A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Anselm

  • Thoughts on atonement (with some help from Gerald O’Collins, James B. Torrance, and C.S. Lewis)

    I’ve been reading and thinking about the Atonement (i.e., the work of Christ in reconciling us to God) again lately, so I thought I’d jot something down on how I see things. The view I’m now inclined toward is that “Abelardian” and “Anselmian” theories of atonement are complementary rather the mutually exclusive. An Abelardian view Read more

  • Toward a non-anthropocentric theology

    Jeremy asked if I’d recommend any books on moving away from an anthropocentric theology. This is a question at the intersection of some perennial ATR themes, so I thought I’d post the answer here. The following list makes no pretense to be either authoritative or exhaustive, but these are some books (in no particular order) Read more

  • More on Anselm, death, and redemption

    Christopher has an excellent follow-up post on Anselm and atonement, addressing some of the worries I had about Jesus’ death being a payment of sorts. Instead of trying to summarize it, I encourage you to read the whole thing. Some of what Christopher wrote brought to mind a passage from Denis Edwards’ Ecology at the Read more

  • The virtues and vices of St. Anselm

    Christopher has a terrific post on St. Anselm and atonement theory. As longtime readers might know, I’m definitely in the St. Anselm-as-unfairly-maligned camp. Among other things, his view of atonement is not the same as what is commonly referred to as “penal substitution”: Anselm explicitly denies in Cur Deus Homo that God punishes Jesus in Read more

  • Stop blaming St. Anselm for the Crusades!

    Rev. Thomas Williams, an Episcopal priest and distinguished philosopher, ably dismantles some of the cruder anti-Anselm polemics that blame his theory of the Atonement for, well, pretty much everything bad in Christian history. Read more

  • An essay on atonement and theodicy

    Note: this is a re-worked version of a series of posts I did back in 2004 on the Atonement and the Problem of Evil. There were a lot of broken links among them, and, since I think the material holds up pretty well, I thought it might be worth slightly re-working the series and combining Read more

  • Scapegoats, sacrifice, and the “violence” of God

    In addition to the other books I’ve been juggling, this weekend I started reading James Alison’s Raising Abel, which carries the subtitle “Recovering the Eschatological Imagination.” Alison is a great writer and offers some startling insights that bring new life to seemingly obscure theological concepts, but here I want to think a little bit about Read more

  • Once more into the breach…

    At the risk of boring readers to tears, Robert Jenson’s article on the atonement prompted me to write something about the oft-made criticism that Anselm imports the conceptual apparatus of feudal law into his theory of atonement and that this distorts the idea of God by replacing it with a deity who is an easily Read more

  • Notes on Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo: 10

    Faced with the need for some kind of satisfaction for sin, Anselm deduces that “If it be necessary, therefore, as it appears, that the heavenly kingdom be made up of men, and this cannot be effected unless the aforesaid satisfaction be made, which none but God can make and none but man ought to make, Read more

  • Notes on Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo: 9

    Okay, the argument so far: Anselm has contended that humankind has fallen into sin by failing to render to God the honor due him (i.e. obedience). As a result we threaten to fail to acheive God’s intended purpose for us, namely, being part of the “celestial estate” and consequently we disrupt the order and beauty Read more