Moral Influence Theory of the Atonement

It is easier to understand the moral influence account if it is read first as an objection and only then as a proposal, because that is the order in which Abelard states it.

The objection is a question about the character of God. If God is willing to forgive, Abelard asks, what stands in the way? To say that God cannot forgive until an innocent man has been killed is to say that the death of the innocent is what makes God gracious, and Abelard held that this makes matters worse rather than better. He puts the point sharply: it seems cruel and unjust that anyone should demand the blood of an innocent person as a price, or be pleased by the killing of one who was guiltless.

That objection is not answered by pointing out that Christ consented, because the question is about what the arrangement says of the one who required it. Nor is it disposed of by observing that Abelard had another theory to sell, since the objection would stand even if he had none.

The proposal follows from it. If the obstacle is not in God, it is in us. The cross is then God's act of displaying a love that goes to the furthest point, and its effect is that those who see it are drawn out of fear into love and freed to live differently. Abelard describes the result as a person bound to God by love so that they do all things out of love rather than out of dread of punishment.

Two features of this deserve emphasis because they are easily lost. Abelard does not say that God is unaffected by sin, and he does not drop the language of redemption. What he denies is that anything had to be paid to anyone before God could forgive, which is a narrower claim than the one his critics usually attribute to him.

The standing objection is that on this account the cross is a demonstration and nothing more, and that a demonstration does not require a crucifixion. If the change happens entirely in the observer, a critic argues, then what is being observed could in principle have been anything sufficiently moving, and the actual death does no work that a lesser sign could not have done.

A second objection follows from the first. If nothing is accomplished outside the person who responds, then those who do not respond are in exactly the position they were in before, and the atonement turns out to be an occasion rather than an act. Critics call this subjectivism and hold that it makes salvation depend on the quality of a human reaction.

A third objection is historical and concerns whether the theory has been read fairly. Abelard's defenders argue that the exemplarist reading was fixed by his opponents and has been repeated ever since without being checked against the commentary, that he retained redemption language, and that the excursus on Romans is a short passage in a long work and was never offered as a complete system.

The defence, when it is made positively rather than as a correction of the record, runs like this. Every account of the atonement has to say something about how a past event reaches a present person, and the transactional models are weakest at exactly that point, since they explain what was done and leave the application to a separate doctrine. Moral influence starts where the others end. Its advocates hold that this is not a weakness but a different order of explanation, and that a theory which changes nobody has not explained the atonement either.

The atlas records that the objection is serious, that the reply is serious, and that no account of the atonement has ever been defined by a council, so neither side is arguing from a settled position.