Models Of The Atonement
Throughout the centuries, Christians have cherished and grappled with this mystery of how His death brought about reconciliation with God. The canonical Gospels devoted such disproportionate attention on events surrounding the final week of Jesus’ life on earth that they are sometimes described as “passion narrative with an extended introduction”. It is as if the action shifts into high-definition, bullet-time motion when the story reaches its climax in the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. But what exactly did Christ accomplish on the cross ofCalvary ? Several frameworks for explaining the atonement have consequently gained
wide acceptance in various historical contexts.
Introduction
Every religion or ideology has its representative symbol. The
lotus flower depicts the emergence of purity from murky waters in Buddhist
thought. The Star of David is a symbol for modern Judaism while the crescent
moon became internationally associated with Islam. Even secular Marxism is
signified by a hammer and sickle to represent industry and agriculture of the proletariat.
At least since the 2nd century A.D., the cross has been used as the
visual emblem for Christianity. For believers, it signifies that the death of
Jesus is central to their faith even though crucifixion was a much-feared form
of capital punishment.
Throughout the centuries, Christians have cherished and grappled with this mystery of how His death brought about reconciliation with God. The canonical Gospels devoted such disproportionate attention on events surrounding the final week of Jesus’ life on earth that they are sometimes described as “passion narrative with an extended introduction”. It is as if the action shifts into high-definition, bullet-time motion when the story reaches its climax in the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. But what exactly did Christ accomplish on the cross of
Models of the Atonement
Surrounded by pagan occults, many early Greek Fathers interpreted
Christ’s death as a ransom paid to Satan to redeem captive humanity from his
clutches. In Mark 10:45 , Jesus said, “For even the Son of Man did not come to be
served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Origen has a popular analogy that likened Satan
to a ferocious fish that swallowed the bait of Christ’s human form and got
caught by the hook of His deity. The forces of hell bit off more than they
could chew when Christ rose victoriously from the grave.
Drawing from these patristic
sources, Gustav Aulen, a Swedish theologian, viewed the cross as Christ’s
public triumph over evil powers in a cosmic battle to unshackle humanity from
bondage. The Christus Victor motif
found biblical support in passages like Hebrews 2:14: “Since the children have
flesh and blood, (Christ) too shared in their humanity so that by his death he
might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— and free those who all their lives
were held in slavery by their fear of death.”
Influenced
by Roman legal codes, early Latin Fathers such as Ambrose construed the cross
as Christ satisfying the requirements of God’s law. They drew support from
Galatians 3:13, which read, “Christ redeemed us from the
curse of the law by becoming a curse for us”.
During the medieval period, the satisfaction
theory of the cross was developed further by Anselm as satisfying God’s honor.
In feudal societies, an overlord whose dignity was offended could either punish
the guilty peasants or forgive them when his honor is satisfied by another.
Although God was dishonored by our rebellion, Anselm believed that we are
forgiven because Christ’s obedient, meritorious death compensated for His
honor.
Peter
Abelard, a younger contemporary of Anselm, reacted strongly against the
prevailing theories and insisted that Christ’s suffering is primarily a display
of how great God’s love is for us. “God demonstrates his own love
for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). His sacrificial death melts away our enmity,
awakens moral change and moves us to seek forgiveness. Some proponents of the moral influence theory also reject any
objective requirement to appease God’s anger. Rather, the sole obstacle to
salvation lies in the subjective resistance of sinners. Consequently, the cross
as an expression of God’s love is required to inspire us to imitate Christ’s
self-giving ethics.
Last but
not least, some influential Church Fathers such as Athanasius in the East and
Augustine in the West (to name just a few) also held that Christ took upon
Himself the deserved penalty of fallen humanity as a sinless substitute in
their place. The penal substitutionary
view was further developed by the Reformers. 1 John 4:8-10 declares, “God is love.
. . . This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his
Son to be the propitiation for our
sins.” In explaining this biblical passage, Calvin wrote that God, at the same
time when he loved us, was also hostile to us because of our transgressions. [1]
Reconciliation was made possible because Christ appeased His holy wrath and
opened the way for our pardon. By doing so, God can be both just and the justifier of the one who has
faith in Jesus (Romans 3:21 -26).
