Summary:

Anselm’s Satisfaction Theory stresses God’s justice and views sin as an injustice that needed to be made right in order for God to forgive.  It would not have been just for God to simply ignore sin and move on.  Since humans could never repay such a large debt, Jesus became a man and lived and died in order to make reparation for human sin and to satisfy the divine justice of God.  This meshes with the Kinsman Redeemer picture.

Anselm of Canterbury was a Catholic theologian who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109.  He is best known through his work Cur Deus homo.  He taught that the salvation of mankind was about more than defeating Satan or paying a ransom to him.  It was about making restitution to God for humanity’s sins.  He developed this into the Satisfaction theory, where satisfaction means restitution, or repaying a debt. 

In this view, human sin has dishonored God.  God cannot overlook such an offence; doing so would contradict God’s very nature, and God is not at liberty to do “anything improper for the Divine character.”  Our failure to honor God constitutes an injustice toward God and a debt which requires repayment.  But while it is man who owes the debt to God, no one other than God could pay a debt of such magnitude. 

This is often stated: only we owe the debt, but cannot pay it; only God could pay the debt, but he doesn’t owe it.  Anselm concluded that God had to become man so that he himself could satisfy humanity’s debt.  The title of Anselm’s best known work is “Cur Deus Homo?” which is Latin for “Why God Became Man”.

Objections to the Satisfaction Theory

Honor and duty were the organizing principles in the feudal society of Anselm’s day.  Serfs worked on estates protected by knights, so they owed their knights a debt of honor for their protection and livelihood.  Knights in turn had to honor the King.  But today we question whether honor is really so important, and does it even make sense to say that we have taken honor away from God?  Second, in this view what did Jesus’ Crucifixion accomplish?  Wouldn’t simply coming to earth as a human be enough to restore God’s honor?