REDEMPTION (Gr. ἀπολύτρωσις). — It is equivalent to ransom, evoking the idea of the liberation of slaves. In Christian doctrine, the redemption accomplished by Christ is the liberation of man from the servitude of guilt and punishment, through the bloody sacrifice of the God-Man, constituted as the mediator between God and the human race.
OUTLINE:
I. Holy Scripture
II. Tradition
III. Scholasticism
IV. Protestantism
V. The Council of Trent
VI. Development of Protestant doctrine
VII. Catholic synthesis.I. HOLY SCRIPTURE
The incarnation of the Word in the designs of God was ordered to the redemption of the human race. The very name of Jesus, which in Hebrew means Savior, carried within itself a promise and a program of salvation. Therefore, the Church sings in its Creed: *Qui propter nos homines et propter nostram salutem descendit de coelis et incarnatus est*. Christ is born as the mediator for the reconciliation of man with God, as St. Paul affirms (1 Tim. 2:5): “There is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” Placed between heaven and earth through the mystery of the hypostatic union, He, though personally distinct from the Father, is one with Him by the identity of nature; and at the same time He is man among men by the specific essence of humanity, which He has wonderfully united to His divine person. He therefore possesses the characteristics and resources of a mediator suited to unite the extreme terms, God and man, separated by guilt. Thus the heart of Jesus Christ becomes the temple and bridal chamber in which the redeemed creature finds and embraces again the Father wrongly abandoned.The redemption accomplished by Christ is His mediation in act. The entire Gospel is a soteriology, a message of salvation, which the prophet Isaiah anticipated many centuries earlier in chapter 53 of his book, called the little poem of redemption, where he vividly describes the figure of the Servant of Yahweh, the man of sorrows, who would be wounded and scourged for the iniquities of men, and through His voluntary and bloody sacrifice would purify souls from sin and reconcile them with God. In vain have Jewish and rationalistic criticism attempted to eliminate the messianic character of this prophecy. The mysterious Servant of Yahweh cannot be the prophet nor the Israelite people: it is realized only in the person of Christ the Redeemer, to whom the prophecy fits down to the smallest details. But the mediatorial mission of Christ is demonstrated unequivocally in the New Testament. The richest source of this soteriology is undoubtedly in the letters of St. Paul, though some critics wrongly attribute exclusively to him the testimony regarding the redemptive value of the life and death of Jesus.
The Synoptics, narrating the institution of the Most Holy Eucharist, emphasize the words of Jesus Christ: “This is my blood of the new covenant, which is poured out for the forgiveness of sins” (Mt. 26:28; cf. Mk. 14:24; Lk. 22:20). But in Matthew (20:28; cf. Mk. 10:45) are recorded the Master’s categorical words, in which He thus defined His redemptive mission: “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom” (ἀπόλυτρον) “for many.”
This fundamental soteriological motif, enunciated by the Synoptics in epigrammatic style, finds in St. Paul a broad doctrinal development. The Apostle begins with the consideration of original sin, which is transmitted from Adam to all humanity (Rom. 5:12), making it an object of God’s wrath and curse (Eph. 2:3). But God, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, freely decrees the redemption of the human race through His incarnate Son and brings His plan to fruition in the fullness of time (Gal. 4:4). Jesus Christ is thus the second Adam, who will give resurrection and life to men, as the first Adam had procured death for them (1 Cor. 15:22; Rom. passim). The entire life of Jesus has redemptive value (Rom. 8:3), but especially His death on the Cross and His Resurrection, which contribute to our salvation not only morally as an example (Phil. 2:5 ff.; Gal. 2:19 ff.; Rom. 6:4 ff.), but also through a true and proper efficient causality (Rom. 4:25). Christ is constituted the bloody victim of our sins, offering to the Father His blood and His life as a propitiatory sacrifice, as the price of ransom and reconciliation. The testimonies mount with a disconcerting realism through a sacrificial language that culminates in the Letter to the Hebrews, in which the Redeemer is presented as priest and victim of His sacrifice of infinite soteriological value. He is the redemption (ἀπολύτρωσις), the ransom (ἀπόλυτρον), the propitiation (ἱλαστήριον), the offering and victim (προσφορά καὶ θυσία) raised to the Father for our reconciliation (Rom. 3:24; 1 Tim. 2:6; Rom. 3:25; Eph. 5:2). The work of Christ our mediator and redeemer could not be described more vividly. The energy of Pauline expressions does not allow metaphorical interpretations: in His life, even more in His bloody sacrifice and Resurrection, there is a real redemptive efficacy capable of freeing man from the bonds of sin and restoring his spirit to holiness.
