Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man)

Cur Deus Homo, Why God Became Man, is Anselm of Canterbury's own 1098 treatise and the founding statement of the satisfaction theory of the atonement, arguing that Christ's death satisfies a debt of honor owed to God by human sin. As the primary text it is the correct source for what Anselm himself argued, in the structure and logic he actually used. Its limit is that it records one theologian's own argument, however influential, not a doctrine formally defined by any church council, since no council has ever adopted a single theory of atonement as binding, so a claim treating satisfaction theory as the church's settled position rather than one influential argument among several needs correction against that fact.