Eleonore's Stump's Atonement synthesizes much of her previous work in philosophical theology to offer a stunning account of the Christian doctrine of the Atonement. I will focus here on satisfaction as a crucial part of her story in order to show both its strengths and its limitations. Stump says the problem the Atonement is meant to solve is the separation of humans from God. But beyond merely restoring humans to right relationship with God, she takes the effects of the Atonement to go some way towards restoring whatever humans have damaged by sin. I will argue that one helpful way her project could be extended would be to explore how the atoning work of Christ is instrumental in the restoration of all creation to the creator God, not just the restoration of humans.
By ‘atonement’, Stump means ‘whatever the nature and effects of Christ's passion and death are as regards human salvation’ (Stump (Reference Stump2018), 7). Those effects are meant as the remedy for human separation from God – a function of the human proneness to moral wrongdoing by which people put distance between themselves and God, and the forward and backward-looking effects of such distance. The forward-looking problem consists in the sinful dispositions that alienate people from God, self, and others. The backward-looking problems consist in both guilt for past wrongdoing and shame in its many forms. For Stump, a theory of the Atonement ought to offer a story that can explain how Christ's passion and death can restore humans to union with God by fixing human proneness to sin, and by eliminating guilt and shame.
She contrasts her theory, which locates the problem to be solved by the Atonement in humans, with Anselmian ones, which locate the problem in some feature of God. Anselmian views say that facts about the divine nature and human transgression require a sacrifice to placate the just wrath of God, and Christ's passion and death can do just that. Stump argues that the God of Christianity is always willing to offer humans forgiveness and union with Godself, and so any obstacles to union must be ones that lie in the human will alone, and nowhere in God.
Given that the Atonement is meant to fix a problem located in humans, to heal the human psyche of its tendency to moral wrongdoing and to rid it of the ills of guilt and shame, it might seem that Stump takes the problem fixed by the Atonement to be merely a psychological one. What she offers her reader is a kind of phenomenology of the saving effects of God's involvement in a human's life. Now, if this is in fact all she does in her book, I take it to be the finest such account on offer anywhere in analytic philosophy. What she develops is theologically rich and compelling in its attention to the frailties of the human condition.Footnote 1
If that were the extent of her project, her reader might worry that by addressing only the problems located in the human psyche, the story is somehow normatively dissatisfying. There appears to be no mark crossed off in the ledgers of justice that must be addressed for all to be made right in the world. A theory of the Atonement, says the objector, must confront the injustice wrought by humans, regardless of what sort of theory of justice one holds.Footnote 2 In what follows I will show how this objection misses the mark. Stump's account of the Atonement extends beyond psychology alone and offers an original take on how to handle the normative dimension of human sinfulness. I will sketch here the most relevant parts of her account of the mechanisms of the Atonement for my concerns, with particular focus on the role satisfaction plays in uniting humans to God and others. What I will argue then is that her account of satisfaction raises a very difficult puzzle about how the Atonement fixes the world.
Stump argues that Christ's passion and death are the best means available to restore human beings to union with Godself, while still respecting human free will.Footnote 3 When Christ willingly died on the cross, he took on simulacra of all the sinful states of intellect and will ever had by humans. The agony he felt on the cross resulted from experiencing what it is like to commit sin and be separated from God by all the attending guilt and shame. Christ did not have any blameworthy states of intellect or will but felt the full force of what is woeful about post-fall humanity nonetheless. This, she argues, is the meaning of the cry of dereliction from the cross.
In taking on sinfulness in this specific way, Christ is able to offer humans reconciliation with God by making possible the removal of the obstacles to union. In order for a person's occurrent sinful dispositions to be corrected, Stump argues, she must undergo a process of spiritual regeneration, which can only work if a person ceases to resist the grace of God. What better way might there be to break down a person's resistance than to offer oneself in love the way Christ did on the cross? This act of love melts the heart and makes possible the quiescence which begins the process of spiritual regeneration.
