Chapter 16
Anselm, Abelard, and Medieval Atonement Theology

Introduction

The medieval period gave the church two of the most important and lasting proposals about why Jesus died. Anselm of Canterbury, writing at the end of the eleventh century, argued that Christ's death was necessary to make satisfaction to God for the dishonor caused by human sin. His younger contemporary Peter Abelard pushed back, insisting that the real power of the cross lies not in any transaction with God but in the way it moves our hearts to love. These two thinkers — one stressing the objective, God-ward achievement of the cross, the other stressing its subjective, human-ward impact — set the terms for a debate that has continued ever since.

But the medieval story does not stop with Anselm and Abelard. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest theologian of the Middle Ages, forged a brilliant synthesis that drew on both Anselm and the earlier Church Fathers. And Hugo Grotius, writing in the early seventeenth century at the boundary between the medieval and modern eras, offered yet another approach — the governmental theory — in response to the radical attacks on substitutionary atonement coming from Socinus. Understanding all of these figures is essential for anyone who wants to trace how the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement developed.

The thesis of this chapter is straightforward: Anselm's satisfaction theory and Abelard's moral influence theory each captured something genuinely important about the cross, but both were incomplete. Anselm was right that the atonement must satisfy something in God's own nature — sin cannot simply be waved away. But he framed the problem in terms of God's honor rather than God's justice, and he distinguished satisfaction from punishment in a way that later Reformers rightly corrected. Abelard was right that the cross is a breathtaking demonstration of divine love — but if love is all there is, if nothing objective happened between God and humanity at Calvary, the cross loses its saving power. Penal substitutionary atonement, as it emerged in the Reformation (see Chapter 17), built on Anselm's core insight while correcting his framework: what the cross satisfies is not merely God's honor but God's justice, and the way it satisfies that justice is through the bearing of the penalty for sin by a willing substitute.

I want to walk through this story carefully, because getting the medieval background right helps us understand where penal substitution came from and why it matters. We will look first at the world in which Anselm wrote, then at his great argument in Cur Deus Homo, then at Abelard's response, then at the important contributions of Aquinas and Grotius. Along the way, I will be drawing on our project sources — particularly William Lane Craig's masterful treatment in Chapter 7 of Atonement and the Death of Christ, David Allen's survey in Chapter 9 of The Atonement, John Stott's discussion in The Cross of Christ, and the relevant sections from Jeffery, Ovey, and Sach's Pierced for Our Transgressions. I will also engage with William Hess's critical perspective from Crushing the Great Serpent, which traces a line from Anselm to what Hess sees as the errors of penal substitution.

The World Before Anselm: Why a New Approach Was Needed

To appreciate what Anselm accomplished, we need to remember where atonement theology stood at the end of the first millennium. As we saw in Chapters 13–15, the Church Fathers did not produce a single, systematic theory of the atonement. What they gave us was a rich tapestry of images and themes — victory over the devil (Christus Victor), ransom from captivity, recapitulation of human nature, sacrifice for sin, substitution for sinners, and the healing of our fallen humanity through the incarnation. These themes coexisted, sometimes in the same author, without anyone feeling the need to sort them into a tidy system.

The dominant framework, especially in popular teaching, was some version of the ransom theory. Christ's death was understood as a ransom paid to free humanity from the devil's grip. But to whom was this ransom paid? Some Fathers said it was paid to the devil himself — a view that reached its most colorful expression in Gregory of Nyssa's famous "fishhook" image, where Christ's humanity was the bait that lured Satan, and his divinity was the hook hidden inside.¹ Others found this idea deeply troubling. Gregory of Nazianzus rejected it bluntly: the ransom was not paid to the devil, for how could a tyrant and kidnapper have any rightful claim on God?²

But if the ransom was not paid to the devil, to whom was it paid? If it was paid to God, in what sense did God need to be "paid"? The Fathers had raised the question but not answered it with philosophical precision. As Craig observes, the church had to wait until Anselm's Cur Deus Homo at the end of the eleventh century for the first truly systematic exploration of why the incarnation and the cross were necessary.³ Anselm stepped into that gap. He was not starting from scratch — as we documented in Chapter 15, substitutionary and even penal language had been present in the patristic tradition all along. But Anselm was the first to pull these threads together into a careful, reasoned argument about why a God-man had to die.

Anselm of Canterbury and Cur Deus Homo

The Man and His Method

Anselm (1033–1109) was a godly Italian who first settled in Normandy and then, following the Norman Conquest of England, was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093.⁴ He is sometimes called the father of medieval scholasticism — that grand attempt to reconcile faith and reason, biblical revelation and Aristotelian logic. Though Anselm included Scripture in his writings and referred to the Bible as "a firm foundation," his overriding method was to show that the truths of the faith are "agreeable to reason."⁵ His imaginary conversation partner, Boso, says at one point: "The way by which you lead me is so walled in by reasoning on each side that I do not seem able to turn out of it either to the right hand or the left."⁶ This gives us a sense of Anselm's style: step-by-step logical argument, building a case that the reader can follow link by link.

Anselm wrote Cur Deus Homo ("Why Did God Become Man?") in 1098. It remains one of the most important books ever written on the atonement. James Denney called it "the truest and greatest book on the atonement that has ever been written," and Robert Franks described it as "epoch-making in the whole history of our doctrine."⁷ Even scholars who ultimately disagree with Anselm's conclusions acknowledge that he changed the conversation permanently. Before Anselm, the question of the atonement was tangled up with the ransom-to-the-devil framework. After Anselm, the conversation shifted to God's own nature — what does justice require? What does holiness demand? These remain the right questions.