This marvelous and complex work of restoration is framed by the Apostle within the doctrine of the Mystical Body, which establishes a profound solidarity between us and Christ in such a way that His Passion, His Death, and His Resurrection become the drama of our spirit. We die with Him to rise with Him to a new life (Rom. 6:4): His expiation is ours, and ours are His merits, if we adhere to Him and are incorporated into His Mystical Body through faith and active charity (Eph. 4:15). Furthermore, the concept of redemption recurs in St. John, who reiterates the Pauline motif of death and blood as expiatory and propitiatory sacrifice: “Behold the Lamb of God, behold Him who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn. 1:29); and in Rev. 5:8: “Worthy are You, O Lord, to take the book and to break its seals, because You were slain, and purchased for God with Your blood men from every tribe”; 1 Jn. 2:2: “And He is the propitiation for our sins.” But St. John broadens the idea of redemption by reconnecting it to the entire life of the Incarnate Word, which is the manifestation and transfusion of supernatural light and life, a preparation for eternal life: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him” (Jn. 3:16-17).
St. Peter also gathers the soteriological doctrine in these words (1 Pt. 1:18): “Knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold… but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ.”
II. TRADITION
The richness of motifs with which Holy Scripture presents the redemption accomplished by Christ is manifested in tradition, which emphasizes now one element, now another. Among the Fathers, a great variety of approaches is revealed in their interpretation and illustration of the data of Revelation, though all are in agreement on the fundamental doctrine regarding the redemptive value of the life, death, and Resurrection of the Savior.The main tendencies can be reduced to two: the first, which predominates among the Eastern Fathers, sees in the Incarnation of the Word already the redemption of human nature, elevated through the hypostatic union to a divine dignity; the second, preferred by the Latins, readily follows the Pauline concept of a bloody expiatory sacrifice. But alongside these fundamental conceptions, suggested by St. John and St. Paul, the Fathers developed secondary forms of exposition, often indulging in metaphorical style and images more suited to the mentality of the people. Thus arose the celebrated theory of the devil’s rights: Christ, to redeem man from the diabolical slavery of sin, paid to Satan the price of His blood. Another no less singular theory is that of the abuse of power: after original sin, Satan had received from God permission to torment men; deceived, he also attacked Jesus Christ, believing Him to be merely a man, and thus lost his dominion over all humanity. Imagination contributed to embellish the idea: Christ was considered as a hook with which God fishes and drags down the great infernal fish.
Rationalists have seized upon these marginal motifs in the Fathers’ doctrine to conclude that, under the influence of Gnostic dualism, they constructed a veritable soteriological mythology, presenting God and Satan as disputing sinful humanity like a prey. But careful critical study has shown the exaggeration in this thesis. Drawing on the best of tradition, St. Augustine removed every ambiguity from the theory of Satan’s rights (De Trinit., 13, cap. 12), highlighting the true reason for redemption (Confess., 10, nn. 43, 68).
In conclusion, among the Fathers there is no organic, systematic doctrine concerning the mystery of redemption, but they offer all its elements in a range that extends from essential lines to nuances and metaphorical coloring. It was the task of the Scholastics to systematize these scattered elements found in the Fathers’ works.
