We're beginning our final unit today of all the fundamental subjects, or foundational subjects in Christian faith. This is the last of the nine. We just finished up the last things, and I have one more thing to add. That doesn't sound quite right, does it? But in my lineup of the nine main subjects, we're taking up the doctrine of the atonement. The Doctrine of the Atonement. You've heard that term before, I trust. The Doctrine of the Atonement is a reference to what Jesus did on the cross. Now that's a pretty important part of Christianity, don't you think? It's about time we talk about the cross. in a class that surveys the foundational doctrines of the faith. Did you know that when we use the word crucial, like when we say, all right, this is a crucial issue. Pay attention. Do you know where the word crucial comes from? It comes from Latin, yes? All right. when we talk about the crux of the matter. Have you ever heard that expression, the crux of the matter? Those are terms that literally mean cross. A crucial issue is a cross issue. It's very interesting that in our everyday language, okay, maybe not your everyday language. In the everyday language of many people in the West who use the English language, we've come to associate cross with what is the most essential element of something. It's crucial, or it's the crux of the matter, the cross. And indeed, the cross is at the very center of the Christian faith. When we talk about the doctrine of the atonement, we're talking about what the Bible teaches about the cross, and specifically what Jesus did. which is to say why he died. What was the significance of that? And when we talk about this today, I wanna go back in time, again, like we have in the past, and I'll talk to you about the church fathers. Today, for a change, I don't actually have all the names of the church fathers I'm gonna refer to, but I have one more church father that I wanna introduce you to. I'll refer to the church fathers in general, and then we're gonna talk about a guy named, Anselm. Have you ever known anybody named with that name, Anselm? I had a friend in college who was named Anselm. He's the only guy I've ever known who had that name. It's a great name. I recommend it. When you start picking up baby names these days, down the road, think about Anselm. That's a great name, especially after what I tell you about him today. All right, so let's begin by talking in general terms about the doctrine of the atonement in the early church. What did they think about the doctrine of the atonement? What did they say about it? And I want you to know that they were interested in three elements of Bible teaching about the cross. Number one, they saw the cross as the place where Satan was defeated. The cross is where a great battle took place. That's how the early church fathers often spoke about the atonement. The place where God and Satan had a certain contest, a battle, and of course, They would speak about Jesus as a ransom that was paid by God to Satan. You guys know what a ransom is, right? If, say, Somali pirates board a ship and take hostage the captain and crew of the ship and require money for their safe release. They're requiring a ransom. That's what a ransom is. It's money paid to liberate a person. Now, why in the world would the church fathers think that a ransom was happening there at the cross? Do you have any ideas why they would say that? How many of you read or have read to you the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? Raise your hand, please. Oh, that's pretty good. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. Do you remember the great scene at the end? Aslan? What? He and the witch? All right. Well, I'm thinking about the stone table. What happens at the stone table? All right. Aslan offers himself on behalf of? Edmund. Edmund, that's right. Edmund. Oh, it's confusing. Which one is it? Edmund. It's Edmund, yes. So Edmund is in service of the queen, right? The wicked queen. Edmund is the one being ransomed. So the queen has him. Aslan wants to free him. Aslan offers himself as the ransom. Do you remember? That's how C.S. Lewis depicts the cross, because of course that's a picture of the cross. Aslan lays down his life for the sake of Edmund, and Edmund goes free. He's the ransom price. So the church fathers, C.S. Lewis loves the church fathers, if you didn't know that about C.S. Lewis. He wrote the foreword to a modern day reprint of the book by Athanasius. He's very well read in the early Church Fathers. Anyway, he takes his imagery from this particular emphasis, the Church Fathers, and this is a biblical emphasis, that Satan has defeated the cross. The Bible teaches that. By the way, the Church Fathers sort of put a twist on it, as did C.S. Lewis, in as much as they would sometimes write about God agreeing that he was gonna pay a ransom price for sinners at the cross to Satan, and he did pay that price. Jesus came and laid down his life, but with a twist, a catch. Satan was given Jesus' life But what Satan didn't count on is that Jesus was not merely man. He was also God. And because of that, he would not be bound by death. He would rise from the dead. And Satan, in other words, was fooled by the whole thing. He was triumphed over. So this becomes the picture of a ransom paid, but also a defeat. It would be like the Somali pirates being paid a ransom that turned out to be the means of their being Destroy. How would that be? Well, God engineers that according to many of the writings of the church fathers. He shows himself wiser and stronger than Satan because Jesus rises from the dead because unlike what Satan thought, he was no mere man, he was