The Argument of Cur Deus Homo

Anselm's argument unfolds in a tight logical sequence. Let me walk through it step by step, since understanding the structure matters.

Step 1: Sin dishonors God. Anselm begins by defining sin as "not rendering to God what is his due." What is due to God? That every rational creature's will should be subject to the will of God. This is "justice, or uprightness of will," and it is "the sole and complete debt of honor which we owe to God." When we fail to give God what we owe — when we disobey — we steal from Him and dishonor Him. "He who does not render this honor which is due to God, robs God of his own and dishonors him; and this is sin."⁸

Step 2: God cannot simply overlook sin. Could God not just forgive out of compassion, without any payment or satisfaction? Anselm says no. "It is not proper for God to pass by sin thus unpunished." More than that — it is impossible. "If it is not becoming to God to do anything unjustly or irregularly, it is not within the scope of his liberty or kindness or will to let go unpunished the sinner who does not repay to God what he has taken away."⁹ For Anselm, this is not about God being petty. It is about the moral order of the universe. "God upholds nothing more justly than he doth the honour of his own dignity." If sin could be simply overlooked, the distinction between sin and righteousness would collapse, and the entire moral order would unravel.

Step 3: Humans cannot make satisfaction on their own. The debt is infinite — it is an offense against an infinite God. Our present obedience and good works cannot make up for past sins, because those good works are already required of us as creatures. We cannot give God something extra. As Anselm puts it: "One who is a sinner cannot justify another sinner." We owe a debt we can never repay.¹⁰

Step 4: Only a God-man can provide the needed satisfaction. Here is the heart of Anselm's argument. Humanity ought to make satisfaction, but cannot. God could make satisfaction, but need not (as God, He is under no obligation to make satisfaction for human sin). "It is necessary that one who is God-man should make it."¹¹ Only a being who is both fully God and fully human — "perfect God and perfect man" — can bridge the gap. The God-man owes nothing on his own account (since he is sinless), so his voluntary self-offering unto death provides a gift of infinite value that more than covers the debt incurred by human sin.

Step 5: Christ's death provides a superabundant satisfaction. Since Christ was sinless, he was under no obligation to die. By voluntarily laying down his life, he gives to God a gift of infinite value that he did not owe. The offering of the God-man's life "outweighs the number and greatness of all sins."¹² Because the Son needs no reward himself, he can transfer the benefit of his sacrifice to sinful human beings. Those who receive the benefits of his merit will be saved.

What Anselm Got Right

Anselm's contribution to atonement theology was enormous, and several of his insights remain permanently valuable.

First, Anselm moved the conversation away from the ransom-to-the-devil framework that had dominated popular atonement thinking for centuries. He insisted that God "owed nothing to the devil but punishment."¹³ The real issue was not between God and the devil but between God and humanity. The debt of sin is owed to God, not to Satan. This was a critical correction. As Allen notes, Anselm "broke with the concept of Christ paying a debt to Satan and maintained that the debt was paid to God via a substitutionary sacrifice."¹⁴

Second, Anselm perceived with striking clarity the extreme seriousness of sin. Sin is not a minor infraction to be brushed aside. It is a willful rebellion against the Creator of the universe, an affront to God's majesty and dignity. Because God is infinite, an offense against God carries infinite weight. This insight — that sin is primarily a Godward offense, not merely an interpersonal harm — is essential to any adequate understanding of the atonement.

Third, Anselm grounded the necessity of the atonement in God's own nature, not in some arbitrary external requirement. The cross is not God's overreaction to a small problem. It is the only adequate response to a problem so deep that nothing short of the incarnation and death of the God-man could address it. This was, as Allen puts it, a "crucial breakthrough in atonement doctrine."¹⁵

Fourth, Anselm's argument for the necessity of the God-man is a masterpiece of theological reasoning. His point about the incarnation — that only one who is both God and human can do what needs to be done — resonates deeply with the broader biblical and patristic witness to Christ's unique identity. The logic of the atonement, for Anselm, flows directly from the logic of the incarnation.

Fifth — and this is often overlooked — Anselm offered a remarkably sophisticated answer to what philosophers call the Euthyphro Dilemma. The dilemma asks: Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good? If the first, then morality seems arbitrary (God could command anything). If the second, then morality seems independent of God. Anselm cuts through the dilemma with elegant simplicity. Since God is not subject to any external law, and since His will determines what is right, someone might ask: Why does God not simply use His freedom to overlook sin? Anselm's answer: "There is nothing more just than supreme justice, which . . . is nothing else but God himself." God's justice is not an external standard He is measured by — it is His own nature. He cannot act unjustly any more than He can stop being God. This means that God's "inability" to overlook sin is not a limitation on His power but a reflection of His perfect character.⁶² Craig rightly notes how significant this move is. It grounds the necessity of the atonement not in some abstract legal code but in the very being of God. This insight remains foundational, regardless of what we think about the details of Anselm's honor-based framework.

