Further, God's justice required that Christ should satisfy by the Passion in order that man might be delivered from sin. But Christ cannot let His justice pass; for it is written (2 Timothy 2:13): "If we believe not, He continueth faithful, He cannot deny Himself." But He would deny Himself were He to deny His justice, since He is justice itself. It seems impossible, then, for man to be delivered otherwise than by Christ's Passion.
ST III 46, 2 ad 3:
Even this justice depends on the Divine will, requiring satisfaction for sin from the human race. But if He had willed to free man from sin without any satisfaction, He would not have acted against justice. For a judge, while preserving justice, cannot pardon fault without penalty, if he must visit fault committed against another--for instance, against another man, or against the State, or any Prince in higher authority. But God has no one higher than Himself, for He is the sovereign and common good of the whole universe. Consequently, if He forgive sin, which has the formality of fault in that it is committed against Himself, He wrongs no one: just as anyone else, overlooking a personal trespass, without satisfaction, acts mercifully and not unjustly. And so David exclaimed when he sought mercy: "To Thee only have I sinned" (Psalm 50:6), as if to say: "Thou canst pardon me without injustice."
One can say that Christ's human acts are meritorious and that His life, that in which we participate through the holy mysteries/the sacraments, provides the template for our deification. This much can be harmonized with Christus Victor theories .
Beyond this, the problem arises when Aquinas writes (ST III 48, 2): "He properly satisfies for an offense who offers something which the offended one loves equally, or even more than he detested the offense."
Usually it is understood as a form of quantitative equalizing, the "accounting ledger." It might be possible to make Aquinas here verbally agree with a Christus Victor theory of atonement, Christ satisfies Divine Righteousness for the sin of Adam (and our sins) by doing what Adam failed to do and thus countering his sin and fall, taking upon the condition of fallen man and healing him, etc..
But St. Thomas continues in III 48, 2: "But by suffering out of love and obedience, Christ gave more to God than was required to compensate for the offense of the whole human race."
The language still remains that of measuring or "accounting, as given in the language of the third objection, "Further, atonement implies equality with the trespass, since it is an act of justice," which Aquinas does not deny in his response.
Similarly, forcing an interpretation of justice as Divine Righteousness (in its wholly holy sense) could be done for ST III 46, 1 ad 3 but it would notbe a good fit :
That man should be delivered by Christ's Passion was in keeping with both His mercy and His justice. With His justice, because by His Passion Christ made satisfaction for the sin of the human race; and so man was set free by Christ's justice: and with His mercy, for since man of himself could not satisfy for the sin of all human nature, as was said above (Question 1, Article 2), God gave him His Son to satisfy for him, according to Romans 3:24-25: "Being justified freely by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God hath proposed to be a propitiation, through faith in His blood." And this came of more copious mercy than if He had forgiven sins without satisfaction. Hence it is said (Ephesians 2:4): "God, who is rich in mercy, for His exceeding charity wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together in Christ."
The article from the new Catholic Encyclopedia may be an attempt at a corrective to "A rigorously juridical concept of satisfaction [that] can suggest an exchange governed by commutative justice. Excessive humanization of the Creator-creature relationship can effect the theological discussion of whether or not Christ's payment of satisfaction in mankind's name was in the strictest sense a work of justice."
It goes a way to try to return to Christus Victor theories of atonement and return to a fuller sense of Divine Righteosness, but it also takes steps back as soon as it advances. For example:
The Prophets and the Psalmist appeal to the justice of god when yearning for deliverance. Goodness, mercy, fidelity, constancy—all these are aspects of the Biblical notion of God's justice. When Saint Thomas speaks of "the severity of God" that was "unwilling to forgive sin without punishment," he rightly couples this immediately with "His goodness" in giving mankind one who could adequately satisfy in behalf of all those who deserved punishment (Summa theologiae 3a, 47.3 ad 1).
[Hampered by too much attachment to Aquinas.]
And: "The word propitiation reminds one that Christ's suffering and death were an expiation for an offense or an appeasement of an offended God."
And yet what follows does not support this as the explanation of propitiation, but rather propitiation as understood in Christus Victor theories : "Though God's loving justice was not punishing His innocent Son, He did so plan the redemptive Passion as to enable Jesus to express His filial love through experiences that came to mankind historically as punishments for sin, namely, suffering and death "
(FB)
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