also God. Here's how one person has put it to describe the early church fathers. Emphasis, Satan took the bait of Christ's humanity, but got the hook of his deity. I like that. Like the evil queen, she thought she had him on the stone table, dead. She took the bait, his humanity. Yeah, that's a good quote, isn't it? Satan took the bait of Christ's humanity, but got the hook of his deity. The fact that Jesus was also God proved to be what actually overthrew Satan. Satan bites. but he gets hooked as a result. Who said that? I don't know. I just found in my research, and that was a good quote, one of the patristic scholars who's trying to summarize the way the early church thought. Now this isn't the only way, but this is one way of looking at the cross. I want you to understand that there are several different ways that we look at what Jesus did at the cross. And they each have their part in making a full view. I'm not gonna exhaust all the different ways that we can look at what happens at the cross, but I'm going back in time. The early church often spoke about Satan being defeated. Number two, the early church spoke of the cross as a model of love. In other words, Jesus was putting on display his love for us and showing us how to love each other. Do you remember what Jesus said? Greater love has no man in this than that he laid down his life for his friends. Jesus didn't just say that, he did it. You might can imagine that this would be especially important to the days in the early church when God's people were actually having, they were forced to lay down their life for their witness. There were martyrs being made in the early century of the church. Christians who would have to ask themselves, do I love my life more than I love Christ? And many of them chose heroically to love Christ more than their life. They gave their life, and they would remember Jesus did this for me. He laid down his life for me, and indeed, that's how the New Testament unfolds this. The New Testament talks about us. Jesus talks about us taking up our cross and following him, being willing to do what he did. And Paul talks about dying daily as a way of living the Christian life. So Jesus as a model of love, when we think about the cross, we think about how much he loves us and what it looks like for us to love him and to love others. It looks like sacrifice. That's a pretty powerful element of the cross as well. So these are a couple of ways that the early church emphasized what was happening at the cross. I'm gonna ask you at this point, so far, All the good things you've said about the cross, what's missing? Just think about what you know of what Jesus was doing at the cross. What's missing from this list? I'm sorry? He took our sin. Okay, that's exactly the path I want you to go down. Run that rabbit a little bit more. It's actually not a rabbit. You want to say anything more about that, Carol? Say it like you mean it. I can't even hear it. Huh? Okay, all right. Very good. They gave us our salvation. Okay, how? By Him taking our sins. Taking our sins? What do we mean? You know, if someone were, if a Martian were to come and sit among us and were to hear us say things like that, take our sins, what do we mean by that? He took our punishment. Punishment. For our sins. Okay. All right, now we're getting warmer and warmer. Now we're hot. You're gonna say something, Josh? About punishment? What was happening to Jesus on the cross? Who was punishing him? God the Father? That's not number one or number two, is it? We haven't talked about that yet. Jesus on the cross taking our punishment in our place from the Father. Whoa. That's pretty big. If that's true, that might actually be the main thing. Number three, we're gonna put it in these terms and I'll explain. Number three is the satisfaction of God's justice. Now I'm gonna open that up a little bit more to be sure. We're gonna call it the satisfaction of God's justice. It's not only where Satan is defeated, not only where Christ models for us the way of love, but the cross is ultimately, this is the main thing, it's the satisfaction of God's justice. Something that's related to that is this term, Sacrifice. How much in the Bible is there of this thing we call sacrifice? When you hear the word sacrifice, what do you think? All right. That's part of the whole testimony. starting the Bible, the whole of the history from Abraham to the days of Christ, actually, scratch that, from the days of Adam to the days of Christ. When did the first sacrifice happen? Remember? In the Bible, first sacrifice? All right, Abel is already offering sacrifices. Ooh, I think Madeline might have, oh, did you, oh, what did you there, Doug? And me too, actually. I was thinking of Abel. Do you actually see sacrifice in the, pardon me, the animals that are dead as a result of Adam and Eve's sins so they can have clothes? Ooh. I think she might have us both. I think that is actually. something sacrificial happening, although it's just sort of being, it's indirectly being taught. The Bible is full of the idea that in order for sinners to be right with a holy God, there needs to be a sacrifice. Someone, something living, that becomes dead, forfeits its life for the sake of the one that is sinful. The Old Testament's full of this. We're gonna return to this next week to talk a little bit more about that, but I want you to know that all three of these things are true elements of what's happening at the cross, but the third, of these three things, the satisfaction of God's justice, is something that the early church fathers don't develop enough. It's kind of ironic, in light of the fact that it's the main thing. The early