III. SCHOLASTICISM
The first to attempt an organic synthesis was St. Anselm (v.) with his golden opuscule *Cur Deus Homo*. Drawing on St. Augustine, this celebrated Doctor employed all his dialectical acumen to illustrate the truths of faith, which he believed and lived with intense devotion, with the light of reason. He sought to give the mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and Redemption a rational form to the point that it sometimes seems to compromise transcendence. Thus, in *Cur Deus Homo*, he began from an entirely objective analysis of sin as an offense against God and, through a juridical process, arrived at the affirmation of an ineluctable necessity of reparation, which could be achieved in only two ways: either punishment or voluntary satisfaction. Since man could not render to God a satisfaction equivalent to the honor taken away by sin, it was necessary that the Son of God become incarnate, who could perform human actions of infinite value due to the hypostatic union, by which those actions belong properly to the Person of the Word, to whom Christ’s human nature is intimately united. Christ, freely offering His life to the Father, satisfies divine justice in a superabundant manner and acquires infinite merits, which overflow to guilty mankind, rendering them worthy of eternal life.The fundamental motif of Anselm’s reasoning is satisfaction. In Roman law, this term signifies the full legal reparation of a crime; in medieval Germanic law, the offering of compensation for an injustice or offense (*Vergeitung*). More than from these profane sources, St. Anselm probably drew from Christian language and especially from liturgy, where the term *satisfaction* was used to denote the intercessions and merits of the saints on behalf of sinners. Yet in the vigorous synthesis of St. Anselm, the Scholastics soon perceived defects and gaps. Above all, they noted the overly juridical character of the treatment, as if God were subject to the norms of human justice and could not exercise mercy and love in His dealings with sinful humanity. Moreover, Anselm’s doctrine lacked the concept of solidarity between men and the Redeemer. Yet Holy Scripture makes divine love and mercy the principal motive of the redemptive work, and St. Paul insists on our solidarity with Christ through the doctrine of the Mystical Body. Subsequent Scholastics, from St. Bernard to St. Thomas, remedied these deficiencies by drawing on the eloquent texts of Sacred Scripture and the Fathers. It is sufficient to recall John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son.” There was thus in Revelation ample material to temper the overly juridical emphasis of St. Anselm.
St. Thomas, embracing the data of Sacred Scripture, the doctrine of the Fathers, and that of the Scholastics who preceded him, condensed the essential elements of traditional soteriology into a sober synthesis, which is considered definitive in the *Summa Theologiae*, III, q. 48.
According to the Angelic Doctor, the two fundamental modes of the redemptive work are the merit and satisfaction of Christ, considered not in isolation but as intimately united with sinful humanity through the Mystical Body, by which Christ the Head constitutes with men as members almost a single person (ibid., a. 2, ad 1). Christ merits and satisfies divine justice by deliberately offering His entire life, but especially His Passion and Death (material aspect). Yet His merit and satisfaction derive their raison d’être from the love of Christ toward the Father and toward men (formal aspect). This moral element dominates the entire redemptive work and lends immense dignity and value to physical suffering. “Christ, suffering out of love and obedience, offered to God more than was required for the reparation of the offense of the whole human race” (ibid., a. 2). And love also gives the character of a perfect sacrifice to the death of the Redeemer, which from the part of the crucifiers was an enormous crime (ibid., a. 3). But redemption is also a liberation, a ransom of man from a twofold servitude: that of guilt and that of punishment. Guilt is slavery to evil and to the devil; punishment is a debt to divine justice. Christ, with His merits and satisfaction, breaks the bonds of both servitudes, cancelling guilt and remitting punishment (ibid., a. 4). St. Thomas touches here on the theory of the devil’s rights, but corrects its defect by affirming categorically that “redemption was necessary to free man with respect to God, not with respect to the devil: it was not to the devil but to God that the price of the blood shed by Jesus Christ had to be paid” (ibid., ad 3). Finally, St. Thomas vindicates, on the basis of Sacred Scripture and tradition, the character of real efficacy of the redemption accomplished by the Savior (ibid.).
