Redemption

REDEMPTION (Gr. Ἀπολύτρωσις). - It is equivalent to ransom, evoking the idea of the liberation of slaves. In Christian doctrine the R. wrought by Christ is the liberation of man from the servitude of guilt and of punishment, through the bloody sacrifice of the God-man, constituted mediator between God and the human race.

I. SACRED SCRIPTURE

The incarnation of the Word in God's designs 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 mediator for the pacification of man with God, as St. Paul affirms (I Tim. 2:5): "There is one God and one mediator of 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 thing with him through the identity of nature; and he is at the same time man among men through the specific human essence, which he has wonderfully united to his divine person. He has therefore the characteristics and the resources of the mediator suited to join the extreme terms, God and man, separated by sin. Thus the heart of Jesus Christ becomes a temple and a bridal chamber, in which the redeemed creature finds again and embraces anew the Father so wretchedly abandoned.

The Redemption wrought by Christ is his mediation in act. The whole Gospel is a soteriology, a message of salvation, which the prophet Isaiah anticipated by several centuries in ch. 53 of his book, called the little poem of the Redemption, where he describes in vivid colors the figure of the Servant of Yahweh, the man of sorrows, who will be wounded and scourged for the iniquities of men and through his voluntary and bloody sacrifice will purify souls from sin and reconcile them with God. In vain has Jewish and rationalistic criticism attempted to eliminate the messianic character of this prophecy. The mysterious Servant of Yahweh can be neither 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 mediating mission of Christ is demonstrated in an unequivocal manner in the New Testament. The richest source of this soteriology is without doubt in the letters of St. Paul, but some critics wrongly attribute to him exclusively the testimony concerning the redemptive value of the life and death of Jesus.

The Synoptics, narrating the institution of the Most Holy Eucharist, underscore the words of Jesus Christ: "For this is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for the remission of sins" (Mt. 26:28; cf. Mk. 14:24; Lk. 22:20). But in Matthew (20:28; cf. Mk. 10:45) are reported the categorical words of the Master, who 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 (λύτρον) for others."

This fundamental soteriological motif, stated in epigraphic style by the Synoptics, finds in St. Paul an ample doctrinal development. The Apostle starts from the consideration of original sin, which is transmitted from Adam to all humanity (Rom. 5:12), making it the 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 carries out his design 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 (I Cor. 15:22; Rom. passim). The whole 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 by way of true and proper efficient causality (Rom. 4:25). Christ is constituted a bloody victim for our sins, who offers to the Father his blood and his life as a holocaust of reparation, as the price of ransom and pacification. The testimonies press on with a disconcerting realism through a sacrificial language, which 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 (ἀντίλυτρον), the propitiation (ἱλαστήριον), offering and victim (προσφορὰ καὶ θυσία) offered to the Father for our reconciliation (Rom. 3:24; I Tim. 2:6; Rom. 3:25; Eph. 5:2). The work of Christ our mediator and redeemer could not have been described more vividly. The energy of the Pauline expressions does not permit metaphorical interpretations: in the life, and even more in the bloody sacrifice and in the Resurrection of Christ, there is a real redemptive efficacy, capable of liberating man from the bonds of sin and of restoring his spirit in holiness.

This wonderful and complex work of restoration is framed by the Apostle in 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 his merits are ours, if we adhere to him and insert ourselves into his Mystical Body with faith and with active charity (Eph. 4:15). Furthermore the concept of Redemption returns in St. John, who reaffirms 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: "You are worthy, O Lord, to take the book and to open its seals, because you were slain and have redeemed us for God with your blood"; I Jn. 2:2: "And he is the propitiation (ἱλασμός) for our sins." But St. John broadens the idea of the Redemption by reconnecting it to the whole life of the Incarnate Word, which is manifestation and transfusion of light and of supernatural life, preparation for eternal life: "God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten, so that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to judge the world, but so that the world might be saved through him" (Jn. 3:16-17).

St. Peter also gathers the soteriological doctrine in these incisive expressions (I Pt. 1:18): "Knowing that you were redeemed not with corruptible gold or silver... but with the precious blood of Christ, an unblemished and undefiled lamb."

II. THE TRADITION

The wealth of motifs with which written Revelation presents the Redemption wrought by Christ is manifested in tradition, which lays emphasis now on one element, now on another. Among the Fathers there is revealed a great variety of approaches in translating and illustrating the data of Revelation, although all are in agreement on the fundamental doctrine concerning the redemptive value of the life, death and Resurrection of the Savior.

