Atonement Theories

A Way through the Maze

Pugh

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781630874209
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

With the subject of the atonement of Christ attracting such a lot of polemical work at this time, it is easy to conclude that the current debate is generating more heat than light. Atonement Theories presents the beginning student, pastor, or researcher with an accessible and fair treatment of every school of thought on this subject. Atonement Theories significantly updates previous histories of the doctrine, providing analysis of some fascinating and highly significant recent developments. It also intriguingly highlights at various points where aspects of this central message of Christianity might find a connection within contemporary culture.This book will empower the reader to quickly gain a working knowledge of current debates and the history behind them.

part one

Christus Victor

The Fathers, from Origen onwards, are known for their crude metaphors of fish-hooks and bait and their ideas about the devil having legal rights and being cheated by God and humankind being ransomed from the devil by the giving of Christ’s life. Hand-in-hand with the ransom-to-Satan theory went the recapitulation theory. Briefly, this was the idea that Christ was the Second Adam, the new Head of humanity. He retraced the steps of Adam, successfully resisting sin and evil in all the ways that Adam failed to, culminating in the ultimate act of obedience: death on a cross. These ways of looking at the cross then fell out of vogue as Anselm’s satisfaction theory, and various responses to it, took center stage from the medieval period onwards. But in the 1930s, the Swedish theologian Gustav Aulèn became enthralled with a view of Christ triumphant over demonic principalities and powers. Ever since his time, we call these patristic ideas the Christus Victor way of seeing the cross. More recently still, the ransom-to-Satan theory has been re-appropriated in differing ways in Word of Faith theology, in feminist theology, and by the emerging church movement. All these new developments are quite surprising and rather fascinating.

The main appeal of this Christus Victor view of Christ triumphant at the cross seems to be the motif of resisting evil, and in particular, the fact that Christ did so in a nonviolent way, not answering violence with violence, but rather disabling it with loving obedience. We have here the picture of a hero who has powerfully overcome humankind’s worst enemies in the best possible way, and bids us all share in the spoils of his victory.

The ransom-to-Satan theory and the recapitulation theory also carry the kudos that comes from being the first ever reasonably well-developed theories of the atonement. This is massively appealing to those who point to the pre-Constantinian church—the church before Christendom—as the place where we should be learning all the lessons we will need as we try to adapt to post-Christendom. In these new contexts the classic ransom-to-Satan idea is never appropriated wholesale, and neither is the recapitulation idea, but in each case these adaptations seem to be all about a desire to move away from passive, defeatist, or austere ways of being human in favor of something more muscular and less individualistic.

This first chapter will look at the ransom-to-Satan theory specifically. It will examine the context in which the ransom-to-Satan theory first arose, and seek to determine why our contemporary context seems once again to be such a ready receptacle for it.

1

The Ransom to Satan

Origins 1: The Context

The ransom-to-Satan theory arose from a profound awareness of evil. Not only were Christians, until 313 CE,1 being systematically persecuted but, as McDonald observes:

The condition of the Gentile world made such notions as bondage and release, captivity and ransom, more tragically familiar. . . . Everywhere economic terror and spiritual fear reigned and intertwined to make human life doubly miserable. Many were enduring bondage and slavery physically, but all were caught up in them spiritually.2

So conscious were the early Christians of the pervasiveness of Satanically inspired evil (see the book of Revelation) that they developed strong dualistic tendencies: God on one side, the devil on the other, and no neutral ground in between. This dualism in turn was fed by the now-thriving gnostic theories that were proving so popular as to almost swamp the church.3 Gnosticism is described aptly by Franks as “like the cuckoo in the sparrow’s nest.”4

Gnosticism, a sprawling aggregate of somewhat extravagant beliefs, is divided into certain distinct groups. Grensted5 claims two types—Valentinian and Marcionite—as the true source of the ransom-to-Satan theory. These types of Gnosticism tended to teach something like this: humankind is under the Demiurge. Some humans have the spark of a heavenly nature, and the goal is to free this spiritual inner self by means of enlightenment (gnosis). The inner self must be released from its bondage to matter. How? The revelation of the Logos from the heavenly world. The Logos, an important Greek philosophical idea, was the very mind of the supreme God, spoken out into the world. He alone could grant enlightenment to truly spiritual people and free them from their false attachment to all things material. But, even those who come from the heavenly world, such as the Logos, must not ignore the power of the Demiurge. The Demiurge was the evil demi-god that created this stultifying, unspiritual thing called matter in the first place. Further solution: the Logos must conform outwardly to material conditions. He must not reveal who he really is—like a king in disguise. Thus, the Demiurge is deceived by this outward conformity by which a totally cosmic Logos takes on the appearance of physical form in order to defeat the Demiurge and free all those that have the inner spark to be able to live a more spiritual existence.

The missing link between these gnostic ideas and the early Christian doctrine of a Ransom to Satan is a very surprising one. It appears that the very person who was one of the most outspoken early critics of Gnosticism actually borrowed quite extensively from their ideas. His name was Irenaeus (130–c.202 CE). Rashdall commented aptly on what was happening here: “Irenaeus simply substituted the devil for the Demiurge.”6 And even before Irenaeus came along, writers such as Justin Martyr were equating Jesus with the Greek Logos. Apart from these two slight changes to the leading characters, the drama remains very similar to the gnostic one. Thus, as the theory developed in Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, Christ is seen to take the form of a frail human delivered into the hands of the devil without the devil fully understanding that he had bitten off more than he could chew. He is deceived by outward appearances. The result is the devil’s defeat and the liberation of Christ’s people.

Franks points to the Marcionite gnostics as the first to use 1 Cor 2:8 (that those who crucified the Lord of glory would not have done so had they known who he was) as a New Testament precedent for the concept that the true God misleads the devil, a passage that would later be quoted very freely in patristic writings in support of the idea that God deceived the devil.7 In fact, all forms of Gnosticism held in common the notion that Christ only seemed to be crucified. Basilides, a significant gnostic leader, has the real Christ standing by laughing while Simon of Cyrene is crucified by mistake due to Christ having engineering a deceptive change in Simon’s appearance.8 So the element of deception, of those crucifying Jesus being misled by appearances, is a prominent gnostic teaching that was, it seems, allowed to flow into the mainstream teaching of the church.9

Origins 2: Emergence

This way of looking at the atonement was soon favored by most of the Fathers, but in varying forms, some more crude than others. Irenaeus, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Christus Victor
• Chapter 1: The Ransom to Satan
• Chapter 2: Recapitulation and Theosis
• Part 2: Objective Theories
• Chapter 3: Satisfaction Guaranteed
• Chapter 4: Luther and Calvin
• Chapter 5: The Nineteenth Century
• Chapter 6: Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Developments
• Part 3: Subjective Theories
• Chapter 7: The Cross as Transformative Revelation
• Chapter 8: “The Spirit Comes from the Cross”
• Part 4: Anthropological Theories
• Chapter 9: The Story of Nonviolent Atonement
• Chapter 10: The Way through the Maze
• Conclusion
• Bibliography