Episode 141 - What If Atonement Is A Battle Before It Is A Transaction

The cross can feel like a puzzle because we keep demanding one neat explanation, then treating every other biblical theme as a distraction.

We take a different route by turning to the second major “direction” of Jesus’ death: how it faces towards cosmic enemies, and how it wins. Hebrews 2 is our anchor text, because it names something painfully ordinary and deeply spiritual at once: the fear of death. If Christ breaks the power of the one who holds death, then atonement is not only about cancelling debt, it is about liberation from tyranny. 

From there we lean into Gustav Aulén’s *Christus Victor* and his claim that early Christianity often pictured the crucifixion as a decisive battle in a cosmic war. We lay out his “tyrants” one by one: sin as a dominating power, death as the last enemy that devours and corrupts, the devil as a real enslaving force, and even “law” as a condemning demand that offers no escape.

Along the way we ask what this model gets right, what it risks getting wrong, and why it still resonates for people who read the New Testament as a story of deliverance. 

We also explore a major fault line in atonement theology: is God the active subject fighting for us in Christ, or the passive object receiving satisfaction?

Aulén contrasts victory with Anselm’s turn away from devil-focused accounts, and we chew on the paradox that sits at the centre of the gospel narrative: the moment that looks like total defeat becomes the moment of triumph. We end by treating the resurrection as the victory parade that declares the cross successful, then point towards what comes next as we keep digging into how Jesus addresses these cosmic tyrants. 

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The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