The principal tendencies can be reduced to two: the first, which predominates among the Eastern Fathers, sees already in the Incarnation of the Word the Redemption of human nature raised by the apostolic union to a divine dignity; the second, preferred by the Latins, readily follows the Pauline concept of the 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 in images best suited to the mentality of the people. Thus was born the celebrated theory of the rights of the devil: Christ, in order to ransom man from the diabolical slavery of sin, paid to Satan the price of his blood. The other, no less singular, is that of the abuse of powers: Satan, as a consequence of original sin, had received from God permission to torment men; deceived, he also attacked Jesus Christ, believing him to be a mere man, and therefore lost his dominion over all humanity. Imagination contributed to color the idea: Christ was regarded as a hook, which God uses to fish for and strike down the great infernal fish.

The rationalists have seized upon these marginal motifs of the Fathers' doctrine to conclude that they, under the influence of Gnostic dualism, constructed a veritable soteriological mythology, presenting God and Satan disputing over sinful humanity as though over a prey. But a careful critical study has brought out the superficiality and exaggeration of this thesis. Gathering the voices of the best tradition, St. Augustine eliminated every ambiguity from the theory of the rights of Satan (De Trinit., 13, ch. 12), bringing to light the true reason for the Redemption (Confess., 10, nos. 43, 68).

In conclusion, among the Fathers one does not find an organic, systematic doctrine concerning the mystery of the Redemption, but of this doctrine they offer all the elements in a range that goes from the substantial lines to the nuances and the metaphorical coloring. It was the task of the Scholastics to reduce to a system these elements scattered throughout the works of the Fathers.

III. SCHOLASTICISM

The first to attempt an organic synthesis was St. Anselm (v.) with the golden opuscule Cur Deus Homo. Linking himself to St. Augustine, this celebrated doctor brought all his dialectical acumen to bear on illustrating the truths of the faith, which he believed and lived intensely, by the light of reason. He sought to give the mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation and the Redemption a rational dress to such a point that at times he seems to compromise their transcendence. Thus in Cur Deus Homo he started from a wholly objective analysis of sin as honor taken away from God, and by a juridical process arrived at the affirmation of an ineluctable necessity of reparation, which can be brought about only in two ways: either punishment or voluntary satisfaction. Since man could not render to God a satisfaction equivalent to the honor taken from him by sin, it was necessary that the Son of God become incarnate, who was able to perform human actions of infinite value through the hypostatic union, by which those actions are proper to the Person of the Word, to whom the human nature of Christ is intimately united. Christ, freely offering his life to the Father, satisfies in a superabundant manner the divine justice and acquires infinite merits, which flow over onto guilty men, making them worthy of eternal life.

The fundamental motive of the Anselmian reasoning is satisfaction. This term in Roman law meant the legal penalty of a crime; in medieval Germanic law the offering of compensation for an injustice or an offense (Wergeld). More than from these profane sources, St. Anselm probably drew from Christian language and especially from the liturgy, in which the term satisfaction was in use to indicate the intercessions and merits of the saints on behalf of sinners. But in the vigorous synthesis of St. Anselm the scholastics soon perceived defects and gaps. Above all they noted in it 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 relations with a transgressing humanity. Moreover, in the Anselmian doctrine there was lacking the concept of solidarity between men and the Redeemer. And yet Sacred 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. These gaps were supplied by later scholastics, from St. Bernard to St. Thomas, going back to the eloquent texts of written Revelation and of the Fathers. It is enough to recall Jn. 3:16: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son." There was therefore in Revelation enough to temper the overly accentuated juridicism 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 Sum. Theol., 3a, q. 48.

According to the Aquinate, the two fundamental modes of the redemptive work are the merit and the satisfaction of Christ considered not as detached, but as intimately united to sinful humanity, through the Mystical Body, by which Christ the Head constitutes with men the members almost a single person (ibid., a. 2, ad 1). Christ merits and satisfies divine justice by deliberately offering his whole life, but especially his Passion and Death (material aspect). However, his merit and his satisfaction have their reason for being in Christ's love toward the Father and toward men (formal aspect). This moral element dominates the whole redemptive work and confers dignity and immense value on physical suffering. "Christ, suffering out of love and obedience, offered to God more than the reparation of the offense of the whole human race required" (ibid., a. 2). And love also gives the character of a perfect sacrifice to the death of the Redeemer, which on the part of the crucifiers was an enormous crime (ibid., a. 3). But the Redemption is also a liberation, a ransom of man from a double 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 by his merits and by his satisfaction breaks the bonds of the two servitudes, canceling guilt and remitting punishment (ibid., a. 4). St. Thomas touches here on the theory of the rights of the devil, but corrects its defect by affirming categorically that "the Redemption was necessary to liberate man with respect to God, not with respect to the devil: not to the devil but to God was the price of the blood shed by Jesus Christ owed" (ibid., ad 3). Finally St. Thomas vindicates on the basis of Sacred Scripture and tradition the character of real efficacy of the Redemption wrought by the Savior (ibid.).

