, Sean Craig"]In book xiii [of De Trinitate], Augustine also rejects penal substitutionary views of the atonement: Augustine considers and dismisses the possibility that the Son died to reconcile enemies to the Father. We were enemies, Augustine says, but enemies on our side, and not on God’s. Augustine replies: “Does this mean then that his Son was already so reconciled to us that he was even prepared to die for us, while the Father was still so angry with us that unless the Son died for us he would not be reconciled to us?.. Would the Father have not spared his own Son but handed him over for us, if he had not already been reconciled? … I observe that the Father loved us not merely before the Son died for us, but before he founded the world…” 
has anyone come across this before? [tag]Luke[/tag] isn’t Augustinism the basis of Calvinism, which has PSA as a central tenet? 
I’ve met some people who go as far as saying you can’t even be a Christian if you reject PSA…
, 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?
, Sean Craig"]In book xiii [of De Trinitate], Augustine also rejects penal substitutionary views of the atonement: Augustine considers and dismisses the possibility that the Son died to reconcile enemies to the Father. We were enemies, Augustine says, but enemies on our side, and not on God’s.
Just a technical point, but Sean has his phraseology reversed. If what he’s reporting is accurate, Augustine rejects the possibility that the Son died to reconcile the Father to us. Augustine isn’t rejecting the Son reconciling us to the Father.
(If this really is Augustine’s position, he’s following the scriptures at least, since the grammar always involves reconciling us to God, not reconciling God to us. We’re the objects of reconciliation, not the Father nor the Son; the Father or the Son is the doer of reconciliation.)
Calvinistic soteriologies don’t necessarily have to go with the version of penal sub where Christ reconciles the Father to us; and I’ve frequently run into Arminianistic soteriologies (and even some Kath soteriologies!) which do involve Christ reconciling the Father to us, so the concept of God needing to be reconciled to us isn’t unique to Calvs.
(I’ve argued elsewhere that it’s actually the natural expectation of worldwide religion, that of course the deity has to be convinced to help or to look favorably on us or to lean toward us or to smile on us. So it isn’t especially strange to find it among Calv or Arm Christians, or even among the occasional Kath. I’d say it’s absolutely the WRONG expectation, if trinitarian theism is true, but not a strange one. 
)
Anyway, that subtle but important correction doesn’t affect the value of Sean’s report, whatever that may be.
Hmm… if Sean’s dissertation is correct, Augustine did have a notion of penal substitutionism, but of a Christus Victor bait-and-switch variety, very popular in those days and strongly connected to the notion of Christ raiding hell.
In other words, Christ convinces the devil to take Him instead of us, since Christ is more valuable a victim to Satan; but that’s the strategic trap, because once the devil slays Christ… well I don’t quite understand the metaphysics actually being aimed at, it seems more like an analogy based on the notion of Satan taking Jesus into hades where Jesus can then kick the ass of all the evil and bust the place wide open from the inside. A trojan horse analogy in other words.
But it could also be a legal analogy (which by Sean’s description seems more likely): Christ ransoms the victims of the devil (paying the price to raise them basically) by taking their place, but then once the devil kills Him, which was the term of the ransom, Christ has finished paying the price and doesn’t have to put up with Satan’s mistreatment anymore–being kept in eternal torment by the devil wasn’t part of the deal, Christ kept his end by allowing Himself to die in the place of those He chooses to save (and here the Calv soteriology can come in, but some Kaths of that day used the same rationale with full Arm scope). So the devil doesn’t get to keep Christ (and gets hades wrecked and his power ruined by Christ in the process), and doesn’t get to keep whomever he agreed to switch for Christ either.
C. S. Lewis may have gotten his notion of Aslan’s sacrifice from Augustine, then!–even though he didn’t really ever appeal to that atonement theory in his non-fiction, but rather to other concepts. (And not to penal sub either for that matter.)
