Which Christ Is the Victor?

The aim of Gustaf Aulen's 1931 book Christus Victor (translating the 1930 Swedish Den Kristna Försoningstanken, or The Christian Idea of the Atonement) was to introduce a new schematization of the debate over the question of how Christ accomplished the Atonement. For a long time, Aulen wrote, two basic views had vied with each other. One was an “Objective Theory” that taught that Christ's death removed a real obstacle between God and Man, thus making it possible for God to grant salvation. The other was a “Subjective Theory”  that held either that Christ's example proves the love of God to Man, eliciting an answering love (Abelard) or that Christ forged the path to true love of God from the human side (Schleiermacher). Aulen proposed a third position. The “Objective Theory,” he argued, was really two theories lumped together, which he dubbed “the Classic Idea” and “the Latin Theory.” Both taught an objective Atonement, but they offered different mechanisms. The “Classic Idea,” discernible in the New Testament and most of the Church Fathers, understood the problem and its solution in dramatic terms. The human race was oppressed by hostile powers: sin, death, and the Devil. Since God loved them, He entered history in the man Jesus and defeated these powers (hence the English title), freeing us from their bondage. The “Latin Theory,” on the other hand, understood things in legal terms. Aulen says it began with legalistic developments in the Western Church's penitential system (he quotes Tertullian and Cyprian as early sources),[i] reached maturity c. 1095 in Anselm's Cur Deus Homo (Why is God a Man?), and came to its most extreme expression in Protestant Scholasticism, although he claims that Luther himself eschewed it in favor of the “Classic Idea.” According to the “Latin Theory,” the problem alienating humanity from God was not the hostile powers, but a debt that Man owed to God, and could not pay. The incarnation solved this problem by providing a man who could pay it, thus making the race acceptable to God. The great success and influence of Aulen's thesis is most apparent in the near-universal use of this tripartite scheme today, and for some time now,[ii] even by those who mean to argue (as I do) that it is a bad division of the subject.

One reason for this popularity is an error that we cannot justly blame on Aulen himself: the desire of much 20th-century theology to get away from the idea of God's wrath, to depict Him simply as Love and simply as Rescuer—not also as the One from whose judgment we needed to be rescued. Aulen does acknowledge the wrath of God as an aspect of the “Classic Idea.” He finds it (ironically but accurately) right in the theme that supporters of both the “Objective Theory” and the “Subjective Theory” have traditionally found most objectionable about the Patristic treatment: the concept of the Devil's rights over the human race, and the idea that God deceived him by hiding His Son in Jesus like an angler hides a hook in a worm, so the Devil would overstep his rights by killing Him. “On the one hand, the devil is an enemy, a beguiler, a usurper; on the other, he has won certain rights over man. . . . The second [idea] shows the limitations of Dualism; for the devil is not a power equal and opposite to God, and in so far as he has power over men, he derives this power ultimately from God, for he stands, as it were, to execute God's own judgment on sinful and guilty man.”[iii] This observation also shows Aulen how to understand Luther's inclusion of God's wrath and Law among the hostile powers overcome by Christ. It is one of the high points of the book (the other being its rejection of “the Subjective Theory”). But those who part company with Aulen where he allows a place for divine wrath have still been able to use his tripartite division as a stick with which to beat “the Latin Theory,” since it claims to cut that doctrine off from almost all of its New-Testament and Patristic roots, assigning them instead to a theory alleged to be contrary.

This division is his fault. Having well-explained how the wrath of God and the Devil's rights can coexist, so that when God overcomes the Devil in the victory of Christ, He is thereby overcoming His own wrath (since the Devil was the executor of that wrath), Aulen is perfectly positioned to recognize how the same thing can be viewed from the other direction: i.e. when God overcomes His own wrath by the sacrifice of Christ, He thereby overcomes the Devil too (because the Devil's power was to execute that wrath). But in a tantalizing passage where he shows how the “Classic Idea” can include even the claim that Christ's death is a sacrifice offered to God to cover mankind's debt, this kind of harmonization is the last thing on Aulen's mind.

