1.1 Abelard’s model of atonement

In an often-quoted passage from his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Abelard writes:

Nevertheless it seems to us that in this we are justified in the blood of Christ and reconciled to God, that it was through this matchless grace shown to us that his Son received our nature, and in that nature, teaching us both by word and example, persevered to the death and bound us to himself even more through love, so that when we have been kindled by so great a benefit of divine grace, true charity might fear to endure nothing for his sake. (on Rom 3:26, answer; Abelard 2011: 167–168)

The different versions of the theory of ‘persuasive love’ correspond to the diversity of meaning which might be given to Abelard’s key word, ‘kindled’. This can sustain a spectrum of meanings, in which the love of God demonstrated in the cross might be an ‘example’, or a creative influence, or a generative power. Evidence for all three of these meanings can be found in Abelard’s writings. Indeed, his approach embraces the whole range, and cannot be reduced to any one of them (Fiddes 1989: 140–158).

1.2 Objectivity and subjectivity in atonement

While Abelard’s approach to atonement is often dismissed as ‘merely subjective’, the ideas of love as creative influence and generative power clearly have an objective aspect to them, as having a reality which cannot be exhausted into human response. The descriptions ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ have usually been employed in thinking about the nature of the atonement, and they are a convenient piece of shorthand (Fiddes 1989: 26–31).

In the first place, an interpretation of the atonement may be said to be ‘subjective’ when it describes salvation as a process in present human experience. It is ‘objective’ when it locates salvation in a past event, outside our experience and feelings. Therefore, no theory of atonement can be entirely subjective or objective, but rather there will be a shifting balance between the two elements in different understandings of atonement. The more that salvation in the present is believed to be dependent on a past event, the more objective it becomes, and the greater is the danger of regarding present experience as a mere appendix to a completed act. But, conversely, the heavier the stress laid upon present experience, the greater the danger becomes of regarding salvation as a merely subjective matter of human feelings. The question then is not whether a view of atonement is objective or subjective; it is how well it integrates the two elements. All theories of atonement, however culturally determined they have been, have at least tried to bring the elements of past and present, event and process, together.

A second set of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ elements is the polarity of act and response. If the first set puts the past and the present in tension, the second relates the divine and the human. Objectively, salvation is an act of God; since human beings are trapped in a predicament from which they cannot extricate themselves, God must take the initiative in providing a release. The apostle Paul sums up the matter when he says, ‘God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us’ (Rom 5:8). Subjectively, salvation must include the human response since it needs two to make a meeting. It would be a mistake, however, simply to identify the past event of salvation with the divine act and the present process with the human response. While God has certainly acted in the past event of the cross, God goes on acting in the process of salvation, taking the initiative in entering the lives of human beings and luring them into response. On the other hand, at the heart of the past event is the human response of Jesus, in open obedience to the Father, fulfilling human destiny where other persons have failed.

The movement between action and response leads to a third and even more profound polarity between objectivity and subjectivity in salvation. Traditional, strongly ‘objective’ doctrines of atonement have proposed some change in God resulting from the atoning work of Christ. More ‘subjective’ accounts have laid the stress upon the power of the cross to produce a change in human attitudes. It seems clear that salvation requires a change in human minds and emotions, described in biblical language as ‘repentance’. Human attitudes of pride, fear, and anxiety create blockages between God and humankind, and God as a saviour sets out to remove these in a sacrificial way. But some views of atonement have suggested that in effect there are blockages to reconciliation in God’s own nature. While affirming that there is no reluctance on God’s part to forgive and accept, it has been suggested that God’s justice requires to be satisfied before God can put forgiving love into effect. Because human beings are guilty sinners, it is maintained, a debt has to be paid to justice before they can be forgiven. Highly ‘objective’ views of atonement have thus conceived of a change in God in the sense that God’s righteous wrath, or the demand of God’s law, is ‘satisfied’ through some kind of propitiating act. More ‘subjective’ views of atonement, such as Abelard’s, insist that the only problem lies in human hearts and minds: while God is always willing to accept us, the problem is how to remove the hindrances to acceptance in us, and how to persuade people to respond to God’s offer of forgiveness.

There is, however, another way of conceiving of an objective ‘change’ in God which does not depend on the idea of ‘satisfying’ God. If God’s suffering with the world is considered seriously, it must involve change of some kind since suffering is always a movement from one state of being to another (Fiddes 1988: 46–76; see Suffering). If God suffers in empathy with the world, even if this is not exactly the same as human suffering, there will be some change in God’s experience of the world according to the kind of response God receives. This clarifies how one particular moment of response, that of Christ himself, could be more intense and critical for God than others. Without thinking of God’s changing from wrath to love, if God did enter into the human predicament in a decisive way in the cross of Jesus then God must have been exposed to something ‘new’ in the divine experience of the world, and even in God’s experience of God’s self.

No understanding of the atoning work of Christ is going to integrate subjective and objective dimensions in a completely satisfactory way. Theories of atonement are, after all, conceptual tools with which humans try to grasp a mystery in the divine-human relationship. Some theories will begin at the objective end of the spectrum of understanding with some kind of transaction or ‘satisfaction’, and then add the subjective appendix of human response. Others will tip the balance the other way, beginning at the subjective end with the present human response to God and then affirming an objective focus in which the cross of Jesus somehow enables this response. Abelard’s approach is of this second kind: the love of God in the pattern of Jesus’ life, climaxing in the cross, is a creative influence and a generative power in the human personality.