There is also something deeply pastoral about Anselm's project that gets lost in the academic debates. Anselm was not writing merely as an intellectual exercise. He was a monk and archbishop who cared about the spiritual lives of ordinary Christians. His argument that the atonement proceeds from both God's justice and God's love for humanity — that "God's justice demands that sin's debt be paid, and God's love for humanity motivated Him to pay the debt Himself" — captures a truth that still moves hearts today.⁶³ Fleming Rutledge, in her magisterial study of the crucifixion, captures this well when she writes that for Anselm (and for us), the self-offering of the Son on the cross proceeds from God's eternal, triune inner being, and we must reject any interpretation that divides the Father's will from the Son's or suggests that anything is happening that does not proceed from love.⁶⁴

What Anselm Got Wrong — or at Least Incomplete

For all its brilliance, Anselm's satisfaction theory has real weaknesses that later theologians rightly addressed.

The most common criticism is that Anselm's framework is too heavily shaped by the feudal culture of his time. In medieval feudal society, relationships were rigidly structured around honor and obligation. A vassal owed honor to his lord; if that honor was violated, satisfaction had to be rendered. When Anselm speaks of sin as "dishonoring" God and of the atonement as "satisfaction" for that dishonor, many scholars hear the echoes of feudal chivalry. It is standard fare in textbooks to claim that Anselm essentially projected a feudal lord's wounded ego onto God.¹⁶

Now, I should say that this criticism is sometimes overstated. Craig has argued persuasively that a careful reading of Anselm shows his fundamental concern is not merely with insulted dignity but with justice and the moral order.¹⁷ As Craig notes, Anselm's reasoning is that God's nature itself requires that sin not be left unpunished — this is an ethical concern, not merely a matter of ego. Recent scholarship has moved away from the dismissive "feudal honor" reading. German scholars such as Kessler, Greshake, and Plasger have demonstrated that Anselm's concern is really with the public order of justice, not private honor in a feudal sense.¹⁸

Even so, there remains a real limitation in the "honor" framework. Stott puts the problem well: "We must certainly remain dissatisfied whenever the atonement is presented as a necessary satisfaction either of God's 'law' or of God's 'honor' in so far as these are objectified as existing in some way apart from him."¹⁹ The issue is not that Anselm was wrong to say that sin demands a response from God. The issue is that his category of "honor" does not go deep enough. The Reformers would later argue — correctly, I believe — that what is at stake is not merely God's honor but God's justice, and that the way satisfaction is achieved is not through the offering of a compensating good (as in Anselm) but through the bearing of the penalty that sin deserves.

A second limitation is Anselm's sharp distinction between satisfaction and punishment. In Anselm's framework, satisfaction is an alternative to punishment. God faces two options: either punish sin or accept compensation for it. Anselm chose the second. Christ does not bear the penalty for our sins; rather, he offers a gift of infinite value that compensates for the dishonor. As Craig explains, "On Anselm's view Christ does not die in our place or pay the penalty for our sins; rather, he offers a compensation to God on our behalf."²⁰ This is an important distinction. What Anselm calls satisfactio is really compensation — a voluntary payment of what is owed, quite different from the penal substitution of the Reformers. Craig clarifies that the label "satisfaction theory" can be misleading for English speakers who naturally associate "satisfaction" with the satisfaction of justice through punishment. For Anselm, it is compensation, not punishment.²¹

The Protestant Reformers chose the other side of Anselm's dilemma. Where Anselm said that the demands of divine justice could be met by compensation, the Reformers argued that they are met through substitutionary punishment — Christ bearing in our place the penalty that our sins deserve. As Craig summarizes: "Anselm thus presents the atonement theorist with a choice: since the demands of divine justice must be met, there must be either punishment of or compensation for sin. Anselm chose the second alternative. . . . By contrast, the later Protestant Reformers chose the first alternative, holding that Christ bore the punishment we deserved."²² Anselm and the Reformers stand on the same ground in insisting that divine justice must be satisfied; they differ on how it is satisfied.

Third, Anselm's theory introduces the concept of "merit" and "reward" that goes beyond what the New Testament actually says. His idea that Christ's sacrifice earns a "reward" which is then transferred to sinners is more indebted to medieval religious culture than to the biblical text. Allen notes that "the NT does not speak of merit in connection with the atonement."²³ This language of surplus merit would later be developed into the Catholic treasury-of-merit system and the practice of indulgences — developments that the Reformation would vehemently reject.

Ben Pugh is probably right when he says that Anselm's Cur Deus Homo "should be viewed as more post-patristic than proto-Reformed."²⁴ Anselm built on the Fathers, but he did not yet reach the Reformers' position. He occupies a crucial middle ground — pointing in the right direction but not yet arriving at the destination.

Engaging Hess's Critique of Anselm

William Hess, writing from an Eastern-influenced, Christus Victor perspective, devotes considerable attention to Anselm in Crushing the Great Serpent, and much of his critique is worth engaging carefully. Hess sees Anselm as the fountainhead of the errors that would later emerge in full-blown penal substitution. He highlights Anselm's insistence that God cannot freely forgive without satisfaction as the key problem. As Hess reads Anselm, this amounts to placing a constraint on God's freedom — as if God's hands are tied by some external legal requirement.²⁶

Hess presses this point by appealing to Jesus' parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18:23–35, where a king freely forgives a massive debt without demanding payment. If God forgives like this, Hess argues, then Anselm's entire framework collapses. God does not need satisfaction; He can simply release the debt.²⁷

How should we respond? Hess raises a legitimate concern about caricatures of the divine nature. We must never portray God as a reluctant forgiver whose arms must be twisted before He will show mercy. But I think Hess misreads both the parable and the theological issue. The parable of the unforgiving servant is about the generosity of divine grace — it is not a statement about the metaphysics of justice. The king in the parable is a character in a story, not a precise analogy for every dimension of God's dealings with sin. In fact, the parable itself ends with the king handing the unforgiving servant over "to the jailers until he should pay all his debt" — language that actually affirms that justice must ultimately be satisfied, not that it can simply be dismissed.

