Christ was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification. So says St Paul in the fourth

chapter to the Romans, verse 25. The verse has a sense of poetry, of balance, of the parallelism that

characterizes the poetry of the Bible. Christ was put to death for our sins, and raised for our

justification. In this poetically balanced word, Paul recognizes God’s work of salvation both in

Christ’s death and in his resurrection, and so does St Thomas Aquinas. In his commentary on

Romans, Aquinas notes how, just before this, Paul has been teaching that we are justified – made just

in the sight of God and deserving of heaven - by faith, justified by faith, faith in the God who raises

the dead, and Aquinas says Paul wants to show us the reason why faith brings about our justification:

why is it that faith in the God who raises the dead transforms us from being unjust in God’s sight to

being just in his sight?

Aquinas’s contemplative thirst for knowledge of our faith always takes us into the search for

reasons, for causes: what is it that makes this faith able to justify us? The answer is of course Christ:

he is the one who causes our justification through faith and all that goes with it. But Aquinas sees

Paul as doing more than identifying Christ as the cause of faith justifying us. Rather Paul is focusing

on two events that pertain to Christ, his death and resurrection, and Aquinas sees Paul as picking out

these two key events for a reason. It is these two mysteries of Jesus Christ that explain the power of

faith, because through the one event our trespasses or sins are dealt with, and through the other we

can walk in newness of life, as Paul puts it elsewhere in Romans: it is through the resurrection that

we live the life of the justified, live in Christ. These two events, Christ’s being put to death, and his

rising to new life, make living faith possible, one by taking away our sin, and the other granting us

newness of life.

But of course, being the kind of preacher and teacher he is, Aquinas wants to penetrate these

mysteries further, pondering them by asking what it is about Christ’s death and resurrection that

connects the one with the forgiveness of our trespasses and the other with our justification. Of course,

we might think, Paul might instead have said that Christ was handed over to death for our

justification, rather than for the forgiveness of our sins. After all, Paul does connect justification with

Christ’s death elsewhere in Romans. I remember being puzzled by this verse as a student and wanting

to ignore it, rather wishing it wasn’t there, because I found it easier to connect our justification with

Christ’s death. And again in John’s Gospel we see the risen Christ breathing on the disciples and

giving them the power to forgive sins, and surely this would make us want to connect the forgiveness

of sin with Christ precisely as risen, and say that Christ rose again to bring us forgiveness of our

trespasses, rather than our justification. Aquinas does not deny that all these are even more deeply

linked than Paul is saying in this one verse. After all, elsewhere Aquinas even defines the process of

justification as ‘the forgiveness of sins’, according to the end-point of this process. So forgiveness

and justification are not two totally separate things. In fact, everything is linked to everything else in

Christianity, and part of the pondering of its mysteries is to grasp the interconnections between them,

and this means a whole web of crisscrossing interconnections for our minds rather than one simple

chain where one thing only connects immediately to one other thing. What we perhaps have in this

one verse from Paul is a focusing on some simple links which are only some very important simple

links in a wonderfully complex web. So, with Aquinas, we can surely take Paul to have spoken as he

did on this occasion deliberately, as well as poetically, that Christ died for our sins and rose for our

justification. But why speak in this way?

For Aquinas this saying is all about cause and effect, one of those philosophical issues –

causation – that helps us appreciate the teachings of the Scriptures, and in this case appreciate the

poetry of Romans 4:25. So, for Aquinas, Paul seems to be saying that Christ’s being handed over to

death brought about – or caused – the forgiveness of sins, and that Christ’s rising from the dead

brought about – or caused - our justification. And one of the principles of causation that is very dear

to Aquinas is that effects somehow imitate their causes, effects are always, in some respect, like their

causes. And so this is what he looks for first in the case of Christ’s death and our forgiveness, and

what his pondering eye falls on is this: extinction, going out of existence. When Christ died, mortal