In addition to beckoning fallen humans to cease resisting God's grace, Christ's experience on the cross also supplies a crucial ingredient required for intimate union. In sharing attention with all humans, Christ was able to set up part of the circuit Stump calls ‘mutual indwelling’ (Stump (Reference Stump2018), 135). The other half of that circuit is completed when humans are able to share attention with God by way of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. In this two-way exchange routed through Christ's passion, all of humankind is within Christ in a new way, and the Godhead can be within humans in a new way. This is not merely a change in the psychology of any given human, but a real ontological difference consisting in a radically new relationship forged between God and creation. Though the problem to be solved by the Atonement is located just in humans, the solution itself is not. It lies in the restoration of relationship – between humans and God.
Furthermore, according to Stump the solution also lies in the restoration of relationship between sinful humans. I take this to be the main thrust of the normative element of her account of the Atonement. Following Aquinas, she argues that satisfaction is a crucial element of the fix for human guilt. Satisfaction is part of penance and consists in making amends to whatever extent the making of amends is possible, not for the sake of compensating the victim, but for the sake of another goal. Stump says, ‘In penance, the wrongdoer is attempting to restore himself as well as the things he damaged in the world, and he does what he can to re-traverse the distance he put between himself and those he injured’ (ibid., 62). The restoration of the sinner is intimately connected with the restoration of what she has damaged, or at least, the possibility of such restoration.
Satisfaction as a re-traversal of distance has a very different flavour from Anselmian satisfaction. As Stump explains, it's not the case that satisfaction is ‘a present made to God to enable God to pardon sinners’, but ‘an offer of union in love made to each human sufferer of the depredations of others’ (ibid., 361). Herein lies the most striking difference between Stump's understanding of satisfaction and Anselmian ones. For her, satisfaction is a gift offered to God, but one made by way of the amends offered to those humans who are harmed or wronged by sin. A person regenerated by God's grace makes amends to God for wrongdoing primarily by making whatever amends she can to the person she has harmed or wronged. She does this in order to heal the broken relations between them, both for her own sake and for her victim's. In claiming that satisfaction for an offence should be directed primarily to the wronged creature, Stump is able to hold on to two things: that the victims of sin have real claims of justice that should be answered in the Atonement, and that the obstacles to the removal of guilt are not located in any feature of God.Footnote 4
However, Stump follows Aquinas in arguing that there are limits to how far any human's satisfaction can go towards making things right (ibid., 367).Footnote 5 How could humans ever do enough to make amends for the horrendous evils they have inflicted? Humans are incapable of defeating all the evils they cause, so there must be more to the story. Here Christ's passion and death play the key role. Christ is able to offer vicarious satisfaction on behalf of wrongdoers to the victims of wrongdoing. When a repentant sinner is united to Christ through the mutual indwelling made possible by Christ's passion, that person identifies with what Christ has done in such a way that Christ's offer of love on the cross to all who suffer can count as satisfaction to any human victim.
That is because what Christ offers on the cross is the very thing that can redeem the suffering of any human victim – the union in love that satiates the greatest human need and desire and integrates a person around what is truly good. If a victim accepts Christ's love, her suffering can be defeated, not just balanced off.Footnote 6 And this is precisely the gift that God most desires too – union with a beloved creature. Rightly understood, Stump argues, Christ's death counts not just as a gift to God but as a sacrifice, though not a sacrifice in the sense of a ritual act to appease an offended deity. Rather, Christ offers up not only his own life, but the lives of all those who identify with him, and in so doing gives them back to God in love.
When someone's suffering is defeated through Christ's sacrifice, she is drawn into closer relationship not only with God, but with her fellow creatures too, as her integration around the good facilitates the restoration of right relations. The problem is, humans have not only damaged themselves and their fellow humans by their sins, fracturing relationship with their brothers and sisters. They have also fractured their relationship with the whole earth. The goodness of the created world has been disfigured by human greed, narcissism, and indifference. Beasts are made to suffer. Even if it is true that the most grievous aspect of the disorder humans cause is the way they have hurt one another, we must admit that the damage spills out past the human boundary. As Stump acknowledges, this damage consists in both injustice and harm towards sentient beasts, and harm to the natural world more generally (ibid., 341).Footnote 7
Concern for the ecological dimension of what ails the world is by no means absent from Stump's project. In fact, she closes with a final reflection calling to mind the impending crisis of global warming, where Stump employs the image of water as a symbol of chaos.
