American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Volume 86, Issue 2, Spring 2012

Christ Our Brother
Family Unity in Anselm’s Theory of the Atonement

If Christ, a single member of the human race, can pay the debt of sin for all of us, then there must be some principle uniting all humanity. Some scholars suggest that, in Anselm’s theory of the atonement, the unity in question is similar to that of a corporation or that it derives from our shared participation in human nature. Neither of these proposals can be supported from Anselm’s text. Rather, there is considerable evidence that Anselm held that all the “children of Adam” belong to the same literal, biological family, and it is this which grounds the unity required for the efficacy of Christ’s work. If we understand family to be a natural human institution, the concept of family unity is persuasive.