1.3 Objectivity and subjectivity in Abelard

A significant question is whether Abelard is able sufficiently to articulate the objective dimension of atonement, in its three aspects of being an action of God, a past event, and change in God. First, he has no problem in affirming transformative love as an act of God. Second, he asserts that this love is ‘poured out’ into human hearts here and now from a specific event in history, though he gives no clear explanation as to how this might be. Regarding the third aspect, however, he struggles to explain how this event might have made a difference to God in God’s relation to the world. This seems to be indicated by the fact that, in his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, while firmly propounding his own theory of redeeming love, Abelard supplements it with several of the traditional metaphors for the atoning work of Christ. Notably there is reference to the removal of ‘penalty’ or ‘punishment’ (on Rom 4:25, Rom 5:19, questions, Rom 8:3; Abelard 2011: 204, 227, 266), but there is also passing reference to sacrifice, expiation, price, and the defeat of Satan (on Rom 1:1, Rom 3:12, 3:26, 4:11, 4:25, 5:10–11; Abelard 2011: 99, 154, 163, 180–181, 204, 207–208; cf. Sermons 9; Abelard 1885: 446d). It is difficult to estimate the significance of this supplementation, especially the reference to a penalty to which human beings are liable, and here there have been several kinds of interpretation of Abelard, all raising the issue of what might be called ‘objectivity’.

In a recent exegesis of Abelard, he is presented as having a double theory of atonement in which ‘Christ has the dual role of exciting to charity and freeing from punishment’ (Burns 1975: 290, emphasis added; so Williams 2004: 265–269; cf. Quinn 1993: 289–291, but see below). Abelard’s use, alongside his theory of kindling love, of the metaphor of ‘sweeping away a penalty for sins’ on the cross (on Rom 4:25; Abelard 2011: 204) has been systematized into the need for a dual atonement, which Thomas Williams names as ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’. The dominion of sin, Williams observes, has the dual aspects of making the sinner liable to punishment and producing an inclination to obey disordered desires (see Abelard on Rom 5:19, question; Rom 4:25; Abelard 2011: 215). Correspondingly, Williams proposes, there is a dual redemption, consisting in an objective transaction of ‘substitutionary punishment’ and a subjective movement of ‘inspiration by love’ (Williams 2004: 261–263). However, as with Burns earlier, penal substitution is narrowly specified in terms of the removal of the eternal punishment due to humans through the sin of Adam. Williams, we notice, understands Abelard to be connecting justification of the sinner here and now with God’s bestowal of love, rather than with penal substitution. Justification is ‘our being made righteous through charity’ (Williams 2004: 269, in line with Abelard’s phrase, ‘justified through the love we have in him’, on Rom 5:9; Abelard 2011: 207). Moreover, both Williams and Burns see problems with the ‘transactional’ aspect they find in Abelard’s supposedly dual presentation. Burns observes that the relation between the temporal punishment of Christ and the eternal punishment of guilty human beings ‘goes unexplored’ (Burns 1975: 290), and Williams claims not to ‘see any straightforward sense in which Abelard can hold that Christ bore the punishment for our sins’ (Williams 2004: 267).

Nevertheless, Williams insists there must be an objective dimension, since humans cannot respond to God with an answering love unless there is some ‘benefit’ in the cross of Jesus for which to be grateful (Williams 2004: 262). He does not consider whether this benefit might be precisely the outpouring of God’s transformative love in the cross, and whether the kindling of love within believers might be called objective. Philip Quinn also maintains that Abelard includes an aspect of ‘penal substitution’ alongside the ‘love that transforms motive and character in redeemed humans’ (Quinn 1993: 292). As evidence he quotes Abelard’s discussion of Rom 4:25, using his own translation of the passage:

In two ways [Christ] is said to have died for our faults: first, because the faults for which he died were ours, and we committed the sins for which he bore the punishment; secondly that by dying he might remove our sins, that, is, the punishment of our sins, introducing us into paradise at the price of his own death, and might, by the display of grace such that he himself said, ‘Greater love no man hath,’ draw our mind away from the will to sin and enkindle in them the highest love of himself. (Quinn 1993: 290)

However, Quinn does not build any case for a ‘dual role’ of Christ in atonement. Far from systematizing the different aspects he sees Abelard as presenting, he is sympathetic to L. W. Grensted’s remark that Abelard’s heart is really in the thought with which he concludes in this passage, that ‘the grace displayed in Christ’s dying might work an inner transformation in us by which are minds are drawn away from sin’ (Quinn 1993: 291, citing Grensted 1962: 109). Quinn thus admits the presence of an element of substitution but stresses that ‘the central motif’ of Abelard’s account, or the ‘dominant motif to which others are subordinated’ (1993: 285, 292) is that of transformative love. This, he underlines, is not Pelagian (obtaining salvation through our own efforts) because the love of God is ‘a benefit of grace conferred on us through Christ’ (1993: 294). Abelard has included an aspect of penal substitution for the sake of completeness in discussion, but it is ‘subordinated to the theme of the transformative power of divine love’ (1993: 296). What Abelard has to contribute to our thinking about the atonement, Quinn affirms, is

the idea that divine love, made manifest throughout the life of Christ, but especially in his suffering and dying, has the power to transform human sinners, if they cooperate, in ways that fit them for everlasting life in intimate union with God. (Quinn 1993: 295)