It can even at times be said [by the later Fathers] that the ransom is paid to God. But such statements do not mean that a doctrine of the Latin type has displaced the classic idea of the Atonement, for this double-sidedness is essential to the classic idea. Deliverance from the powers of evil, death, and the devil is at the same time deliverance from God's judgment on sin. The same is true of the image of Debt, which is parallel to the image of Ransom, but is much less frequently employed. Athanasius speaks of the Word of God as by the offering up of His body “paying the debt for all by His death,” and that thereby death was “satisfied”; he also connects this thought with the idea of sacrifice, and says that “The Word gave the body which He took, as an oblation, as an undefiled sacrifice in death, and so removed death from all His brethren by His vicarious sacrifice” (On the Incarnation, ch. 9). The debt is regarded as paid primarily to death, but he can also say that a “debt of honour” is paid to God. The alternation of phrase means that it was the judgment of God's righteousness that subjected man to death. Athanasius is in no way forsaking the classic point of view; the payment of the debt is God's own act, carried out by the Logos, while at the same time it is God who receives the payment.[iv]

Now, Athanasius is not “forsaking the classic point of view,” that's clear enough; but he is agreeing with the “Latin Theory,” and this suggests that the two ideas are compatible. Aulen protests that “the payment of the debt is God's own act,” but this is true in the “Latin Theory” too, just as much as in the “Classic Idea,” because the man who offers Himself is also the incarnate Logos [Word] of God. So where is the distinction? Aulen continues to explain:

Least of all is it true to say that we have here anything like a rational theory of the Latin type, according to which satisfaction would be paid to God's justice from man's side, from below. . . . Even when the suffering which Christ endured is treated as the endurance of the punishment which men deserved, this is another instance of the same double aspect. When Christ suffers the punishment involved in God's judgment on sin, this is the accomplishment of God's own work of redemption.[v]

This further attempt to distinguish the positions just confuses them further. If Jesus Christ is God and Man—as He manifestly is both to the Fathers and the Medievals—then when He offers Himself as the sacrifice, is that not at one and the same time God Himself accomplishing redemption from man's side? How can these two halves be pitted against each other?

It seems incredible that such a basic Christological error should be encountered in a learned treatise on, of all subjects, the Fathers of the Church, but it keeps recurring. Every time Aulen's argument veers close to the conclusion that “Christus Victor” and Vicarious Substitution might be two different emphases in the same Biblical-and-Patristic understanding, out comes this strange insistence that the “Classic Idea” pictures redemption as a continuous act of God, and the “Latin Theory” suffers a discontinuity where suddenly it becomes the work of Man.[vi] In chapter 4, Aulen argues that the numerous New Testament passages that call Christ's death a sacrifice cannot be used to support “the satisfaction-theory of the Atonement” because “the essential point is missing, . . . the idea that the Divine justice was to receive adequate satisfaction for man's default, through the payment made by Christ on man's behalf. According to that doctrine, the offering is made to God from man's side, from below; in Paul it is the Divine Love itself that makes the redemption.”[vii] Then a few pages later, he tries to take the Epistle to the Hebrews away from “the Latin Theory” by pointing out that “it regards the sacrifice of Christ both as God's own act of sacrifice and as a sacrifice offered to God,” and then arguing, “This double-sidedness is always alien to the Latin type, which develops the latter aspect and eliminates the former. . . . No earthly sacrifice made by man could effect that which is here effected; only a heavenly, divine, eternal sacrifice.”[viii] But how exactly did the Medievals “eliminate the former” when they expressly confessed the Divinity of Christ? In that same passage, Aulen says “Christ dies, as it were in God's name” (emphasis added). But no; the Fathers he has quoted and the Medievals he is criticizing would both put that quite differently. When Christ died, God died. And when God made the sacrifice, the Man did too; because they are One and the Same Person.

When Aulen addresses Anselm in chapter 5, this argument appears again. “The crucial question is really this: Does Anselm treat the atoning work of Christ as the work of God Himself from start to finish?”[ix] Then he answers, “Anselm does not give up his basic assumption that the required satisfaction must be made by man.”[x] If Christ is acting as a man, Aulen reasons, the atonement must have ceased to be the work of God. “[The Fathers] show how God became incarnate that He might redeem; [Anselm] teaches a human work of satisfaction, accomplished by Christ.”[xi] “God is no longer regarded as at once the agent and the object of the reconciliation, but as partly the agent, as being the author of the plan, and partly the object, when the plan comes to be carried out.”[xii] In other words, when Christ offers the sacrifice, God is not offering it, only receiving it. In the final chapter of the book, Aulen writes, “In the Latin type . . . the satisfaction is offered by Christ as a man. . . . At the same time, the Atonement is still in some sense the work of God, since He is regarded as planning the Atonement,”[xiii] and “[In the Latin type] God is no longer the direct agent in the atoning work.”[xiv] Since the man Christ clearly is “the direct agent,” this logic works only if Christ is not God.

