6. Patristic Theories

In part 2 of this work, we want to survey briefly some of the historically most influential theories of the atonement. We do not pretend to survey adequately the history of the development of this doctrine; comprehensive histories have already been written. Rather our aim is simply to highlight some of the principal theories of the atonement that have been offered throughout church history up until the modern period. An understanding of these various accounts of the atonement will be helpful to us as we seek in part 3 to articulate a philosophically coherent and biblically adequate theory (or theories) of the atonement.

Embroiled as they were in Trinitarian and Christological controversies concerning the person of Christ, the Church Fathers devoted little time to reflection upon what later theologians were to call the work of Christ (e.g., his achieving atonement). The doctrine of the atonement therefore never occasioned the sort of controversy aroused by the Trinity and incarnation, with the result that no ecumenical council ever pronounced on the subject of the atonement, leaving the church without conciliar guidance.

When the Church Fathers did mention the atonement, their comments were brief and for the most part unincisive. Indeed, during this period there was no treatise of any Church Father devoted to the subject of the atonement. The church had to wait until Anselm’s Cur Deus homo? in the eleventh century for a systematic exploration of the atoning significance of Christ’s death. What remarks the Church Fathers did make on the subject of the atonement have to be culled from their biblical commentaries, where brief comments on the death of Christ are made, or from treatises devoted to wider topics like the incarnation, where asides might be made concerning the atonement.

The remarks of the Fathers on the atonement tend to reflect the multiplicity and diversity of the NT motifs concerning the atonement that the Fathers had inherited from the biblical authors. Hence, it would be inappropriate to ascribe to the Church Fathers any unified or developed theory of the atonement. All the NT motifs concerning atonement—sacrifice, substitutionary punishment, ransom, satisfaction, and so on—may be found in their pages.

To illustrate the point, consider the description of Christ’s passion given by Eusebius (260/5–339/40) in his Demonstration of the Gospel:

Echoing Isaiah 53 and Galatians 3:13, Eusebius employs the motifs of sacrifice, vicarious suffering, penal substitution, satisfaction of divine justice, and ransom price.

Eusebius rightly emphasizes Christ as a sacrificial offering to God for sins on the pattern of the OT Levitical animal sacrifices. In chapter 10 of book 1 he explains:

Notice that Eusebius correctly construes the ransom as a sacrifice offered to God for sins. Christ is the sacrifice to end all sacrifices that was symbolized by the animal sacrifices. Eusebius also sees these sacrificial victims as substitutes for those who offer them. Quoting Leviticus 17:11, Eusebius comments that Moses

Eusebius plausibly interprets the hand-laying ritual as indicative of the substitution of the animal for the offerer in its death. In the same way Christ is offered to God as a substitute for us, taking the death we deserve: “The great and precious ransom has been found for Jews and Greeks alike, the propitiation for the whole world, the life given for the life of all men, the pure offering for every stain and sin, the Lamb of God” (1.10). Eusebius even seems to affirm the imputation of our sins to Christ:

Eusebius’ proof texts are, appropriately, Galatians 3:13 and 2 Corinthians 5:21. Christ therefore suffers the punishment for our sins:

Indeed, those foundations are already to be found in Origen (184/5–253/4), one of the most influential and seminal atonement theorists. His statements concerning Christ’s atoning death also involve a rich mélange of motifs, including penal substitution and expiatory sacrifice. Like Eusebius after him, he interprets Christ’s death as a sacrificial offering foreshadowed by the Levitical animal sacrifices. In his Homilies on Numbers he portrays Christ as a sacrificial lamb who not only propitiates God but also purifies mankind of sin (24.1.6–8). For sin is expiated through death, which is the prescribed penalty for sin: “Death which is inflicted as the penalty of sin is a purification of the sin itself for which it was ordered to be inflicted. Therefore, sin is absolved through the penalty of death and nothing remains which the day of judgment . . . will find for this offense” (Homilies on Leviticus 14.4.2). Animal victims, however, could not avail to cleanse mankind from sin; Christ alone “is one ‘lamb’ who was able to take away the sin of the entire world” (Homilies on Numbers 24.1.8). It is Christ’s deity that makes his sacrifice uniquely efficacious for the expiation of the sins of mankind.