Transcript

Why Atonement Has Many Angles

Rev Dr PRB 0:30

Well, welcome to the next episode of Christ-Centered Cosmic Civilization as we're continuing to dig into issues of atonement. And now I want to pivot towards the second of the big aspects of the death of Jesus. We've kind of been looking at how the death of Jesus might face towards humanity and have an impact on humanity. At the end, we're going to circle back to that and try to give a better account of that. And but right now we're going to look at the option of how to what extent does the death of Jesus face towards cosmic enemies? And how does he get victory over cosmic enemies through his death? Again, I just want to flag up again the fact that these aspects, like facing towards humanity, facing towards cosmic enemies, facing towards God, that I find it again so frustrating nowadays how people say you can only select one of these options, and that has to be an exhaustive explanation of the cross. Whereas, of course, what we're constantly wanting to assert is that all of these are in fact in the Bible aspects of the death of Jesus. And there's so many things that are achieved in this death, and we want to embrace all of them. But of course, it what we're trying to do is is there something at the very center of it all? One thing that has a kind of priority. Maybe that's the case. That's what we're we're looking for. But anyway, let's chew on Hebrews 2 verses 14 and 15. And here that we it's a clear examination of the idea that the death of Jesus liberates humanity from a tyranny, at least one tyranny. This is what is said, Hebrews 2, verses 14 to 15. Since the children have flesh and blood, Jesus too shared in their humanity, so that by his death he may 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 the fear of death. And I'll just read on a couple of verses just to get a little bit more of what he accomplishes in his death. For this reason, he had to be might made like them, like human beings, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted. I wanted to read all those verses because you can see there that there are numerous things accomplished through the sufferings and death of Jesus. We wanted to especially notice this idea of breaking the power of the devil, and that is in connection with also the power of death. But also there is this element there, uh there's sin, sin has to be broken there, perhaps, but also this idea of being able to help us when we are tempted, there's also an element of by his death, he does give us an example and is able to resource us. We'll come back to that more later. Now then, in his 1931 landmark work, Christus Victor, the Swedish theologian Gustav Aulan revitalized what he called the classic view of the atonement. And whether this is the classic view, I'm not sure, but what he does do in this book is gives voice to aspects of the death of Jesus, or certainly a vocabulary about the death of Jesus that is important. So Gustav Allen's argument is that for the first say thousand years of Christian history, the work of Christ was understood primarily as a cosmic victory rather than a legal transaction or a moral example. So he's arguing that the second way of the second aspect of the cross facing and addressing cosmic enemies was the primary way of understanding the death of Jesus for the first one thousand years of, and I have to say, in his book, he's really addressing what I call Mediterranean Christianity, so kind of orthodox, Eastern Orthodoxy, and then to a degree earlier Catholic writers. But what he shows is that Christ is the vic is like a champion, a victorious champion, and he does this by shraming the cross not so much as Jesus passively suffering punishments being inflicted on him, but rather Jesus as an active warrior that in some way at the cross he is an active warrior defeating enemies that are too powerful for us to defeat. So it's a the cross then is framed as a decisive battle in a cosmic war, and that we are we were losing that war or completely defeated in that war, but this divine warrior comes out to fight, and the cross is the weapon and the battlefield in which the divine warrior wins the war. Okay, so how is that how does Gustav display this concept of the victorious Christ? Well, first of all, what are the enemies? Christ's death is a triumph over the powers of evil that have defeated humanity or hold humanity in bondage, and he refers to these as the tyrants, these cosmic tyrants. And there are cut there are really four of them. There is sin, sin is understood as a power, a tyrant that alienates humanity from God. This is something we must circle back round to in a future episode. In understanding in what way sin is not only a legal problem, or some would say it's not a legal problem at all, it's not a judicial problem at all, it's not a problem of justice, it's a problem of power. Sin has power over us, and that power must be broken. So that's this first cosmic enemy. Sin is a power, says Gustav Aulan, that alienates humanity from God. Secondly, death is this physical and spiritual enemy, and the Bible does describe death as the last enemy that must be defeated. So it's not merely a just punishment for wrongdoing. There's more to it than that. It's as if the by in the Bible, death is itself a ravenous beast that just keeps eating up humanity, and the power of death is not just that we are mortal, but death has a kind of corrupting power upon humanity, also a power of decay, so death causes or is connected with decay, moral decay, as well as physical decay. And to be dead spiritually dead has to be addressed. So sin, death, also the devil, and the devil is taken seriously in this as a genuine power over an a devilish army, the foot that's the devil and all his forces of evil, unclean spirits, demons, devils, this array of enemies of God, and the devil is like a roaring lion that prowls around to see whom he may devour. And in these in this I this idea that humanity has in making the sinful