The Life and Death of Jesus are not merely an example, which influences men morally, but are a causal principle, which influences consciences even physically in order to heal them. This efficacy springs from the divinity of Christ and passes through his humanity as the instrument of the Word who made it his own. The whole doctrine of St. Thomas can be recapitulated schematically thus: Christ, as head of humanity, his Mystical Body, driven by love and obedience, offered himself to the Father as mediator and voluntary victim for the sins of men and accomplished the Redemption by engaging his whole self with his divinity and his humanity, soul and body. There is in this complex work an efficient causality, which is promoted by the person of the Word and passes through the assumed humanity. The efficient causality is exercised along two parallel lines: merit, which is linked to the free will, and satisfaction, which is linked rather 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 therefore made man's redemption the focal center of his entire religious system. Indeed, both he and his immediate followers did not hesitate to affirm that the doctrine of man's justification through the merits of Christ the Redeemer is something entirely new, as if it were their own invention. Luther started from the concept of original sin (v.), which was supposedly so disastrous as to corrupt human nature profoundly, stripping it of reason and freedom. Through a sad personal experience he had become convinced that nature was so corrupted and dominated by sinful concupiscence that it could not be healed even by God. Consequently he held that Christ's redemption could not regenerate and transform man, a slave of sin, interiorly, but had to be a work extrinsic to man with a juridical-moral function, in the sense that God condescends not to take our sins into account in view of the holiness and merits of Jesus Christ.

Thus was born the theory of "imputation," according to which God would not impute to man, who is incurable, his sins (which remain indelibly fixed in the soul), but would impute 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 his deep wounds, but in the eyes of God he would appear sound and holy through the interposition of the holiness of Christ the Redeemer. Nor does man have anything to do for this entirely extrinsic justification of his: he cannot freely contribute to his salvation, he cannot perform any act other than a blind feeling of faith, understood as trust and abandonment to divine mercy. Faith, then, without works, without efforts and struggles.

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 with regard to the redemption, have no meaning in Lutheran doctrine.

Jansenism, the fruit of genuine Lutheranism, developed Luther's system by reducing the joyful Gospel message to a gloomy and inert anguish before the problem of eternal destiny. Luther not only overturns and mortifies human psychology with his extrinsicist and negative soteriology, but he tears man away from the heart of Christ, breaking every real bond of solidarity and reducing the Savior to a scapegoat, who alone bears the blows of justice, cut off from humanity, without being able to exercise any decisive influence on man's heart for an intimate restoration. A system, then, that is inhuman, which while it debases man's nature 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 grasped the full gravity of the error and responded to the Lutheran provocation with the doctrine defined at the Council of Trent (1545-63). In this doctrine, which summarized the genuine Christian tradition developed from divine Revelation, human nature was vindicated above all. The Council, while it recalled (sess. V) the doctrine already defined against Pelagianism (v.) in the 5th-6th centuries (Councils of Carthage and of Orange) on original sin and its consequences, by which the whole man has fallen (in deterius commutatum), defended the integrity of human nature and especially its freedom, which makes it responsible for its acts and capable of cooperating with divine Grace for its salvation (sess. VI, chaps. 5 and 6 and cann. 4 and 5). It rejected the Lutheran 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 and cann. 9, 11, 12), and it vindicated for man the right and the duty to perform good works constantly under the impulse of Grace in order to merit in a true and proper sense the increase of Grace and eternal life (cann. 20, 24, 26, 32).

Together with the truth of the internal sanctification of man by virtue of infused Grace, the Council of Trent re-established against Luther the true redemptive function of Christ (sess. 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 he, under the impulse of an immense love, faced the torment of the Cross, by which he merited justification for men and gave full satisfaction to the Father on their behalf. Through his Passion and Death, Jesus Christ infused into men sanctifying Grace, which makes them living members of his Mystical Body and adopted sons of God, heirs of paradise. Men grafted into Christ the Redeemer, like branches into the vine, satisfy the divine precepts with good works done by virtue of God, and merit eternal life. In this way, according to St. Paul's concept, the Life, Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ are reproduced and alternate, under the action of redeeming Grace, in the soul of the Christian, who is on the march toward the supreme goal. The whole 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 to move placidly along the track of merit-satisfaction, traced by tradition down 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 within the very bosom of the Protestant sects, which kept multiplying after Luther's death.