Richard Weingart, in his thorough study of Abelard, had already taken a similar line, avowedly following the much earlier account of Robert Taylor who had denied that Abelard’s theory of divine love was merely exemplarist (Weingart 1970: 126; Taylor 1935: 213). Weingart, unlike Quinn, takes up the language of subjectivity and objectivity, and insists that Abelard’s often-quoted account of Rom 3:26 is not ‘subjective’. The whole tone of the passage is set by the theme that God is moved by love to take the initiative in transforming men’ (Weingart 1970: 131). Weingart takes notice of the fact that Abelard, alongside his theory of transformative love, ‘employs so many of the traditional metaphors for, and descriptions of, Christ’s atoning work that are arbitrarily labelled “objective”’ (1970: 131). However, he insists that Abelard’s diversity of expressions all simply underline that his approach is ‘theocentric’; he is using them to articulate, in different ways, ‘the infusion of divine love in the unregenerate hearts of sinners’ (1970: 14, cf. 150). Weingart takes seriously Abelard’s protest against the notion of offering satisfaction to God, judging (unlike Quinn) that Abelard always denies Christ’s work to be one of appeasement or substitution (1970: 150). While Abelard uses the language of ‘the price of his own death’ (for example on Rom 4:25, above), he maintains that this is simply about ‘bearing the cost of man’s salvation in love’, and that Abelard ‘uses the commercial metaphors of ‘purchase’ and ‘price’ without implying any theory constructed in a commercial mode’ (1970: 146). If Quinn, citing Weingart, subordinates penal substitution to transformative love (Quinn 1993: 293), Weingart himself effectively assumes it into the loving action of God. Alister McGrath rightly concludes from reading Weingart that Abelard does not hold an ‘exemplarist’ theory of atonement, but McGrath then on that basis appears to discount all accounts of persuasive love as being non-Abelardian and an Enlightenment invention (McGrath 1985: 208–212).

It appears, then, that systematic notions of a ‘dual’ model of atonement in Abelard cannot be sustained, noting the qualifications of both Burns and Williams themselves and agreeing with Weingart and Quinn that the model of transformative love is normative in Abelard (Fiddes 1989: 140–145). This model has in itself both subjective and objective aspects, being a subjective response entirely reliant on an objective divine action of ‘pouring out love’ into the human personality. Abelard evidently finds it difficult to explain both how this event is objectively associated with the historic cross of Jesus and how God is affected by it. The second part of this article will outline an ‘Abelardian’ approach that does deal with these issues. In a strictly historical assessment of Abelard, Abelard seems to be less consistent than either Weingart or Quinn propose. He appears to be making a passing appeal to the metaphor of transferred penalty (which Burns argues is actually an innovation in Abelard compared with Anselm; Burns 1975: 304), as well as other images such as sacrifice, in searching for a way of reinforcing objectivity in God’s work of salvation. He attempts consistency – for example, when he quotes the word propriator from the Vulgate translation (on Rom 3:25; Abelard 2011: 163), he says nothing about appeasement of God’s wrath, and in his comment on Rom 4:25 it is possible to understand him as saying that the penalty for sin is removed by God when, and because, love is kindled in the human heart and the will is deflected back to God. But there remains an untidiness about his thought. He appears to be appealing to metaphors which might give objectivity to the work of salvation, but he is not able to integrate them into his main idea of the power of divine love. Nor does he use them to show how God’s act of love in the cross might be an occasion for ‘change’ in the life of God and God’s relation to the world.

An appeal to the suffering of God out of love in the cross of Jesus would certainly strengthen the objectivity of Abelard’s account. God, it may be said, undergoes the bitter depths of human experience in the cross. God shows his love by enduring to the uttermost the estrangement of his own creation. Although one may affirm that God has always suffered with creation, here God goes to the furthest point on the journey of identification and so experiences something ‘new’ in relation to the world, and in this sense is changed (Moltmann 1977: 62–63; Fiddes 1988: 7–10). But Abelard, like others of his time, is not able to give this answer. He is working with the presupposition that the divine nature cannot suffer or change in any way, so that it is only the human nature of Jesus which literally suffers in the cross. Following the tradition of ‘two nature Christology’, Abelard explains that when God assumed humanity the divine and human natures were united in one person, so it is permissible to interchange the titles and characteristics given to God and man in Christ. Thus one can certainly say that ‘the Lord of glory was crucified’; but this must be interpreted as ‘the man or body assumed by him was fastened to the stake’ (Expositio symboli apostolorum; Abelard 1885: 625a).

Abelard, for all his celebration of the freedom of God to love, restricts divine freedom at this point. God is not free to endure suffering and death, because the divine essence must be always impassible and immutable. While some modern theologians have continued this classical tradition (e.g. Creel 1986; Weinandy 2000), others have contested it. They have either affirmed that God has the freedom to choose to be conditioned by the world (Barth 1936–1977: 303: [vol. II/1]) and so to be open to suffering befalling God (Fiddes 2001: 181, 188–190; Pinnock 2001: 86–92), or that God’s own nature as love necessarily means God must endure the suffering implicated in loving the world as it is (Oord 2022: 160–116). Some have wanted to retain impassibility but have re-defined it as God’s not being passive to external forces, while actively choosing one manner of suffering or another in response to the world (Sarot 1992; Gavrilyuk 2004; Lister 2012). Any of these approaches, questioning a strict application of classical metaphysics, would give a greater objectivity to God’s demonstration of love in the cross of Christ.

1.4 Persuasive love and other theories of atonement

The basic orientation of Abelard’s thought – subjective with an objective focus – enables other images of atonement to be employed in a similar way, and in a manner which corresponds more closely with the scriptural texts from which they have been derived. Abelard himself fails to link traditional images with persuasive love and so tends to leave images of sacrifice, victory over Satan, and transferred penalty as a mere supplement to his major theory of love. But a model of persuasive love can be argued to be consistent with scripture, not only because of the many references there to the love of God manifest in Christ (especially John 14–18; 1 John 3–5) but also because it places images of atonement more firmly in their biblical context, as opposed to the way they are often read in terms of the culture of the interpreter.

