The dogmatic history of atonement has its own history, beginning with F. C. Baur’s 1838 Die christliche Lehre von der Versöhnung. Baur introduced the influential approach of treating atonement in terms of competing theories, particularly Anselm’s satisfaction theory and Abelard’s moral exemplar theory.Footnote 1 He did so in the context of nineteenth-century German idealism and the post-Enlightenment reconsideration of traditional dogmas, enabling skeptics of satisfaction to find alternative approaches to Christ’s work in the past. Subsequent scholars, notably Gustaf Aulén a century later, have added to the number of available theories.Footnote 2 Other theologians have worked to enrich the concept of ‘theory’ itself, with Ian T. Ramsey introducing the language of ‘models’ in the mid-twentieth century and Oliver D. Crisp more recently undertaking to distinguish clearly among motifs, metaphors, doctrines, models, and theories.Footnote 3 The result is a framework that enables sophisticated conceptual thinking about Christ’s work. Nevertheless, the method of using theories or models to approach atonement has come under pressure, for both historical and doctrinal reasons. Khaled Anatolios voices both, arguing that ‘models’ are a modern imposition on ancient texts and a barrier to attempts at doctrinal synthesis like his own.Footnote 4 Adam J. Johnson adds that theory-language tends to produce one-dimensional, anachronistic readings of older theological texts, which might better be understood in terms of multiple ‘aspects’.Footnote 5 In Baur’s wake, many theologians have used atonement theories to think about dogmatic history, but shifting approaches to atonement theories over time presents the methodological conundrum that they are a contested feature of dogmatic history rather than a neutral tool for carrying it out.
Recognising the contingent development of atonement theories as an interpretative tool invites inquiry into the conditions that made their emergence possible. Johannes Zachhuber has situated Baur in his proximate context, showing his debts to Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Hegel. These sources shape the idealist impulse to approach atonement in terms of theories whose content is on some level ahistorical (although only knowable through historical situatedness), and they illuminate the tension between idealism and neo-rationalist historicism in Baur’s thought.Footnote 6 This tension continues to shape dogmatic history; it is difficult to talk about developments over the longue durée without recourse to conceptual frameworks like atonement theories, but overarching concepts always risk eliding contextual particularities, including the particularities that enabled the concepts themselves to emerge.
This paper attends to a moment in dogmatic history that helped make satisfaction thinkable as an atonement theory. The motivating event was the Socinian attack on satisfaction, beginning with Faustus Socinus’s De Iesu Christo Servatore in 1594. The spread of Socinian ideas prompted a multi-confessional backlash that began with published defenses of satisfaction and gradually led to the emergence of a new dogmatic locus de satisfactione. In a Reformed context, this locus appeared in connection with the priestly aspect of Christ’s threefold office, a framework that Calvin used to address Christ’s work. It is in this anti-Socinian context that John Owen brought the word ‘atonement’ into the realm of debates about Christ’s work. While Owen’s linkage of ‘atonement’ with penal satisfaction lays the foundation for penal satisfaction to be understood as an atonement theory, his theological innovation is complex in ways that cannot be rendered intelligible using the framework of atonement theories. In the first place, Owen’s thinking about Christ’s work involves multiple aspects: he understands the reconciliation of humans to God as involving an act of ransom, not satisfaction. Secondly, he introduces the word ‘atonement’ not to reference either Christ’s work in general or a particular mechanism but rather to argue, against Socinian views, that God needs to be reconciled to humanity. It is only in the context of this larger relational claim, indicated by the word ‘atonement’, that an argument for the particular mechanism—penal satisfaction—becomes intelligible. In this sense, ‘atonement’ is a term of art not for Christ’s work but for an aspect of God’s character. Nevertheless, as anti-Socinian polemic continued in the later seventeenth century, ‘atonement’ began to catch on as something of a synonym for ‘penal satisfaction’, a development that enabled both the emergence of atonement theories as a framework and the particular identification of Reformed theology with penal satisfaction, notwithstanding Reformed theologians’ treatment of it as only one aspect of Christ’s work. Attending to Owen’s case shows that atonement theories can be impediments to the kind of careful reading required for making sense of older theological texts on their own terms.Footnote 7 Anti-Socinian polemic contributed to the flattening effect that Johnson finds at work in interpretative uses of atonement theories, even as Owen’s novel usage of ‘atonement’ also highlights his attention not to the mechanism of Christ’s work but to its relational significance.
