The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ

by Fleming Rutledge

More important still, Anselm’s view of God’s action on our behalf is actually quite close to the patristic narrative that he is accused of leaving behind. Hart explains: Sin having disrupted the order of God’s good creation, and humanity having been handed over to death and the devil, God enters into a condition of estrangement and slavery to set humanity free. . . . Formidable linguistic shifts aside, Anselm’s is not a new narrative of salvation. In truth, this facile distinction between a patristic soteriology concerned exclusively with the rescue of humanity from death and a later theory of atonement concerned just as exclusively with remission from guilt . . . is perhaps supportable, but only in regard to emphasis and imagery; Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, and John of Damascus (to name a few) were no less conscious than Anselm that the guilt which places humanity in bondage to death is overcome on the cross, nor is he any less concerned than they with the Son’s campaign against death’s dominion over those [all human beings] who have turned from God in disobedience. Indeed, in Cur Deus Homo, the matter of guilt is somewhat recused; it is guilt that is set aside, made of no account by Christ’s grace, so that death should be overcome without violence to divine justice. (emphasis added)33