History Commons^™

Peter Abelard’S Theology Of Atonement: A Multifaceted Approach And Reevaluation, Denis Kaiser

Faculty Publications

As a person trained primarily in philosophy, Peter Abelard employed an intense questioning mentality in fleshing out his theological ideas. His extreme debating style of totally deconstructing theological positions and then afterward including some of those same aspects into his own views made it easy for his religio-political enemies to take apparently heterodox statements and declare these as representative of Abelard’s entire atonement theology. However, many of his theological beliefs are supported in the New Testament and were already held by the church fathers. He frequently affirmed Christ’s substitutionary sacrifice as the ransom to redeem man. He rejected various contemporary …