life was extinguished in him – he was no longer alive, humanly speaking, but dead, since body and

soul were now separated: his mortal life was extinguished, was no more. And when our sins are

forgiven, they too are extinguished: their guilt is remitted and they are no more. Aquinas sees this

likeness of extinction as linking cause and effect in Paul’s linking of Christ’s death and our

forgiveness: the extinction of Christ’s life brought about, caused, the extinction of our sins, and this is

why Paul can say simply that Christ died for our trespasses. Likewise, when life is returned to Christ

at the resurrection, it is not his old mortal life that comes to him, but the glorious life of the

resurrection. What comes to him, in short, is a new life. And when we are justified, a new life is also

given to us, in this case the new life of righteousness by which we walk in newness of life,

transformed from the state of sinner to the state of the justified, set on the journey to heaven. So, just

as we had the likeness of extinction in the case of Christ’s death and our forgiveness, so now we have

the likeness of newness in the case of Christ’s resurrection and our justification. And this explains

why Paul makes the links he does here of Christ’s death to our forgiveness, and his resurrection to

our justification. And in teasing out the meaning of Paul’s simple but poetic linking of death and

resurrection to forgiveness and justification, respectively, Aquinas has deployed the resource of hard

philosophical thinking about causes and effects, and he did so not to reduce the poetry of Scripture to

rational concepts, as if that were what theology is about, but to enhance the mind’s wonder at Paul’s

poetry and the heart’s adhesion to the truth that lies within it.

Aquinas also makes some further comments in his commentary which are helpful hints for

exploring in a more disciplined way how Christ’s death and resurrection make distinctive

contributions to our salvation. With the help of his more systematic works, like the Summa

Theologiae, I aim to follow Aquinas in exploring how these mysteries help us make our return to God

along the path of faith to eternal life in heaven. The first comment is about merit. Aquinas says that it

is plain that Christ was put to death for our trespasses from the fact that he merited the forgiveness of

our sins. We’ll come back to what this means. However, Aquinas says, the resurrection did not merit

the forgiveness of our sins. Now I’ve already said that there has to be some connection between the

resurrection and the forgiveness of our sins. But here Aquinas tells us what the connection is not:

Christ’s resurrection does not merit our forgiveness, while his death does. And this gives one reason

why Paul doesn’t say in Romans 4:25 that Christ rose for our forgiveness: his resurrection didn’t

merit it. But this also shows us something important about Aquinas’s overall understanding of

salvation. In this life we are pilgrims on a journey to our heavenly homeland. By his grace, which

comes to us through Christ, God makes us deserving of heaven as a reward, by setting up a kind of

proportion between the grace of charity we receive in this life and its heavenly reward. So in this life

of pilgrimage, we are made able to merit heaven, while heaven is not a place where we continue to

merit some further reward, because we will then have all our reward. To some extent Christ too was a

pilgrim on earth – you only have to think of his mortal body to grasp that – he was not born with a

resurrection body, but was born on pilgrimage to his complete glorification. And so when he died,

Jesus merited his resurrection. We can see this intimated by Paul, when he said that Christ humbled

himself all the way to death on a cross, and therefore God highly exalted him. So when Christ was

raised from the dead, he was fully in the state of a reward, and no longer in a state to merit any more.

Everything indeed that he could have merited, he had already merited in this life up to the point of his

death. So there is a divide here between what Christ’s death could contribute to our salvation, and

what his resurrection could contribute. Only his death could merit our forgiveness, and indeed did

merit it, and while his resurrection does contribute to our salvation, it does not contribute by way of

meriting: the resurrection already belongs to the state of reward, not to the state of merit. Before

going on to speak about what the resurrection does contribute, which I shall do at the conclusion of

this talk, I’ll first say something more about Christ’s death and how it contributes uniquely to our

salvation.