Satisfaction: Framing the Socinian challenge
Understanding John Owen’s contribution to the conditions that make penal satisfaction thinkable as an atonement theory requires some attention to how people thought about satisfaction before him: generally, not as a distinct theory but as one aspect of a broader framework for conceptualising Christ’s work. For instance, Caroline Walker Bynum argues that a common thread in late medieval soteriology ‘holds that the blood of the cross is sacrifice, satisfaction, and the enkindling of love’.Footnote 8 Rather than competing atonement theories, this framework presents a broadly shared picture in which different theologians, both scholastic and lay, might emphasise different aspects while remaining resolutely focused on Christ’s blood. Against this backdrop, Calvin both does and does not innovate. His innovation consists in using the idea of Christ’s triple office (triplex munus) to order different aspects of Christ’s work—an idea he apparently got from Eusebius via Martin Bucer.Footnote 9 This framework was not especially prevalent in late medieval theology. Ludwig Schick traces the idea of the triple office extensively in the patristic period before offering only a very brief account of the later middle ages, noting that in scholastic theology the priest-king distinction set the pattern, whereas the full triple office could appear in mystical literature.Footnote 10 If Calvin returned to what he understood as a patristic idea, innovating by returning to the past, he also remained in continuity with medieval precedent as described by Bynum. Namely, he construes Christ’s work as a whole while acknowledging that it has multiple aspects, much in the way that the doctrine of divine simplicity admits of conceptual distinctions among divine attributes without rendering God composite. Christ’s work is, finally, simple, and satisfaction helps to explain it without becoming either the whole picture or a constituent part of it.
If Calvin uses the threefold office to unify different aspects of Christ’s work in his singular person, the question remains as to how and why Reformed theology came to be so thoroughly associated with penal satisfaction. The answer has to do with two interrelated theological debates that result in satisfaction emerging as a distinctive dogmatic locus—the phenomenon that creates the conditions for satisfaction to become a theory of atonement. This is a somewhat subtle point. Both Anselm and Thomas, for instance, wrote theological treatments of satisfaction in the later Middle Ages, but in neither case was satisfaction itself in the foreground as the core issue at hand. Anselm’s famous treatment is not titled De Satisfactione Christi but Cur Deus Homo, in keeping with Katherine Sonderegger’s argument that Anselm’s account of Christ’s work is not, on his own terms, separable from his account of Christ’s person.Footnote 11 Thomas takes up the matter in Summa Theologiae IIIa. q. 48, where the heading is de modo passionis Christi quantum ad effectum. The articles present a series of aspects: merit (per modum meriti, article 1), satisfaction (per modum satisfactionis, article 2), sacrifice (per modum sacrificii, article 3), and redemption (per modum redemptionis, article 4).Footnote 12 Thomas concludes that each of these aspects, rightly construed, pertains to the question of how Christ’s passion is efficacious. To be sure, satisfaction also factors in Thomas’ treatment of redemption—a recurring conceptual difficulty that will require further attention later—but it would nevertheless not make sense to recast the entire question as one de satisfactione. Satisfaction moves into the foreground only under the heat of polemic, and the differences between, say, Anselm’s view and Thomas’ do not raise the temperature enough for the pot to boil over. That would require the onset of the Reformation.
The first boiling point involved penance.Footnote 13 In this case satisfaction rises to the surface first on the Catholic side, with Johannes Eck’s 1523 De Satisfactione, defending the notion that ‘satisfaction for the punishment of sin ought to include penitence’ against Luther’s attacks on the penitential system in the 95 Theses and elsewhere.Footnote 14 Calvin’s 1559 Institutes indexes the topics ‘de Co[n]fessione Papalie, & satissfactione’ and ‘de Satisfactione Papali,’ both keyed to a discussion of penance in Book III Chapter IV—significantly, the index’s only references to satisfaction.Footnote 15 The chapter that tends to get referenced for his account of penal substitution—Book II Chapter XVI, following his treatment of the triple office in Chapter XV—refers in its heading to redemption, not satisfaction.Footnote 16 Later in the century, the universities at Ingolstadt and Tübingen produced published disputations defending the Lutheran view against the error of the Catholics, who, according to the Tübingen theologian Dietrich Schnepff, ‘ascribe the satisfaction for our sins to works’ by requiring acts of penance.Footnote 17 Schneppf’s framing suggests that the debate about penance, notwithstanding the intrinsic significance attending one of the Catholic sacraments, is a bit of a smoke-screen for a higher-order concern about Christ’s work. This debate is where the distinction between satisfaction in Anselm’s sense or Thomas’ and penal satisfaction in the Reformed sense would slowly get worked out.