The Life and Death of Jesus are not merely an example that morally influences men, but a causal principle that also physically affects consciences for their healing. This efficacy springs from the divinity of Christ and passes through His humanity, the instrument of the Word that assumed II. The entire doctrine of St. Thomas can be schematically summarized as follows: Christ, as the head of humanity, His Mystical Body, moved by love and obedience, offered Himself to the Father as mediator and voluntary victim for the sins of men, and effected their redemption by engaging His entire self with His divinity and humanity, soul and body. In this complex work there is an efficient causality, promoted by the person of the Word and passing through the assumed humanity. The efficient causality operates along two parallel lines: merit, which is connected to free will, and satisfaction, which is rather connected to the sacrifice of the flesh. The fruit is the liberation of man from the slavery of guilt and punishment and his reconciliation with God (ibid.).
IV. PROTESTANTISM
There is no doubt that Luther reduced Christianity to a problem of salvation and thus made man’s redemption the focal point of his entire religious system. Indeed, both he and his immediate followers did not hesitate to affirm that the doctrine of man’s justification by the merits of Christ the Redeemer is something entirely new, as if it were their own invention. Luther began with the concept of original sin (v.), which he held to be so disastrous as to deeply corrupt human nature, stripping it of reason and freedom. Through a sad personal experience, he became convinced that nature was so corrupted and dominated by concupiscence that redemption in Christ could not regenerate and inwardly transform man, enslaved by sin. Instead, it had to be an extrinsic work to man, with a juridico-moral function, in the sense that God deigns not to take account of our sins in view of the holiness and merits of Jesus Christ.Thus arose the theory of “imputation,” whereby God does not impute to man his incurable sins (which remain indelibly fixed in the soul), but imputes to him the holiness of His Divine Son, who died for the salvation of sinners. In this way, man remains in himself what he is, with his sins and deep wounds, but appears healthy and holy in the eyes of God through the interposition of the holiness of Christ the Redeemer. Nor does man have anything to do for this justification, which is entirely extrinsic: he cannot freely contribute to his salvation, nor can he perform any act beyond a blind sentiment of faith, understood as trust and abandonment to divine mercy. Thus, faith without works, without effort, and without struggle.
The whole Gospel rebels against this Lutheran interpretation. The regeneration of the spirit, the radical renewal, the new creation, the new man, of which St. Paul and St. John speak in reference to redemption, have no place in Lutheran doctrine.
Jansenism, a fruit of genuine Lutheranism, developed Luther’s system by reducing the joyful evangelical message to a harsh and inert anguish in the face of the problem of eternal destiny. Luther not only overturns and mortifies human psychology with his extrinsic and negative soteriology, but tears man from the heart of Christ, breaking every real bond of solidarity and reducing the Savior to a mere expiatory figure, who alone bears the blows of justice, severed from humanity, without exercising any decisive influence upon the heart of man for an intimate restoration. Thus, a system that is inhuman, which while degrading the nature of man also offends the power, goodness, and wisdom of God, emptying the mystery of the Cross and destroying the world of Christ’s redeeming grace.
