, Sean Craig"]Keith, here’s the section of a chapter of my diss where I lay out how augustine on atonement work. not much writing has been done on augustine’s atonement theory, and most deny that he has one. but i think it’s best made sense of by thinking of it as a sort of rhetoric. It’s nothing like penal substitution, in my view. In many ways, to conservative reformed ears augustine’s soteriology sounds a lot like works righteousness. He would deny imputation. For him, justification is acquiring the virtue justice, which is for A. the same thing as the love of God (I summarize A’s understanding of justice as "the maximally affirmative organization of our attachments–therefore a form of love because it’s fundamentally a way of being attached–and the maximally affirmative way of networking bodies based on the rightly ordered attachments). Sorry if it’s a bit obnoxious to post something so long:
by providing the objective conditions that make it possible for us to pursue justice rather than power, Christ is a necessary component in our release from the devil’s power and consequent acquiring of eternal happiness. But how does the persuasion work? The language of exchange or substitution enters at this point. “What then is the justice that overpowered the devil?” It had to be justice of one who was never deceived: “the justice of Jesus Christ—what else?” The devil was overpowered because “he found nothing in him deserving of death and yet he killed him.” In this way, Christ’s “innocent blood” was “shed for the forgiveness of sins,” because the death of Christ is our release from captivity.
The mechanics become clearer when Augustine asks whether the devil would have been overpowered if Christ had chosen to deal in power rather than justice. Here is where humility is important, because it shows why Augustine thought it not sufficient just to give an example of justice, but a true sacrament of divine justice, which displayed with it the divine humility-greatness. It was precisely because he “did not have to” but because he “wanted to” that we can be persuaded that his sacrifice was voluntary and proceeded not from a lamentable injustice, but out of supreme, eternal justice and love. Recognition of the divine humility is necessary in order to know that the humility of Christ is also the humility of God. As it was, “the justice of humility” (humilitate justitia) was “set before us” (commendata est) by Christ’s voluntarily dying. The power that follows that justice was demonstrated by his rising from the dead. “What could be more just than to face even death on the cross for justice’s sake? And what could be a greater show of power than to rise from the dead and ascend into heaven with the very flesh in which he had been killed.” By willingly submitting to death that he did not deserve, Christ served as the perfect exemplum of virtue in a world of sin, the perfect example of what it is to choose justice rather than power and to be vindicated by eternal beatitude.
The combination of humility and justice, the double exemplification, is what makes Christ the ultimate persuader of our souls. Augustine uses the imagery of substitution, exchange, and debt to describe what this voluntary dying means for us. When one really understands the proper ordering of justice and power, one is able “to see the devil overcome when he thought he himself was overcoming” (videre diabolum victum, quando sibi vicisse videbatur ). Before Christ died, the devil held us “deservedly” (eos diabolus merito tenebat), but he was “obliged” to give us up “deservedly” (hos per eum merito dimitteret) because he killed Jesus “undeservedly” (immerito). He took “the blood of Christ” as “a kind of price,” and “when the devil took it he was not enriched by it but caught and bound by it.” This transaction is more than a metaphor. By exemplifying perfect justice, Christ served as a persuader of all those caught under the devil’s power, the overcoming of the devil’s anti-mediation.
Since God the Father did not need to reconcile with humanity, for the Father always and unchangeably loved us, and since the source of our captivity to the devil was not the Father’s will in any absolute sense, the Son’s “transaction” releases us from the devil precisely by opening our blind eyes so that we can see, opening us to true justice, and therefore opening us to our previous blindness. “Nor for that matter were we really God’s enemies except in the sense that sins are the enemies of justice.” The only way, then, to make us God’s friends was to reconcile us to justice, “so that we might be disentangled from [the devil’s] toils.”
In his sacrifice, Jesus shows us what it is to love God, what it is for God to love us, and what it looks like in this world when our loves are rightly ordered. Christ’s death might be analogized to various historical instances in which the patient submission to injustice sets the conditions for exposing the set of lies and ideologies used to keep people in injustice. One thinks of the peaceful witness of the hosed-down civil rights marchers who nevertheless persisted, of the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square who were mowed down by communist tanks, of the contemporary martyrs whose innocent deaths expose the superstructure of lies and deceptions necessary to kill them. Sometimes, the image of the justice is so powerful and the demonstration of its enactment so clear that the exemplars of the virtue expose the forces of deception for what they are and provide the condition of the possibility of release for those victimized by the lies necessary to maintain the order that dominates them. It is in this sense that Augustine thinks that the devil was tricked, and that the moment of his victory was really the beginning of his defeat. By patiently, powerfully, justly, humbly shedding his blood, he revealed the futility of the devil’s whole mode of being, of the amassing of power without a good will. He showed the contingency of the arrangement in which the devil humiliates us. He also showed us how the devil humiliates us and thereby opened a way to live without despair of wholeness and in grateful recognition of God’s gift, which is ultimately divine love. In this way, Jesus gave a way out of the devil’s power. In Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection, we can see exactly the exercise of humility and justice that we needed to see in order to escape from the devil’s humiliation, releasing us from despair and pride. In one sense, then, Jesus’ task is chiefly to expose the deception and machinations, the fraud and craftiness, of the devil in order to open up a space for us to be free from them, since exposing the false power at work is an important part of demystifying it and helping those bound by it to go free.[tag]sharktacos[/tag] I know you’ve done a lot of research on PSA, have you come across this?