Anselm's God-Man

Well, I'm blogging. Sorry it took awhile. It's been a busy couple of weeks. After all, I still have 2.5 books to read by year's end.

I just finished Joerg Rieger's Christ and Empire. The premise of the book is that the doctrine of Christ has been understood to have developed in a vacuum. By assuming this, we have missed how the doctrine was shaped by the political contexts in which it was found and that it ended up supporting empire as it was formed by those in positions of power. However, the idea of Christ itself is so dynamic and unable to be boxed in by empire that even these traditional doctrinal statements leave openings to be reintepreted to resist empire.

The chapter that caught my eye the most was on Anselm's doctrine of the God-Man. This doctrine is that which affirms that Christ was fully God and fully man and sets forth the satisfaction theory of atonement: Christ came and took our place to restore the violated honor God.

There's two major points here. First, the idea of satisfaction needs to be placed in its historical context. This doctrine came together in the days of the feudal system. Within the Norman conquest of England, there were many fiefdoms. The lords of these fiefdoms were responsible for their territory and demanded absolute obedience of their subjects who had to answer to them and the king. Obedience meant order and honor. Disobedience meant chaos and dishonoring the lord and the king. So when someone was disobedient, they came down hard. The lord and the king's honor had to be restored. Honor was important because recognizing one's place in society is what maintained order.

There were two ways to restore order: punishment and satisfaction, instituting interpersonal relationships that overcome the distortion of the relationship.

So here are a few observations:

1) Satisfaction is not about God getting violent revenge, but restoring order.
2) The satisfaction theory of atonement was formulated with the existing power structures in the background and fails to redefine lordship.
3) Despite that failure, notice that Anselm chooses the nonviolent option for restoring order. This will become important in considering the second point.

The second point is this, Anselm wrote of this doctrine in Cur Dues Homo in which he speaks to a student of the need to convince "unbelievers" of the reasons why God becoming man makes sense. This is important in this time in which the church felt the need to reconcile God's omnipotence, impassibility, and immutability with the idea of God becoming man and dying. Now, today we assume "nonbelievers" refers to people without any kind of faith. Yet, that was not the concern then like today when battles against secular humanism and other such things tend to be the focus of many Christians.

Instead, other religions were the main issue. Yet, the issue goes even deeper than the level of religious ideas and is a response to two developments: economic developments that led to a migration of Jewish peoples into urban areas of the Norman Empire and the Crusades. The result is the repression of the Jewish peoples and military action in Jerusalem.

The significance here is that what the empire tried to achieve by the sword, Anselm tried to achieve by reason. Anselm again seems to think in terms of peace while not questioning whether or not God really backs the empire and assuming superiority to his counterparts.

Rieger's insights challenge us to evaluate all out traditional doctrines and see where they lead us to support abusive power structures. My mind goes straight to dispensationalism and the end times. I see a great deal of this in Left Behind thinking and back in our history with Manifest Destiny. What do you think of any of this?