More importantly, saying that God's nature requires a response to sin is not the same as saying God's freedom is constrained by some external force. As Craig argues, Anselm gives exactly the right answer here: "There is nothing more just than supreme justice, which . . . is nothing else but God himself."²⁸ The "constraint" is not external — it is God's own character. God cannot act unjustly because God is justice. This is not a limitation on God's freedom any more than saying "God cannot lie" is a limitation on His omnipotence. God's nature is the standard, and He always acts consistently with who He is. As we argued in Chapter 3, God's love and justice are not in tension — they are both expressions of His one perfect nature. The cross is where they meet.

Where Hess is right is that Anselm's specific framework — the language of feudal honor, the emphasis on compensation rather than penalty — has real weaknesses. Where he goes wrong, I believe, is in concluding that these weaknesses discredit the entire trajectory from Anselm to penal substitution. The problems with Anselm are problems of formulation, not problems with the fundamental insight that the atonement must address something in God's nature. As Schooping demonstrates at length, the theological substance of penal substitution — that Christ bore the penalty of our sin, satisfying divine justice on our behalf — was present in the Church Fathers centuries before Anselm wrote a word.²⁹

Peter Abelard and the Moral Influence Theory

Abelard's Argument

Peter Abelard (1079–1142) was a brilliant French philosopher and theologian who attracted large audiences with his scintillating lectures. He is best known to general readers for his tragic love affair with Heloise, but in the history of theology, his real significance lies in his response to Anselm's satisfaction theory.³⁰

Like Anselm, Abelard rejected the old ransom-to-the-devil theory. But he also could not accept Anselm's idea that God needed to be "paid" before He could forgive. In his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Abelard exclaimed: "How very cruel and unjust it seems that someone should require the blood of an innocent person as a ransom, or that in any way it might please him that an innocent person be slain, still less that God should have so accepted the death of his Son that through it he was reconciled to the whole world!"³¹

That is a powerful objection, and we should not dismiss it too quickly. The idea that God needs the blood of an innocent man before He will forgive does sound disturbing. (It is worth noting, however, that Anselm himself anticipated this concern and insisted that the Father did not compel the Son to die but that Christ gave himself freely.) Abelard's objection would echo down through the centuries — eventually resurfacing in Steve Chalke's "cosmic child abuse" accusation in the twenty-first century (see Chapter 20 for a full response).

So what did Abelard propose instead? His answer was that the real power of the cross lies in its ability to move our hearts. Christ's voluntary self-sacrifice, endured out of pure love for sinful humanity, is the ultimate demonstration of divine love. When we contemplate the cross, our hearts are kindled with gratitude and love for God, and this love is what frees us from sin. As Abelard wrote: "Our redemption is that supreme love kindled in us by Christ's passion, which not only delivers us from the bondage of sin, but also acquires for us the true freedom of children, where love instead of fear becomes the ruling affection."³²

On Abelard's view, the cross does not accomplish anything between God and humanity in an objective sense. Nothing changes in God's disposition toward sinners. Rather, the cross changes us. It is a demonstration, a moral influence, an inspiration. God was never the problem — we were. Our hearts needed to be softened, and the cross is the ultimate tool for softening them.

Evaluating Abelard: What He Got Right

Before we criticize Abelard, let us be fair. He was not wrong about everything. In fact, he captured something genuinely biblical.

The cross absolutely is a demonstration of God's love. Romans 5:8 says it plainly: "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." First John 4:10 says: "In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." The cross was intended, among other things, to reveal the depth of God's love in a way that transforms how we relate to Him.

The cross is also a moral example. First Peter 2:21 says: "Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps." There is a genuine exemplary dimension to the atonement. Abelard was not inventing this out of thin air.

Furthermore, Abelard was right that any theory of the atonement that pits an angry Father against an unwilling Son is deeply problematic. His instinct that something is wrong with the picture of God "requiring the blood of an innocent person" before He will forgive is a healthy theological instinct — one that defenders of penal substitution need to take seriously, not dismiss. The best formulations of PSA, as we argue in Chapter 20, insist that the Trinity acts in unified love at the cross and that the Son goes willingly. Abelard's concern is a legitimate warning against distorted versions of PSA.

Evaluating Abelard: Where He Went Wrong

The problem with Abelard is not that he was wrong about the love of God or the transformative power of the cross. The problem is that he tried to make these truths do all the work of the atonement — and they cannot bear that weight alone.

Three criticisms are decisive.

First, if the cross is only a demonstration of love, why was it necessary? Could God not have demonstrated His love in some less brutal way? Why a cross? Why blood? Why the agony of Gethsemane and Golgotha? If the only purpose was to inspire our hearts, God could surely have found a gentler method. The moral influence theory cannot explain why the cross specifically was needed.³³ The answer, we believe, is that something objective had to happen — sin had to be dealt with, justice had to be satisfied, the penalty had to be borne. The demonstration of love is real, but it is the result of something deeper.

