Gustav Aulén and Christus Victor
Gustav Aulén and Christus Victor
It is particularly Gustav Aulén, the Swedish theologian, who through his influential book Christus Victor (1930) reminded the church of this neglected truth. The book’s original Swedish title means something like ‘The Christian Concept of Atonement’, but Christus Victor captures his emphasis better. His thesis, in a study which is more historical than apologetic, is that the traditional reconstruction of two main atonement theories is mistaken, namely the ‘objective’ or ‘legal’ view (Christ’s death reconciling the Father), associated with Anselm, and the ‘subjective’ or ‘moral’ view (Christ’s death inspiring and transforming us), associated with Abelard. For there is a third view which Aulén calls both ‘dramatic’ and ‘classic’. It is ‘dramatic’ because it sees the atonement as a cosmic drama in which God in Christ does battle with the powers of evil and gains the victory over them. It is ‘classic’ because, he claims, it was ‘the ruling idea of the Atonement for the first thousand years of Christian history’ (pp.22–23).
So Aulén was at pains to demonstrate that this concept of the atonement as a victory over sin, death and the devil was the dominant view of the New Testament; that it was held by all the Greek Fathers from Irenaeus at the end of the second century to John of Damascus at the beginning of the eighth, and is therefore held by Eastern Orthodox churches today; that the leading Western Fathers believed it too (though often side by side with the ‘objective’ view), including Ambrose and Augustine, and Popes Leo the Great and Gregory the Great; that it was lost by medieval Catholic scholasticism; that Luther recovered it; but that subsequent Protestant scholasticism lost it again and reverted to the Anselmian notion of satisfaction.
Aulén is, therefore, very critical of Anselm’s ‘satisfaction’ doctrine, which he calls ‘Latin’ and ‘juridical’. He dismisses it a little contemptuously as ‘really a sidetrack in the history of Christian dogma’ (p.31), in fact a deviation. His critique of Anselm is not altogether fair, however. He rightly underlines the truth that in the ‘classic’ view ‘the work of atonement is regarded as carried through by God himself’, that ‘he himself is the effective agent in the redemptive work, from beginning to end’ (p.50), and that indeed ‘the Atonement is, above all, a movement of God to man, not in the first place a movement of man to God’ (p.176). But he is unjust to represent Anselm’s view of Christ’s death as contradicting this, namely as ‘an offering made to God by Christ as man’ (p.22), ‘as it were from below’ (p.50), or ‘a human work of satisfaction accomplished by Christ’ (p.104). For, as we saw in chapter 5, Anselm emphasized clearly that, although man ought to make satisfaction for sin, he cannot, for they are his sins for which satisfaction has to be made. Indeed, only God himself can, and therefore does, through Christ. In spite of what Aulén writes, Anselm’s teaching is that, through the work of the unique God-man Christ Jesus, it is not only man who made satisfaction; it is God himself who was both the satisfier and the satisfied.
Nevertheless, Gustav Aulén was right to draw the church’s attention to the cross as victory, and to show that by his death Jesus saved us not only from sin and guilt, but from death and the devil, in fact all evil powers, as well. His thesis was relevant too in a century torn apart by two World Wars and in a European culture aware of demonic forces. He was also correct in pointing out that ‘the note of triumph’, which ‘sounds like a trumpet-call through the teaching of the early church’ (p.59), was largely absent from the cool logic of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo?. Luther, on the other hand, struck this note again. His hymns and catechisms reverberate with joy that God has rescued us from that ‘monster’ or ‘tyrant’ the devil, who previously held us in the captivity of sin, law, curse and death.
Another just criticism of Aulén’s thesis is that he made too sharp a contrast between the ‘satisfaction’ and the ‘victory’ motifs, as if they are mutually incompatible alternatives. But the New Testament does not oblige us to choose between them, for it includes them both. Thus, God took the initiative and won the victory through Christ, but one of the tyrants from whom he liberated us was the very guilt which, according to Anselm, he died to atone for. An admirable attempt to combine the two concepts was made by the nineteenth-century Scottish commentator John Eadie:
Our redemption is a work at once of price and of power – of expiation and of conquest. On the cross was the purchase made, and on the cross was the victory gained. The blood which wipes out the sentence against us was there shed, and the death which was the death-blow of Satan’s kingdom was there endured.3
In fact all three of the major explanations of the death of Christ contain biblical truth and can to some extent be harmonized, especially if we observe that the chief difference between them is that in each God’s work in Christ is directed towards a different person. In the ‘objective’ view God satisfies himself, in the ‘subjective’ he inspires us, and in the ‘classic’ he overcomes the devil. Thus Jesus Christ is successively the Saviour, the Teacher and the Victor, because we ourselves are guilty, apathetic and in bondage. P. T. Forsyth drew attention to this in the last chapter of his book The Work of Christ which he entitled ‘The Threefold Cord’. He refers to the ‘satisfactionary’, ‘regenerative’ and ‘triumphant’ aspects of the work of Christ, and suggests that they are intertwined in 1 Corinthians 1:30, where Christ is made unto us ‘justification, sanctification and redemption’ (pp.199–200). And although ‘some souls...will gravitate to the great Deliverance, some to the great Atonement, and some to the great Regeneration’ (p.233), yet all are part of the Saviour’s total accomplishment, ‘the destruction of evil, the satisfaction of God, and the sanctification of men’ (p.202).
As we concentrate now on the theme of ‘conquest’, it may be helpful if we look first at the historic victory of Christ at the cross, and then at the victory of his people, which his victory has made possible.