Pierced For Our Transgressions
Although
penal substitutionary atonement has been the predominant theme in evangelical
preaching, some theologians today seem to favor a plurality of atonement
theories. In differing degrees, the various models stress crucial facets of
Christ’s work on the cross that should be recovered. They need not be mutually
exclusive. Indeed, it appears that when we understand the centrality of the cross as
something accomplished primarily in relation to God Himself that its
implications for the cosmos, demonic powers and ethics come into more balanced
perspective.
Let us attempt a synthesis of these themes: The
heart of the cross is, first and foremost, Christ’s vicarious
sin-bearing to take upon Himself the just wrath of God (Isaiah 53). He absorbed
the punishment that we deserved as a substitute so that sinners may be forgiven
while satisfying the righteous
demands of God’s law. However, the moral law ought not to be seen as a higher
abstract entity independent of the Law-giver, but a reflection of God’s own
holy character.
Unless the cross objectively
rescues us, it would be an empty show of sentimentality just like a silly
lovesick boy who declares, "Darling, I will prove my love for you by
jumping off Niagara Falls
And yes, by looking at the cross, we can learn much about Christ’s
obedience even unto death and denying one's will to do the Father's. 2 Peter 2:21 says, “Because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that
you should follow in his steps.” Yet, it is because Christ has rescued
us from moral condemnation that we have the most powerful, liberating
motivation for obedience in life. Otherwise, our moral performance degenerates
into yet another self-salvation project.
Furthermore, a painful death by crucifixion
is not apparently victorious if we conceive it exclusively as cosmic warfare. The demonic powers were stripped of
their condemnatory weapons and made a public spectacle precisely because Christ
forgave our trespasses by nailing our legal debts on the cross (Colossians 2:13 -15).
The first Passover serves as an illuminating
paradigm for connecting the deliverance of God’s people from spiritual bondage
with penal substitutionary atonement. Nine plagues had fallen upon their
Egyptian oppressors while the Israelites were spared in a protracted “power
encounter”. But Pharoah stubbornly refused to let His people go. The stage was
set for the climactic “judgment on all the gods of Egypt 12:12 ). If the tenth plague followed the same pattern as the
preceding ones, it would be a coherent narrative of how divine judgment liberated
humanity from evil powers. But unlike the other plagues, the firstborn of the
Israelites were not automatically
spared when God struck down the firstborn of Egypt 13:11 -16). What a sobering caution against
triumphalism to realize that God’s
people are not merely victims but guilty sinners in need of atoning grace! Similarly, our own liberation from Satan’s accusing
condemnations is secured on the grounds of Christ’s once-for-all atonement as
the Lamb of God (Hebrews 9).
The Divine Conspiracy
In summary, we can make much sense of various biblical themes
of atonement through the lens of Christ's vicarious sacrifice. But in and of
themselves, these motifs are emptied of their power. Unfortunately, this doctrine
of penal substitutionary atonement has recently been described by critics as
'cosmic child abuse', portraying a fierce Father who needs to punish the
innocent Son before He could forgive the guilty. But the objection fails to see
that Jesus is not just a third-party bystander.
He is the Judge Himself receiving the punishment. He is the
incarnate God, eternally one with the Father. The cross is biblically portrayed
as a Trinitarian conspiracy of love where the Father ‘so loved the
world that he gave his only-begotten Son’ (John 3:16 ) and the Son voluntarily accepts the cross as the
supreme expression of His own love: “Greater love has no man than this, that a
man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends.” (John 15:13) That’s
the kind of love that continue to inspire countless choruses of worship devoted
to the Sinless One who
became sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God in Him:
In Christ alone! who took
on flesh
Fulness of God in helpless babe!
This gift of love and righteousness
Scorned by the ones he came to save:
Till on that cross as Jesus died,
The wrath of God was satisfied -
For every sin on Him was laid;
Here in the death of Christ I live.[2]
Fulness of God in helpless babe!
This gift of love and righteousness
Scorned by the ones he came to save:
Till on that cross as Jesus died,
The wrath of God was satisfied -
For every sin on Him was laid;
Here in the death of Christ I live.[2]
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