By far the more intense boiling point involved the challenge to satisfaction posed by Faustus Socinus and his followers, beginning at the end of the sixteenth century. Socinianism provoked treatments de satisfactione from Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed writers, now explicitly focused on Christ’s work. The precipitating event was Socinus’ 1594 publication of De Iesv Christo Servatore, which documents an oral and subsequently written debate between Socinus and the French Protestant Jacques Couet (i.e., Covetus).Footnote 18 The Third Part of the book debates whether Christ’s death satisfied God’s justice concerning human sin; Covetus presents a thesis in the affirmative, and Socinus argues the negative side.Footnote 19 This is, of course, hardly the first time that a theologian argued against a particular conception of Christ’s work; what made Socinus distinctive was the thorough and detailed manner of his attack on satisfaction as an aspect of Christ’s work at all. He argued that God is both able to and indeed wills to forgive our sins without accepting satisfaction;Footnote 20 that since we do not perish, divine justice could in no way be satisfied for our sins;Footnote 21 that Christ could not satisfy divine justice by paying the penalty we had to undergo from God’s law;Footnote 22 and that Christ could not satisfy divine justice for us by doing those things which we were obliged to do by God’s law.Footnote 23 The conclusion, unsurprising given the relentless repetition of this phrase, is that Christ is not able to satisfy divine justice for our sins; indeed, Socinus declares the very idea manifestly in conflict with the grace of God.Footnote 24 The broad scope of Socinus’ attack shows that, at the time, satisfaction could mean many different things. Although Socinus sets out to refute each option in turn, his fundamental objection is to the idea that God in any sense requires satisfaction for human sin, which he finds incompatible with divine forgiveness and the grace that underwrites it. Whatever differences were beginning to emerge among Reformed, Lutheran, and Catholic approaches to satisfaction, Socinus’s attack threatened them all.
Socinus’ ideas soon became difficult to ignore thanks to the Racovian Catechism, first published in 1605 and then disseminated across Europe over the next few years. This publication gave rise to a multi-confessional backlash, commencing in 1611 with Sibrandus Lubbertus’s De Iesu Christo Servatore [… ] Contra Faustum Socinum.Footnote 25 Further signs appeared in 1615, with the publication of two tracts defending satisfaction against Valentin Smalcius, lead author of the Racovian Catechism. One, published in Kraków by the Jesuit Marcin Smiglecki, was titled De Christo Vero et Natvrali Dei Filio, carrying the subtitle Eiusdemque pro peccatis nostris satisfactione. The other, published in Wittenberg by the Lutheran Wolfgang Franz, was titled Disputationem Theologicarum de Sacrificiis Satisfactionis Christi pro Peccatis Totius Mundi. Surely the most significant continental response appeared in 1617: Hugo Grotius’s Defensio Fidei Catholicae de Satisfactione Christi Adversus Faustvm Socinvm Senensem.Footnote 26 Whereas sixteenth-century texts with satisfaction in the title had tended to treat penance, now such titles indicate attention to Christ’s work in a specifically anti-Socinian sense. As the seventeenth century wore on, the response to Socinianism began to inform systematic theology, with treatments de satisfactione emerging amidst discussions of Christ’s threefold office. In 1629, for instance, William Ames followed his treatment De Officio Christi with a chapter De Satisfactione in his Medulla Theologiae, a work of brief dogmatics that had a long life as a textbook in theological education.Footnote 27 Fifty years later, François Turretin devoted five chapters of his magisterial Institutio Theologiae Elencticae (1679–85) to the topic of satisfaction (Quaestiones X–XIV under Locus Decimvs Quartus: De Officio Christi Mediatorio). Satisfaction has moved into the foreground as a dogmatic locus identified with Christ’s work in a way that had not been true a century earlier.
John Owen and the invention of atonement
Socinianism plays a key role in John Owen’s influential identification of satisfaction with ‘atonement’. Even though Owen, like Calvin, treats satisfaction as only one aspect of Christ’s work, the anti-Socinian context means that satisfaction takes by far the most prominent role in Owen’s argument. This development contributes significantly to both the possibility of thinking about penal satisfaction as a distinctive atonement theory and to the identification of that theory with Reformed theology. Nevertheless, Owen uses the word ‘atonement’ not to identify the mechanism of Christ’s work but to make a relational claim that God, pace Socinus, needs to be reconciled to humanity. ‘Atonement’, as Owen uses it, is more to do with the doctrine of God than with Christ’s work.