Notice that, according to Origen, apart from Christ’s sacrifice the world would have necessarily perished. Origen, indeed, seems to think that the incarnation and sacrifice of Christ were necessary conditions of salvation from sin:

According to this statement, God the Word would have remained in his preincarnate state and would not have become a sacrificial victim had not propitiation for sin been necessary (for salvation).

Notice that Christ’s sacrificial death serves both to expiate sin by discharging the penalty due for sin and to propitiate God by satisfying the demands of divine justice:

At the foundation of Origen’s atonement doctrine lie the demands of divine justice, which prescribed the just desert for sin and which must be satisfied if forgiveness of sin is to be available.

Since the prescribed punishment for sin is death and God’s justice must be satisfied, Christ, like the Servant of Isaiah 53, bears in our place the punishment that was our just desert:

Christ could be punished for our sins because our sins were imputed to him. Origen expressed with shocking boldness the imputation of our sins to Christ. Explaining in his Commentary on the Gospel of John that “darkness is brought upon men by their evil deeds,” Origen denies that 1 John 1:5 “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness” can be truly said of Christ the Savior.

Since our sins are imputed to Christ, there is darkness in Christ after all, despite his deity. Origen quickly adds, “Let no one suppose that we say this from any lack of piety towards the Christ of God; for as the Father alone has immortality and our Lord took upon Himself, for His love to men, the death He died for us, so to the Father alone the words apply, ‘In Him is no darkness,’ since Christ took upon Himself, for His goodwill towards men, our darknesses” (2.21). Our sins imputed to him, Christ bears the punishment that our sins deserve, thereby expiating sin and propitiating God, satisfying divine justice and obtaining for us God’s forgiveness of our sins.

Origen was not alone in affirming the imputation of our sins to Christ and his substitutionary punishment for our sins. No clearer statement is to be found among the Church Fathers of the imputation of sin and substitutionary punishment than that of John Chrysostom (349–407). “For all the outrages which we heaped on Him in return for His benefits, He not only did not punish us, but gave us His Son. He made Him to be sin for us—that is, He allowed Him to be condemned as a sinner and die as one accursed. He made Him to be a sinner and sin, who, far from having committed sin, knew no guile” (Homilies on II Corinthians, homily 11). Christ was punished, then, for our sins: “God was about to punish them, but He forbore to do it. They were about to perish, but in their stead He gave His own Son” (Homilies on I Timothy, homily 7.3). Chrysostom provides this striking illustration: “A king, beholding a robber and malefactor under punishment, gave his well-beloved son, his only-begotten and true, to be slain; and transferred the death and the guilt as well, from him to his son, (who was himself of no such character), that he might both save the condemned man and clear him from his evil reputation” (Homilies on II Corinthians, homily 1). Notice that both the guilt itself and the penalty for it (death) are laid on Christ.

Along with the motif of sacrifice, Origen wants to include the motif of redemption in his doctrine of the atonement. But instead of thinking of redemption in terms of a sacrificial offering, Origen thinks of it as a ransom payment to the enemy who held us captive.

Origen thinks that Christ’s human soul was a ransom payment made to Satan to gain our release:

Origen never integrated these motifs of ransom and sacrifice into a systematic unity. In his commentary on Romans, after speaking of Christ as a ransom payment, Origen does proceed to speak of Christ as not only ransom but sacrifice, saying:

A long, interesting discussion of the mercy seat follows. Origen concludes that Christ is at once “the propitiatory and priest and sacrifice which is offered for the people.” Because “he is a sacrifice, propitiation is effected by the shedding of his own blood for the forgiveness of past sins” (2.8.11). How this fits with Christ as a ransom paid to Satan remains obscure. They appear as two largely independent aspects of Origen’s multifaceted atonement theory.

Underlying Origen’s ransom approach is a view stemming from Irenaeus (d. 202) that Satan had certain legal rights over man in virtue of his sinning that God, as perfectly just, had to respect. Though God could have ripped man from Satan’s clutches by force, says Irenaeus, He freed man instead by rational persuasion, offering Christ in exchange for man.