That Christ’s death is the kind of thing that does merit is clear from Christ’s teaching in the

Beatitudes: Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’s sake, theirs is the kingdom of

heaven. For Aquinas, an act that merits always has to be free, and so he has to puzzle out how Christ

died freely when God commanded his passion and other people were the ones who put him to death.

Again, for Aquinas, it’s all about puzzling over causes and effects, and things can cause effects, he

says, in two ways, either directly or indirectly. Christ’s persecutors killed him directly, but Christ was

responsible indirectly, because he had the divine power to prevent his passion and death, but he

willed not to use it. In this way his death was voluntary, and so could be meritorious. And while it is

true that God commanded him to suffer, this very command presupposed that Christ was free, and

that his obedience was undertaken in perfect meritorious freedom. Moreover, the fact that Christ did

and suffered all this out of supreme charity confirms the meritorious character of his passion and

death, which wins the reward not only of his own resurrection but of our salvation, our forgiveness.

And yet there has to be something more to say about Christ’s passion than that it was

meritorious of our salvation. And the reason for this is that there was so much that was meritorious in

Christ’s life, as has already been intimated in today’s conference. Jesus’ whole life was marked by

his perfect freedom and was motivated by that supreme charity with which his soul was blessed from

the very beginning of his human life. According to Aquinas, all of Christ’s life was enveloped in this

meritorious love. However, we Christians do suppose that there is a difference between Christ’s

passion and death and the preceding mysteries of his life, and that Christ achieved the forgiveness of

our sins through his passion and death in a way that he did not through all the preceding actions of his

life. There is something special about the cross and what it achieves. However, we cannot suppose

that Christ’s freedom to merit or his inner charity was somehow greater or more powerful on the

cross. No, he loved us with the same inner intensity throughout his whole life, and does so with the

same inner intensity even now. He does not love God and us more now in heaven than he did on the

cross, and he did not love with greater intensity on the cross than he did in the cradle or in his

Mother’s womb. The difference lies not in the inner reality of Christ’s soul, but in the nature of the

work done in freely laying down his life for us. There was something about this giving up of his life

which was suited for the forgiveness of sins, which no other work done by Christ, whatever its own

value, possessed. Aquinas’s task is to try to say what that different thing was, that marked off Christ’s

passion and death from all the events and mysteries that had comprised his life to that time.

For Aquinas, the different thing about Christ’s passion and death was that they dealt with

certain obstacles that stood in the way of our being saved, such as our sin and the debt of punishment

arising from it and all else that goes with this, the power of the devil over us, our enmity towards

God, and our exclusion from the path to heaven. While Christ merited our salvation right from the

beginning of his human life, these obstacles, if they remained, would still stop us from benefitting

from his merits. What Christ’s passion and death did was to remove these obstacles, so that we could

benefit from his merits. The question, for Aquinas, was what it was about Christ’s suffering and

death that fitted them to remove these obstacles in a way that all that went before in Christ’s life was

not so fitted. In other words: how did Christ’s passion uniquely save us?

When I first began studying theology, it seemed to be assumed that there was one thing about

the cross that made it saving of us, one thing that the cross did in order to bring us the forgiveness of

sins, or whatever salvation was. Theologians were seen as proffering many different theories as to

what this one thing was, and all of them falling short. Some theologians thought Christ’s death was a

satisfaction made to God, others that it was a sacrifice which fulfilled all the sacrifices that had gone

before, others that it was the payment of a ransom that redeemed us from the devil’s captivity, or the

example of supreme love that stirred up love in us, or whatever it might be. But all these competing

theories had been struggling to express that one thing that the cross achieved, the one thing there was

about Christ’s passion and death that made it salvific or saving.

But with Aquinas and many of his contemporaries there is something truly liberating about

the fact that he doesn’t think there is one thing the cross does to save us. For Aquinas, Christ’s

passion has many effects which contribute to our salvation, and this is bound up with the fact that he

doesn’t think there is just one thing wrong with us from which we need saving. Rather, we humans

are complex creatures, and there is a lot to go wrong with a complex creature, and so there is much

and not just one thing that Christ puts right. And so there are many things about the cross which make

it saving of us, and not just one. There is no contradiction in the cross being a satisfaction, and also

being a sacrifice, and also being a redemption. Christ’s passion and death are all of these, and we’ll

now look at them now one by one.