For instance, when stress is placed on the objective dimension of the image of sacrifice, the death of Christ is understood as propitiating or appeasing an offended God. It is difficult to reconcile this with scriptural texts which present a Hebrew understanding of the atoning sacrifice as a means of expiation for sin, or a wiping out of sin from the community through the infusion of new life represented by blood. Atonement is thus something that God does for people, not what people do to God. In the Levitical law God is portrayed as declaring: ‘The life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you for making atonement for your lives […] for, as life, it is the blood that makes atonement’ (Lev 17:11). Sacrifice is also understood in Hebrew religion as a gift made to God and as a means of communion with God (Lev 3; 7). When used in the context of a persuasive love of God, these original meanings of sacrifice are recalled. The sacrificial death of Christ can be understood as inciting a love for God in the hearts of sinners which thereby prompts them to make the sacrifice of Christ their own (Rom 12:1; cf. Heb 13:15). Turning from an attitude of rebellion against God to living a life suffused with a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving underlines the dimensions of sacrifice as a gift-offering and as communion with God. This also picks up the atoning element of sacrifice: sin is not an object but a human lack of trust in God, and it is this attitude which is transformed, and so sin is expiated, by the recreation of love and obedience towards God (Heb 10:12–18).

Perhaps the strongest stress on objectivity has been in understanding the death of Christ as a satisfying of God’s offended honour (Anselm 1998: 282–289) or as a substitutionary punishment which satisfies the demand of God’s law (Calvin 1961: 507–508 [vol. 1]). This kind of theory necessarily relegates a human response to God’s work to a kind of appendix, adding a second phase of gratitude to justification of the sinner, rather than response being part of the redemptive process. Yet the problem is sin in human experience, and reconciliation must mean a healing of relationships in which both parties are involved (see further discussion in Reconciliation). The New Testament insight that Christ has ‘carried our sins’ (1 Pet 2:24; cf. Gal 3:13; 1 John 2:2) has been changed in this framework from Christ’s willing identification with the predicament of human life, separated from God and enduring the impact of alienation, into a transaction which reflects the culture of later times. Later ‘satisfaction’ theories arise either from the assumption of medieval feudal obligations (Anselm) or from the absolute demands attributed to law by those in the sixteenth century who wanted to curb the power of human princes by making law ultimate (Calvin). If we adopt the pattern of God’s persuasive love, then we understand that the death of Christ incites us to an attitude of penitence, moved by the cry of Christ on the cross (‘my God, why have you forsaken me?’) which is, in effect, a confession on behalf of humanity that God is just in saying ‘no’ to those who say ‘no’ to God (Forsyth 1938: 150, 164; cf. Campbell 1873: 118). Thus justice is ‘satisfied’, not by inflicting a substitute penalty, but by the return of repentant sinners to a loving God, making the confession of Christ their own, asking for and receiving forgiveness. Again, a subjective response has only been made possible by an objective act.

A favourite image of atonement among the church fathers was that of the victory of Christ (Christus victor), decisively conquering all the hostile powers that spoil human life at the cost of great suffering. The pattern is of a victory won through weakness, and triumph won from the jaws of defeat. Stressing objectivity, the fathers understood the victory as a decisive defeat of Satan in a final battle between two cosmic champions. But scripture shows an awareness of a much wider range of hostile powers to be overcome, including Paul’s identification of the enemies of ‘sin, law and death’ within human existence (Rom 7:7–25), and the ‘principalities and powers’ which appear to be structures in society as much as cosmic forces (Col 1:16; 2:15; Rom 8:38; Eph 6:12). Moreover, scripture witnesses to an ongoing threat of evil in the world which does not quite fit with a cosmic battle won in the past. A stress on the persuasive love of God, by contrast, understands the death of Christ as an objective victory in the sense that it enables a victory here and now in human lives over all hostile powers that prevent the flourishing of life. These might be sins inhering in the individual person, in the common mind of communities, or in social structures. God is always offering victory over forces that spoil life; the problem is human cooperation with the divine purposes, and the love of God disclosed in the cross has the power to move human wills to work with God. Surveying the power structures of his time (Rom 13:1–7), Paul enjoins, ‘[o]we nothing to anybody except love’ (Rom 13:8).

1.5 Successors to Abelard

Those who have aimed to follow Abelard’s approach of persuasive love have rarely reflected the whole range of what persuasion means, including example, creative influence, and generative power. This is also a spectrum from subjective to objective aspects, and there has been a tendency to neglect or at least underplay the objectivity within the theory. This can be seen happening already in an early appreciative comment on Abelard by Peter Lombard, who writes:

So great a pledge of love having been given us, we are both moved and kindled to love God who did such great things for us; and by this we are justified, that is, being loosed from our sins we are made just. The death of Christ therefore justifies us, inasmuch as through it charity is stirred up in our hearts. (Sentence 3, Dist. 19.1; Rashdall 1919: 371)

This summary of Abelard certainly reflects not just the example but the creative influence of God’s love. However, to say that love is ‘stirred up in our hearts’ implies that the justifying love is already there, where Abelard is anxious to underline that it is ‘poured into’ our hearts. Much more inclined to the subjectivity of an example is Faustus Socinus, who maintains that

Jesus Christ is our saviour because he announced to us the way of eternal salvation, confirmed, and in his own person, both by the example of his life and by rising from the dead, clearly showed it, and will give that eternal life to us who have faith in him. (Socinus 1656: 121)

God’s love revealed in the cross would be, he argues, ‘diminished and obscured’ if God were pressing the right to receive a penalty for sin (Socinus 1990: 251). Socinus’ stress on an example of love, though not his theology generally, continues in the work of a series of German Protestant theologians in the age of Enlightenment such as G. S. Steinbart, I. G. Tollner, and G. F. Seiler (see McGrath 1985: 210–211), culminating in the thought of Immanuel Kant. He declares (in 1793) that one ‘must steadfastly cling to the prototype of humanity and follow this prototype’s example in loyal emulation’, adding that a person who does this, ‘and he alone, is entitled to consider himself not an unworthy object of divine pleasure’ (Kant 1998: 81). Kant also thinks that there is a need for divine grace and pardon to make up the deficiency between the disposition of a person for moral perfection and actual achievement of it. Thus the divine judgment in reckoning man righteous on account of his disposition towards good is always ‘a decree of grace’ (Kant 1998: 92). However, this does not, in Kant’s view, undermine a view of atonement based on moral example but complements it (against McGrath 1985: 213–217).