On further reflection, though, I’m not sure there’s any switching exactly in Sean’s report of Augustine. It’s more like Christ volunteers to share (not substitute) the fate of sinners molested by Satan; and by doing so, and rising again, empowers sinners (only those Christ elects to empower of course 
) with the ability to see and follow the true path of self-sacrificial love, the way of God, rather than the way of sin. And so in that way breaking the power of Satan. (But only for the elect. God takes over for Satan apparently later in regard to the non-elect, thus breaking Satan’s power that way instead.)
Alex, It’d be great to see a link to what Augustine actually said before I have an opinion.
I thought you’d find it interesting Jason
[tag]Luke[/tag] ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf103.iv.i.xv.xi.html I think this is a translation of it?
I couldn’t make sense of that paragraph from Augustine but it didn’t seem to be denying PSA which Augustine strongly affirms when he wrote this other paragraph:
Against Faustus, Book 14, Section 6 newadvent.org/fathers/140614.htm
Luke, Augustine is just repeating various scriptural idioms in that text. He doesn’t anywhere deny that Christ was in some sense our substitute, and neither did I say he does. He denies that Jesus died to reconcile God to humanity, as if our sin required God to punish someone to achieve justice. God doesn’t change God’s disposition toward us (given divine simplicity and immutability). God elected us and loved us and sent Christ to persuade us to return to God. Augustine explicitly denies that God needed to be reconciled to us in the passage I cited (my citations don’t appear in the excerpts posted). That is consistent with an atonement in which Christ is our substitute in some sense (Augustine doesn’t have an atonement theory and can only be artificially placed in one), but I don’t think Augustine’s thought is at all consistent with penal substitution (also because he doesn’t even consider a forensic account of justification. It doesn’t make sense given his anthropology. For Augustine, justification is the same as coming to acquire the virtue justice through Christ’s objective work and the spirit’s sweetening). I think that Herbert McCabe gets the position right in his sermon “Forgiveness” which, fittingly, is on this week’s Gospel reading. The sermon is published in a collection called “Faith Within Reason” published by Continuum.
Here’s a summary account of Augustine on atonement from my dissertation: “Augustine narrates Jesus in a way that shows how he is able to overcome despair and pride by demonstrating divine humility and justice and thereby revealing how much God loves us. This justice and humility set up the conditions of the possibility of persuading us to return to virtue, which consists in love of God and love of neighbor. By setting these conditions, Christ sets the condition for the restoration of our wills. By restoring our wills, God will lead us from the knowledge (scientia) to the wisdom (sapientia) in which the life of our souls consists. In narrating Christ this way, Augustine does not establish an “atonement theory” in a way that they are commonly thought of. Augustine provides what might be called a “literal” account of the atonement in terms of his anthropology that I described above and in the previous chapter, but this literal account needs the various tropes he relies upon to make sense. It is only as the exemplum and sacramentum (aesthetic trope, moral example) that Christ is able to exchange his life for ours by entering into our place (substitution, but not penal) and thereby secure a release from the devil (Christus victor). Augustine does not impose a comprehensive theory of atonement and work his account of the divine image around that. Rather, given his doctrine of God, scriptural data, and his understanding of the human structure and condition, he shows what it might mean for us that Christ paves our way back to God.”
When we consented to the devil’s temptation to trade the whole for the part, we were handed over to the devil’s power “by a kind of divine justice” (quadam justitia Dei). The devil acquired “full property rights (jure integro possidebat) over us.” “By right” (jure) the principalities and powers held us until we paid the “penalty” (supplicia) to them.
The penalty is divine. Augustine makes it clear, however, that this penalty is not divinely inflicted but permitted, not a consequence of God’s turning from creatures—as if the Unchanging would somehow regard creatures differently!—but rather the consequence of creaturely turning to the demonic consolidation of power before justice. God is not beholden to a standard of justice above God, nor is God angry with creatures. Rather, God passively permits this process to take place, so the “penalty” is not divine in its execution. It is just one another way—a very important one—that demonic activity is taken into divine purposes.