V. THE COUNCIL OF TRENT
The Church perceived the gravity of the error and responded to the Lutheran challenge with the doctrine defined at the Council of Trent (sessions 1545–63). In this doctrine, which comprehends the genuine Christian tradition developed from divine Revelation, the human nature was first vindicated. While recalling (Session V) the doctrine already defined against Pelagianism (v.) in the 5th–6th centuries (Councils of Carthage and Orange) regarding original sin and its consequences, by which the whole man is corrupted (in deterius commutatum), the Council defended the integrity of human nature and especially its freedom, which renders man responsible for his acts and capable of cooperating with divine grace for his salvation (Session VI, chaps. 5 and 6; canons 4 and 5). It rejected the Lutheran doctrine of justification by imputation and reaffirmed the traditional concept of sanctification through grace infused into the soul together with charity and the other virtues (ibid., chap. 7; canons 9, 11, 12) and vindicated for man the right and duty to perform good works constantly under the impulse of grace, so as truly to merit an increase of grace and eternal life (canons 20, 24, 26, 32).Alongside the truth of man’s internal sanctification by infused grace, the Council of Trent reestablished against Luther the true redemptive function of Christ (Session VI, chaps. 7 and 16). The incarnate Word came into this world to save men from eternal perdition, the fruit of original and personal sin; for this reason, moved by immense love, He endured the torment of the Cross, by which He merited justification for men and made full satisfaction to the Father on their behalf. Through His Passion and Death, Jesus Christ poured sanctifying grace into men, making them living members of His Mystical Body and adopted children of God, heirs of heaven. Men, grafted onto Christ the Redeemer as branches onto the vine, satisfy the divine precepts through good works done by the power of God and thereby merit eternal life. In this way, according to the concept of St. Paul, the Life, Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ are reproduced and perpetuated, under the action of redeeming grace, in the soul of the Christian, who is journeying toward the supreme goal. The entire doctrine of St. Paul, meditated upon and lived by fifteen centuries of Christianity, is reaffirmed in the canons of the Council of Trent against the aberrations of Luther.
VI. DEVELOPMENT OF PROTESTANT DOCTRINE
While Catholic doctrine, after the 16th century, continued serenely along the path of merit and satisfaction traced by tradition up to St. Thomas and confirmed by the Council of Trent in the light of the solidarity between humanity and its Redeemer, according to the concept and reality of the Mystical Body, Lutheran doctrine underwent crises and reactions in the very direction of the Protestant sects that multiplied after Luther’s death.The first of these reactions is due to Socinus, who transferred the Lutheran principles of free examination and contempt for tradition onto the ground of pure rationalism, inspired by humanism. Socinus harshly criticized the inhuman concept of penal substitution, the basis of Luther’s and Calvin’s soteriology. For him, an innocent Christ suffering and atoning for others, the true sinners, is immoral and anti-God: reparation, like sin, is personal. Hugo Grotius, as a good jurist, sought to save the Lutheran penal substitution from shipwreck by insisting on the juridical relationship between guilt and punishment and the necessity
of expiation for the restoration of the order, disturbed by sin. But Socinus’s seductive ideas had a strong influence and wide development in the theology of the last century. In Protestantism it is necessary to distinguish an orthodox, conservative current, which seeks to defend and preserve the initial positions of the “Reformation,” even if it softens some of the harshness of the Lutheran conception, and a progressive current, which feels the rationalistic influence first of Socinus and then of Kant. As regards the problem of the Atonement, liberal Protestantism found its adequate expression in the work of Auguste Sabatier (*La doctrine de l’expiation et son évolution historique*, Paris 1903). He claims to discover in Holy Scripture two redemptive ideas: one ritualistic, of Levitical origin, which is expressed in the concepts of expiatory sacrifice (St. John and the Epistle to the Hebrews), and the other moralistic, of prophetic origin, which presents Christ as the just man who suffers for the salvation of his people (doctrine of Jesus and of Paul). As for tradition, Sabatier traced its lines with a simplicity that did not trouble itself with documentation; he maintained that soteriology had passed through three phases: the first, mythology, proper to the Fathers, who would have been influenced by Gnosticism in combining strange theories (of the devil’s rights, of the abuse of power, etc.); the second, proper to the Scholastics, which can be defined as juridical and runs from Anselm’s satisfaction to the theory of St. Thomas, who adds the concept of solidarity, and to the desperate Lutheran conception of penal expiation, taken up again by Grotius; the third, moralistic, which arose and developed within liberal Protestantism and which, according to Sabatier, would be the true one.