Schleiermacher goes beyond Kant’s moral example and describes a creative influence, or what he calls the ‘sphere of living influence’ which is the ‘creative activity’ of Christ. By this activity Christ ‘assumes us into fellowship with Him’ through ‘a creative production in us of the will to assume him into ourselves, or rather […] our assent to the influence of his activity’. Such influence on individual consciousnesses, by which the redeemer assumes believers into the power of his own consciousness of God, only happens within the corporate life of the Christian community (Schleiermacher 1928: 425–426, 429–430). Without naming Abelard, Schleiermacher echoes him in identifying divine love and wisdom as the key elements of the ‘self-impartation’ of God in the incarnation, operative in redemptive influence on human lives (1928: 723–733). Schleiermacher does not, nevertheless, entirely express the spectrum of persuasive love from subjective to objective, since he cannot – by his own confession – adequately account for the influence of Christ in the community. He rejects the view that this happens entirely by following the teaching and example of Christ (a view he dismisses as ‘empirical’), but can only resort to calling the redemptive activity of Christ ‘mystical’ (1928: 429–431).

A key exponent of Abelard’s understanding of atonement in English-speaking theology was the Anglican theologian Hastings Rashdall. He wrote of Abelard that

The efficacy of Christ’s death is now quite definitely and explicitly explained by its subjective influence upon the mind of the sinner. The voluntary death of the innocent Son of God on man’s behalf moves the sinner to gratitude and answering love – and so to consciousness of sin, repentance, amendment. (Rashdall 1919: 358)

His favourite quotation from Abelard is that the purpose and cause of the incarnation ‘was that He might illuminate the world by His Wisdom and excite it to the Love of Himself’ (1919: 358, 362). Unlike Kant, he moves beyond an example to the objectivity of moral influence, and even at one point hints at generative power, writing ‘it was the love exhibited by Christ in submitting to that death which has really moved the heart, touched the conscience, and regenerated the life of believers’ (1919: 360). However, like Schleiermacher, he generally occupies the middle of the spectrum from subjective to objective, edging towards the objective end. He does not in fact recognize his view of moral influence as being ‘objective’ at all, dismissing ‘any of those always difficult and sometimes repulsive theories of substitutive or expiative or objective efficacy’ (1919: 361–362), but the way he treats the power of love to ‘move’ the sinner has something undeniably objective about it.

Appealing explicitly to Abelard, the American congregational theologian Horace Bushnell rejects the notions of an ‘example’, and even an ‘influence’ as inadequate for understanding the redemptive love of God in Christ, and prefers the phrase ‘moral power’, creating a transformation in people’s life and character:

In Christ, accordingly, we find this higher power so magnified – a power that we may call the Moral Power of God […] Christ, by his incarnate life and passion, becomes that higher kind of power – executing, in that manner, or by virtue of that kind of power, the internal new creation, for which […] he came into the world. (Bushnell 1877: 169)

Bushnell is clearly moving towards the objective end of the spectrum of persuasive love. He thinks that ‘influence’ is too weak a word, as it does not contain the idea of ‘vicarious sacrifice’, meaning Christ ‘bore our sins on his feeling, became inserted into their bad lot by his sympathy as a friend, yielded up himself and his life, even, to an effort of restoring mercy’ (1877: 46). Love, asserts Bushnell, is ‘an essentially vicarious principle’, although he thinks that the moral power of Christ derives from revealing justice as well as love (1877: 46, 170–171). Bushnell wavers, however, as to how this moral power becomes active in the human personality. In one place he seems to conceive it as operating directly, writing that ‘we consciously want some vehicle of God to the soul, that is able to copy God into it. Something is wanted that shall go before and beget, in us, the disposition to copy an example’ (1877: 169–170). However, in considering the Johannine saying of Jesus that ‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself’ (John 13:32), he writes:

he will be the regenerator of souls, not by action upon them, but by what he is to sight. There shall be that in him, that quality of good and glory, which, being fixedly beheld, shall [be…] as a power of immortal healing. (Bushnell 1877: 173–174, emphasis added)

Successors to Abelard seem unable, then, to embrace the entire spectrum of persuasive love from the subjective to the objective, while Abelard himself attempts to do so with mixed success. Embracing this spectrum is not possible without a more thorough integration of the doctrine of persuasive love into the doctrines of the Trinity and Christology, a coherence described below.

2.1 Problems with persuasion

Before developing a contemporary theology of persuasive love, it is appropriate to consider some of the objections that have been raised against it in modern times. Responding to these is helpful in seeing how Abelard’s own presentation might be modified and extended, while still keeping to his basic model of transformative love.

2.2 Means of persuasion

Some versions of atonement as ‘persuasive love’ lose objectivity when they describe how the love disclosed in the cross of Jesus is to be experienced here and now (see section 1.5). But there is a range of ways in which to comprehend the creative power of the cross of Jesus, moving from the mid-point of the subjective-objective spectrum to the more objective end.

First there is the power of disclosure of what it means to be truly human. John Macquarrie has suggested that there are moments in human history that ‘open up new possibilities of existence’ (Macquarrie 1977: 324). When something genuinely new is exhibited in a human life, it is not just an example to be copied, but provokes a repetition of itself in the future; it is not only capable of repetition but calls out to be re-enacted (Macquarrie 1977: 324–325; cf. Bushnell 1877: 211). The love displayed in the life of Christ was such an event, with his acceptance of the outcasts and marginalized in society, brought to a climax in his self-sacrificial death. Such a new thing in the world excites a response of love, and thus Christ is the ‘pioneer of our salvation’ (Heb 2:10; 10:19; 12:2). The objectivity of the event is deepened, further, by being captured in a story. Like Abelard’s telling of the story of the cross to Heloise, this is not just words to be heard, but an opportunity to enter into the story for oneself; indeed, a story actively draws the hearer into its world.

