Christus Victor
Ben Myers is currently blogging his way through Barth's Church Dogmatics in what promises to be an interesintg an informative series. I'm set to follow suit by slowly blogging my way through Gustav Aulen's classic work on the atonement Christus Victor. Together with Richard, I've blogged a fair bit on the atonement in the last year or so, particularly on the ever-controversial doctrine of penal substitution, which has once again been the subject of much discussion recently following the controversy over Steve Chalke's book The Lost Message of Jesus. Christus Victor remains a classic work of historical theology and in under 200 pages manages to cover the entire history of the Christian doctrine of the atonement.
One for your Christmas stocking
Over the next few weeks and months I want to trace the history and development of the Christian idea of atonement as outlined in Christus Victor it several bitesize chunks. Aulen spends little time looking at biblical teaching on the atonement, largely because he notes that all the different models of the atonement have made an appeal to scripture. In any case, the Bible itself does not directly address the complex issues or answer the systematic questions in the way that we might like it to. Anyway, without further ado, here's chapter 1...
The problem and its answers
The early church did not have a highly developed doctrine of the atonement, and as we can see from the earliest creeds and writings of the earliest Christians, the major doctrinal issues of the first few centuries of the church were concerned more with the person of Christ and the doctrine of the trinity. In fact it was not until Anselm developed his satisfaction theory in Cur Deus Homo? over 1000 years later that the first complex theory of the atonement developed. Anselm saw the atonement as primarily being deliverance from guilt and a debt of obedience, although these ideas of course did not originate with Anselm:
"Needless to say, it is not implied that Anselm's teaching was wholly original. The stones lay ready to hand; but it was he who erected them into a monumental building." (p18)
The problem, Aulen notes, is that Protestant Orthodoxy has continued to assume Anselm's model (wih minor variations) right through the medieval period, through the Reformation, and as a result it is now asumed that the church has always held to this model. However, the model of the atonement held for the first 1000 years of the church's history did not resemble Anselm's doctrine as closely as one might think.
Anselm's descendants are now found in those who advocate a more 'objective' model of the atonement (where the atonement is concerned mainly with effecting God), whereas the offspring of Anselm's contemporary Abelard are found among supporters of more 'subjective' models of the atonement (where the emphasis of Christ's work is seen as being on affecting a change in humanity), however the 'classic' idea of the atonement to which the early church held is not really adequately expressed by either the objective or subjective approaches to the atonement:
"Its central theme is the idea of the Atonement as a divine conflict and victory; Christ - Christus Victor - fights against and triumphs over the evil powers of the world, the 'tyrants' under which mankind is in bondage and suffering, and in Him God reconciles the world to Himself [...] God is pictured as in Christ carrying through a victorious conflict against powers of evil which are hostile to his will." (p20)
Thus Aulen labels the classic idea of the atonement as 'dramatic' as opposed to the 'objective' and subjective' models of atonement which developed later. In contrast to the objective model of the atonement, the dramatic view constitutes a continuous workof God from start to finish, whereas the on objective view (with which we are perhaps more familiar) the atonement originates with the will of God but is completed in action by Christ's offering of himself to God on behalf of man.
It is also fairly clear that the dramatic view is greatly different to the subjective view of the atonement. It is not concerned primarily with effecting mankind but with altering the state of the whole cosmos, as God is seen to reignand triumph over all the dark powers that have enslaved his creation. For the first 1000 years (ish) of the church it was this dramatic or 'classical' view of the atonement that dominated the church's thinking, although its place of prominence was gradually eroded in favour of the Anselmic 'latin' model of objective atonement.
Why has the classic idea of the atonement been neglected?
Aulen notes that the classic idea of the atonement has largely been forgotten (in the west at least) due mainly to theological developments in the 18th and 19th centuries. Protestant Orthodoxy came under attack, and with it the objective view of the atonement. Theologians such as Schleiermacher promoted a more subjective understanding of the atonement. Those who attacked the Anselmic view of the atonement did not really distinguish it from the classic dramatic view.
The confusion was perhaps understandable. Both the objective and classical models use terms like 'substitution' and 'sacrifice', or they employ legal metaphors and imagery that sound Latin, but although the terms may be similar, they actually mean very different things when the two models are set side by side.
Both the conservatives (who preferred the objective model) and the liberals (who leaned towards a subjective approach) equally disregarded the classical view. The conservatives disliked it because it had never reached a satisfactory formulation, whereas the liberals disliked it as they considered the language that talked of Christ's triumph over the powers as too mythological and other-worldy to be of any real value. More significantly, the liberals rejected a dualistic idea of a radical split between good and evil and so were less likely to welcome a model of the atonement that saw Christ's work as part of a conflict between the two. Aulen is equally critical of both the conservatives and the liberals of the 19th century for not having looked sufficiently at the historical understanding of the atonement prior to Anselm.
If the history of dogma is studied close enough it will become clear, says Aulen, that the Latin theory (to which most of us are no doubt accustomed) is more of a sidetrack in the development of the atonement theory and that the classical model of atonement is the one most strongly attested to by the New Testament and the Fathers, before being reawakened by Luther in the 1500s. It is then Luther, and not Anselm, who is in continuity with early church teaching. Of course if one wishes to appeal to the early church to make one's case, then to the early church one must go, and to this end the next installment will look at the doctrine of atonement in Irenaeus.