But moralism is the negation of the mystery of the Cross preached by St. Paul and St. John. From an inquiry made among Protestants themselves twice (1883–1900) on the soteriological question, these conclusions can be drawn: 1) almost unanimous abandonment of the Lutheran theory of penal expiation. 2) A broad agnostic tendency among those theologians, such as Dale, Olver, and especially Farrar, who accept the fact of the Atonement but do not wish to investigate the manner, which is mysterious and inexplicable. 3) Besides these two first positions, which are merely negative, in modern Protestant theology two positive currents are discernible, of which one is the residue of the orthodox doctrine that goes back to the first Reformers, and the other is the outcome of liberal Protestantism, which is connected with Socinus and even more with Schleiermacher:
a) Liberal current: it is inspired by subjectivism and Kantian immanentism, seeking to explain the Atonement by psychological and moral means and in an individualistic sense. Every man must solve the problem of his salvation by looking to Christ as an example and stimulus to repentance and moral restoration. This is the doctrine of Ritschl, Sabatier, and Harnack, which can be defined as a kind of mystical moralism in which it is difficult to recognize the face of a supernatural religion. Rivière is right to affirm the fundamental identity of this modern Protestant theory with that of the thoroughly rationalist Socinus;
b) Orthodox current: it is connected with the Lutheran tradition, maintaining the concept of expiatory satisfaction and therefore the objective character of the Atonement. Evidently this current is a reaction against the liberal one and strives to keep soteriology on the religious line of the supernatural, according to the demands of Holy Scripture. But it has already abandoned the old Lutheran schemes, in which the idea of penal substitution dominates as an exigency of God’s vindictive justice. Dr. Fremantle and Dr. Horton (in *The Atonement…* cited in the bibliography, vol. II, pp. 164 and 131 ff.) insist on the obedience of Christ, which gives value to his sufferings, and on the solidarity that binds all sinful men to Christ, who redeems them by his loving and painful sacrifice. In the same sense speak Lidgett, Fulliquet, and Snowden. In this way Protestant theology returns, consciously or unconsciously, to Catholic theology.
Lutheran pessimism had a repercussion in the anguished philosophy of Kierkegaard and even more in the so-called “theology of crisis” of Karl Barth. The latter, educated in German Calvinism, reacted against the digressions of scientific Protestant theology with an energetic appeal to the Lutheran motif of the Bible, accepted as the sole source of religious experience under the influence of the Holy Spirit, who enlightens individual believers. Barth began in 1919 with a commentary on St. Paul, *Römerbrief* (now in its 5th edition), in which he placed at the foundation of his theology the concept (attributed to the Apostle) of the absolute transcendence of God and his full dominion over man. In its latest expression Barth’s theology, with special regard to soteriology, can be summed up in these terms. Man is tormented by the enigma of his life and of the world: original sin has cast him out of the realm of truth, to which he cannot return by his own strength. He is a lost man who seeks anxiously. To his question there is no other answer than the Word of God written in the Bible, in which is revealed the “yes” of the eternal divine being and the “no” of human existence at the mercy of time. Human reason can do nothing in relation to God; human will is passive. Man’s freedom is illusory when he is far from God; he regains it by the act of faith, but faith is blind submission to the divine will and makes him feel the responsibility of sin without giving him the strength to free himself from II. The act of faith creates freedom and personality in the sense that it resolves the nothingness of man in the “yes” of God, but not in this life. On earth the sinful man remains such and therefore a slave to his nothingness, from which he cannot escape even by leaning on Christ the Savior. The contrast between God all and man nothing is not resolved in this life, not even by faith and grace: to the man tormented by the crisis before God and unable to overcome his temporal problems, salvation is announced as the hope of eternal life, only beyond the limits of time.
But against such Lutheran revisions, which repeat, on the philosophical and theological plane, the old motif of the despotic dominion of God and the absolute impotence of man, there are not lacking significant reactions (cf. H. W. Rüssel, *Gestalt eines christlichen Humanismus*, Amsterdam 1939), which at least indirectly accuse the need for an orientation toward Catholic doctrine.
One cannot deny the contrast that is evident between the historical evolution of Protestant soteriology, full of contradictions, and the firm consistency of Catholic soteriology, despite its progressive doctrinal development, always adhering to the data of written and oral Revelation.
In our age the Vatican Council had prepared a schema on the Atonement, which was not defined because of the interruption of the work, but it is already a testimony to the mind of the Catholic Church, which preserves and reconfirms the Tridentine concepts of vicarious satisfaction and merit and that of solidarity.