It turns out that Aulen's tripartite scheme depends on a neo-Nestorian Christology at every turn to justify its bifurcation of the “Objective Theory” (which is Biblical, Patristic, Medieval, and classically Protestant) into two opposed camps. This is seen in the quotations given above, and in the way he consistently says (when stating his own position) that God worked redemption in Christ, making Christ the acting subject only when he's describing the “Latin Theory.” It is also suggested by the fact that he takes time to mention the Patristic rejection of the Apollinarian, Monophysite,[xv] and Docetic[xvi] heresies, but never breathes a word about their rejection of Nestorianism, which was in many ways the opposite of those three teachings. There are also two passages where he is more explicit. He sums up “the dominant view of the Atonement” in the Medieval West by saying, “The payment is primarily the work of Christ's human nature, but it gains increased meritorious value on account of the union of human nature with the divine nature in Christ.”[xvii] Note here that the “human nature” is treated as the acting subject, while the divine nature is just in Christ at the same time as the human nature is working. And in the final chapter, Aulen summarizes the Patristic position by saying, “Christ is set forth as the Man in whom God both reveals His essence and carries out His work of deliverance and atonement.”[xviii] God is in Christ again, as in a place, but this time He is working salvation instead of the human nature, and that is what makes the “Classic Idea” different than the “Latin Theory” and superior to it. Aulen is assuming two persons in Christ.

A look at his systematic theology[xix] not only confirms this verdict, but makes it worse. In the course of the book he calls out the three Christological heresies mentioned in Christus Victor and adds four more: Modalism, Monothelitism,[xx] Arianism, and “the so-called Dynamic Monarchianism.”[xxi] Again, Nestorianism is not mentioned; it is instead taught:

In the second place, the significance of Christocentricity is misinterpreted when God and Christ are identified, as occurred in Modalism [and, he does not mention, in the Fathers and the Ecumenical Councils]. . . . It is undeniable that in this case Christocentricity tends to hide and impair the theocentricity of faith. Christ become synonymous with the entire concept of God. . . . It fails to see that the real question is about a revelation of God in the real meaning of the word, and that this revelation takes place in history, in “the despised man, Christ,” as Luther expressed it. As soon as this is realized, it becomes impossible to identify Christ with God, or to conceive of the divine “essence” as synonymous with the man Christ.[xxii]

Later he writes, “The confession of faith in Christ . . . rejects all attempts to identify Christ with God and thus view him as a god visiting this world (theophany),”[xxiii] and “The Formula of Chalcedon . . . declares that Christ is not a divinity wandering around in disguise on earth, but that he is our brother and a man like us.”[xxiv] Of course, what Chalcedon actually declares is that Christ is both, but Aulen claims to divine “the real purpose of the doctrine of the 'two natures'”: namely to state “that it is the divine being himself who meets us in the lowliness of the historical, human person.”[xxv] In again, as in a workshop, one Person in another person.

And that Person is not the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Aulen is not as orthodox as Nestorius was, because he has redefined the Trinity too.

It cannot be denied . . . that this terminology, 'three persons in one Godhead,' endangers the unity of faith in God. . . . We must note carefully that the term person (persona) at the time of the formulation of this doctrine did not possess the fixed and definite significance of independent individuality which it has today. The ancient church understood the word person in such an indefinite and vague sense that it could readily be combined with a most thoroughgoing monotheistic conception which was very firmly held. If we were to explain to the men of the ancient church what we mean by person and personality . . . they would brand us as tritheistic heretics.[xxvi]

Such an introduction, pitting Trinitarianism against Monotheism, is suspicious to say the least, but could perhaps be explained by reference to the Modern assumption that multiple persons must possess multiple wills—an assumption that does not hold for Nicene Orthodoxy. This is not the direction in which Aulen goes, though.