The whole earth is soaked with the tears of the suffering victims of human evil, who float as flotsam and jetsam in the wreck that humans have made of themselves and their world. In the power generated by science and technology, human evil begins to dismantle even the order that made the earth a good place for beasts and humans, until it seems that the pandemonium and disorder evocatively described as water threaten to overrun the world. (ibid., 410)
Stump argues that God's love, evidenced in the Atonement, cannot be quenched even by the chaos humankind has unleashed on the earth. But as is clear from the very image of rising waters she employs, the damage done is not merely to human individuals and communities.
Can all that damage be rectified through the restoration of union between human beings and their creator? What of the rest of creation – all the suffering beasts, and all that is marred of the beautiful earth? If satisfaction calls out for the harms and injustices inflicted by humans to be defeated, how might such a story go if the problems present in the world because of sin do not just lie in the hearts of humans?
Now, this is clearly beyond the scope of what Stump sets out to defend. Hers is the story of how humans can be reconciled to God, not how all of creation can be set aright. But given that on her view of satisfaction, reconciliation is situated in relation not just to God, but to other creatures as well, it makes sense to look for some way for the story to extend to other creatures with whom humans are meant to be in relationship. In fact, such extension might be necessary if what she says about satisfaction as a fix for guilt is correct.
Her account of how the Atonement addresses the occurrent sinful dispositions of humans can be of some help here. When a person restored by God's grace becomes properly integrated around the good, she will be able to grow in the virtues that allow her properly to relate to the rest of creation. Indeed, in many Christian communities, there is a growing awareness of the importance of exercising these virtues on behalf of the planet as a central part of the Christian vocation. The backward-looking problem of guilt, however, is harder to figure out. If humans cannot fully atone for their own ecological sins by making what amends they can, how might the atoning work of Christ go the remaining distance to be re-traversed?
A partial suggestion, at least as regards sentient victims, is that when Christ shared attention with creatures on the cross, he might have had access to the minds of all kinds of sentient creatures.Footnote 8 Perhaps he felt the pain of all animals that have suffered because of moral evil. It is hard to imagine how this might figure into a story about the defeat of their suffering, but if Stump is right about what Christ was actually experiencing on the cross, the kind of solidarity he shared with humanity might extend to solidarity with other creatures as well. And there is, no doubt, something here to explore about the solidarity Christ might have felt with all animals who had been offered up in ritual sacrifice. There might be some special kind of glory, either in this life or in the world to come, for beasts who have suffered like Christ.
Perhaps how the rest of creation is woven into the story of the atoning work of Christ must remain a mystery. Maybe the solution is completely eschatological, located in the new heavens and new earth. Or, maybe Stump's story might need to be supplemented with the help of metaphors and motifs employed in other accounts of the Atonement. One advantage she notes about patristic Christus Victor accounts, for example, is that they are cosmic in scope (Stump (Reference Stump2018), 20). As many have suggested, the best way to think about the Atonement might be as an amalgam of these different stories.Footnote 9
Part of what is most attractive about Stump's account of the Atonement is its focus on the restoration of relationship, not just along the single axis of individual humans to God (though the reconciliation of any individual is cause enough for the heavens to rejoice). The picture is even more lovely in what it says about the harmonization of all of fallen humanity, of how through the Atonement each person can be ‘at peace with themselves and others and at home in the love of God’ (ibid., 411). Those who favour Stump's account and those who simply think that models of the Atonement should aspire to be more cosmic in scope have good reason to ask how Christ's passion and death can work to restore all of creation.Footnote 10
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Eleonore's Stump's Atonement synthesizes much of her previous work in philosophical theology to offer a stunning account of the Christian doctrine of the Atonement. I will focus here on satisfaction as a crucial part of her story in order to show both its strengths and its limitations. Stump says the problem the Atonement is meant to solve is the separation of humans from God. But beyond merely restoring humans to right relationship with God, she takes the effects of the Atonement to go some way towards restoring whatever humans have damaged by sin. I will argue that one helpful way her project could be extended would be to explore how the atoning work of Christ is instrumental in the restoration of all creation to the creator God, not just the restoration of humans.