Second, on Abelard's view, the ground of our forgiveness shifts from Christ's objective work to our subjective response. We are forgiven because we love God, moved by the cross to repentance. But this actually reverses the biblical order. In the New Testament, forgiveness comes first and gratitude follows. We do not love God in order to be forgiven; we are forgiven and therefore we love. As Stott observed, Abelard misread Luke 7:47 ("her sins are forgiven because she loved much"), making love the ground of forgiveness rather than its result.³⁴ This is a serious error. If our forgiveness depends on the quality of our love, then salvation rests on our performance — which is the very thing the gospel overthrows.

Third, the moral influence theory cannot account for the vast biblical vocabulary of sacrifice, propitiation, redemption, substitution, and penalty that the New Testament uses to describe what happened at the cross. As we documented in Chapters 7–12, the New Testament consistently uses language of Christ dying "for" us (hyper, ὑπέρ; anti, ἀντί), bearing our sins, becoming a curse in our place, offering himself as a sacrifice, and satisfying divine justice. None of this language makes sense if nothing objective happened between God and humanity at Calvary. As Bernard of Clairvaux, Abelard's own contemporary, saw clearly: without the redemptive death of Christ, his humility and love "are as if you were to paint on the air."³⁵ A demonstration of love without an objective accomplishment is a demonstration that demonstrates nothing.

Was Abelard Really a Pure "Moral Influence" Theorist?

Interestingly, recent scholarship has challenged the traditional assumption that Abelard held a purely subjective view of the atonement. The passage from his Romans commentary that is always quoted — the one about love being kindled in us — may not represent his full position. In his comments on Romans 4:25, Abelard wrote something quite different:

He is said to have died "on account of our transgressions" in two ways: at one time because we transgressed, on account of which he died, and we committed sin, the penalty of which he bore; at another, that he might take away our sins by dying, that is, he swept away the penalty for sins by the price of his death.³⁷

This is remarkable. Here Abelard affirms that Christ "bore the penalty" for our sin and "swept away the penalty for sins by the price of his death." This sounds much more like penal substitution than moral influence! As Allen notes, recent scholarship has shown that "Abelard was not an exemplarist in that he did not explain the atonement exclusively as one that provides an example but expressed a penal substitution notion, as well."³⁸ Caroline Walker Bynum has confirmed that "Anselmian and Abelardian understandings of Christ's work of redemption were far closer to each other than generally portrayed." She argues that "there are subjective and objective elements in the theories of both Anselm and Abelard. . . . Hence, it is quite wrong to see two redemptive theories warring for precedence in the twelfth century. . . . There are not two theories (Abelardian and Anselmian) in the Middle Ages but one."³⁹

If Bynum is right — and the evidence is compelling — then the standard Anselm-vs.-Abelard narrative is an oversimplification. Both thinkers were working with multiple dimensions of the atonement. Abelard's distinctive emphasis was on the subjective, love-inspiring dimension, but he did not necessarily reject the objective, penalty-bearing dimension. This should give us pause before we reduce either thinker to a caricature.

That said, the theory that has historically been called "the moral influence theory" — the view that the cross accomplishes reconciliation solely through its subjective impact on us — remains inadequate for the reasons given above, regardless of whether Abelard himself held it in that pure form.

What we can say with confidence is that the moral influence dimension of the atonement is real but derivative. It is real because the cross genuinely does move hearts, inspire repentance, and kindle love for God. But it is derivative because this subjective power depends on an objective reality. The cross inspires love because something astonishing happened there — God Himself bore the cost of our sin. Take away the objective accomplishment, and the subjective response has nothing to feed on. A demonstration of love that demonstrates nothing is, as Bernard said, painting on air. This is why, throughout this book, I have insisted that the various atonement models are not competing alternatives but complementary facets of a single, multi-dimensional event, with the penal substitutionary dimension at the center. The moral influence of the cross is a genuine and precious facet — but it draws its power from the substitutionary center.

The Scholastic Development: From Anselm to the Reformers

Between Anselm and the Reformation, several important thinkers continued to develop atonement theology. This is often treated as a footnote, but it deserves more attention because it shows that the trajectory from satisfaction to penal substitution was not a sudden leap but a gradual development.

Peter Lombard (d. 1160), whose Sentences became the standard theological textbook for the later medieval period, is a particularly interesting figure. According to Bynum, Lombard retained the idea of Christus Victor — Christ's victory over the powers of evil — while also agreeing with Anselm on the necessity of satisfaction. But crucially, Lombard understood that satisfaction in penal substitutionary terms. He moved beyond Anselm's language of compensation toward the language of punishment borne on our behalf. This matters because it shows that the "penal" element was not invented by Luther and Calvin but was already emerging within medieval Catholic theology itself.⁶⁵

The Scholastics — the theologians who taught in the medieval European universities — further developed Anselm's position. Both the Thomists (followers of Thomas Aquinas, who were Dominicans) and the Scotists (followers of Duns Scotus, who were Franciscans) taught that the demands of divine justice were satisfied by Christ's cross, though they differed in the details of how this worked. As Stott notes, it was the Anselmian view that prevailed among careful students of Scripture, even as it was being refined and sharpened in significant ways.⁶⁶

This gradual development is important because it undermines the popular narrative that penal substitution was a radical innovation of the Reformers with no precedent in earlier Christian thought. The truth is that the penal dimension was being articulated — tentatively at first, then with increasing clarity — throughout the medieval period. The Reformers did not invent penal substitution out of whole cloth; they brought to full and systematic expression what had been emerging for centuries.

