Ever since reading Gustaf Aulén's
Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the
Atonement, I have been studying in an intentional way the nature of the
atonement.
This study has had two tracks. On one track, I went through
the whole Bible reading it just for the purpose of finding its explanation of
the atonement. What problem is the atonement solving? How does the atonement
solve the problem? Specifically, why does substitution work?
Several times the Bible leads right up to the point of a
direct, explicit answer, and then stops short.
The climax of this is in Hebrews.
The best thing I could conclude came in the linkage between Leviticus and
Hebrews, where the sacrifice of Christ works not because of sacrifice or
substitution
per se (which would be only monism, where a principle of
substitution would stand over God and require God to do things in a certain
way), but because it was Christ – the unique Christ
– who was sacrificed: it works because
it was He who
did it.
As part and parcel of this view, sacrifice and substitution also work
only because, firstly, God is triune. The Trinity accounts for the uniqueness of
Christ, and it accounts for the effect on God of the sacrifice of Christ and his
substitution for us in the sacrifice. The search for the theory of the atonement
turned into the search for the identity of God and the identity of Christ;
atonement works because of
the Trinity and the Incarnation.
On the second track, I read from the church's literature on the
atonement. I got a lot of good from some authors such as the several works of
Leon Morris that relate to the atonement. I still recommend Morris and some
others, but in general, I experienced a rising dissatisfaction with the
leadership the theologians were exercising over us lay people concerning the
atonement.
This dissatisfaction reached a climax while reading James Beilby and Paul R. Eddy, eds.,
The Nature of the
Atonement: Four Views (IVP Academic, Downers Grove, IL: 2006). There
are more than four views, but this work selected four of them. It selected an
author to represent each view. Each author contributed a chapter setting forth
one of the views, and the other three authors contributed responses to that
chapter.
This portrayed a church severely divided over an indispensable doctrine, the
atonement. None of the authors succeeded in overcoming the views of the others.
The divisions were not of kinds that could be either resolved or left
satisfactorily to stand as paradox as we do with the Trinity, the Incarnation,
and so on. This is like going to a committee of mechanics who are still arguing
about what torque and drive train are.
Of course, a major part of my problem is that I am not a
theologian and lack the qualifications to be doing this work, most notably, any
facility with Hebrew, Greek, or German. Two years of high school Latin help, but
not that much. Yet, I am pressed into it because, like everybody else, I either
live or die by the atonement. It is a matter of death and life. I am pressed
into it also because I am a husband, father, and grandfather. It is part of the
responsibility of these vocations to confess to my wife, children, and
grandchildren what I believe about the atonement. Weight is there.
I give this background so that, by contrast with it, I can
express to an extent my profound appreciation for the following excerpt from
Albrecht Peters, trans. Thomas H. Trapp,
Commentary on Luther's Catechisms, Creed, pp. 161-62 (Concordia
Publishing House, St. Louis: 2011). Here, Peters shows how Luther viewed two of
the primary theories of the atonement. One of them is called variously the
Latin, Anselmian, objective, payment, merits, or satisfaction theory. The other
is called by Aulén and others the Christus Victor theory or the church's
classical theory, in which Christ by conquest delivers us from tyrants. The
tyrants are sin, death, the Devil, and the fallen world. If Albrecht is right,
Luther, and so far as I know, only Luther, has accomplished something for my
quest. I don't know yet whether this should be called a resolution, a
harmonization, or what, but it looks very much like a solution to my problem.
The reformer thus takes up both constellations of
motifs: on the one hand, Christ as the one who vanquishes all the powers of
destruction and powers of death and, on the other hand, Christ as our substitute
and as our propitiatory offering over against God's holy, judging wrath. Luther
links both aspects in such a way that the hidden emphasis from the Western
Church and the Middle Ages, on the punishing suffering of Christ, persists. The
propitiation of God's wrath remains the center, in terms of content, in the
catechisms as well; at the deepest level, it is God's curse of judgment that
delivers us over to the powers of destruction. These powers stand in a unique
relationship with God; according to the Large Catechism, on the one hand, they
are our "tyrants," caught up in rebellion against God, and yet, on the other
hand, they are the "harsh schoolmasters" that God Himself put in place, which
means that they are the authorities who run the prison; the real prison came
into existence for us when God gave us over under the condemning wrath of His
Law. "Death, sin, hell, all of these come from the wrath of God; they are its
harsh schoolmasters." Even among these ominous allies, Luther intimates that
there is a pecking order; Satan stands at the top; he "clearly is to be
identified as a prince over sin and the prince of death." This is the
specifically theological dimension; to it corresponds an anthropological aspect.
As we are free, in heart and conscience, from the accusation of the Law and from
the wrath of God that thereby brings its onslaught, we are free, as well, with
respect to the battle against the satanic demons; for us, these have been
rendered harmless, because the wrath of God no longer stands behind them.
By means of these insights, Luther deepens and
personifies both the "classical theory of the atonement" of the Christus Victor
model as well as Anselm's teaching about satisfaction. By means of his
hyper-realistic and drastic images of Christ's victory over the dark comrades,
sin, death and the devil, he reaches back into the tradition of the early Church
and the Eastern Church and renews its emphasis on the motif of a battle that
encompasses the entire earth. But because he points out, in, with and under the
onslaughts of the powers of death, how Christ fully suffers the deepest, holy
wrath of judgment from God that hangs over all human guilt, and inserts the Law
at this point as well, into the list of the powers that effect the curse, the
reformer deepens the early Church's confession about Christus Victor by means of
insights that are set forth initially by Paul: precisely by suffering the full
consequences of the divine curse of judgment upon the guilt of human sin, Jesus
Christ overcomes the original power of those that destroy.
Since Luther serves as a forerunner of the modern
existential interpretation of Jesus' sufferings unto death by being struck down
by the Law of God in one's conscience, he frees the Latin teaching and Anselm's
motif of Christ's suffering as punishment, at the same time, from a type of
moralism that is contractual and legal. Finally, in Jesus' cross and
resurrection, the merciful love of God breaks right through God's own holy
judgment. God does battle here with God.
