A Latin View of Satisfaction?

"Christ satisfies in a way that is superabundant. Why? Why would he die if he doesn't need to die? Because the passion & death of Jesus is a human manifestation of the intensity of divine love. God loves you, & Jesus Christ on the cross is the perfect expression of that fact."

— Thomistic Institute (@ThomisticInst) June 28, 2022

Is There an Equivalent in the Byzantine Rite?

Happily preserved in Divine Worship: The Missal and the #Ordinariate communities. pic.twitter.com/cdbl9lRo0T

— Fr James Bradley (@FrJamesBradley) January 30, 2021

Septuagesima Sunday tomorrow. A pre-Lent that was known by St Gregory the Great in 590s AD. Still kept in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. (Abolished in the modern Roman Rite in 1970.) A time to prepare for our observance of Lent. pic.twitter.com/u6ZZdOBXzZ

— Fr Timothy Finigan (@FatherTF) January 30, 2021

Aiming at Latin Theories of Satisfaction

why Latin/Frankiah theology is topsy turvy in a nutshell https://t.co/0lT7AzbwcU

— Byzantine Ambassador (@byzantinepower) October 13, 2020

The Nominalist Bogeyman?

CWR: Negotiating grace, nature, freedom, autonomy: A conversation with Douglas Farrow
“The faith is handed down to us by the Church. We don’t get to invent it,” says the author of Theological Negotiations: Proposals in Soteriology and Anthropology. “But we do share in the task and responsibility of trying to understand it.”

Dr. Farrow: It takes me next to two very basic areas of dispute: the relation between justification and sanctification, in which Luther becomes my chief interlocutor, and the relation between “satisfaction” and punishment, a subsidiary but crucial topic that if anything is even more misunderstood today. Both of these have very significant implications for pastoral theology, as for systematic theology.

Those two chapters are followed by a pair on doxology. The first of these treats what I call “doxological Pelagianism”; that is, the tendency to rely on nature to perfect itself even in the act of worship, where the grace of God in Jesus Christ should be most evident. It will be among the most controversial chapters in the book, since it takes its cue from Protestant thinkers while contending that the problem is more exaggerated in Protestantism than in Catholicism, where it is also present.

The second is a detailed treatment of the problem of transubstantiation. Here I return to Aquinas, and to the task of rethinking some of his ideas by way of a more adequate eschatology. I expect this chapter to be controversial as well, even inside Catholicism. But both Catholics and Protestants, if they read it patiently, will perhaps find that the whole stubborn business—the very serious business—of transubstantiation appears in a fresh light.

I'd need more historical evidence before accepting his claims about nominalism:

CWR: In the Introduction, you write, “Nominalism is Western civilization’s wounded side, from which is flowing, not water and blood, but blood and fire.” Can you provide some background and context to that strong statement?

Dr. Farrow: That is said with respect to modernity’s doomed attempt to re-found Western civilization on the basis that “God” is merely a concept in the world, a way of speaking about emergent order in the world, rather than the living God, the God of the Bible who through the incarnation suffers and dies with man, who as man actually conquers death for the sake of life eternal. It was through nominalism that we learned to regard the latter as myth, as an empty vessel that could be filled with fresh content as required. But the fresh content we have poured into it has not brought progress towards perpetual peace, as the fathers of modernity hoped. It has brought moral confusion, incited hubris of every kind, and led to the sickness unto death; that is, despair. Western civilization is crumbling before our eyes, and being torn down by our own hands. We’ve decided that there’s little or nothing there worth salvaging, not even the statuary, as it turns out.

A Latin View?

First Things: Embracing the Kind of Redeemer God Appointed by George Weigel

Animals feel pain, John Paul noted, but only men and women suffer. So suffering, even great physical suffering, has an inner or spiritual character; suffering touches our souls, not just our nervous systems. That is why the Bible is “a great book about suffering” (in John Paul’s striking phrase). And while the Scriptures contain many accounts of profound suffering, the Bible also teaches that “love . . . is the fullest source of the answer to the question of the meaning of suffering.” That was the truth to which Isaiah prophetically pointed in the “Suffering Servant” songs. To grasp that truth fully, however, humanity needed more than images or arguments; a demonstration was required.

That demonstration, Salvifici Doloris teaches, was what God ordained “in the cross of Jesus Christ.”

There the Son, giving himself without reservation to the Father’s plan of redemption, took the world’s evil upon himself and immolated it in perfect self-sacrifice to the divine will. On the cross, theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote, the Son freely bore “all that the Father finds loathsome,” and did so in order to “clear out all the refuse of the world’s sins by burning it in the fire of suffering love.” At Calvary, the divine wrath at the world’s wickedness coincides with the divine mercy, determined to heal all that evil has broken or disfigured. On Calvary, the purifying fire of divine love reaches into history and transforms everything in this world that seems to stand against love, including suffering and death. 

To embrace the cross is to embrace the logic of salvation as God has established that logic, not as we might design things. God’s “demonstration” does not end on Good Friday, however. It continues through Holy Saturday until the full meaning of “redemption” is revealed on Easter. 
There, in the Risen Lord who manifests what Benedict XVI called an “evolutionary leap”—a new and supercharged mode of human life—we encounter the supreme demonstration of the divine logic of redemption. There, in the “Lamb . . . [who] had been slain” (Revelation 5:6) but who is now gloriously, radiantly alive, we meet God’s triumph over death itself and over all that is death-dealing in the world. There, we meet the redeemer God ordained.

Jesus . . . has become a high priest forever. . . . For all eternity he lives and intercedes for us . . . there is no limit to his power to save all who come to God through him (First Responsory,  Office of Readings for Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Lent, from Hebrews 6:19–20, 7:24–25). 

What is the Greek for "intercedes" here? ἐντυγχάνειν

Who intercedes? Only Jesus as man? Or the Son of God, in the loving conversation with the Father? The Word of God, who creates anew?

What does God find "loathsome" or "hateful"? Not sin. But the consequences of sin, the ways in which His creation has been damaged or marred because of sin? God does not want suffering.

"There the Son, giving himself without reservation to the Father’s plan of redemption, took the world’s evil upon himself and immolated it in perfect self-sacrifice to the divine will." Here is something akin to the obedience which St. Augustine and Joseph Ratzinger would emphasize as being integral to the sacrifice of Christ. Does such a view find parallels in the East, whether Greek or Syriac? There is definitely scriptural warrant for this, for example St. Paul, Hebrews 5:8-10, Romans 5:19. And this is probably the primary way in which the satisfaction of Christ should be understood, as it is His obedience or "righteousness" which enables us to be obedient or "righteous."

My question is whether this obedience is the main or even the first part of how we should understand the sacrifice of Christ.

N. T. Wright on Atonement

Debt (and Satisfaction)

Notes on Divine Righteousness, Satisfaction and Atonement

St. Thomas, ST III 46, 2 obj. 3

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)