恩典与救赎
文摘
历史
2024-03-04 12:10
英国
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英格兰主教长主教座“圣奥古斯丁之座”
Like the fallen angels, the first human beings willed happiness in preference to justice. By doing so they abandoned the will for justice and became unable to will justice for its own sake. Apart from divine grace, then, fallen human beings cannot help but sin. Anselm claims that we are still free, because we continue to be such that if we had rectitude of will, we could preserve it for its own sake; but we cannot exercise our freedom, since we no longer have the rectitude of will to preserve. (Whether fallen human beings also retain the power for self-initiated action apart from divine grace is a tricky question, and one I do not propose to answer here.)So the restoration of human beings to the justice they were intended to enjoy requires divine grace. But even more is needed than God’s restoration of the will for justice. In Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became A Human Being, or Why the God-Man?) Anselm famously attempts to show on purely rational grounds that the debt incurred by human sin could be suitably discharged, and the affront to God’s infinite dignity could be suitably rectified, only if one who was both fully divine and fully human took it upon himself to offer his own life on our behalf.就像堕落天使一样，第一代人类更愿意追求幸福而不是正义。通过这样做，他们放弃了正义的意志，并且无法为了正义而意志正义。因此，若没有神的恩典，堕落的人类就无法避免犯罪。安瑟姆声称我们仍然是自由的，因为我们仍然如此，如果我们有正直的意志，我们就可以为了它本身而保存它；但我们无法行使我们的自由，因为我们不再拥有需要维护的正直意志。（除了神的恩典之外，堕落的人类是否也保留了自发行动的能力，这是一个棘手的问题，我不打算在这里回答这个问题。）因此，使人类恢复应有的正义需要神圣的恩典。但除了上帝恢复正义意志之外，我们还需要做更多的事情。在《Cur Deus Homo》（为什么上帝成为人类，或者为什么是神人？）中，安瑟伦著名地试图以纯粹理性的理由表明，人类罪孽所造成的债务可以得到适当的免除，而对上帝无限尊严的侮辱也可以得到解决。只有当一个既完全神性又完全人性的人愿意为我们献出自己的生命时，我们才能得到适当的纠正。