Augustine does speak about divine “retribution” (tamen per ejus retributionem justissimam mors), where he analogizes divine justice to the justice of a judge—but note the passive nature of the judgment even here: “In the same way a judge imposes a punishment (supplicium) on a guilty man, and yet the cause of the punishment (supplicii) is not the justice of the judge but the deserts of the crime.” God, likewise, in justice—almost out of deference to human agents!—passes us on to the devil’s “power,” which can be defined negatively: the devil’s power is the power of a bad will. God “merely permitted” our captivity to happen. God “withdrew” and sin “marched in.” He is careful to qualify the sense in which God withdraws so as not to undermine his entire theology of creation. God remains life-giver and judge. Humankind remains ultimately under divine jurisdiction, even when it is under the devil’s. “Not even the devil is cut off from the jurisdiction of the Almighty, or from his goodness either for that matter.” Any “spiritual warfare” that takes place is no threat to God, who is unchanging and unthreatened by any creature, no matter how powerful in relation to other creatures. But the devil remains a very real and constant threat to the creatures God loves, posing an indirect threat to God’s designs for creation.
In what, then, does the judgment on us consist exactly? “The devil was holding on to our sins, and using them to keep us deservedly fixed in death.” We might also say that the devil was humiliating us, making us more vulnerable. By keeping us focused on our sin and therefore in despair and pride, he had us by “property rights” in this subjective sense only; these property rights were exclusively based in our willing submission to the devil’s deceit. God invests the divine energies in rescuing us from the devil’s dominion. In what follows, I will trace Augustine’s answers to two questions before reflecting more deeply on justice and humility of Christ.
First, he asks Boso’s later question to Anselm: “Was there no other way available to God of setting men free from the unhappiness of this mortality, that he should want his only begotten Son, God coeternal with himself, to become man by putting on a human soul and flesh, and, having become mortal, to suffer death?” It is not enough, Augustine argues, to claim that it was “good” (bonum) and “befitting the divine dignity” (divinae congruum dignitati) that Wisdom incarnate and die. He rejects the answer that “no other possible way was available to God,” for “all things are equally within [God’s] power.” He more modestly demonstrates that it was the most “suitable” (convenientia) way of healing our “unhappy state.” Since we were “disheartened by the very condition of mortality” and “despairing of immortality,” the divine mission in Christ was to make a demonstration of the divine love. By demonstrating divine love and the extent of divine valuing of us, Christ would be able to “[raise] our hopes” and “[deliver] the minds of mortals.” In many ways, the remedy for the devil’s humiliation of us vulnerable human creatures was for God to dazzle us with divine humility-with-justice and thereby undo the devil’s unjust humiliation. “What,” Augustine asks, “could be clearer and more wonderful evidence” of divine love than “that the Son of God, unchangeably good, remaining in himself what he was and receiving from us what he was not [a beautiful blending of Augustine’s concept of humility with orthodox Christology], electing to enter into partnership with out nature [nostrae dignatus inire consortium] without detriment to his own, should first of all endure our ills without any ill deserts of his own; and then once we had been brought in this way to believe how much God loved us and to hope at last for what we had despaired of, would confer his gifts on us with a quite uncalled for generosity, without any good deserts of ours, indeed with our ill deserts our only preparation?” (most of this is from trin. 10.10.13)
(It goes on and on after this)
I’m not convinced. Augustine is simply repeating the doctrine of PSA that he picked up from earlier church fathers, For example Justin Martyr, Athanasius and Ambrose all taught what we now recognise as the doctrine of PSA before Augustine. Pierced for Our Transgressions by Jeffery, Ovey and Sach lays out the main biblical and historical data for this doctrine in an Evangelical and scholarly manner.
Luke, I’m confused. Do you think Augustine believed that Jesus died to reconcile God to us? I’m interested if you have a text that says so. I’m not concerned with whether PSA is true or not, but whether Augustine held something like it.
