THE ATONEMENT SERIES: PART 5
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QUESTION: Christians are often told to live a Christ-like life and to ask themselves, “What would Jesus do?” In addition to being an example of how we should live a Christian life, should the life of Christ separately excite, inspire, and influence us apart from, say, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit?
PETER ABELARD was a French theologian and philosopher and was considered by many to be one of the great minds of his age and was commonly referred to as the “Descartes of the 12th century.” Abelard originally developed what is known as the Moral Influence theory of the Atonement. Our reading is from Abelard’s Commentary on the Epistles to the Romans.
READING: What need was there, I say, for the Son of God, for the sake of our redemption, when he received flesh, to endure so many great fasts, reproaches, lashes, spitting, and finally the most violent and shameful death of the cross that he might even endure the cross with sinners? […]
How very cruel and unjust it seems that someone should require the blood of an innocent person as a ransom, or that in any way it might please him that an innocent person be slain, still less that God should have so accepted the death of his Son that through it he was reconciled to the whole world. These and similar things seem to us to inspire a not insignificant question, namely, concerning our redemption and justification through the death of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Nevertheless it seems to us that in this we are justified in the blood of Christ and reconciled to God, that it was through this matchless grace shown to us that his Son received our nature, and in that nature, teaching us both by word and by example, persevered to the death and bound us to himself even more through love, so that when we have been kindled by so great a benefit of divine grace, true love might fear to endure nothing for his sake.
[Peter Abelard, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ¶¶116-117]
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