Our initial impulse might be to say, “God’s revelation has given us all we need to know about Christian faith and practice, so we don’t need anything more than what the Bible teaches.” However, in practice, this attitude doesn’t actually work. Because the Bible is a complex book with a lot of different genres of writing, it is open to a lot of different theological interpretations on subjects like the nature of God’s sovereignty and man’s free will, the practice of the Lord’s Supper, what the end times will look like, etc. To actually arrive at a theological position on any of these topics, Christian thinkers need to apply the use of reason to the biblical text to find the most plausible interpretations. In fact, most of Christian history has given broad freedom to the use of reason to explore theology, philosophy, and science, and the results of those explorations have given us new ways of thinking about revealed truth. This method of rational exploration, though, does have its dangers.
Anselm & Abelard – Whose Theology Should We Listen To?
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The Power of Reason: Anselm’s Rationalistic Apologetics
Anselm was convinced that God had given human beings the power of reason so that it could be used to his glory. His motto was: “Faith seeking understanding,” starting from faith and then reasoning from there, with the expectation that reason could shed an even brighter light on the truth of the Gospel. One area where Anselm put this to the test was in apologetics (the defense of the faith). He wanted to devise an argument for the existence of God that could be proved by reason alone (i.e., that just by thinking through the logic of a statement, without any help from the Bible or Christian experience, he could convince someone that God exists). To do this, he came up with a quirky logical argument (“the ontological argument”) which defines God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” Now, if that thought exists only in our own minds, then it is by definition not “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” Why not? Because we can conceive of a being that fits that statement and actually exists in reality, not just as an idea in our mind. Thus, since an existent “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” is clearly greater than a non-existent one, then God must exist. This argument has often been viewed as little more than logical sleight-of-hand, but many philosophers today are still convinced of its validity when expressed in certain forms.
Reasoning about the Atonement
Anselm was the first Christian thinker to devise a new way of thinking about the theology of the atonement, based on what he found in Scripture (especially the book of Romans): that our sins can be conceived of as crimes against God, and since God is so great and our crimes so heinous, nothing we could possibly do could atone for them except the ultimate penalty: death. But Christ took the punishment for our sins on himself, so that we now have right legal standing with God. This is known as the “penal substitutionary model” of the atonement.
Other, more ancient interpretations of the atonement also existed, which the church fathers had reasoned out based on biblical evidence: (1) the moral influence model, which Anselm’s rival Abelard championed as the only true expression of atonement theology. This model says that Jesus lived an exemplary life, taught us how to live, surrendered himself non-violently up to death as an illustration of God’s love, and rose from the dead as an inspirational symbol of the power of virtue. In essence, what Christ did on the cross was teach us the right way; (2) the ransom model, in which Christ’s sacrifice paid the ransom-price to redeem us from under the power of Satan; (3) the healing model, in which Christ’s death and resurrection began the deep healing of our sinful human nature; and (4) the Christus Victor model, in which Christ’s death and resurrection was his triumph over the powers of sin, Satan, death, and hell.
What both Anselm and Abelard got wrong was that they assumed that there could only be one right way to think about the atonement—that one of these models was right, and the others were wrong. But Christian tradition has always upheld all of these models to a greater or lesser degree; they do not exclude one another. On the cross, Jesus paid the penalty for our sins and taught us the right way and ransomed us from sin and Satan and began our healing from sin and triumphed over the powers of death and hell.