By ‘atonement’, Stump means ‘whatever the nature and effects of Christ's passion and death are as regards human salvation’ (Stump (Reference Stump2018), 7). Those effects are meant as the remedy for human separation from God – a function of the human proneness to moral wrongdoing by which people put distance between themselves and God, and the forward and backward-looking effects of such distance. The forward-looking problem consists in the sinful dispositions that alienate people from God, self, and others. The backward-looking problems consist in both guilt for past wrongdoing and shame in its many forms. For Stump, a theory of the Atonement ought to offer a story that can explain how Christ's passion and death can restore humans to union with God by fixing human proneness to sin, and by eliminating guilt and shame.
She contrasts her theory, which locates the problem to be solved by the Atonement in humans, with Anselmian ones, which locate the problem in some feature of God. Anselmian views say that facts about the divine nature and human transgression require a sacrifice to placate the just wrath of God, and Christ's passion and death can do just that. Stump argues that the God of Christianity is always willing to offer humans forgiveness and union with Godself, and so any obstacles to union must be ones that lie in the human will alone, and nowhere in God.
Given that the Atonement is meant to fix a problem located in humans, to heal the human psyche of its tendency to moral wrongdoing and to rid it of the ills of guilt and shame, it might seem that Stump takes the problem fixed by the Atonement to be merely a psychological one. What she offers her reader is a kind of phenomenology of the saving effects of God's involvement in a human's life. Now, if this is in fact all she does in her book, I take it to be the finest such account on offer anywhere in analytic philosophy. What she develops is theologically rich and compelling in its attention to the frailties of the human condition.Footnote 1
If that were the extent of her project, her reader might worry that by addressing only the problems located in the human psyche, the story is somehow normatively dissatisfying. There appears to be no mark crossed off in the ledgers of justice that must be addressed for all to be made right in the world. A theory of the Atonement, says the objector, must confront the injustice wrought by humans, regardless of what sort of theory of justice one holds.Footnote 2 In what follows I will show how this objection misses the mark. Stump's account of the Atonement extends beyond psychology alone and offers an original take on how to handle the normative dimension of human sinfulness. I will sketch here the most relevant parts of her account of the mechanisms of the Atonement for my concerns, with particular focus on the role satisfaction plays in uniting humans to God and others. What I will argue then is that her account of satisfaction raises a very difficult puzzle about how the Atonement fixes the world.
Stump argues that Christ's passion and death are the best means available to restore human beings to union with Godself, while still respecting human free will.Footnote 3 When Christ willingly died on the cross, he took on simulacra of all the sinful states of intellect and will ever had by humans. The agony he felt on the cross resulted from experiencing what it is like to commit sin and be separated from God by all the attending guilt and shame. Christ did not have any blameworthy states of intellect or will but felt the full force of what is woeful about post-fall humanity nonetheless. This, she argues, is the meaning of the cry of dereliction from the cross.
In taking on sinfulness in this specific way, Christ is able to offer humans reconciliation with God by making possible the removal of the obstacles to union. In order for a person's occurrent sinful dispositions to be corrected, Stump argues, she must undergo a process of spiritual regeneration, which can only work if a person ceases to resist the grace of God. What better way might there be to break down a person's resistance than to offer oneself in love the way Christ did on the cross? This act of love melts the heart and makes possible the quiescence which begins the process of spiritual regeneration.