I suppose I’m not concerned with the title PSA because it’s an anachronism. I’m just concerned with the very narrow point about whether for Augustine Jesus died because God needed a substitute to be sacrificed on humanity’s behalf in order to fulfill divine justice. It’s that point that Augustine denies, and it cannot be reconciled with his thought. I find the desire to show whether an anachronistic concept of PSA is in the church fathers or medieval scholastics very strange. Doctrines like atonement are so intimately tied to other theological loci that it is very difficult to establish continuity without a more textured engagement with the particular thought of each theologian.
Great point, Sean!
Hey Alex and Sean,
You guys are making a storm in a tea cup because Augustine taught Penal Subsiutiubnary Atonement (PSA). **For example he wrote: **
Against Faustus, Book 14, Section 6 newadvent.org/fathers/140614.htm
I’m not making this up, reliable Evangelical scholars also think that Augustine taught PSA. For example Pierced for Our Transgressionsby Jeffery, Ovey and Sach shows that not only Augustine but lots of the Church Fathers have taught a form of PSA.
Alex, I find all of this really interesting. It certainly does seem, of your first quote of Augutine’s, that he doesn’t view the atonement in a PSA way. The passage Luke cited, I agree with Sean, reminds me so much of the biblical language. With Christ, if there is a substitution of a type, it’s not in the penal way many have understood, where God is reconciling himself to us, rather than us to God. It’s my experience that when people quote passages, like Luke’s example or specific verses in the bible, they see only PSA because their understanding has been so entrenched in understanding it only in that way. We look at the same passage and see a completely different way to understand it. Whatever I’ve believed in the past, it’s always taken me some time to be able to see the text from another perspective.
Sean, so you agree that Augustine finds the doctrine of PSA in the Biblical text then? (I think you just kicked an en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Own_goal then.) 
Amy couldn’t the same be said about a Universalist? That they read things through their own entrenched bias? This thread being a case in point.
Or your quote from Against Faustus being a case in point.
Because, so far as that paragraph you keep repeating goes, there’s nothing in it that necessarily involves Jesus being cursed and punished by God’s wrath; consequently nothing in it that runs against Sean’s report of what Augustine explicitly denies elsewhere.
Someone could read that type of PSA into the paragraph from AF, of course, without any tension, but no one could read it into (much less out of) the portions quoted by Sean.
Now, maybe there are other things from that text which speak of the innocent Son being punished in wrath by the Father instead of us, but then you should quote those things instead in order to argue that Augustine believed that – and even then that would be simply contradictory to what Sean quoted (at some length) from Augustine in the other text.
But if one text was later than the other (or if one text was spurious or being wildly mis-translated perhaps) that would explain the contradiction: Augustine changed his mind later and decided he was wrong. (Or never said what one text says in the first place.)
In Sean’s quote from Augustine earlier, Augustine vociferously denies that the Father was angry at the Son or expressed wrath at the Son instead of at us. In that quote, the punishment of God for sinners is to passively allow them to be trapped by the devil, and it is the devil who then inflicts wrath on them.
That’s the curse Augustine is talking about Christ taking upon Himself, thus freeing those under the curse by substituting Himself for them (in Augustine’s version of a bait-and-switch or ransom theory of atonement popular in the first several centuries) – the curse is from the devil (and other sinners), not from God.
To add a bit more resolution, I’m pretty sure I recall Augustine affirming that God actively punishes the devil and sinners eschatologically; he didn’t promote the notion that post-mortem divine judgment and punishment is always passive. (Unlike some non-universalists today who want to get away from the notion of God actively punishing anyone at all yet still keeping a hopeless end for some sinners.)
But that would still fit the concept Sean quoted from Augustine: when God does actively punish someone, then there’s no hope of salvation from that punishment. (I expect Aug would or more likely did quote Heb 2 and 10 in this regard, among other things.)
In this way Augustine would avoid another route of introducing schism between the intentions of the Father and the Son in the unity of the deity: there’s no schism when the Son substitutes in to save sinners, because God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) wasn’t directly punishing those sinners in the first place yet (the point Augustine is stressing in the quote Sean found); and when God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) does start directly punishing sinners (having first saved whomever He intends to save, which Augustine took the Calv limited scope about), neither will God (not even the Son) be trying to save them from that punishment.