Aquinas takes satisfaction first in the Summa. It is based on something with which we are all

familiar, that if we do something wrong or offend someone we need to make up for it somehow. The

penitential system in the early Church and the practice of confession has made Christians familiar

with the truth that, because our sins are offences against God, we need to make satisfaction for our

sins, which we undertake in penances, something which can have value only insofar as they depend

on the cross of Christ. In the few centuries before Aquinas, theologians developed the idea that Christ

himself, in giving up his life, had made satisfaction for the sins of the whole world, such that our

penances would be participations in his great act of satisfaction. Aquinas sees Christ offering to God

out of love and obedience not as something merely equal to what could be demanded in recompense

for the sins of all the world, but as offering something of greater value. This greater value he explains

not only by the greatness of the charity out of which Jesus suffered, but also the dignity of the life

that he laid down, the human life of one who was God as well as man, and Aquinas judges even the

dignity of Christ’s physical flesh to be an infinite dignity, because it is the flesh of a divine person.

Finally, Aquinas adds the great extent of Christ’s suffering, including both the physical and the

psychological. In psychological terms, Aquinas is thinking not only of weariness and natural fear, but

of the great grief and sorrow that came to Christ not only at his own suffering and impending death,

but his grieving over the sins of the whole world. In physical terms, Aquinas sees the pain of the

wounds and scourgings as extreme since Christ’s body was most perfectly formed, including the

sense of touch on which pain is based – since there was no male sperm involved in the formation of

Christ’s body but rather the power of the Holy Spirit, any defects in body that may have come from

the action of human sperm were excluded, and Christ’s body was perfectly sensitive to touch and

thus to suffering. Going beyond this, the extent of Christ’s sufferings was also underlined by the fact

that he suffered at the hands of friends as well as enemies, and all classes of people, and he suffered

in reputation when he was insulted, and suffered the loss of his clothes of which he was stripped, and

so on. The result of all this – Christ’s love, the dignity of the life that he laid down, and the extent of

his suffering - is that Christ’s passion was not only sufficient to satisfy for the sins of the whole

world, but was a superabundant satisfaction: the sins of the world, and of any other worlds God might

create, cannot match up, as it were, to the dignity and value of what Christ has done and suffered.

Now of course in all this Christ was not satisfying for himself, because he had committed no

sin. Rather he was satisfying for us. Aquinas allows that Christ can satisfy on our behalf because,

drawing on Paul’s notion of the Body of Christ, he says that together we make up a single mystical

body, where one member can come to the assistance of another member. Aquinas thinks of an

individual committing a sin with their feet but making compensation for it through the industry of

their hands. It seems to be a commonsense notion that we can often help each other out to make

satisfaction, especially where the one who makes satisfaction and the one who needs to make

satisfaction are closely related in some way: I might make recompense on behalf of my sibling or

child, if they are unable to make it. Likewise in the Mystical Body of Christ the Head can make

satisfaction for the members. Aquinas points out that this shows how Christ’s dying is particularly

fitting, because he has submitted to the same penalty which was rightly deserved by his members, the

penalty of death, and it is in general fitting, where one makes satisfaction for another, to submit

oneself to the penalty they deserve. As the effect of this satisfaction, the members are also likened to

the Head, especially through the sacraments, buried with him in baptism, undertaking penance

themselves, and so forth. And so, with sin taken away, we are no longer God’s enemies, and we are

reconciled to God.

Identifying Christ’s passion in terms of satisfaction is not Aquinas’s only way of explaining

its operation. The notion of satisfaction does not exclude Christ’s death working by way of sacrifice.

