Atonement

• Some scholars argue that the main way of viewing the Atonement from the earliest Christians to the medieval era was as a 'victory' of God over the devil and the forces of death and darkness.
• Associated with 'victory' is the theme of ransom; the souls of humanity were held by the Devil and a price needed to be paid for our release (Mark 10:45).
• Gregory the Great (b 540CE) developed the idea that the devil had acquired the rights over fallen humanity and that the only way he could lose those rights was if he were to exceed his authority.
• Jesus acted as a baited hook: the Devil thought he had control over Jesus as he did over all humanity; however, Jesus was sinless, and in killing Jesus, the Devil forfeited his power over human souls.
• The 20th C theologian Gustav Aulén saw the Christus victor approach having appeal in the context of the two World Wars in terms of the darker sides of human nature they revealed and the need for spiritual liberation.
• Some rejected Gregory’s view as it implied (i) God was not omnipotent and (ii) the world did not ultimately belong to God, but to the devil.
• Anselm set out his substitutionary theory of the atonement in his book Cur Deus Homo (‘Why Did God Become Man?’).
• The main theme of this approach is the righteousness of God which requires human obedience.
• Sin breaks a righteous state and the only way it can be restored is if satisfaction can be made for sin.
• The notion of ‘satisfaction’ can be understood as ‘restitution’ as was reflected in the laws of his time and the penitential system of the Church.
• Only God has the ability to make satisfaction, and so comes to earth in the form of Jesus.
• Jesus lives the obedient life that humans could not and then is punished with humanity’s sin on the cross.
• This theory involves an ‘economic’ approach (sins need to be paid for) and a legal approach (God’s righteous laws need to be kept).
• Belief in supernatural intervention was abandoned in favour of naturalistic explanations in the enlightenment; some focussed on Peter Abelard’s view (not an enlightenment thinker) of the cross as a sign of God’s love.
• These thinkers rejected the notion of inherited sin, belief in the Devil and a savage God that required the sacrifice of his son.
• Instead, Jesus was approached as an enlightened human being who set a superior moral example.
• Those who felt inadequate, judged and threatened by Jesus’ good example had him murdered out of greed and envy.
• Jesus faced his persecution with composure, compassion, integrity and fidelity to his message and beliefs.
• In this view, the cross – and how Jesus faced it – becomes an inspiration for us to stay true to our moral compass.