Thomas Aquinas: The Great Medieval Synthesis

Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) was without question the greatest theologian of the Middle Ages. Born near Monte Cassino in Italy, he joined the Dominican order as a young man — much to the horror of his aristocratic family, who kidnapped him and held him hostage for over a year trying to change his mind. After his release, he devoted his life to scholarship, teaching, and writing, producing a body of work that remains foundational for Roman Catholic theology to this day.⁴¹

Aquinas's treatment of the atonement in his monumental Summa Theologiae represents a brilliant synthesis of earlier approaches. Rather than choosing between Anselm's satisfaction and Abelard's moral influence, Aquinas wove together multiple threads. He spoke of Christ's death as accomplishing salvation in five complementary ways: as satisfaction, as merit, as sacrifice, as redemption, and as the efficient cause of our salvation.⁴²

Aquinas on Satisfaction and Penalty

Aquinas took up Anselm's satisfaction framework but gave it a sharper edge. In discussing whether Christ's passion brought about our salvation by way of satisfaction (per modum satisfactionis), Aquinas affirmed: "He properly atones for an offense who offers something which the offended one loves equally, or even more than he detested the offense. But by suffering out of love and obedience, Christ gave more to God than was required to compensate for the offense of the whole human race."⁴³

Crucially, Aquinas went further than Anselm in connecting satisfaction to the language of punishment. He wrote that Christ's passion was "the price of punishment by which we were freed" from both our slavery to the devil and our debt of punishment before God.⁴⁴ As Jeffery, Ovey, and Sach observe, this amounts to "a clear statement of penal substitution: God must punish sin to maintain his justice, but Christ suffered in our place and freed us from this debt."⁴⁵ The language of punishment and penal substitution, which was implicit in Anselm but not fully developed, becomes much more explicit in Aquinas.

In one particularly significant passage, Aquinas explained how God the Father gave up His Son to suffer in our place while the Son suffered willingly:

It is wicked and cruel to hand an innocent man over to suffering and death if it is against his will. Nor did God the Father so treat Christ in whom he inspired the will to suffer for us. God's severity is thus manifested; he was unwilling to remit sin without punishment, as the Apostle intimates when he says, "He did not spare even his own Son." But it also illustrates God's goodness, for as man was unable to make sufficient satisfaction through any punishment he might himself suffer, God gave him one who would satisfy for him.⁴⁶

Notice what Aquinas is doing here. He addresses head-on the worry that PSA depicts a cruel God who punishes an unwilling victim. No, says Aquinas — the Father "inspired the will to suffer" in Christ; the Son went willingly. But God's severity is also real: He "was unwilling to remit sin without punishment." This is remarkably close to the mature formulation of penal substitutionary atonement, even though Aquinas did not use the term. He affirms both the willing love of the Son and the justice-satisfying nature of His death.

Where Aquinas Departed from Anselm

There is one significant area where Aquinas moved away from Anselm, and it matters for the later debate. Anselm held that satisfaction for sin was strictly necessary — God could not have forgiven humanity without it. Aquinas took a different view: God could have forgiven sins without satisfaction if He had chosen to do so. The order of divine justice that requires satisfaction is something God freely established, not something that constrains Him against His will. As Aquinas put it: "Even this justice depends on the Divine will, requiring satisfaction for sin from the human race. But if He had willed to free man from sin without any satisfaction, He would not have acted against justice."⁴⁷

This is the distinction between what Craig calls the "necessitarian" and "non-necessitarian" versions of satisfaction. Anselm's is necessitarian (satisfaction is absolutely required); Aquinas's is non-necessitarian (God chose this path but could have chosen otherwise).⁴⁸ However, Aquinas argued at length that God's choice of salvation through Christ's passion was not arbitrary — it was the best and most fitting way to accomplish a whole array of purposes, including demonstrating God's love, providing a moral example, meriting grace, showing the seriousness of sin, and defeating the devil.⁴⁹

I find Aquinas's instinct here to be partially right. It is true that God is not bound by any external force. But I lean toward the view (shared by Anselm and later by the Reformers) that God's own nature — His justice and holiness — does require a response to sin. The necessity is not external but internal: God always acts in accordance with who He is, and who He is includes perfect justice. This will be discussed more fully in Chapter 26.

Aquinas's Multi-Faceted Approach

What makes Aquinas especially valuable for our purposes is his refusal to choose just one atonement model. He incorporated elements of satisfaction (Anselm), moral influence (Abelard), Christus Victor (the patristic tradition), redemption, and sacrifice into a single, multi-dimensional account. Craig observes that in Aquinas's framework, Christ's passion has a threefold effect: "insofar as it frees us from the servitude of guilt, it acts by way of redemption; insofar as it reconciles us to God, it acts by way of sacrifice; and insofar as it liberates us from the debt of punishment, it acts by way of satisfaction."⁵⁰

This kind of multi-faceted thinking is exactly what this book is advocating (see Chapter 24 for the full integration). The atonement is not a single-dimension event. It is a diamond with many facets — and each facet reveals a genuine aspect of what Christ accomplished. Where I depart from Aquinas is in insisting that the penal substitutionary dimension stands at the center of the diamond, holding the other facets in their proper place. Aquinas gave it a place but did not give it the centrality that I believe the biblical data warrants.