church fathers don't develop that enough, which is why, whether you knew it or not, your good instincts to talk about the cross being a place of punishment and so on, have a lot to do with this guy. Let's talk about him now. Anselm of Canterbury. He's called Anselm of Canterbury because he became the Archbishop of Canterbury. His years were 1033 to 1109. Now, those dates should jump out at you and you might say, wait a minute, you're calling him a church father? No fair. Do you remember what I said at the beginning of the year about who the church fathers are in technical terms? Does anybody remember? How old do you have to be to be a church father in the technical sense of the term? Does anybody remember? Pardon me? Well, here's what I said at the onset of the year A rule I'm getting ready to break. If you hear someone saying, I'm studying the church fathers, the way scholars typically use that term, church father, they mean the people who led the church in the first 500 years. Aung San obviously is not a church father by that definition. But you know what? I have used the word in a broader sense. I refer to church fathers as people who lived and blessed the church all the way up to the present time. So there's a certain sense which you can speak broadly to church fathers. This guy is right in the middle of the medieval period, right? He's right smack dab in the middle of the Middle Ages. And he's an exception to the rule. All the other guys we've been studying were really older. within the first 500 years. We'll make an exception now. If I tell you a few things about Anselm, you're going to tell me, that sounds familiar. For example, he grew up with a very pious mother, very godly mother, and a godless father. Now, how many times have we heard that before among mature fathers? His father actually, ambitions to be in a church, but as you can guess, he was not successful. Unsolved left home, eventually as a young man to join a monastery. He wrote as a monk, and eventually through his writings, he became famous. And as often happens when people write and become famous, someone important decided that he needed to do a job and put him in a very prominent place. And so that came about in 1093. He was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by a guy named William II of England. Archbishop of Canterbury, a pretty prominent role in the church. There's something ironic about that because William was actually a very wicked king. And though he appointed Anselm to be archbishop in England, the two men would have a great deal of conflict of the years. I think this will mean something to you when I say that Anselm has been called the second Augustine. How's that? The second Augustine. I told you about how important St. Augustine was, how much has been written about him. Probably the greatest mind between the Apostle Paul and perhaps the modern reformers, Augustine. But if there's a second place, it would be for Anselm. Yes? I'm sorry? So this is a little bit of background about Anselm. Now what I want to spend the next few minutes talking about is how is it that he had insight into this third element of what the cross is all about. This term satisfaction, the view of the cross as the satisfying of God's justice, we really get that way of speaking from this guy named Anselm. It's not stating it too strongly to say that Anselm began a whole new way of thinking and talking about the atonement. Per Deus Homo. Anybody want to try to translate that for me from the Latin? Cur Deus Homo. God. Man. With? Not quite. Huh? Why? Cur why? Why? What would it be in the English, then? Why God Became Man is the name of the most famous writing of Unsolved. Why God Became Man. You don't need to give me Latin, but I thought you might be curious to see it. Cur Deus Homo. Why God Became Man is the book, the treatise, that he wrote in the atonement that was really paradigm shifting for the church. So the book is put in the form of a question, if you will. And here's some of the questions that Anselm is wrestling with in that book. Why did God have to go to all this trouble to save us? To create the world, God just said something. Right? He just spoke. Genesis tells us he spoke all things into existence over six days. If God can just speak and create the world, why can't he just speak and save the world? Have you ever thought about that? You have? Doesn't it seem like a lot of trouble for God to go to, to become a man? grow up, live, suffer, die, be raised from the dead, all that? Well, somebody I knew who isn't Christian, they asked me that question. Wow. Okay. I didn't know how to respond, so. Okay. Yeah. Cur deus homo. I'm someone asking that question. More to the point, if we need forgiveness of sins, why couldn't God just forgive us. When you do something unkind to someone else, do you go find something to kill in order to offer up a sacrifice so that you can be forgiven? Or do you go to someone else thinking, if I ask them to forgive me, They'll just do it. They'll just say, I forgive you. It's the latter, isn't it? You just, you expect that from others? That they can just forgive you? Just do it. Why does God have to have a sacrifice in order to forgive us? Anselm's asking that question in that book. And if he had to have someone die, why did he have to be a divine person? Why couldn't he send an angel to do that? Let the Jehovah's Witnesses teach. Jesus was an angel. He became a man. These are the kind of questions that Anselm raises, and it really has everything to do with Why is Christmas so necessary? Why did God have to come to the earth and become a man and eventually die on a cross? Now here's the answer in a nutshell that