In addition to beckoning fallen humans to cease resisting God's grace, Christ's experience on the cross also supplies a crucial ingredient required for intimate union. In sharing attention with all humans, Christ was able to set up part of the circuit Stump calls ‘mutual indwelling’ (Stump (Reference Stump2018), 135). The other half of that circuit is completed when humans are able to share attention with God by way of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. In this two-way exchange routed through Christ's passion, all of humankind is within Christ in a new way, and the Godhead can be within humans in a new way. This is not merely a change in the psychology of any given human, but a real ontological difference consisting in a radically new relationship forged between God and creation. Though the problem to be solved by the Atonement is located just in humans, the solution itself is not. It lies in the restoration of relationship – between humans and God.
Furthermore, according to Stump the solution also lies in the restoration of relationship between sinful humans. I take this to be the main thrust of the normative element of her account of the Atonement. Following Aquinas, she argues that satisfaction is a crucial element of the fix for human guilt. Satisfaction is part of penance and consists in making amends to whatever extent the making of amends is possible, not for the sake of compensating the victim, but for the sake of another goal. Stump says, ‘In penance, the wrongdoer is attempting to restore himself as well as the things he damaged in the world, and he does what he can to re-traverse the distance he put between himself and those he injured’ (ibid., 62). The restoration of the sinner is intimately connected with the restoration of what she has damaged, or at least, the possibility of such restoration.
Satisfaction as a re-traversal of distance has a very different flavour from Anselmian satisfaction. As Stump explains, it's not the case that satisfaction is ‘a present made to God to enable God to pardon sinners’, but ‘an offer of union in love made to each human sufferer of the depredations of others’ (ibid., 361). Herein lies the most striking difference between Stump's understanding of satisfaction and Anselmian ones. For her, satisfaction is a gift offered to God, but one made by way of the amends offered to those humans who are harmed or wronged by sin. A person regenerated by God's grace makes amends to God for wrongdoing primarily by making whatever amends she can to the person she has harmed or wronged. She does this in order to heal the broken relations between them, both for her own sake and for her victim's. In claiming that satisfaction for an offence should be directed primarily to the wronged creature, Stump is able to hold on to two things: that the victims of sin have real claims of justice that should be answered in the Atonement, and that the obstacles to the removal of guilt are not located in any feature of God.Footnote 4
However, Stump follows Aquinas in arguing that there are limits to how far any human's satisfaction can go towards making things right (ibid., 367).Footnote 5 How could humans ever do enough to make amends for the horrendous evils they have inflicted? Humans are incapable of defeating all the evils they cause, so there must be more to the story. Here Christ's passion and death play the key role. Christ is able to offer vicarious satisfaction on behalf of wrongdoers to the victims of wrongdoing. When a repentant sinner is united to Christ through the mutual indwelling made possible by Christ's passion, that person identifies with what Christ has done in such a way that Christ's offer of love on the cross to all who suffer can count as satisfaction to any human victim.
That is because what Christ offers on the cross is the very thing that can redeem the suffering of any human victim – the union in love that satiates the greatest human need and desire and integrates a person around what is truly good. If a victim accepts Christ's love, her suffering can be defeated, not just balanced off.Footnote 6 And this is precisely the gift that God most desires too – union with a beloved creature. Rightly understood, Stump argues, Christ's death counts not just as a gift to God but as a sacrifice, though not a sacrifice in the sense of a ritual act to appease an offended deity. Rather, Christ offers up not only his own life, but the lives of all those who identify with him, and in so doing gives them back to God in love.
When someone's suffering is defeated through Christ's sacrifice, she is drawn into closer relationship not only with God, but with her fellow creatures too, as her integration around the good facilitates the restoration of right relations. The problem is, humans have not only damaged themselves and their fellow humans by their sins, fracturing relationship with their brothers and sisters. They have also fractured their relationship with the whole earth. The goodness of the created world has been disfigured by human greed, narcissism, and indifference. Beasts are made to suffer. Even if it is true that the most grievous aspect of the disorder humans cause is the way they have hurt one another, we must admit that the damage spills out past the human boundary. As Stump acknowledges, this damage consists in both injustice and harm towards sentient beasts, and harm to the natural world more generally (ibid., 341).Footnote 7
Concern for the ecological dimension of what ails the world is by no means absent from Stump's project. In fact, she closes with a final reflection calling to mind the impending crisis of global warming, where Stump employs the image of water as a symbol of chaos.