What Satan did not realize was that Christ, as the second person of the Trinity, could not be held by him. Raising Christ from the dead, God defeated Satan, leaving him without captives. Irenaeus explains:

Gregory of Nyssa (335–395), who followed Origen closely in matters of the atonement, went even further by emphasizing that men had freely sold themselves into slavery to Satan; hence, Satan’s right over man must be respected (Catechetical Oration 22). Still, Satan was a deceiver, and so it was just of God to deceive Satan in return. By his incarnation the Son appeared an attractive hostage in exchange for the human beings under Satan’s sway. Gregory offered a popular illustration of God’s clever deception of Satan: “In order to secure that the ransom in our behalf might be easily accepted by him who required it, the Deity was hidden under the veil of our nature, that so, as with ravenous fish, the hook of the Deity might be gulped down along with the bait of flesh” (24). Only after the captives had been freed did the Son manifest his divine power by rising from the dead, breaking the bonds of death and hell and escaping from Satan’s power.

In expressing Christ’s triumph over the forces of evil, Origen echoes the apostle Paul:

This emphasis on Christ’s achieving victory over sin, death, and the devil has come to be known as the Christus Victor theory of the atonement. Modern scholars have tended to focus on this facet of the Fathers’ teaching, doubtless because of its peculiarity and curiosity. According to this theory the sacrifice of Christ’s life served to deliver mankind from bondage to Satan and from the corruption and death that are the consequences of sin. Sometimes, as in Origen’s case, the Fathers interpreted Jesus’ ransom saying very literally to mean that Christ’s life was a payment to Satan in exchange for human beings.

But not everyone agreed with Origen’s ransom model. A different version of the Christus Victor theory is to be found, especially among the Latin Fathers, according to which Christ was not given as a ransom to Satan but rather was the victim of Satan’s unjust and deadly attack. Often confused with the ransom model, this so-called political model of Christus Victor attributes Satan’s undoing to an overreach of authority on the devil’s part. As on the ransom model, Satan was conceived to have, by God’s permission, right of bondage over sinners. Thinking Christ to be vulnerable human flesh, Satan attacked and killed Christ. But unlike the sinners under Satan’s authority, who deserved the punishments inflicted by him, Christ was entirely guiltless and therefore undeserving of death. Satan had thus acted unjustly in slaying Christ, so that God was justified in liberating those who are united with Christ by faith.

Augustine (354–430) is a paradigmatic proponent of this political version of the Christus Victor theory, which, in Augustine’s hands, integrates, in a way not found in Origen, the motifs of sacrifice and redemption. In his treatise On the Trinity Augustine explains:

We see here the affirmation of the devil’s right over man, in consequence of man’s freely chosen sins. So Augustine emphasizes repeatedly that Christ’s victory over Satan was won not through an exercise of raw power but by righteousness. “It pleased God, that in order to the rescuing of man from the grasp of the devil, the devil should be conquered, not by power, but by righteousness” (13.13.17). To be sure, the devil is also conquered by the power of Christ’s resurrection, but Christ’s conquering through righteousness is first and foremost: “He conquered the devil first by righteousness, and afterwards by power: namely, by righteousness, because He had no sin, and was slain by him most unjustly; but by power, because having been dead He lived again, never afterwards to die” (13.14.18).

This raises the question, “What, then, is the righteousness by which the devil was conquered?” The answer: “What, except the righteousness of Jesus Christ?” (On the Trinity 13.14.18). The further question then arises: “And how was he conquered?” Augustine answers:

The initial answer, more superficial, seems to be that Christ conquered through righteousness in that he, being righteous, was unjustly treated by Satan. But this answer would not suffice to explain how we are freed from our just desert and forgiven of our sins by believing in him. The deeper answer is therefore that “innocent blood was shed for the remission of our sins.”

Here we connect with a second motif in the passage cited above, that Christ was “the one and most real sacrifice offered up for us.” The principalities and powers could justly demand our death as the “penalty” for sin. But Christ’s innocent death was undeserved and could therefore serve as a sacrifice that removes sin and obviates its penalty: “We, indeed, came to death through sin; He through righteousness: and, therefore, as our death is the punishment of sin, so His death was made a sacrifice for sin” (On the Trinity 4.12.15). God’s love is proved in that Christ should, “without any evil desert of His own, bear our evils” (13.10.13).