Entering the story, a person then suffers an impact upon the self from beyond itself; as Reinhold Niebuhr has pointed out, in a moment of reflection the self can be broken of its self-will and its evasions of the truth, and the hammer blow is delivered from outside itself by the disclosure of the cross. This is, Niebuhr underlines (echoing Abelard), the ‘wisdom’ and the ‘power’ of God. As the self seeks inauthentic ways to deal with its anxiety, it needs to be turned towards the way of trust in God. The Pauline confession that ‘I am crucified with Christ’ can thus be understood as ‘[m]y ego is shattered by the crucifixion of Christ’ (Niebuhr 1943: 59–64, 103–115).

The persuasive power of the event is even more intense when its power of disclosure is understood as revelation. The revelation of God is not the sending of a message but the unveiling of God’s very being, which means that God is present, encountering the one who receives the revelation. As Karl Barth puts it, revelation is ‘the person of God speaking’ (Barth 1936–1977: 304 [vol. I/1]). God acts both in the original event and in its repetitions as the story is told, so that, as Macquarrie perceives, ‘the event is an event of grace, working in those whom it addresses and making possible their response of faith’ (Macquarrie 1977: 325). The event is creative because God is present in it, embodied in the personality of Christ, to enable human response. Moreover, if God once suffered with humanity in the cross, experiencing human alienation to the utmost degree, it can be said that God has experienced something new and is now approaching human persons with this experience at the heart of God’s own being. Such an encounter with God is bound to affect a human personality. The link between the cross in the past and healing of broken lives in the present is no less than God, and persuasive love is a persuasive presence.

Finally, this persuasion is more than subjective, because it is embodied in the community of the church which tells the story of Christ, which has lived through the ages under the cross, and which links believers now with the earliest discipleship. Schleiermacher’s insight was that, if God was present in Christ, and if this presence actually had the power to form human personalities, then Christ must bring about a new kind of ‘corporate life’ between himself, those who are seized by his influence, and each individual with the other. Through the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist, believers encounter the risen Christ who is at work in the world and who summons them to discipleship there with him. Abelard comments that Christ bids persons to his table as if inviting us ‘to suffer together with me’ (Sermons 32; Abelard 1885: 575a). Moreover, the elements of bread, wine, and water in the sacraments focus the presence of God which is to be found in the whole physical creation; though God-in-Christ gives himself to persons in an intensified way in the sacraments, and though they provide a special place of encounter with the person of Christ crucified and risen, this gift and meeting can be repeated in the life of the world outside the church.

The objectivity of persuasion, and the link between this influence of love and the historic event of the cross, is thus to be found in a mutual indwelling between the redeemed person and God. Eleonore Stump has pointed out that the goal of love is ‘union with the beloved’, and so the aim of the cross is ‘union with God in this life’ (Stump 2020: 11). Her key idea is that union and indwelling are made possible through the event of the cross because there Christ ‘mindreads’ all human psyches in his deep empathy with all human beings (2020: 166). But it is not necessary to develop such a speculative idea; engagement here and now with a God in whose experience is the cross is sufficient to re-create human attitudes and responses to God and others, as becomes clear when considering what it means to participate in God.

2.3 Participating in the triune God

The presence of Christ, conforming persons to himself, is intimately bound up with the cross, whether he is met in the community of the church or the community of the wider world. The transforming presence of Christ is not simply illustrated by the cross; it also comes from the cross, in that it is the God who experienced the cross in Christ who is present to human persons. This encounter with the God of persuasive love is properly understood, in the Christian tradition, as participation in the triune God. To meet God means to be summoned to enter more deeply into the interweaving of loving relationships which is God’s own life. To talk of God as Trinity is not to make a picture of God that can be painted on canvas, etched in glass or sculpted in stone, or even visualized in the mind. God can never be the object of thought or analysis like other objects in the world. When the word ‘God’ has been used in this article, it stands not for a superior divine being but for the triune God, and the function of this language is not to describe God but to enable participation in God.

Here it is essential to realize that when the church fathers spoke about ‘persons’ in God (hypostases) they meant distinct realities that can only be understood in their relation to each other. Augustine went further, and suggested that the ‘person’ of the Father was a relation (de Trinitate 5.6), and Aquinas later maintained that relations in God ‘subsisted’, that they were as ‘substantial’ as anything else we can say about God (Summa Theologiae 1a.29.4). To these tentative explorations into understanding ‘person’ in God as no more and no less than a relationship we can add the insights of Karl Barth that ‘with regard to the being of God, the word ‘event’ or ‘act’ is final’ (Barth 1936–1977: 263 [vol. II/1]), and that God is ‘the one who loves in freedom’ (1936–1977: 301, 307 [vol. II/1]). It follows, building on these insights, that to speak of God as three persons is not to visualize three subjects but to witness to the experience of being drawn into an event – into relations of love that are greater and more inexhaustible than our own. These relations have a ‘pattern’ which is not an example of love to be imitated and reduplicated in the world but a rhythm, a movement of love, in which we participate and which shape our own life. God persuades us by embracing us in ‘acts’ of love.