“When the loving will of God became incarnate in Christ,” he writes, “this did not constitute its first appearance.”[xxvii] “The Christian confession of faith in Christ is essentially a confession of faith in the incarnation of divine love, of God, in the man Jesus Christ. . . . This expression ['incarnation'] affirms first and last that the revelation in Christ has reference to God's approach to man and that divine love itself here enters the hostile and finite world. It affirms that the 'essence' of God, or in other words the divine and loving will, 'dwells' in Christ.”[xxviii] This is similar to Dynamic Monarchianism in that Love and Will are dynameis, powers of God, that by dwelling in Christ effect an “incarnation”; but the point on which Aulen criticizes that earlier heresy is its conception of those powers as subordinate to God rather than as His own extension into the world. So Aulen's is a Unitarian rather than a Subordinationist rendition. “The religious intention in the confession of faith in Christ is obscured as soon as something other than God's 'disposition of heart' becomes essential and as soon as the idea of a more or less 'physical' unity of substance appears. . . . God's essence is his loving will, not some obscure 'substance' behind this will.”[xxix] “The divine and loving will becomes fully 'incarnate' when the work is finished.”[xxx] Thus Aulen denies the eternal Personhood of the Son, as well as His Personal Identity with the man Jesus. The only “Son” who personally exists is not divine, but only a man indwelt by Divine Love. So if anything is done from the human side, it is simply a man, and not God, who must be doing it.

On the basis of these denials, then, he repeats the strange accusation we saw at the heart of Christus Victor. In “the classical idea of the atonement, . . . God is reconciled in and through his act of reconciliation. This is one continuous and divine act accomplished through Christ. . . . But [in the scholastic theory of the atonement] at the decisive point in the act of reconciliation, the rendering of satisfaction, the emphasis is placed on the service which Christ qua homo [as man]renders. But the act of God is thereby impaired.”[xxxi] Since this argument is incoherent when placed in an orthodox context, namely one that is faithful to the Fathers for whom Aulen purports to speak, the tripartite division he bases on it also fails. The “Classic Idea” and the “Latin Theory,” rightly understood, are two sides of the same coin, of the one Atonement worked by Jesus Christ, the Man who is also God.

[i]Gustaf Aulen, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1931; Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2003), pp. 80-1.

[ii]In his 1968 foreword to a later edition of Christus Victor, Jaroslav Pelikan notes that already, “in the almost forty years since its appearance in English it has become the starting point for countless essays, articles, and books on the doctrine of the Atonement; and its title has established itself in the theological usage of Swedish, German, and English as a technical term in its own right, so that even those who have not read the book use the phrase.” (New York: Macmillan Pub. Co., 1969), p. xi.

[iii]Aulen, Christus Victor (2003), p. 54.

[iv]Ibid., p. 56.

[v]Ibid., pp. 56-7.

[vi]Ibid. p. 91.

[vii]Ibid., p. 72.

[viii]Ibid., p. 77.

[ix]Ibid., p. 86.

[x]Ibid., pp. 86-7.

[xi]Ibid., p. 88.

[xii]Ibid.

[xiii]Ibid., p. 146.

[xiv]Ibid., p. 152.

[xv]Ibid., p. 60.

[xvi]Ibid., p. 151.

[xvii]Ibid., p. 93.

[xviii]Ibid., pp. 151-2.

[xix]Gustaf Aulen, The Faith of the Christian Church , 4th ed. (Philadelphia: The Muhlenberg Press, 1948).  The 4th edition of the Swedish original was published in 1943.

[xx]Ibid., p. 217.

[xxi]Ibid., p. 216.

[xxii] Ibid., p. 64.

[xxiii]Ibid., p. 210.

[xxiv]Ibid., p. 217.

[xxv]Ibid.

[xxvi]Ibid., p. 256.

[xxvii]Ibid., p. 259.

[xxviii]Ibid., p. 211.

[xxix]Ibid., p. 213.

[xxx]Ibid., p. 221.

[xxxi]Ibid., p. 238.

Eric Phillips has a PhD in Early Christian Studies (Greek & Latin Patristics), and pastors Concordia Lutheran Church in Nashville, TN. He contributes to Just & Sinner as the Weidner Institute Fellow of Historical Theology.