As Allen summarizes, Peter Lombard, the great systematizer of medieval theology, "agreed with Anselm regarding satisfaction; but he, unlike Anselm, viewed it as penal substitution."⁵¹ And Aquinas himself "likewise affirmed a penal satisfaction component in the atonement," speaking of it "as a satisfaction, an example, and a victory over Satan."⁵² The groundwork for the Reformation's explicit penal substitution was being laid.

Hugo Grotius and the Governmental Theory

Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) was a famous Dutch jurist and one of the founders of modern international law. He enters the atonement debate not as a theologian but as a legal thinker responding to the radical challenge of Socinianism.

The Socinian Challenge

Before we can understand Grotius, we need to understand the crisis he was responding to. Faustus Socinus (1539–1604) had launched the first truly systematic attack on penal substitutionary atonement. His objections were sharp and would echo through subsequent centuries (they are addressed in detail in Chapters 25–27). Socinus argued that punishment cannot be transferred from the guilty to the innocent; that if Christ actually paid the penalty for sin, then forgiveness is unnecessary (because the debt is settled, not forgiven); and that PSA makes God's mercy and justice contradictory.⁵³

These were serious intellectual challenges. In place of penal substitution, the Socinians advocated viewing the cross as a demonstration of God's love and an incentive to lead people to salvation through Christ — essentially a form of moral influence theory.⁵⁴

Grotius's Response

Grotius published his A Defense of the Catholic Faith concerning the Satisfaction of Christ, against Faustus Socinus in 1617. Unfortunately, his theory is widely misrepresented in secondary literature today. He is often accused of betraying penal substitution and offering a soft, watered-down "governmental" theory instead. But as Craig demonstrates, a careful reading of Grotius reveals something quite different.⁵⁵

Grotius explicitly presents his work as a defense of penal substitution. He argues from extensive exegesis of the Greek and Hebrew texts that Christ's death has "the character of a punishment." He affirms that Christ "was chastised by God" and "bore our sins" — that is, bore the punishment for our sins. He ridicules Socinus's moral influence theory as inadequate to explain why an innocent man had to suffer such a violent death.⁵⁶

Where Grotius makes his distinctive contribution is in his understanding of God's role. He argues that we should think of God neither as a judge bound by the letter of the law (which would mean He could never pardon anyone) nor as a private party in a personal dispute (which is how Socinus sometimes portrayed God). Instead, God should be understood as a Ruler — a sovereign governor of the moral order. As a Ruler, God has the authority to "relax" the strict requirements of the law in ways that a mere judge cannot. But as a just Ruler, He also cannot simply let sin go unpunished without any demonstration that He takes sin seriously, because doing so would undermine the moral governance of the universe.⁵⁷

So for Grotius, Christ's death serves a dual purpose: first, to demonstrate divine retributive justice with respect to sin, and second, to make it possible for God to exempt us from punishment through the remission of our sins. God, as the sovereign Ruler, exercises His authority to "relax" the strict demand that each sinner bear his own punishment, and instead accepts Christ's suffering as a substitute — but this relaxation is not arbitrary. It is grounded in the demands of good governance and the maintenance of moral order.⁵⁸

Evaluating Grotius

The governmental theory, at least in the version commonly associated with Grotius (which may be a simplification of his actual view), has both strengths and weaknesses.

On the positive side, Grotius captures something important about the public and cosmic dimension of the atonement. The cross is not merely a private transaction between God and individual sinners; it is a public demonstration that God takes sin seriously and upholds the moral order of the universe. There is genuine biblical support for this idea — Romans 3:25–26 speaks of God putting forward Christ as a propitiation "to show his righteousness," "so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus." The cross does vindicate God's justice publicly.

On the negative side, if the governmental theory is pressed too far in a non-necessitarian direction — if Christ's death is merely a demonstration of what sin deserves rather than the actual bearing of what sin deserves — then the substitutionary heart of the gospel is weakened. The concern, as Allen notes, is that the governmental theory "retained an objective penal aspect of the atonement, though this is often missed by its critics."⁵⁹ In its best form, Grotius's theory supplements rather than replaces penal substitution. In its weaker forms, it drifts toward moral influence with a governmental veneer.

Craig classifies Grotius as "a defender of a non-necessitarian penal substitutionary theory" — that is, Grotius affirms penal substitution but holds that God's choice of this path was contingent rather than strictly necessary.⁶⁰ If this reading is correct, then Grotius has been unfairly maligned. He was not abandoning penal substitution but defending it on different philosophical grounds than the Reformers.

There is a lesson here about the dangers of relying on secondary sources. Many textbooks and reference works describe the governmental theory as a departure from penal substitution, when in fact Grotius himself expressly defended penal substitution. The "governmental theory" as commonly described — a merely deterrent or demonstrative view of Christ's death — may be more the creation of later interpreters than of Grotius himself. This is a recurring problem in theology: thinkers are simplified, labeled, and placed into neat categories that do not always reflect what they actually wrote. We saw the same thing with Abelard, who is routinely described as a pure "moral influence" theorist despite his own penal substitutionary language. When studying the history of atonement theology, there is no substitute for reading the primary sources carefully — a principle that guided our treatment of the Church Fathers in Chapters 14 and 15.