Anselm gives, and it's his great insight. It's the thing that has shaped the way the church has thought about the atonement. It's helped the church understand the atonement ever since he wrote. Anselm said, there's something in the nature of God that require the atonement. Something about God and the way he is had to be satisfied. Here's what Anselm means by that. When you and I sin, we rob God. What do we rob God of in our sin? Well, Anselm said, we rob him of his honor. He's due honor, obedience. We rob him of something that is due to him. Sin puts man in God's debt. Anselm said, when we've sinned against God, we've got to make it right. to restore what we've robbed from God, his honor. But you and I don't have any ability to do that. We can't actually repay what God, what we've taken from God. And so God has a choice. God can either punish us for that and gain honor by that, regain his honor in the punishing of us, or he can punish someone in our place. And that punishing of someone in our place is a satisfaction of God's justice. Now let me try to illustrate that sense of satisfaction. Last night our president ordered a military strike against Syria. 59 or 60, I'm not sure exactly the number, Tomahawk missiles struck an airfield in the surrounding area in Syria. You know this perhaps, I was a little bit slow coming to it. I saw the news this morning. Why was that done? Does anybody know? It was because their president was like releasing chemicals and gases on civilians. All right, so the whole, I won't say the whole world community, but much of the West has been horrified to see pictures of children dying in agony from sarin gas that apparently the Syrian army used on civilians. It's a terrible way to die. You don't look like there's anything wrong with you. except that your whole body is going into convulsions. You're foaming at the mouth, and you suffocate. Now, there's a lot of history in this. Syria has used chemical weapons in the past, blah, blah, blah. It's a dreadful thing. That's not the first time it's happened. But the whole community of the West, what our president calls all civilized nations, have a sense that there's a tremendous injustice that's taking place. And that creates a certain craving or longing. What is it that the West is craving? Well, whether they know it or not, they're craving justice, that justice be done, whether or not That even began to happen with what the president ordered as a whole other matter. In God's view, as he sees sins large and small in the earth, that creates a desire in God for justice to be done. You have that kind of desire in you because you're made in God's image. Oftentimes sin converts that and you want vengeance rather than justice. But in God, it's a holy desire for justice to be satisfied. And a, pardon me, Anselm puts his finger on that in his book in a new way for the church. And what he makes us see is that when God provides Jesus as a sacrifice in the cross, God is providing a way for God himself to satisfy the justice of God. Did you follow that? Why couldn't Jesus have just been an angel? Well, he's dying for the sins of the world. He's dying for the sins of all who will be saved, more specifically. a great deal more sin than any one mere creature could atone for. His death had to be of infinite worth in order to count for the sins of all the redeemed. When you hear, if you hear someone talk about the satisfaction theory of the atonement, Mr. Blair, we'll talk about that a little bit more next year. You're talking about Anselm's understanding of the atonement. Let me put this almost on a bumper sticker. It would be kind of a long bumper sticker, but let me put it almost on a bumper sticker. When God saves man, he's not only saving him from Satan, He is doing that, but he's not only saving him from Satan, nor is he just saving him from himself, because you know, sinful people will destroy themselves if given the opportunity. Salvation is first and foremost being saved from God. What does it mean to be saved from God? It means that your sin, my sin, place us in grave danger of the wrath of God. God is our greatest enemy in our sins. because he and his wrath, in satisfying his justice, will punish sinners. But what Anselm recognized is that at the cross, God is providing a way to save us from his own wrath. You and I have learned that from the beginning of our Christian lives. We've been taught that in Sunday school. That's why it was instinctive to you when I said, what's missing? And you told me number three was Jesus being punished in our place. But folks, that's not always been clear in the church. And before we're done with this subject, I'll tell you how even in modern day era, those we call liberal Christians don't buy this either. They don't like the doctrine of the wrath of God, the justice of God. But Anselm helped us understand that our need to be saved does not primarily need to be saved from Satan, not primarily need to be saved from ourselves, it's primarily a need to be saved for the wrath of God. And who do you think is the only person who could save us from God? If God is against you, who could be for you? Unless it was God. Salvation is God's providing a way within the Godhead for God in his love for sinners to save us from his own wrath against sinners. Guys, I want you to honor the man named Amsol for helping the church understand that in new ways in the book that he wrote, Why God Became Man. Next time we get together, we'll talk about the doctrine of propitiation. You probably don't use that word every day, but that's where we're gonna be going as we return to the crux of the issue, doctrine of the atonement. You are right.