VII. CATHOLIC SYNTHESIS
The dogma of the Redemption is a very complex mystery, in which both human and divine elements play a part: the psychology of sin under its double aspect of fault and punishment, repentance and reparation, the value of the actions and sufferings of the Incarnate Word in the light of the hypostatic union, the relationship between Christ and humanity according to the doctrine of the Mystical Body, and the divine attributes of justice, love, and mercy in their function of the redemptive work. Justly does the Catechism of the Council of Trent admonish (Part I, arts. 4, 5): «Nam si quid aliis humanae menti et intelligentiæ difficulitatem affert, certe crucis mysterium difficillimum existimandum est vixque percipi a nobis potest, salutem nostram ex cruce ipsa et ex eo qui pro nobis ligno illi affixus est pendere». It is the *mysterium absconditum a saeculis* of which St. Paul speaks (Eph. 3:9; Col. 1:26; Rom. 16:25).
The position of the Catholic Church in the face of this mystery is a middle one between the two extremes found in ancient and modern Protestant theology; and its doctrine translates the Revelation expressed in the Symbol: «Propter nos homines et propter nostram salutem descendit de coelis; et incarnatus est... passus et sepultus est; et resurrexit».
Christ, constituted the mystical Head of humanity, is ours; for us He offers to the Father His life in loving obedience, thus satisfying divine justice offended and meriting our reintegration. In the work of Christ there is an objective aspect, to which expiation, penal substitution, propitiatory sacrifice, vicarious satisfaction, and the redemption of man enslaved by sin and the devil are related; and there is a subjective aspect, in which is found the motive of example, given by Christ as an innocent victim of sin, the participation of men of good will who adhere to Christ through faith, love, and compassion, and through the Sacraments receive from Him the fruitful and healing stream of Grace.
In Lutheran theology the influence of Christ the Redeemer upon men is only of a juridical (imputation) or moral (example) character; in Catholic theology the influence of Christ is physical-moral, because redemptive Grace is a physical reality, which derives from the Word through the humanity assumed and sacrificed on the Cross. According to Catholic doctrine, the profound and definitive analysis of the resonance of the analysis of sin is such that as many are the aspects of sin, so many are those of the Redemption, as is evident in the doctrine of St. Paul.
Now sin is reduced principally to the denial of love and the violation of justice: he who sins detaches himself from God to adhere to creatures, perverting love; and moreover he offends God and His law by disturbing the order established by God and thus violating justice. Sin is therefore essentially hatred and iniquity: two elements of which the first is subjective because it is inherent in the human spirit, the second is rather objective, because it violates the order inherent in nature as an expression of the will of God under the form of law. To the first element corresponds the fault of guilt, to the second that of punishment. Therefore the Redemption must be a restoration of love and justice for the reconciliation of man with his offended Creator. Once sin is conceded, the exigency of justice immediately arises for the restoration of order and the reparation of the offense given to God. But this offense is in a certain sense infinite by reason of its object (God) and therefore cannot be adequately repaired by man. Thereupon intervenes love, which impels God to send His Son into the world, so that, by becoming incarnate, He might place Himself in a condition to suffer and offer to the Father a worthy satisfaction for the sins of men. Certainly God, moved by love, could have pardoned man without the tragedy of the Cross, but since His works are perfect, He willed to satisfy also the exigencies of justice with the abundance of His love, so that the incarnate Word might undergo the greatest suffering.
As an act of justice, the Redemption answers to the objective aspect of sin (iniquity) and is translated into the concept of satisfaction; as an act of love, it answers to the subjective aspect of guilt (hatred) and is realized in the concept of merit.
Both justice and love make use of suffering as a material element suited to justice which demands and to love which gives.
The Redemption, according to Catholic doctrine, resolves itself into an act of love, which is at the root of all the works of God (cf. St. Thomas, *Sum. Theol.*, 1a, qq. 20–21).
Pietro Parente.