but I would say that seems to be the general picture of how the 'atonement' works in Augustine.

Response by Archimandrite Gerasim Power

This is a very interesting post, Brad! Very refreshing in fact. The Blessed Augustine is quite the enigma to everyone, especially Eastern Orthodox Christians. His theology is at first sight, really way out there.

His understanding of the incarnation tends not to emphasize the idea that Christ would have been incarnate whether we had sinned or not, in order to fulfill God's plan of theosis, and that after the Fall, it took on the quality of a 'rescue mission', so that the plan would continue.

In order to understand anything of his theology, one must first understand the man himself. He was a brilliant rhetorician with exceptional Latin, and a very weak knowledge of Greek. He led a typically dissolute life in the 4th cent. Roman Empire. His very patrician father was rather ill-tempered and stern, his mother, gentle and pious. He was highly educated and also was once a rather duelistic Manichean. His conversion was not only an intense spiritual thing, but also quite emotional, as was he. His love for God was extremely deep, his remorse and contrition over his former way of life, almost overwhelming, his gratitude to God as his Saviour, beyond words. It is in his short, but significant monastic writings (yes he was a monk of sorts), his homilies, and his Confessions that we can get a true picture of just who this guy was and what made him tick – including theologically.

While not, of course, agreeing with many of his theological ideas, I do feel that the Scholastics of the Mediaeval period in the West, not to mention the Protestant Reformers of the 16th, have largely misunderstood, hijacked, and distorted the thoughts of Augustine. Only by really looking at the man himself and his life can we actually get anywhere near understanding his ideas, theological or otherwise. My favourite quote of his, coming from his Confessions, where he totally bares his soul to me really sums up what Augustine of Hippo is all about – and it's among the most beautiful of thoughts:

"You called, You shouted, and You broke through my deafness. You flashed, You shone, and You dispelled my blindness. You breathed Your fragrance on me; I gasped and now I pant for You. I have tasted You, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for Your peace, Oh Beauty ever ancient, ever new, how late have I loved You!"

Response by David Guretzki

Some good stuff in this article, but I think you over reach on point 4. Augustine's resistance to wrath as a perturbance in God does not mean that wrath is therefore ad extra to God and somehow now a descriptor of the human. Augustine does in fact still talk about appeasing God's wrath through the mediation of the Son. Rather, he is saying that wrath of humanity is tainted by emotion (that's his Platonism coming through) but for God, wrath is impassioned and therefore just. But it is still IN God and sent by God to abide on humans in their sinfulness. So I think you may be reading in to Augustine a notion of wrath as "natural consequences to sin" where it isn't.

See his Letter 164 to Evodius regarding the Descenus. 

It also might be important to note the date of the letter relative to City of God. Augustine did develop. 

See also this Brigham Young article on "The Harrowing of Hell." It seems to echo a few things about what I thought about Augustine. 

Brad's Final Thoughts

I am grateful to Dr. Ben Myers, Fr. Gerasim and Dr. David Guretzki for their contributions. Between their insights and the further readings they suggested, I have come to the following thoughts and questions, all still tentative and contingent on further study:

1. The big question for me is whether or not Augustine’s position on the descensus requires him to come up with an alternative necessity for the death of Christ that leads to satisfaction motifs. It need not if the death and resurrection itself functions as the mechanism by which God frees us from death.

2. After reading Augustine's Letter to Evodius, I concluded that that Augustine’s version of descensus is much narrower than the Eastern Fathers and Liturgy, which unanimously speaks of Christ's death and descent to metaphorically “raise up Adam [human nature] with himself" by his resurrection. That is, the Eastern decensus seams Christ's death and resurrection together for the ontological salvation of humanity from death.  

Augustine's focus in the letter focuses more narrowly on debates within the descensus discussion re: 1 Peter (and there’s a wide range of opinion on this even in the East). But what he seems to hold in common with them is that Christ descends by death into death, but Satan, death and hell cannot hold him. He is victorious over them by the resurrection, SO THAT the elect are raised by grace to their resurrection from death to life by faith (?)–not in some afterlife rescue but here and now (by grace thru baptism?) and at the end of the age (and this seems how the East applies it as well).

So in Augustine's embrace of Christ’s personal victory over death by death, at least in this letter, he follows the other Fathers logic that there is no need for some additional atoning mechanism (eg satisfaction, appeasement) to justify the Father’s forgiveness. His grace initiates the saving act by which Christ assumes human nature, endures the human condition and overcomes it in himself, and does so righteously. My tentative conclusion is that his conservative interpretation of descensus maintains the necessary core: that God cures death by unilateral death, descent and resurrection. His issue with the East will not be on that front, but re: his monergism. 

That is, Augustine could in good conscience cite the Apostles Creed without altering the essential meaning of ‘descent.’ Calvin, on the other hand, knowingly reinterprets the creed to relocate desncensus to the Cross, where he views it, not as Christ's victory over death, but the unleashing of the Father's wrath on the Son.
 
AND YET, when I read the City of God, Guretzki's point stands: I cannot see Augustine's wrath described there as simply consequence. Rather, he doubles down on retribution and describes eternal conscious torment as both directly imposed and divinely maintained. By this stage in Augustine's developing (or devolving?) theology, there can be little doubt that he sees retribution IN God (contra the Eastern Fathers), but I am not yet sure that I see wrath-appeasement IN God as essential to his atonement theory.

4 Comments

  1. Sgonzo88
    Sgonzo88 on November 6, 2017 at 4:45 pm

    So good. Thanks for posting this. Always good to read the words of the church fathers themselves instead of the interpretation of them by someone else. Interesting how this issue is still such a pretentious conversation in 2017.

    Reply
  3. Jeff
    Jeff on October 7, 2018 at 11:04 am

    Augustine and Aquinas, and those certain scholastics following them, didn’t understand synergism to be simplistic ( 50/50), much nuance on two levels of causality , so a necessitas absoluta reading of foreknowledge / predestination misses the mark entirely,

    Reply
  4. Gary Knight
    Gary Knight on August 28, 2021 at 5:05 pm

    The discussion is already 4 years old (although, what is 4 years in 16 centuries ?) .. yet I thought I would note that Augustine’s point in De Trinitatis as quoted in your section 2 (and your own point in para. 2 of section 5) is subsumed in recognizing that He who is sent, while clearly the Son, is also intimately the Father (“I am in the Father and the Father is in me”). Thus the atoning sacrifice is of God entirely, as an outpouring of Love (“God is Love”) and indeed pity (to paraphrase: “Let us forgive them, for they know not what they do”). This pity is not ‘condescending’ in the sense that some people use it, but in the best sense of Pieta or Pie (impassioned empathetic caring, the way a pelican feeds her young). As John says, “God sooo (or thus) loved the world,” and so it is that the very name of Jesus (Y’shuah) is “the salvation of God” (as announced prophetically by Simeon). This unity of God and His work is the reason that Athanasius can say “the glory of God is man fully alive”: it is not the glory of the Son alone, or the Holy Spirit (by whom one is ‘born from above’ as Jesus explained), or the Father taken in categorical separations, but of the blessed Trinity beheld in its awesome Oneness. This should bring us back to the reason Augustine was writing that work in the first place. Best regards, a third-order Augustinian.

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