In his treatise Against Faustus Augustine makes explicit his affirmation of Christ’s being substitutionally punished. He says, “Christ, though guiltless, took our punishment, that He might cancel our guilt, and do away with our punishment” (14.4). He interprets Galatians 3:13 to mean by “curse” the punishment of death that is due for sin:

Augustine says, “The curse is pronounced by divine justice, and it will be well for us if we are redeemed from it. Confess then that Christ died, and you may confess that He bore the curse for us” (14.7). So in On the Trinity Augustine characterizes Christ’s atoning death as “a hidden and exceeding mysterious decree of divine and profound justice” (4.12.15).

It is interesting that Augustine seems to affirm Christ’s penal substitution without imputation of sin to Christ. In Against Faustus he says to his opponent, “Confess that he died, and you may also confess that he, without taking our sin, took its punishment” (14.7). Perhaps he is here speaking ex concessis. But elsewhere he says, “By taking on your punishment, while not taking on your guilt, he canceled both guilt and punishment.” But he seems to be of two minds on the issue, for he qualifies his statement by adding, “and if he did take it on, he took it on in order to cancel it, not to commit it” (Sermons 171.3). Since everyone would agree that Christ did not commit sin, Augustine’s prima facie claim that Christ assumed punishment but not guilt would seem to imply a doctrine of penal substitution without imputation.

As a result of Christ’s sacrificial death, we are delivered from Satan: “If, therefore, the commission of sins through the just anger of God subjected man to the devil, doubtless the remission of sins through the merciful reconciliation of God rescues man from the devil” (On the Trinity 13.12.16). Therefore, “he who even slew Christ for a time by a death which was not due, can as his due detain no one who has put on Christ, in the eternal death which was due” (13.16.20).

Comparing the conquering of Satan by power and by righteousness, Augustine reflects:

Here we find that integration of the motifs of redemption and penal substitution that was wanting in Origen. Christ bore undeservedly the punishment of sin that we deserved, namely, death, so that by his death our sins are remitted. This is how he through righteousness achieves victory over the devil. Augustine muses that God’s power is more greatly manifested by raising Christ from death than by preventing his death; but that is not the reason why God permitted Satan to so afflict Christ. “But the reason is really a different one why we are justified in the blood of Christ, when we are rescued from the power of the devil through the remission of sins: it pertains to this, that the devil is conquered by Christ by righteousness, not by power” (13.14.18). Thus, Augustine wonderfully confesses Christ as “both Victor and Victim, and therefore Victor, because the Victim” (Confessions 10).

Augustine also interacts with an interesting objection to his view. On the one hand, prior to sending the Son, God is wrathful with us and needs to be reconciled to us by the death of His Son; on the other hand, it is through the Father’s love that the Son is sent in the first place. “In the one, the Son dies for us, and the Father is reconciled to us by His death; in the other, as though the Father first loved us, He Himself on our account does not spare the Son, He Himself for us delivers Him up to death” (On the Trinity 13.11.15). How is this paradox to be resolved? Augustine’s answer serves to underline the importance of the satisfaction of divine justice. He explains that the wrath of God “is nothing else but just retribution. For the wrath of God is not, as is that of man, a perturbation of the mind” (13.16.20).

The wrath of God is not hatred but retributive justice. God loves even those who are justly condemned before Him and so sends His Son to redeem them.

One of the most interesting features of the Christus Victor theory espoused by Augustine is his conviction, shared by many Fathers, that Christ’s incarnation and death were not necessary for man’s redemption. God could have liberated mankind by a simple exercise of divine power. Not everyone agreed, however. Origen, as we have seen, seemed to think the satisfaction of God’s justice necessary for man’s redemption and salvation. Gregory of Nyssa connected the necessity of Christ’s passion not to the need to satisfy divine justice but to the need of a ransom offered the devil to purchase the release of his human captives. Gregory discusses at some length the following objection:

Gregory’s response appeals crucially to God’s justice, which required His payment of a ransom to the one who rightly held men in bondage, if they were to be freed:

What ransom would induce Satan to relinquish his captives? The offer of Christ himself:

As Gregory’s final comment makes clear, the redemption of mankind via the passion of Christ exhibits God’s goodness, justice, and wisdom. “His choosing to save man is a testimony of His goodness; His making the redemption of the captive a matter of exchange exhibits His justice, while the invention whereby He enabled the Enemy to apprehend that of which he was before incapable, is a manifestation of supreme wisdom” (23).