For Aquinas, a sacrifice is an act performed for God’s honour, that is, the honour properly due to him

as God, in order that we might be acceptable to God. Aquinas recognizes that Scripture and the

Fathers present Jesus’ suffering and death as sacrificial. Of course Aquinas does not see those who

put Christ to death as offering sacrifice: rather they were committing a crime. But from Christ’s point

of view it was the offering of himself as a sacrificial victim, because he voluntarily suffered it out of

love. Aquinas concludes that Christ’s offering of himself by enduring the Passion, coming as it did

from the maximum of charity, was maximally acceptable to God. His sacrifice was a sacrifice of

peace that reconciled us sinners to God by making us acceptable to him, and Aquinas explains our

reconciliation with God just as much by appeal to the notion of Christ’s death as a sacrifice as by

appeal to his death as a satisfaction.

But not only does Aquinas see Christ’s passion as working by way of satisfaction and by way

of sacrifice: he also sees it as redemption, in other words, the payment of a ransom to free those in

captivity or slavery. The Bible is of course full of talk of God as our Redeemer, and Aquinas takes

this title to apply in a special way to the Son of God made man, who gave himself up as a ransom for

many. As 1 Peter has it, Christ redeemed us by his precious blood. Now there were some theologians

who had wanted to say that either Christ’s death worked by satisfaction or it worked by way of

redemption, that is, by a ransom payed by Christ to the devil who held humanity captive. Aquinas

didn’t see satisfaction and redemption as alternatives, but he didn’t agree that Christ paid his ransom

to the devil. He approaches the question of redemption by building on what he has already

established about satisfaction, from which we already have some sense of Christ’s death as a

payment, satisfaction being a kind of payment made in compensation for an offence committed. By

sin humanity had contracted the debt of a penalty owed to God, and Aquinas says this a sort of

captivity, just as anyone who contracts a debt is no longer free in the sense of being completely their

own master. But, as we have already seen, Christ’s satisfaction frees us from this debt, and this is one

way in which Christ redeems us, here by a payment of recompense made to God made with his life of

infinite dignity, with his precious blood. Our debt of punishment is abolished by Christ’s

superabundant payment, and because the sin on which this this debt rested is now forgiven.

So there is another sense in which human beings are captive and in need of redemption, and

here Aquinas builds further onto the notion of payment by satisfaction. Not only did humanity

contract its debt to divine justice, but it also contracted a slavery to sin itself. Jesus himself said in

John 8:34 that everyone who sins is a slave to sin, and Aquinas takes this very seriously. He argues

that because it was the devil who induced humanity into sin in the Garden of Eden, sinful humanity

was delivered into servitude to the devil. Although humanity never ceased to belong to God, since we

are always subject to his power, we ceased to belong to God in respect of charity: that union of love

no longer existed, and in place of it human beings had become obligated to the devil, just as they

were always obligated to God. Against those who thought that the devil had thereby obtained some

kind of legitimate rights over humanity, so that the devil needed to be paid in justice for the

redemption of sinners, Aquinas held that the devil had acted unjustly and so had no such rights, and

could demand no such price paid to him, and got no such price. However, although the devil had

acted unjustly, it was quite just of God, Aquinas thought, to punish humanity for its sin by affirming

its servitude to the devil. However, the devil overstepped the boundaries set on him by God, when he

conspired in bringing about Christ’s death, because Christ, being sinless, did not deserve to die. And

when Christ made satisfaction by freely accepting death, he paid a kind of price to God that paid off

both our debts, our debt of punishment to God, which we have already spoken about, and also our

obligation of servitude to the devil, which God had ordained. So Christ’s death is like a precious

payment that frees us both from our obligation to make satisfaction to God and releases us from

servitude to sin and the devil. With our sin forgiven, the devil no longer has power over us.