Owen turned his pen against Socinianism in 1648. The 1609 English publication of the Racovian Catechism was dedicated to King James, who promptly ordered its burning and thereby slowed the impact of Socinianism in England.Footnote 28 The Latin Catechism was successfully printed in London in February 1652, licensed for publication by none other than John Milton, who was obliged to defend his action before a Parliamentary committee.Footnote 29 An English translation followed the next year, likely produced by John Biddle. The Catechism was preceded by the publication, in translation, of Socinian commentaries on Hebrews (1646) and Galatians (1650).Footnote 30 In the intervening decades, Socinianism was not unknown in England, owing to the influence of Socinianism on later Remonstrant theology.Footnote 31 Some overt anti-Socinian activity occurred. Ames was English, although he was installed at Franeker by the time he published the Medulla Theologiae in 1629. Soon thereafter, John Prideaux, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford from 1615, used the occasion of preaching annually at the Oxford Act to argue against key Socinian tenets.Footnote 32 In 1634 his topic was De Christi satisfactione.Footnote 33 Written in English rather than Latin, the Presbyterian Francis Cheynell’s 1643 The Rise, Growth, and Danger of Socinianism repeatedly notes the Socinian denial of Christ’s ‘satisfaction’.Footnote 34 Notably, however, Cheynell never uses the word ‘atonement’. Owen, therefore, is a little ahead of the curve, writing against Socinianism (in English!) before the Racovian Catechism became readily available in that language, but he is also hardly the first Englishman to take up the cause. Indeed, he was not only at Oxford when Prideaux preached in 1634 but was also Prideaux’s student.Footnote 35
Owen’s novel usage of ‘atonement’ arises from contingencies in that word’s prior history. The Oxford English Dictionary first identifies ‘atonement’ in 1514 in Thomas More’s History of Edward V, where it denotes the ‘Restoration of friendly relations between persons who have been at variance; reconciliation’.Footnote 36 The word retains a broad sense of ‘reconciliation’ in the sixteenth century, a sense that allows its use in theological contexts but does not limit its use to them.Footnote 37 Tyndale influentially uses ‘atonement’ in connection with the sacrifices described in Leviticus. Meanwhile, texts in the 1540s wish for an ‘atonement’ between England and Scotland via union of the latter with the former.Footnote 38 Thomas Wilson’s A Christian Dictionarie (1612) does not include ‘atonement’ in its list of significant topics, and under the heading ‘To make Atonement’ it offers this definition: ‘To declare one to be purged from his sins, and reconciled to God, Leu. 5, 10. The Priest shal make an attonement for him.’Footnote 39 Discussions of Christ’s work appear in other definitions: ‘Bloud of Christ’, ‘price of redemption’, ‘to redeeme’, and ‘Satisfaction’.Footnote 40 Christ’s work is not yet an ‘atonement’, and neither is satisfaction specifically. Surveying early usages, Joel R. Gallagher argues that ‘atonement’ refers not to Christ’s work but to the effect (however achieved) of reconciliation between God and humans; the word is not inherently soteriological in its meaning and is distinct from notions of satisfaction.Footnote 41 As to when this shift in meaning occurred, Gallagher writes that ‘questions remain’.Footnote 42 A hint appears in William Prynne’s 1630 Anti-Arminianisme, the earliest instance cited by the OED with reference to ‘the redemptive work of Christ’. Prynne uses the word in passing in a critique of Arminian universalism, but he does not develop it into a term of art, as Owen will do.Footnote 43
Understanding the exegetical basis of Owen’s work requires closer attention to the use of ‘atonement’ in English Bible translations. In the 1611 King James Bible—the version that Owen was using—the word ‘atonement’ appears 81 times in the Old Testament, primarily in the sense of propitiation accomplished through sacrifice. This usage reflects Tyndale’s influence. Although both Tyndale and the KJV translators worked primarily from the Hebrew, Owen also consulted the Septuagint, where the English usages of ‘atonement’ generally correspond to forms of the verb ἱλάσκομαι, meaning ‘propitiation’. Meanwhile, ‘atonement’ appears only once in the KJV New Testament, in Romans 5.11: ‘And not onely so, but wee also ioy in God, through our Lorde Jesus Christ, by whom we have now receiued the atonement.’ Here, the Greek word is not a form of ἱλάσκομαι but of καταλλάσσω, meaning ‘reconciliation’ (as the other three instances of that verb in Romans 5 are translated). This usage of ‘atonement’ goes back to the 1535 Coverdale Bible, which used that word three times in the New Testament. Following the Bishops’ Bible, the KJV has replaced the Coverdale phrases ‘and hath geven vs the office to preach the attoneme[n]t’ and ‘the word of ye attonement’ in 2 Corinthians 5.18–19 with ‘and hath giuen to vs the ministery of reconciliation’ and ‘the word of reconciliation,’ in keeping with its broader treatment of καταλλάσσω. Although the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Gospel of John draw typological connections between the propitiatory sacrifices described in the Old Testament and the work of Christ, the KJV does not use the word ‘atonement’ to connect these concepts. In this period, ‘atonement’ and ‘reconciliation’ remain interchangeable synonyms in broader usage, although English Bibles tend instead to link ‘atonement’ with propitiation (forms of ἱλάσκομαι in the Septuagint), preferring to translate forms of καταλλάσσω as ‘reconciliation.’