The whole earth is soaked with the tears of the suffering victims of human evil, who float as flotsam and jetsam in the wreck that humans have made of themselves and their world. In the power generated by science and technology, human evil begins to dismantle even the order that made the earth a good place for beasts and humans, until it seems that the pandemonium and disorder evocatively described as water threaten to overrun the world. (ibid., 410)
Stump argues that God's love, evidenced in the Atonement, cannot be quenched even by the chaos humankind has unleashed on the earth. But as is clear from the very image of rising waters she employs, the damage done is not merely to human individuals and communities.
Can all that damage be rectified through the restoration of union between human beings and their creator? What of the rest of creation – all the suffering beasts, and all that is marred of the beautiful earth? If satisfaction calls out for the harms and injustices inflicted by humans to be defeated, how might such a story go if the problems present in the world because of sin do not just lie in the hearts of humans?
Now, this is clearly beyond the scope of what Stump sets out to defend. Hers is the story of how humans can be reconciled to God, not how all of creation can be set aright. But given that on her view of satisfaction, reconciliation is situated in relation not just to God, but to other creatures as well, it makes sense to look for some way for the story to extend to other creatures with whom humans are meant to be in relationship. In fact, such extension might be necessary if what she says about satisfaction as a fix for guilt is correct.
Her account of how the Atonement addresses the occurrent sinful dispositions of humans can be of some help here. When a person restored by God's grace becomes properly integrated around the good, she will be able to grow in the virtues that allow her properly to relate to the rest of creation. Indeed, in many Christian communities, there is a growing awareness of the importance of exercising these virtues on behalf of the planet as a central part of the Christian vocation. The backward-looking problem of guilt, however, is harder to figure out. If humans cannot fully atone for their own ecological sins by making what amends they can, how might the atoning work of Christ go the remaining distance to be re-traversed?
A partial suggestion, at least as regards sentient victims, is that when Christ shared attention with creatures on the cross, he might have had access to the minds of all kinds of sentient creatures.Footnote 8 Perhaps he felt the pain of all animals that have suffered because of moral evil. It is hard to imagine how this might figure into a story about the defeat of their suffering, but if Stump is right about what Christ was actually experiencing on the cross, the kind of solidarity he shared with humanity might extend to solidarity with other creatures as well. And there is, no doubt, something here to explore about the solidarity Christ might have felt with all animals who had been offered up in ritual sacrifice. There might be some special kind of glory, either in this life or in the world to come, for beasts who have suffered like Christ.
Perhaps how the rest of creation is woven into the story of the atoning work of Christ must remain a mystery. Maybe the solution is completely eschatological, located in the new heavens and new earth. Or, maybe Stump's story might need to be supplemented with the help of metaphors and motifs employed in other accounts of the Atonement. One advantage she notes about patristic Christus Victor accounts, for example, is that they are cosmic in scope (Stump (Reference Stump2018), 20). As many have suggested, the best way to think about the Atonement might be as an amalgam of these different stories.Footnote 9
Part of what is most attractive about Stump's account of the Atonement is its focus on the restoration of relationship, not just along the single axis of individual humans to God (though the reconciliation of any individual is cause enough for the heavens to rejoice). The picture is even more lovely in what it says about the harmonization of all of fallen humanity, of how through the Atonement each person can be ‘at peace with themselves and others and at home in the love of God’ (ibid., 411). Those who favour Stump's account and those who simply think that models of the Atonement should aspire to be more cosmic in scope have good reason to ask how Christ's passion and death can work to restore all of creation.Footnote 10