In all these ways – satisfaction, sacrifice, redemption - we can see something of how Christ’s

suffering and death are fitted for something that all his preceding actions were not: dealing with sin

and its guilt, the debt of punishment, our servitude to the devil, and the other obstacles that stood in

the way of our benefitting from his passion. Because of sin, our way to heaven was barred, and so

Aquinas sees it as the effect of Christ’s passion that sin is no longer there to bar our way, and the gate

of heaven has been opened to us.

Before I return to the notion of causality at work in all this, we should remind ourselves that

Aquinas did not think that God absolutely needed to have Christ suffer and die in order to forgive our

sins. Absolutely speaking, God could have just decreed our sins forgiven, and that would be that. But

Aquinas sees God as going about our forgiveness in a way that was fitting, indeed very fitting, and it

was because of this plan that it was necessary that Christ should suffer and so enter into glory. God’s

choice of the passion as the means of our deliverance from sin also brought with it many other

advantages for us, such as at the same time meriting for us the grace of justification and heavenly

glory, and also because in it we can really see how much God loves us, and this stirs us up to love

him back, and Aquinas reminds us how Jesus said of one woman, Many sins are forgiven her because

she loved much. But there is more: the passion also gives us an example to follow of obedience,

humility, constancy, justice and all the other virtues found there; the price paid makes us all the more

needful of abstaining from sin; it gave us humans some dignity in that it was a human being, one of

us, who defeated the devil who had first overcome us, and so on. I suppose that Aquinas felt it was

difficult to think of another way God could have overcome our sin that had so many other advantages

to it. The fact that Aquinas says that the passion was not absolutely necessary for God to obtain the

end he wanted does not detract from the importance of the way God actually chose, that is, the way

of Christ’s cross, as though it was just as good as any other way. Rather God’s choice of the passion

was a wise choice, which invites us to explore his wisdom, the wisdom of his choice, to explore the

mysteries of Christ’s passion and death as Aquinas explored them, and so come to love him all the

more.

I have said a number of times that it was important for Aquinas to explore the mysteries of

our faith with a notion of causation, refined by philosophy. Many theologians were willing to say that

our salvation was caused by Christ’s passion, and that its effect within us was caused by the

sacraments. But they were not always willing to see this as efficient causality, strictly speaking,

where an agent really does directly cause some effect. Aquinas’s teacher, St Albert the Great, spoke

of Christ causing our salvation as God, while as man he merited our salvation rather than strictly

caused it. But Aquinas comes to take cause in a strict sense, seeing Christ’s passion as an

instrumental cause of our forgiveness. Just as when we as principal causes of some effect use

instruments to cause the effect, so God uses Christ’s passion as an instrumental cause of our

forgiveness. We may use a pen to write, the woodsman may use an act to chop down a tree, but in all

cases like this, the instrument is a real cause of the effect, the pen causing the writing on the page,

and the axe causing the tree to fall. Of course an instrument cannot act unless it receives its impetus

from the principal cause – the pen can’t write on its own and the axe can’t chop down a tree on its

own – and yet its causal power is real. In this way, God uses the suffering and death of Christ as

fitting instruments with which to cause our salvation.

This serious use of the idea of instrumental cause allows us finally to see how the resurrection

also plays a role in our salvation. As we have already seen, Christ’s resurrection does not merit our

salvation, as his passion does, and it does not cause our forgiveness, as his passion does. And yet it is

truly a cause, the cause of the resurrection of our bodies at the end of time, but also of something

now, that is, the resurrection of our souls. Just as we speak of the Fall, so we can speak of our

salvation now as a raising up from the state of sin to the state of the justified, where souls that were

once dead through sin now live with the life of Christ, with gifts that make us share in the divine life

of God himself. For our souls to be made just is for them to be raised up to the union of love with

God that had been lost through the Fall, and this is why we can say that the resurrection is the true

instrumental cause of the resurrection of our souls, just as we can say that Christ’s passion is the true

instrumental cause of our forgiveness. And so, with Aquinas, we can rejoice together with Paul, that

Christ was put to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.