Owen will link the concepts identified with these Greek words to develop ‘atonement’ as a term of art for the satisfaction by which Christ reconciles God to humans in his 1648 Salus electorum, sanguis Jesu, or, The death of death in the death of Christ. There, the primary polemical target is the notion of universal redemption, as espoused in the separatist Thomas Moore’s 1646 treatise, The Vniversallity of Gods Free-Grace. Moore is not expressly Socinian—he opens by telling readers about the ‘Saviour of the World; who by the grace of God tasted death for Every man, And became the Propitiation for the sinnes of the whole world’—and Owen locates Moore under the umbrella of Arminianism (which by this time often included Socinian influences).Footnote 44 Consequently, scholarly treatments of Owen’s Salus electorum, sanguis Jesu tend to underplay its response to Socinianism in comparison to later texts like the 1653 Diatriba de Justitia Divina, where the keyword is the Latin satisfactio rather than the English ‘atonement’.Footnote 45 Nevertheless, Socinianism directly informs the part of the text where the word ‘attonement’ predominates. A clue appears in the work’s appendix, where Owen writes that ‘In handling of [the satisfaction of Christ], my eye was chiefely on the Socinians, the noted knowne opposers of the person, grace and merit of Christ; the most wretched prevaricators in Christian Religion, which any age ever yet produced.’Footnote 46 Even though Owen did not initially set his sights on Socinianism, he could not address Christ’s satisfaction for long without taking up the Socinian challenge.
At first, Owen discusses satisfaction in response to Moore’s universalism in a passage that shows how complexly Owen interweaves humans’ reconciliation to God with God’s reconciliation to humans. The discussion begins from the human side by addressing ‘Redemption,’ which Owen identifies with the New Testament language of ἀπολύτρωσις. He defines this term as ‘the delivery of any one from captivity and misery by the intervention λύτρα of a price or ransom’, explaining ‘that this ransom or price of our deliverance was the bloud of Christ’.Footnote 47 Owen considers redemption in three points, with the verb ‘atone’ appearing in the first: ‘He that receives the ransome doth also give it, Christ is a propitiation to appease and attone the Lord.’Footnote 48 Owen’s language of appeasement connects this usage of ‘atone’ with the predominant sense of ‘atonement’ as ‘propitiation’ in the KJV Old Testament. Here, it is God who is rendered ‘at one’ with Godself by the payment of ransom, as divine justice is appeased immanently. His second point is that ‘the captive or prisoner, is not so much freed from his power, who detaines him, as brought into his favour’.Footnote 49 Here, too, propitiation is the operative concept, although Owen does not use the word. He argues that spiritual and civil ransom work differently:
when a captive amongst men, is redeemed by the payment of a ransome, hee is instantly to bee set free from the power and authority of him that did detaine him: but in this spiritual redemption, upon the paiment of the ransome for us, which is the bloud of Jesus, wee are not removed from God, but are brought nigh unto him. Ephe. 2.13. not delivered from his power, but restored to his favour: our misery being a punishment by the way of banishment, as well as thraldome.Footnote 50
Owen emphasises the human loss of divine favour instead of thralldom to the devil, such that redemption brings humans back from banishment into right relationship with God. Both satisfaction and the devil come into play in Owen’s third point: ‘that as the Judge was to be satisfied, so the Jaylor was to be conquered’.Footnote 51 Here, even as a Christus Victor motif appears, Owen seems to identify satisfaction with the first point’s language ‘to attone the Lord’, that reconciliation with divine justice that occurs when Jesus, as God, pays a ransom to God that also restores humans to divine favour. Ransom is the mechanism and satisfaction the effect with respect to the workings of God ad intra; ad extra, ransom brings about the return of humanity to God’s favour.
While arguing against Moore, Owen treats redemption as a singular idea that has aspects of ransom and Christus Victor motifs. Ransom satisfies divine justice while also reconciling humans to God, and Christus Victor gives the usurping devil his due following his failed assault on Christ. Writing against Socinianism, however, obliges Owen to develop his position more precisely. Now, the overarching term is not ‘redemption’ but ‘reconciliation’:
The reconciling of one party and the other may be distinguished, but both are required to make up an entire reconciliation. As then the folly of Socinus and his Sectaries is remarkable, who would have the reconciliation mentioned in the Scripture, to be nothing but our conversion to God, without the appeasing of his anger and turning away his wrath from us, which is a reconciliation hopping on one legge[.]Footnote 52
A few pages earlier, Owen had emphasised the need for human reconciliation to God while treating ‘appeasement’ as something that happened when God accepted the ransom that God (in the person of Jesus) paid. ‘Satisfaction’ thus seemed to refer to God’s reconciliation to Godself as justice and mercy prove compatible, but in this passage, appeasement involves God’s relationship to humans, signaled by God’s wrath. Both human reconciliation to God and God’s reconciliation to humanity are needed.