In praying to the Father, people find that their words are fitting into a movement of relationship that is already there before them, like that of a conversation between a son and a father; so, as the apostle Paul says, we offer our ‘yes’ to God through the ‘Amen’ which Christ speaks as the faithful Son to the Father (2 Cor 1:20–21). There is a movement of loving response into which people can lean and by which they are influenced. In giving themselves away to others, persons find themselves leaning upon a different movement – that of a self-giving and mission that is far deeper than their own. ‘As the Father has sent me’, Jesus tells his disciples, ‘so I am sending you’ (John 20:21). So Christians share in the ‘sending’ of the Son by a Father who ‘so loved the world that he gave his son’ (John 3:16; Moltmann 1977: 53–56). The ancient doctrine of ‘eternal generation’ expresses the conviction that this is an eternal movement of mission (missio means sending). At the centre of these movements is the cross of Jesus, and in suffering persons find themselves supported by a movement of suffering love which is more terrible than their own. Since what is being talked about are movements of mutual giving and receiving of love, in a God who cannot be compared with anything in the world, there will be found a need to refer to these relations with female metaphors of ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ as well as accustomed male images of ‘father’ and ‘son’. This diversity of gender also gives full scope to people’s actual experience of being immersed into, and influenced by, these patterns of love.

Understanding the atonement as persuasive love thus can only be seen as truly objective, as well as subjective, when it is placed in the context of a doctrine of the triune God. It is not a free-standing idea but connects with other doctrines. It is just as inseparable from a doctrine of creation. In creating a reality other than God’s self, God with humility ‘makes room’ within God’s interweaving relations of love for created persons to dwell (cf. Moltmann 1981: 111–114). As Karl Barth insists, Christians cannot discern behind the intention of God to make a covenant of love with created beings; they cannot envisage any other kind of God than the one that God has freely willed to be (Barth 1936–1977: II/2, 6). The very language of Trinity assumes a relation with creation, as God ‘sends out’ the Son for the purpose of creating and then redeeming a creation that has slipped from the purposes of God (Rahner 1975: 21–24). It is a pure abstraction to attempt to think of a self-enclosed Trinity of love, as if God could be satisfied with God’s own inner relations, without exercising an outward-going love. Correspondingly, the movements of love in God cannot be known except through relations with others in the world, whether human others or other created beings and things. God’s relations of love are always deeper, richer, and more persistent than those of human persons, but they can only be experienced through human relations, since all beings dwell in God.

Creation and redemption are thus intertwined: redemption is a new creation. The very process of creation is one of persuasive love, as God lures all created things towards goals that will make for the flourishing of life. Even though all creation (not just the known universe) participates in God, this does not mean that everything participates in the same way. Beings can refuse or resist the persuasion of God’s love and yet still be held within God. As Hans Urs von Balthasar has suggested, the only place that someone can say ‘no’ to God is within the ‘yes’ of the Son to the Father, and God feels the pain of this rejection (Balthasar 1994: 329). This is nothing other than the suffering of the cross. Redemption consists in learning to say ‘yes’ with Christ, and so being drawn deeper into communion.

2.4 Love and the Spirit

Abelard, like the apostle Paul, found that he needed the language of ‘Spirit’ in order to express the generation of human love by the love revealed in the cross of Christ – to be, it could be said, truly objective. Yet he found it difficult to explain how this love was ‘poured out’ as Spirit from the historic event of the death of Christ (Fiddes 1989: 153–155). He even at times simply views the work of the Spirit as preparing the human mind to receive the revelation of God’s love in Christ (Expositio in Hexaemeron, Abelard 1885: 770d–771a).

How love, Spirit, and crucifixion belong together becomes more comprehensible from the perspective of participation in the pattern of love in God, at the centre of which is the experience of the cross. The ‘bonding’ of love in God cannot be confined to the Spirit; not even Augustine thought that, despite calling the Spirit the ‘mutual love’ and ‘communion’ of the Father and the Son (de Trinitate 5.12, 27–29). If encounter with God is understood as participation in the rhythm of relationships within God, then each of these distinct relationships must be creating ‘communion’ (koinonia). Yet experience of God does lead Christians to associate ‘fellowship’ in a particular way with the person of the Spirit; the Spirit, for example, prays within believers ‘with groans that cannot be articulated’ (Rom 8:14–16). The Spirit is that movement in love in God that is always ‘opening up’ relations to a greater depth and to a new future (cf. Jenson 1997: 158). Whether these are relations in God or in created beings, the Spirit is the disturber and the awakener. This is the Spirit that the gospel writers describe as resting upon Jesus and bestowed by Jesus on his disciples (Mark 1:10; John 20:22). Moreover, there is a dimension of human participation in God that is not satisfied by talk of a father-son (or ‘mother-daughter’) relationship. Another metaphor – a ‘breathing’, like the gentle movement of air in our bodies or the strong wind blowing outside us – is needed to evoke those depths of personal experience which are more to do with moods, intuitions, non-verbal communication, and empathy.

All human language about God is analogy, corresponding to the truth and yet falling short of it. But images taken from everyday human relations can conceptualize human experience of God’s activity. Using traditional images of atonement which are read through the lens of persuasive love, believers can conceptualize their experience of being enabled to love, and therefore to sacrifice, to repent, and to win victories over hostile forces. Yet in all these processes there remains something mysterious, something to do with the depth of personality for which only the range of impressionistic images which the scriptural writers supply for the Spirit will suffice – a breeze blowing gently, a gale uprooting everything in its path, a breath stirring, oil trickling, fire warming and fire burning, water refreshing and water in which one is totally immersed, wings beating and wings brooding (e.g. Gen 1:2, 2:7; Isa 4:4, 40:7, 44:3, 61:1; Ezek 37:9; Luke 1:35, 3:22; Acts 2:2–3; 1 Cor 12:13).

2.5 The pattern of love in Christ

The word ‘pattern’ can be adapted from Bernard of Clairvaux’s use of it (meaning a mere example) when it is understood to mean a network of relations within God, an interweaving of movements of love in which human persons participate. An understanding of atonement as persuasive love, however, also needs a Christology which accords with this vision of the triune God. It was, after all, the ‘pattern of life’ of Christ to which Bernard was referring.