In contrast to this necessitarian perspective, Augustine speaks of “the other innumerable ways which He who is omnipotent could have employed to free us” (On the Trinity 13.16.20; cf. 13.10.13). Augustine asserts bluntly, “They are fools who say the wisdom of God could not otherwise free men than by taking human nature, and being born of a woman, and suffering all that he did at the hands of sinners” (On the Christian Struggle 100.11). Given His omnipotence, God could have freed man from Satan’s power directly. But God preferred to conquer Satan not by sheer power alone but by just means that respected Satan’s “rights.” The entire arrangement was freely chosen by God as most fitting. So the defense of Christ’s passion as God’s chosen means of salvation requires one to show “not indeed that no other mode was possible to God, to whose power all things are equally subject, but that there neither was, nor need have been, any other mode more appropriate for curing our misery” (On the Trinity 13.10.13). Augustine believes that no other mode of salvation would more effectively demonstrate how greatly God loves us, thereby giving us hope of immortality beyond our just deserts (13.10.13; cf. 13.14.18).

George Smeaton suggests that because the Church Fathers focused on the consequences of sin, principally death, rather than sin itself, they held that God in His omnipotence could redeem us without atonement. God freely chose to take on human nature in Christ as an appropriate way to deal with human mortality and death. But Christ’s death was not required to satisfy the demands of God’s inherent justice. “They separated God’s free-will from the moral perfections of His nature—rectitude, wisdom, and goodness.” The statement needs to be qualified, however. As we have seen, when concerns of justice did come into play, it was often the devil’s rights that were in the forefront, not the demands of God’s retributive justice. In virtue of the necessity of dealing justly with the devil, Christus Victor theories of the atonement could be just as necessitarian in nature as Anselm’s later satisfaction theory.

The thoughts of the Church Fathers on the subject of Christ’s atonement, sketchy and scattered as they are, exhibit that diversity of motifs found in the NT. The notion that the Fathers were singularly committed to a Christus Victor theory of the atonement is a popular misimpression generated by the secondary literature. A reading of the primary sources makes it clear that they were equally committed to the understanding of Christ’s death as a sacrificial offering to God for human sins. Indeed, according to Joseph Mitros, by the fourth and fifth centuries in both the Latin West and the Greek East, “the sacrificial theory of salvation combined with the idea of penal substitution constituted the main stream of thinking.”

Rarely were these motifs integrated. In Augustine’s poignant slogan Victor quia Victima we find the best expression of a systematic view of these diverse motifs. Christ conquers by his self-giving sacrifice. Augustine’s synthesis illustrates effectively the truth that Christus Victor is not a stand-alone theory but an aspect or facet of a fuller account. Taken alone, Christus Victor not only ignores important NT atonement motifs, but it also fails of explanatory sufficiency, for it offers nothing to explain how God’s vanquishing Satan achieves forgiveness of sin and reconciliation with God.

The Christus Victor theory or motif persisted for about nine hundred years, from Irenaeus and Origen until the time of Anselm. The medieval critique of the view was directed primarily against the notion of Satan’s having rights over man. But it might be questioned whether that feature of the theory is essential. Fallen man’s lying within Satan’s power is certainly a biblical teaching (2 Tim 2:26; 1 John 5:19) and does not depend upon Satan’s having any legitimate right over us. Already in the patristic period, versions of Christus Victor existed that did not center on payment of a ransom to Satan to gain sinners’ release but on God’s vanquishing Satan by means of Christ’s passion, again a biblical teaching that is independent of Satan’s having legitimate rights over fallen human beings (2 Cor 2:8; Col 2:15).

Modern critics, however, generally dismiss any role whatsoever for the devil in one’s atonement theory. Since Satan is in modern thinking a mythological figure, obviously we cannot have been freed from bondage to him. In any case, Christus Victor can still be a valuable facet of an atonement theory even without the devil. For redemption from our bondage to sin, death, and hell does not depend upon the reality of a personal devil. Of course, the modern mind-set may be equally averse to notions of personal immortality and especially hell, but such compromises of biblical teaching can be resisted. Anyone aspiring to articulate a biblically adequate atonement theory will want to include Christus Victor as a facet of that theory.