Socinian theology, however, rejects the idea of divine wrath that requires appeasement. According to the Racovian Catechism, the blood of Christ confirms the divine will to believers in two ways:
first, because it ascertained us of the exceeding great love of God towards us, so that he is thereby engaged to make good what he hath promised us in the New Covenant…. Next, because, being followed with a resurrection to Eternall Life, it maketh us sure that we also, if we obey the commandments of the Lord Jesus Christ, shall be partakers of the same Resurrection.Footnote 53
The Catechism then turns to refuting the ‘fallacious, erroneous, and very pernicious’ opinion ‘that Christ by his death merited Salvation for us, and fully satisfied for our sins’.Footnote 54 Satisfaction, the Catechism argues, is repugnant to the scriptural idea that God forgives sin freely, is inconsistent in that the Son undergoes physical but not eternal death, and is an invitation to antinomianism.Footnote 55
For Owen, the Socinian view does not address the divine wrath occasioned by human sin and therefore, in his vivid phrase, leaves reconciliation hopping on only one leg. His pioneering use of ‘atonement’ arises from his effort to put both legs in place. To supply the missing second leg, God’s reconciliation to humanity, Owen turns to Romans 5, citing verse 10—’for when we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Sonne’—before turning to verse 11:
We are said to receive τὴν καταλλαγὴν this reconciliation (which, I know not by what meanes, we have translated, attonement) which cannot be meant of our reconciliation to God, or conversion, which we cannot properly be said to accept, or receive; but of him to us, which we receive when it is apprehended by faith.Footnote 56
Owen goes on to argue that the mechanism of God’s reconciliation to elect humanity is satisfaction, which the verse from Romans invites him to identify with ‘attonement’. It is worth pausing over his befuddlement about the translation choice in Romans 5:11, which arises from recognizing that forms of the verb καταλλάσσω are rendered as ‘reconciliation’ in verse 10 and ‘atonement’ in verse 11. Notably, Owen does not see ‘atonement’ as self-evidently a term of art for Christ’s work in general or satisfaction in particular. ‘Reconciliation’ seems adequate in his eyes to communicate Paul’s meaning.
When Owen later undertakes a two-chapter ‘digression containing the substance of an occasionall conference concerning the satisfaction of Christ’, he seizes on the word ‘attonement’ as capable of providing needed precision.Footnote 57 Owen explains that his foregoing writing was interrupted by the visit of a concerned soul, whose ‘misapprehension’ was
That the eternall unchangeable love of God to his elect, did actually enstate them in such a condition, as wherein they were in an incapacity of having any satisfaction made for them: the end of that, being to remove the wrath due unto them, and to make an attonement for their sinnes; which, by reason of the former love of God, they stood in no need of, but onely wanted a cleare manifestation of that love unto their soules, whereby they might be delivered from all that dread, darknesse, guilt, and feare, which was in and upon their Consciences, by reason of a not-understanding of this love, which came upon them through the fall of Adam. Now to remove this, Jesus Christ was sent to manifest this love, and declare this eternall good will of God towards them, so bearing, and taking away their sinnes, by removing from their consciences that misapprehension of God and their owne condition, which by reason of sinne they had before; and not to make any satisfaction to the justice of God for their sins, he being eternally well pleased with them.Footnote 58
According to this view, which Owen’s appendix identifies with Socinianism, no ‘attonement’ is necessary because God’s love obviates any sense that God could need to be reconciled to them. In describing the view, Owen suggests that responding to it will involve arguing that humans deserve God’s wrath and that reconciliation will require a satisfaction that removes this wrath from them.Footnote 59 Under the influence of Romans 5:11, Owen has invoked ‘attonement’ to distinguish the reconciliation effected by Christ’s satisfaction from the reconciliation effected by his redemption.
Owen’s use of ‘atonement’ indicates that the debate is less about Christ’s work than about the character of God. For Socinians and, as it happens, also Moore, God’s love renders satisfaction unnecessary and even repugnant. Owen, by contrast, insists that human offenses against divine justice require the reconciliation of the relationship in both directions, including from God to humans. That God provided a means to accomplish that reconciliation demonstrates divine love. For example, Moore writes that Christ, in laying down his life, ‘therein gave us an example, not to make propitiation for sinne, but to testifie love in suffering’.Footnote 60 Here is something like exemplarist atonement, as later writers might call it. Owen rebuts this claim by saying, ‘The love and faithfulnesse of Jesus Christ, in the ministration of the Gospel, that is, his performing the office of the Mediatour of the New-Covenant, is seen in nothing more, then in giving his life for a ransome. Joh. 15. 13. 2. Here is not one word of giving us an example, though in laying down his life he did that also.’Footnote 61 Owen believes that Christ set an example of obedience for humans to follow, but his argument is not that exemplarism gets the mechanism of atonement wrong but that, on its own, it gets the nature of God wrong and consequently denies atonement altogether.