choices that we have done, Adam and Eve did, were enslaved to the devil and have become owned by him, and he is the god of this world. The Bible even says the devil is like the god of this world, and he is able to blind and enslave and crush humanity. How is he to be defeated? How does the Bible address that? And the idea is that the the cross of Christ is that decisive blow against the devil, and uh and then there's one more kind of cosmic enemy, cosmic tyrant, and here this one's sort of a bit more controversial and complex in that Gustav Aulan has it as the law, meaning here, well, not into not exactly the law of Moses given at Sinai, but more and more a bigger concept of law as in the demand for righteousness and moral perfection and so on, or God's demands of what it is that humans must do and be, but the law demands this without providing a solution. It's like a harsh tyrant that make has high demands and and brutal punishment, but no way out of it. It's and so in this way, and and and now when he's speaking like this, writing like this, it's he's very much as a Lutheran. And if you're familiar with Luther's kind of understanding of law standing over against gospel, and law then in that mentality can be seen. And the Bible, you can see where this comes from with a particular way of understanding law in Paul. Law, we might want to say, well, that's law as as it wrongly understood law, but Gustav Allen is portraying it as the law is like a cosmic tyrant that must be defeated if humanity is to be free. So those are the enemies, the tyrants, and the divine warrior must go out to defeat sin, death, the devil, and the law. And when all these cosmic opponents are destroyed in the death of Jesus, then humanity is free and free to be friends with God, at peace with God. And what prevents that, what prevents reconciliation are these cosmic tyrants. Now, there's another thing, one of the critical points in Christus Victor, this idea, is what Gustav Owland says, like in the in the first thousand years, God is active, is the active champion who fights the battle in Christ to defeat these enemies. So God is the subject of the work going on on the cross. He's the doer of it. He's doing something. God is doing something on the cross, fighting, winning victory. But he says, in after after Anselm, after Anselm, there's a different totally opposite view of Christ on the cross from Anselm onwards, and then strongly strengthened in the Reformation. This uh an idea of Christ is passive on the cross. So this, if you I don't know whether we covered this when we looked at Schleiermacher, but Schleiermacher wrestles with the idea of the active righteousness of Christ and the passive righteousness of Christ. And that in the in this classical Protestant form, is that the life of Jesus is his active righteousness when he is actively doing all that the say the law requires, actively living the righteous life. But then the passive righteousness of Christ that is considered to be his death and sufferings, when now he is passively suffering the punishment that is laid on him. So here he is not active but passive in fulfilling. So the law, the idea is the law makes demands about what how a human should live. Jesus does that in his life, but the law says if you are sinful, you must be punished in the following way, principally death. And so this is kind of the negative side. He's positively fulfilled all that the law requires, but now in his death, he negatively fulfills it. He endures the punishment for sin, and now he's passive. And so here Gustav Arlen makes this point that that it's a huge change of perspective to go from God as the active subject accomplishing something in the cross to this other view where Christ is passive first in punishment, but that the idea is that it's humanity, Christ as a human, is offering up to God his death as satisfaction for the sins of the world. So that in this Christ is passive, and it is God who is the object of the cross. The cross is facing towards God, and God is kind of passive in this, in this eye. This is how we're gonna we we're gonna strongly disagree with what Gustav's saying here in later episodes of the podcast, where we're gonna say, no, God is absolutely active in atonement, but we it his argument is that Christ is passive and God is the object of the cross, and that and and and I think that is what something we are going to argue for: that God is an object of what is done on the cross, as well as being the subject of what is done on the cross. But he Gustav Alin like makes this clear division between the enemies of the cross being what God goes out to fight against actively, to this other model where Anselm does very deliberately pivot away from the devil as being the focus of attention towards God being the focus of attention. That is very deliberate. And that's important there because what the reason Anselm does that is because he says, look, if you have this idea that the devil owns humanity and the ransom must be paid to the devil because he rightly and justly owns humanity and therefore rightly and justly is punishing humanity, he's he Anselm says, No, we cannot give the devil does not have justice on his side, he's entirely associated with injustice, and it is wrong to pay the idea of God is having to pay the devil to set humanity free, and that the devil is entitled to a just payment for humanity. Ansam cannot stomach that. The question of justice is not the devil. It's God who is the one who, you know, how can he be just and the justifier of sinners? We'll come, we might be able to even deal with Anselma as a full episode at some point. But the point being here, though, is Gustav Aureland is noting, and it's a powerful point for us to chew on, the movement from God being the active victor champion to this perception of God being the one who is passively receiving something, and Christ himself being passive on the cross, receiving punishment in order that God would receive, be the object of the