The first of these reactions is due to Socinus, who carried the Lutheran principles of free examination and contempt for tradition onto the ground of pure rationalism, inspired by humanism. Socinus sharply criticized the inhuman concept of penal substitution, the basis of the soteriology of Luther and Calvin. For him, Christ, innocent, suffering and paying for others, the true sinners, is something immoral and contrary to law: reparation, like sin, is personal. Hugo Grotius, as a good jurist, sought to save Lutheran penal substitution from shipwreck, insisting on the juridical relationship between guilt and punishment and the necessity of expiation for the restoration of the order disturbed by sin. But the seductive ideas of Socinus had a strong influence and a broad development in the Protestant theology of the last century. One must distinguish in Protestantism an orthodox, conservative current, which seeks to defend and preserve the initial positions of the "reformation," even while blunting some of the harshness of the Lutheran conception, and a progressive current, which feels the rationalistic influence first Socinian and then Kantian. As regards the problem of the Redemption, liberal Protestantism found its adequate expression in the work of Auguste Sabatier (La doctrine de l'expiation et son évolution historique, Paris 1903). He believes he discovers in Holy Scripture two redemptive ideas: one ritualistic, of Levitical origin, which expresses itself in the concepts of expiatory sacrifice (St. John and Letter to the Hebrews), the other moralistic, of prophetic origin, which presents Christ as the righteous one who suffers for the salvation of his people (the doctrine of Jesus and of Paul). As for tradition, Sabatier traced its lines with a simplism that takes no care for documentation; he maintained that soteriology has passed through three phases: the 1st mythological, proper to the Fathers, who would have undergone Gnostic influence in the combination of strange theories (of the rights of the devil, of the abuse of power, etc.); the 2nd proper to the Scholastics, which can be defined as juridical and runs from Anselmian satisfaction to the theory of St. Thomas, which adds the concept of solidarity, and to the exasperated Lutheran conception of penal expiation, taken up again by Grotius; the 3rd called moralistic, which arose and developed within liberal Protestantism, 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 by 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 proper to those theologians, such as Dale, Oliver and above all Farrar, who stand by the fact of the Redemption and do not wish to inquire into the manner, which is mysterious and inexplicable. 3) Besides these first two positions, which are merely negative, in modern Protestant theology two positive currents are discernible, one of which is the residue of the orthodox doctrine, which goes back to the first "reformers," the other is the epilogue of liberal Protestantism, which connects back to Socinus and even more to Schleiermacher: a) liberal current: it is inspired by subjectivism and Kantian immanentism, seeking to explain the Redemption by psychological and moral means and in an individualistic sense. Every man must resolve the problem of his salvation by looking to Christ, as exemplar and stimulus of repentance and moral restoration. It is the doctrine of Ritschl, of Sabatier and of Harnack, which can be defined as a kind of mystical moralism, in which it is difficult to discern the face of a supernatural religion. Rivière is right to affirm the fundamental identity of this modern Protestant theory with that of the purely rationalistic Socinus; b) orthodox current: it links back to the Lutheran tradition, maintaining the concept of expiatory satisfaction and therefore the objective character of the Redemption. Evidently this current is a reaction to 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 schemes of Lutheranism, in which the idea of penal substitution dominates as a demand of God's vindictive justice. Dr. Fremantle and Dr. Horton (in The atonement..., cited in bibl., vol. II, pp. 164 and 131 ff.) speak insistently of the obedience of Christ, which gives value to his sufferings, and of the solidarity that binds all sinful men to Christ, who redeems them with his loving and sorrowful sacrifice. Lidgett, Fulliquet and Snowden speak in the same sense as well. 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, against the digressions of scientific Protestant theology, reacted with an energetic appeal to the Lutheran motive of the Bible, accepted as the sole source of religious experience under the influence of the Holy Spirit, who enlightens individual believers. Barth made his debut in 1919 with a commentary on St. Paul, Römerbrief (already in its 5th edition), in which he placed at the basis of his theology the concept (attributed to the Apostle) of the absolute transcendence of God and of his full dominion over man. In its latest expression the theology of Barth, with special regard to soteriology, can be summarized in these terms. Man is tormented by the enigma of his own life and of the world: original sin has made him leave the kingdom of truth, to which he can no longer return by his own powers. He is a lost man who anxiously seeks. 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, the human will is passive. Man's freedom is illusory when he is far from God; it is regained by the act of faith, but faith is blind submission to the divine will and makes one feel the responsibility of sin without giving the strength to free oneself from it. 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 sinful man remains such and therefore a slave of his nothingness, from which he cannot escape even by leaning on Christ the Savior. The contrast between God as all and man as nothing is not resolved in this life, not even with faith and with Grace: to man tormented by the crisis before God and powerless to overcome his temporal problematicity, salvation is announced as hope of eternal life, only beyond the limits of time.