This distinction speaks to the question of why a new term was necessary, given that ‘satisfaction’ was already current as a term capturing a key point in the debate with the Socinians and that ‘reconciliation’ seemed perfectly apt, even to Owen, as a way to render New Testament uses of καταλλάσσω. The answer is that ‘satisfaction’ refers to the mechanism whereby Christ reconciles God to humans, whereas ‘atonement’ speaks to a need for such reconciliation in the first place. When Socinians deny the atonement, as Owen says they do, they deny the existence of a relational dynamic in which God needs reconciling to humans. The mechanism for bringing that reconciliation about is a second-order concern. To this point, the first chapter of Owen’s digression concerns itself not with how satisfaction works but with why it is necessary in the first place, arguing that the idea of divine wrath is compatible with divine love.Footnote 62
Owen’s primary emphasis on relationality allows for some complexity in his thinking about the mechanism. As noted earlier in discussing Thomas Aquinas, some potential conceptual muddle between ransom/redemption and satisfaction exists because both involve the payment of a price. Indeed, this linkage leads Owen to identify the two in a passage from his digression’s second chapter:
If Jesus Christ paid into his Fathers hands, a valuable price and ransome for our sins, as our Surety, so discharging the debt that we lay under that we might go free; then he did bear the punishment due to our sins, and make satisfaction to the justice of God for them (for to pay such a ransome, is to make such satisfaction) but Jesus Christ paid such a price and ransome as our surety into his Fathers hands, &c.Footnote 63
Rather than muddying the waters, Owen is in fact working out how to cement the link between satisfaction and atonement exegetically by connecting τὴν καταλλαγὴν in Romans 5:11 with the broader concepts attached to forms of ἱλάσκομαι. He begins with Romans 3:25, which says that God sent Christ Jesus ‘to be a propitiation (ἱλαστήριον) through faith in his blood.’ Owen defines ἱλαστήριον as ‘a Propitiation, an attonement, a mercy seat, a covering of iniquity,’ connecting the verse in Romans to the Septuagint of Exodus 25.Footnote 64 Building on these foundations, he turns to Hebrews 2:17, where Christ ‘is said to be a merciful High Priest, εἰς τὸ ἱλάσκεσθαι τὰς ἁμαρτίας τοῦ λαοῦ to make reconciliation for the sins of the people, to reconcile God unto the people.’Footnote 65 Linking his new equation of atonement and satisfaction with the language of propitiation in Hebrews enables Owen to connect ‘attonement’ with Christ’s priestly office, which ‘consisted in this, to beare the punishment due to our sinnes, to make attonement with God, by undergoing his wrath, and reconciling him to sinners upon the satisfaction made to his justice’.Footnote 66 He links the propitiation in Hebrews to the reconciliation in Romans 5:11, again noting the odd translation choice.Footnote 67 Now Owen has developed an exegetical basis for the view that Christ’s sacrificial act of propitiation appeases the Father’s wrath, meaning that the demand of justice occasioned by human sin has been satisfied. Owen weaves these theological threads together in the word ‘atonement’, which indicates Christ’s bridging of a relational gulf between God and humanity. Because Socinians denied that God needed reconciling to humanity, Owen’s usage of ‘atonement’ refers primarily to his assertion of this need, while referring secondarily to the propitiatory, sacrificial mechanism and the satisfaction it brings about. The existence of the solution depends first on the existence of the problem, and Owen uses ‘atonement’ to name the problem to which satisfaction offers a solution.
Owen’s exegetical linkage of ransom and satisfaction seems like a conceptual muddle only if one is committed to the idea that these are distinct atonement theories in competition with each other, with Owen obliged to choose between them. This is not to say that they are without meaningful conceptual distinctions. Christ’s payment of a price simultaneously satisfies the Father, enabling his reconciliation to humanity, and releases humanity from bondage, enabling their reconciliation to God through justification and sanctification. The structure of ransom looks different depending on whether it is considered from the human side or the divine side. The importance of perspective is why the visual metaphors behind Johnson’s talk of ‘aspects’ and theoria prove so useful.Footnote 68 The differences between ways of talking about Christ’s work may have more to do with relational perspectives than with conceptually distinct mechanisms—one work seen from many different angles instead of one work with many competing theoretical explanations jostling for primacy.
Conclusion
Owen’s work casts a new light on the familiar idea that the doctrine of atonement has never had an agreed-upon dogmatic formulation, with the result that theologians through the years have advanced a number of theories or models. Owen’s identification of ‘atonement’ with satisfaction could, from a certain perspective, resemble an atonement theory—indeed, the theory for which Owen’s book offers an influential articulation. Nevertheless, attention to Owen’s conceptual development of ‘atonement’ shows that, for all the emphasis that he places on satisfaction, he does not treat it as the whole of Christ’s work. Not only is there the reconciliation of humans to God that Christ brings about, but there are also Christ’s prophetic and kingly offices to consider. For Owen, ‘atonement’ is explicitly not the word for Christ’s work as a whole, and it would be a serious error to claim that he identifies Christ’s work solely with satisfaction. Indeed, Owen’s identification of ransom and satisfaction, treated above as a potential conceptual muddle, might indicate instead that Owen understands Christ’s work as fundamentally simple. Whatever analytical or polemical utility there might be in distinguishing between the payment of the price that satisfies God and the way that this payment releases humans from bondage and enables their reconciliation to God, in the end the underlying work is the same.