Traditionally, a Christology in which Christ is said to have two natures – divine and human – in one person has been invoked in order to support doctrines of atonement in which God remains immune from suffering. In theories that are over-objective at the expense of subjectivity, Christ as a whole person, divine and human, identified with the Son or Logos of God, performs some kind of transaction involving suffering death. Typically this involves Christ being a propitiatory sacrifice, a victim of Satan who turns the tables and becomes a victor, or the one who endures a penalty for sin in place of humanity. But in these theories it is in his human nature that the divine Son suffers, not in his divine nature which remains impassible. By contrast, a view of atonement as persuasive love depends for its objective force on the unlimited involvement of God in suffering. There is, then, no need for a two-nature Christology to shield God from vulnerability. The language of ‘two natures’ in the Chalcedonian formula is an accommodation to philosophical concepts of the time, and it may be argued that it would be better to focus on the repeated Chalcedonian doxological assertion of the person of Christ as ‘one and the same Son’ (Stevenson 1973: 337).

This is essentially the proposal of Wolfhart Pannenberg, who affirms that the human son, Jesus, shows that he is the ‘same’ as the eternal Son through his human characteristics of dedication to the will of God, his self-sacrifice for God, and openness to the world and the future. Pannenberg proposes that in the ‘function of his message’, and the activity related to the message, Jesus relates to God the Father in such a complete way that he is ‘indirectly’ one with the eternal Son of God within the Trinity (Pannenberg 1968: 334–335). This community of activity with the Father is also a union of being since, Pannenberg avers with reference to Hegel, ‘the truth of personality is to win it through this submerging, being submerged in the other’ so that ‘personal community is essential community’ (1968: 336). Further, the particular sonship of Jesus is the fulfilment of all human personality, since all human beings can become sons and daughters of God through Jesus (1968: 337). In less skilled hands than Pannenberg’s, this approach might lapse into the error of affirming ‘two sons’ loosely joined together, which was typical of the heresy known as ‘Nestorianism’ (though not of Nestorius himself). To avoid this peril, and to follow up the idea of a ‘pattern of love’, it would be better to think of ‘one sonship’, or one movement of love which is like the relation of a son to a father, in both the life of Jesus and the rhythm of the Trinity.

It is through the particular human sonship of Jesus of Nazareth, expressed in his words, actions, and suffering, that human persons are drawn more deeply into the communion of God’s being. The relationships in which Jesus lived were perfectly one with the dynamic of God’s relations of love in a way that human relationships are not and never will be. The church fathers spoke of the Son as homo-ousios (one in being) with the Father. Playing on these words, John Hick declares that he was homo-agape (one in love) with God, with a numerical identity of love and not simply a generic sameness (Hick 1977: 156–159, 164). Taking this affirmation in a direction that Hick does not, one can say that the Christian claim is that the human ‘movement’ of the life of Jesus fits more exactly into the movements in God than all other finite lives, but that all life shares to some extent in this same dynamic.

All the speech of Christ, all the ways he saw the world, and all his acts fit exactly into the movement in the Trinity that is recognized as being like a son relating to a father. The relation of the human person Christ to the one whom he calls his heavenly father can be mapped exactly onto the relation in God which is like that between a son (or daughter) and a father (or mother). His accepting love for those whom respectable society rejected, his prayer of loving trust, saying ‘abba, Father’, his hearing of a father’s speech to him at the baptism and transfiguration, saying ‘this is my beloved son’, and his cry of love-in-desolation, ‘my God why have you forsaken me?’, all of these fit into the pre-existing movements of the Trinity which are like speech, suffering, and generous love. The sonship of this human son is the same as a divine sonship, or a relation like that between a son and a father. Because the pattern of Jesus’ life and death exactly corresponds to the rhythm of love in God, after the resurrection of Jesus the human son Jesus of Nazareth cannot be separated from the son-like (or daughter-like) movement of relation in God; one cannot be thought of or experienced without the other.

This explains why the pattern of love in the life and death of Christ has a persuasive contemporary force which is more than a subjective arousing of emotion. Through his resurrection from the dead, this pattern of Jesus is now inseparable from the rhythms of the triune God which embrace and influence human persons; the infinite movements of divine love which are the persuasive force in creation are for ever marked by the love manifested in the ministry and cross of Jesus in time and history. As persons encounter and participate in God, they are thus shaped by the pattern of love which was embodied in Jesus of Nazareth. This Christology is not merely functional, concerned only with how Jesus acts and not how he was, but is for eternity. As Pannenberg insists, a communion of activity with God is also a communion of being; a person who is exactly one with the acts of God ‘belongs inseparably to the essence of God’ (Pannenberg 1968: 336).

Christians confess that, by a mystery of the desire and grace of God (theologically it may be called ‘election’), the pattern of Christ’s human life fits more exactly than any other into the relational movements of the triune life; thus, communion with Christ opens up the way for all created beings to participate in God. But this is therefore an inclusive uniqueness. When it is recognized, similar patterns can be seen in all other bodily life. Wherever in the world people give themselves to others or sacrifice themselves for others, these actions will also match the movement in God which is like a son going forth on mission in response to the generosity of a father. Further, wherever there is the movement of a measure of music, or of a stroke of a brush, or of a blow of a chisel, or an arrangement of words in poetry which echo God’s glory, the maker and the audience find they are sharing in an outflow of expressive love from a source of infinite creativity. Since all these actions share in the patterns of love in God, the body of Christ can be discerned in them. All become vehicles of the persuasive love of God which creates response in the human personality and so achieves healing in the lives of human beings who have drifted from the love of God – bringing reconciliation between themselves and God, and reconciliation with each other.