cross. So now then, this idea, the paradox of the cross, that Gustav Owlan is big on this, highlighting the dramatic paradox that the moment of apparent defeat is actually the moment of total victory. And in this he is sort of going back to ideas that you do get in the early church fathers, and it's this idea that by submitting to death, Christ lures or tricks even the powers of evil into a trap. And the idea is that these at least two of the tyrants, let's say death and the devil, exert their full power upon Christ. But because in Christ is all the fullness of God in bodily form, there's infinite divine life. Death and the devil cannot hold him. So in trying to swallow Christ, the divine Christ, the author of life, in trying to swallow him, death itself is swallowed up. Or the idea is, and you get it, of course, I in the Lion, the Witch in the Wardrobe, is like when Aslan offers himself to the to the White Witch and says, if you will release, let's say, all humans rather than just that one individual character, but if you release your hold upon the sinner, then you can have me instead. And the white witch agrees to this, and then they they kill Aslan, her and all her forces, and then they think they've won and they're rejoicing and so on and the celebrating. And then, of course, there's a deeper magic that they don't know about. And by this, he Aslan is able to rise from death and is victorious. So in in accepting this, like a it's like they've been tricked, or they're saying, Oh, we can now get rid of Aslan forever. And so death and the devil in this idea. We can get rid of Christ forever. He's the one who holds everything together. The universe is for him and in him, and all of this. And if we get rid of him and kill him off, then that's it. If we can bring him under the power of the curse, then we can get rid of him forever. But it's all a trick and a trap. And when death tries to swallow him, death is he's too big for death to swallow, and death chokes on him and has to let him go and he comes back to life. Or in in making this transaction, the devil thinks he's got the ultimate prisoner, but this prisoner is too powerful for him to hold, and the prisoner just walks free. So that's the idea there. Now, again, we we will probably be thinking, I don't know if the Bible actually sees Christ as tricking death and the devil. There is that verse that says, if the powers of this age realized who he was, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. Yeah, and so out of that suggestive sentence, you could argue that they were tricked into killing him. Tricked into killing him. Because if they'd realized who he was and what he was capable of, or if they'd known about the deeper magic, they wouldn't have done it because that be in because in killing him, they they have been defeated. So there is some truth in this, but Anselm isn't happy with this whole idea of trickery or deception being used to beat the devil. Because he says, look, the devil isn't the big problem. It's not Judgment Day is not about the power of the devil. Judgment Day is about the power of God, and God is the one who we must fear in the end, not the devil. So, but nevertheless, this paradoxical account that it in Augusta's good and of course this is something that I find actually all like all the different accounts of the death of Jesus tend to lie come to this same kind of insight. That there's something about the cross that looks as if it's total defeat, but is actually wonderful victory and triumph and glory. All of the different views seem to agree on that. But he Gustav Allen does a lot on this. I'll give a quote from him. He says, The work of Christ is first and foremost a victory over the powers which hold mankind in bondage, sin, death, and the devil. So it looks like it might be a defeat, but it's actually a victory. So what is the resurrection in this model? Well, the death of it's important to hold the death and the resurrection together, says says Owlon. The death is the battle, and the resurrection is is like a victory parade. The empty tomb proves that the tyrants have lost their sting and that a new age has begun where the powers of evil are dethroned, even if they haven't been completely eliminated yet, but the power has gone, and there's no need to feel to live as slaves of them anymore. So that's the idea. In that, it's kind of is the resurrection accomplishing anything in that? It's a victory parade, it's a declaration that the cross was successful. This is a classic kind of Protestant way of understanding the resurrection, that it doesn't really accomplish anything in itself. What it is is confirmation that the cross was successful. And Gustav Allen has that. Okay, what I've been wanting to do here then is to pivot us towards addressing these tyrants of sin, death, the devil, and possibly the law. To me, I mean, Gustav Allen doesn't list the law in in many of those quotations he gives, but it's there, this idea that the law has to be broken, or you typically like Paul seems to have this equation whereby you have to like we have there's a straight choice between trusting in the law or trusting in Christ, because by the law Christ is a cursed condemned man. He dies hanging on a tree, and cursed is anyone who dies hanging on a tree, rejected by heaven, rejected by earth, a cursed death. So according to the law, Christ is cursed and is got is rightly god forsaken. That is a cursed death. So he the this curse lies upon him according to the law. But God, there's it by the resurrection, he is vindicated, he is declared to be righteous. That's Romans 4 25. He is justified by the resurrection, declared to be righteous. So the law's verdict on on Jesus is set against kind of God's verdict upon Jesus, and then there's a way there that the law then is defeated, its verdict is answered is answered and set aside in a way. Well, from next time, I'm hoping we'll begin to dig more into this idea of the cross of Jesus as addressing these cosmic tyrants.