Nevertheless, ‘atonement’ became increasingly identified with Christ’s act of sacrificial satisfaction. This shift is evident in a later text that shows Owen considering the possibility that ‘atonement’ could refer to several different models: ‘The Jews to this day, think that God was atton’d for sinne, by the sacrifices of Bulls and Goats, and the like: and the Socinians acknowledge no Attonement, but what consists in mens Repentance and new obedience. In the crosse of Christ, are the mouthes of all stopped as to this thing.’Footnote 69 Three models are on evidence here: Jewish atonement by sacrifice alone, Socinian rejection of atonement’s necessity, and atonement accomplished by Christ on the cross. For Owen, God must be reconciled to humans, but sacrifice alone will not suffice; only Christ’s sacrifice will do. This line of thinking further develops Owen’s exegetical linkage between propitiatory sacrifice and reconciliation.
Edward Stillingfleet took up Owen’s identification of ‘atonement’ with satisfaction in his own contests with Socinians during the latter decades of the seventeenth century. Writing against the Socinian Johannes Crell in his 1669 Six Sermons with a Discourse Annexed, Concerning the True Reason of the Suffering of Christ, wherein Crellius his Answer to Grotius is Considered, Stillingfleet uses ‘atonement’ 61 times. Although he does argue the point that God requires reconciliation to humanity, his usages of ‘atonement’ chiefly refer to Christ’s sacrificial act. Three out of six chapters in Stillingfleet’s annexed Discourse focus on sacrifice; the others concentrate on the relationship between Christ’s sufferings and the punishment for sin. The relational context is still present, but it is not central to the argument. Satisfaction may not be an atonement theory just yet, but Owen and Stillingfleet have created some of the conditions that enabled it to become one.
To be clear, neither Owen’s development of ‘atonement’ as a term for the reconciliation accomplished by Christ’s satisfaction nor Stillingfleet’s strong linkage between ‘atonement’ and Christ’s sacrifice constitutes an atonement theory in Baur’s sense. They are seventeenth-century English Reformed theologians, not nineteenth-century German idealists, and they do not share Baur’s investment in working out an analytical framework for making sense of shifts in dogma over time. Indeed, attention to Owen’s case in particular reveals some of the limitations in using atonement theories to interpret earlier theological texts. In the first place, the framework of theories assumes that ‘atonement’ refers to Christ’s work, which might be understood by recourse to different mechanisms, whereas Owen used ‘atonement’ to emphasize the need for God’s reconciliation to humans, accomplished by Christ’s work of satisfaction. For Owen, atonement is to do with God first and with Christ’s work second. This logical sequence points to another distinction between Owen and analytical accounts of atonement theories, which is that Owen is not attempting to create firm conceptual distinctions between, say, ransom and satisfaction.Footnote 70 Both Christ’s work and the kinds of reconciliation it brings about can have different aspects, not all of which Owen identifies with ‘atonement.’ To this point, in the context of the broader Reformed tradition, a case might made for construing Christ’s work as simple, notwithstanding useful analytical distinctions like the notion of Christ’s threefold office. Although debates about penance and through the later fires of controversy with Socinians brought satisfaction to new prominence, it was never the whole picture.
Relativising penal satisfaction within Reformed theology in this way raises one final imperfect analogue with atonement theories. Baur introduced the novel story that Peter Abelard offered a counter to Anselm’s morally dubious satisfaction theory of atonement—a story with a long afterlife, notwithstanding its well-documented distortion of Abelard.Footnote 71 In the wake of Baur, this essay’s argument could seem to imply an effort to minimise penal substitution out of some moral distaste or a desire to advocate for, say, exemplarist atonement instead. What Baur and his successors have made more difficult is simply attending to someone like Owen on his own terms—a project with its own theological imperatives, rooted in charity and a desire to recognise the gifts at work in the body’s many members. The projects of historical understanding and making constructive use of past theological writings (as Baur did) can be at tension with each other.
For this reason, the framework of atonement theories that Baur introduced is best understood as a development within the history of Christian theology than as a neutral tool for interpreting it. Reading Owen as a proponent of penal substitution atonement risks missing his novel, pointedly relational introduction of ‘atonement’ as a theological term of art for an aspect of Christ’s work. To account for such developments, dogmatic history needs to look beyond atonement theories, even as it may continue to make tactical use of theory language. There is, finally, no substitute for close attention to how individual writers draw on shared language while also inflecting terms in ways particular to them. Theology at core involves a tension between divine vastness and linguistic limitations, and the act of interpreting theological texts is likely to go awry if the meanings of words are allowed to function too transcendently, and such transcendence is precisely the risk not only in appealing to theories or models but also in assuming that ‘atonement’ straightforwardly refers to the mechanism of Christ’s work.
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