But against such Lutheran revivals, which repeat, on philosophical and theological ground, the old motive of the despotic dominion of God and of the absolute impotence of man, significant reactions are not lacking (cf. H. W. Ruessel, Gestalt eines christlichen Humanismus, Amsterdam 1939), which at least indirectly betray the need for an orientation toward Catholic doctrine.

One cannot deny the contrast that emerges between the historical evolution of Protestant soteriology, bristling with contradictions, and the firm coherence of Catholic soteriology, notwithstanding 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 Redemption, which was not defined because of the interruption of its 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 of merit, and that of solidarity.

VII. THE CATHOLIC SYNTHESIS

The dogma of the Redemption is a very complex mystery, in which human and divine elements play a part: the psychology of sin under the twofold aspect of guilt 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, the divine attributes of justice, love and mercy in function of the work of redemption. Rightly does the catechism of the Council of Trent admonish (part 1, arts. 4, 5): « Nam si quid aliud humanae menti et intelligentiae difficultatem affert, certe crucis mysterium difficillimum existimandum est vixque percipi a nobis potest, salutem nostram ex cruce ipsa et ex co qui pro nobis ligne 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 before this mystery is a middle one between the two extremes that are found in ancient and modern Protestant theology; and its doctrine translates the Revelation expressed in the Creed: « Propter nos homines et propter nostram salutem descendit de coelis; et incarnatus est... passus et sepultus est; et resurrexit ».

Christ, having made himself the mystical head of humanity, is ours, and for us he offers the Father his life with loving obedience, thus satisfying offended divine justice and meriting our reintegration. In the work of Christ there is an objective aspect, to which are linked expiation, penal substitution, propitiatory sacrifice, vicarious satisfaction, the ransom of man enslaved to sin and to the devil; and there is a subjective aspect, in which find a place the motive of example, given by Christ as the innocent victim of sin, the participation of men of good will, who adhere to Christ by faith, by love and by compassion, and through the Sacraments receive from him the fruitful and healing sap of Grace.

In Lutheran theology the influence of Christ the Redeemer upon men is only of a juridical character (imputation) or a moral one (example); in Catholic theology the influence of Christ is physical-moral, because redeeming 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 Redemption is linked to the analysis of sin, so that there are as many aspects of the Redemption as there are of sin, as is evident in the doctrine of St. Paul.

Now sin is reduced principally to the denial of love and to the violation of justice: whoever sins detaches himself from God in order to adhere to creatures, perverting love; and furthermore he offends God and his law by disturbing the order established by God and therefore by violating justice. Sin is therefore essentially hatred and iniquity: two elements of which the first is subjective because it is immanent in the human spirit, the second is rather objective, because it violates the order immanent in nature as an expression of the will of God in the form of law. To the first element corresponds the offense of guilt, to the second that of punishment. Therefore the Redemption must be a restoration of love and of justice for the reconciliation of man with his offended Creator. Once sin is committed, there immediately arises the demand of justice for the restoration of order and the reparation of the offense done 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. There intervenes therefore love, which moves God to send his Son to earth, so that, by becoming incarnate, he may place himself in a condition to suffer and to offer the Father a worthy satisfaction for the sins of men. Certainly God, moved by love, could have forgiven man without the tragedy of the Cross, but since his works are perfect, he willed to satisfy also the demands of justice with the abundance of his love, bringing it about that the Incarnate Word should face the greatest sorrow.

As a work of justice, the Redemption answers to the objective aspect of sin (iniquity) and is translated into the concept of satisfaction; as a work 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 sorrow, as of a material element suited to the justice that demands and to the love that gives itself.

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).