The governmental theory, in its later and more developed forms (particularly among New England theologians like Jonathan Edwards Jr. and the "New Divinity" movement), did drift further from penal substitution than Grotius himself intended. In these later versions, Christ's suffering was increasingly understood as a public demonstration of the seriousness of sin rather than as the actual bearing of the penalty for sin. This weakened version of the theory — the one most people have in mind when they hear the phrase "governmental theory" — rightly deserves the criticism that it replaces substitution with demonstration. But we should be careful not to blame Grotius for the excesses of his later followers.

The Significance of the Medieval Period for Penal Substitution

Stepping back from the individual thinkers, what can we say about the medieval period as a whole and its significance for the development of penal substitutionary atonement?

First, the medieval period demonstrates that the fundamental questions about the atonement — Why did Christ have to die? What did His death accomplish? How does it relate to God's justice? — cannot be avoided. They keep surfacing because the biblical data demands answers. Anselm's great achievement was to pose these questions with philosophical rigor and to insist that the answers must be grounded in God's own nature. Even those who reject his specific answers — including Abelard, Aquinas, and later critics — owe him a debt for establishing the terms of the conversation.

Second, the trajectory from Anselm through Peter Lombard through Aquinas shows a gradual sharpening of the penal element. Anselm spoke of compensation; Lombard spoke of penal substitution; Aquinas spoke of Christ bearing the "price of punishment" on our behalf. As Allen observes, the step from Anselm's satisfaction to the Reformers' penal substitution was not a radical break but a natural development — a deepening and correcting of insights that were already present in Anselm's framework and, as we argued in Chapters 14–15, in the Church Fathers before him.⁶¹

Third, the medieval period confirms the multi-faceted nature of the atonement that this book defends. Neither Anselm nor Abelard nor Aquinas held a one-dimensional view. They all recognized multiple aspects of what Christ accomplished — satisfaction, love, example, victory, redemption. The question was never whether the atonement has multiple dimensions (everyone agreed it did) but where the center lies. This book argues that penal substitution is the center — the load-bearing pillar around which the other dimensions are arranged — and the medieval evidence supports the trajectory toward that conclusion, even if the medieval theologians themselves did not yet articulate it in those precise terms.

Fourth, the Socinian challenge and Grotius's response remind us that the philosophical objections to penal substitution are not new. The arguments that critics raise today — that punishment cannot be transferred, that punishing the innocent is unjust, that real forgiveness requires no payment — were being articulated four centuries ago. The fact that thoughtful Christian thinkers like Grotius found them answerable should encourage us as we engage these same objections in Chapters 25–27.

Conclusion

The medieval atonement debate, for all its distance from our own time, remains remarkably relevant. We are still debating the same basic questions that Anselm and Abelard debated nearly a thousand years ago. Does the cross accomplish something objective, or does it merely inspire a subjective change in us? Does God's nature require a response to sin, or can sin simply be overlooked? Is Christ's death a penalty borne in our place, or a compensation offered on our behalf, or merely an example of self-giving love?

I believe the evidence points clearly toward a both-and rather than an either-or. The cross is objective — something real happened between God and humanity at Calvary. The cross is a demonstration of love — the greatest the world has ever seen. The cross does transform those who contemplate it. And the cross does address God's justice — not by compensating His wounded honor (Anselm's formulation, which does not go deep enough) but by bearing the judicial penalty that human sin deserves (the Reformation formulation, which we will explore in the next chapter).

There is something deeply encouraging about tracing this historical development. The church did not arrive at penal substitutionary atonement overnight. It was a journey of centuries — from the varied and unsystematized language of the Church Fathers, through Anselm's breakthrough insight about the necessity of satisfaction grounded in God's nature, through the Scholastics' gradual sharpening of the penal dimension, through Aquinas's brilliant multi-faceted synthesis, and finally to the Reformers' full articulation of the doctrine. At each stage, faithful Christians were wrestling with the same biblical texts, asking the same questions, and being drawn by the Holy Spirit toward a deeper and more adequate understanding of what happened at the cross.

This does not mean, of course, that earlier formulations were simply wrong. Anselm's satisfaction theory captured genuine truths that remain valuable. Abelard's emphasis on the transformative power of divine love is a permanent contribution to Christian thought. Aquinas's insistence on a multi-dimensional approach is exactly the instinct we need. Even Grotius's concern for the public, cosmic dimension of the atonement — God's governance of the moral order — resonates with biblical themes about the vindication of God's justice before the watching universe (Romans 3:25–26).

What the medieval period shows us, ultimately, is that the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement did not drop from the sky. It grew organically from the church's sustained reflection on the biblical witness, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, over many centuries. And it grew because the biblical data kept pressing the church toward this conclusion: the cross is not merely an example, not merely a demonstration, not merely a compensation. It is the place where the just and holy God bore in Himself — in the person of His beloved Son — the full weight of human sin, so that sinners could go free. That is the story the Reformers would tell. That is the story of Chapter 17.

Anselm laid the foundation. Abelard reminded us not to lose the love. Aquinas began building toward the penal dimension. The Reformers would complete the structure. And at every step, the church was being drawn deeper into the mystery of the cross — the mystery of a God who is both perfectly just and perfectly loving, who will not overlook sin and yet refuses to abandon sinners, who satisfies His own justice by bearing its demands Himself. That is the God we meet at the cross. That is the God whose story we continue to trace.