2-23. 2. Fathers: G. van Crombrugghe, De soteriologiae christianae primis fontibus, Louvain 1905; J. Rivière, Le dogme de la R. Essai d'étude historique, Paris 1905; id., Le dogme de la R. chez st Augustin, ibid. 1928; id., Le dogme de la R. après st Augustin, ibid. 1930; id., Le dogme de la R. Etudes critiques et documents, Louvain 1931. 3. Scholastics: St. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo (cf. L. Heinrichs, Die Gesangstungstheorie des hl. Anselmus von Canterbury, Paderborn 1909; P. Ricard, De santificatione Christi in tract. s. Anselmi • Cur Deus Homo, Louvain 1914; J. Rivière, Le dogme de la R. Etude théologique, 3rd ed., Paris 1931, pp. 97 and 216). St. Bonaventure: R. Guardini, Die Lehre des hl. Bonaventura von der Erlösung, Düsseldorf 1921. A large part of Catholic theology on the question of the R. harks back to the thought of St. Thomas; therefore the scholastic manuals generally develop the subject along the lines of the Summa Theologica; Harnack, Sabatier, Turmel do not see in St. Thomas an organic soteriology, but discover in it gaps and defects. This severe judgment, deriving from little understanding and much prejudice, has also influenced some author of ours. Scotus (Op. Oxon., In III Sent., dd. 19-20) approaches the problem from another point of view, not without criticizing St. Thomas. He sees the R. as occasional and not as the end of the Incarnation, starting from the concept of the absolute primacy of Christ in the divine plan of creation: cf. Tg. Fetten, Johannes Duns Scotus über das Werk des Erlösers, Bonn 1913; J. Rivière, La doctrine de Scot sur la R. devant l'hist. et la théol., in Estudios Franciscanos, 45 (1933), pp. 271-83. 4. Early Protestants: v. CALVINO LUTERO SOCINO. 5. Modern Protestants: classical orthodox current: Fr. Bonifas, Etudes sur l'expiation, Montauban 1861; B. Pozzy, Histoire du dogme de la R., Paris 1868; J. Bastide, Exposé du dogme de la R., Montauban 1869. Liberal rationalist current: A. Reville, De la R., Paris 1859 (inspired by the work of Ch. Baur); A. Ritschl, Die Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, 3rd ed., Bonn 1889; A. Sabatier, La doctrine de l'expiation et son évolution historique, Paris 1903 (a lively synthesis of the whole liberal doctrine developed from Schleiermacher onward); G. B. Stevens, The christian doctrine of salvation, Edinburgh 1905; R. Mackintosh, Historical theories of atonement, London 1920. Modern orthodox current (which approaches Catholic positions): Dr. Wetzel, Grundlinien der Versöhnungstheorie, Leipzig 1910; P. L. Snowden, The atonement and ourselves, London 1919; H. Monnier, Essai sur la R., Neuilly 1929. On the recent currents of Protestantism: The atonement in modern religious thought. A theological symposium, London 1907; E. Pfenningsdorf, Der Erlösungsgedanke, Göttingen 1929 (report of the Frankfurt Congress of 1928); The second World conference on faith and order (Edinburgh 1937), ed. Hodgson, London 1938. A survey of Protestant theology on the R. has recently been made by Thomas Hywel Hughes, The Atonement. Modern Theories of the Doctrine, London 1949. He proposes his strange opinion, according to which God chooses the death on the Cross of his Son in order to acquire in himself the sense of a certain responsibility in the sins of men! On the "theology of crisis," which is a return to the thought of Luther and Calvin, cf. Karl Barth, Römerbrief, Munich 1919; id., Kirchliche Dogmatik: I. Die Lehre vom Wort Gottes (2 vols.), II. Die Lehre von Gott (2 vols.), ibid. 1932; III and IV (in preparation). An effective critique in J. Hamer, L'occasionalisme théologique de K. Barth, Etude sur sa méthode théologique, Paris 1949. 6. Catholics: H. N. Oxenham, The catholic doctrine of atonement, London 1865; E. Hugon, Le mystère de la R., Paris 1910; I. Lammme, La R. Etude dogmatique, Louvain 1911; A. Donders, Erlösungsschmacht in alter und neuer Zeit, Münster 1926; L. Richard, Le dogme de la R., Paris 1932; H. N. Oxenham, Le dogme de la R. au début du moyen âge, ibid. 1934; R. Storr, Erlösung, Rottenburg 1935; M. Bendiscioli, Il problema della giustificazione. La coscienza cristiana del peccato e della R. nel suo sviluppo storico, Brescia 1940.

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