Comparison of Two Theories of Atonement with Direct Reference to Primary Texts - Term Paper Example

With Direct Reference to Primary Texts Critically Compare 2 Different Theories of Atonement One of the earliest stories in the Bible is of conflict between man and God. The gulf between God and man brought about by man’s sin is shown by Christ’s words from the cross ‘ My God, my God, why have you deserted me?’ Matthew 27 v 47. Later, in verse 51, Matthew relates how the curtain of the temple was torn in two – a symbol of man regaining his proper place before God. Reconciliation is through Christ. Ephesians 2 v 13 – 15:- In Christ Jesus, you that used to be so far apart from us have been brought very close by the blood of Christ. For he is the peace between us, and has made the two into one and broken down the barrier which used to keep them apart, actually destroying in hi sown person the hostility caused by the rules and decrees of the Law. The story of the fall in Eden is followed almost immediately by conflict between men ( Genesis 3 and 4). A recurring question that runs through the scriptures is ‘How can man and God be reconciled?’ The Bible is also the story of God reaching out to men in love, especially through the life, love, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ .The word Atonement means to unite and comes from mediaeval Latin adunamentum. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as expiation, reparation for a wrong and as the reconciliation of God and man. It is thus closely linked to ideas about salvation, reconciliation and redemption. Despite being such a central theme of the Bible it is one which is difficult to explain, which is why there have been over the centuries many attempts to explain exactly what Atonement means. There follows some of the many ideas on the subject that developed over time. The list is not complete some theologians arguing for 10 or even 12 theories. Substitutionary Atonement – This tells us that Gods displeasure and wrath, directed at us because of our sin, could only be truly satisfied by the death of Jesus and his perfect, sinless sacrifice. This is sometimes known as the Satisfaction Theory Ransom – Our sin means that, despite being created by God we belong to Satan, and through the sacrificial death of Christ God is able to buy us back. Christus Victor - we are dead in our sins, destined for the grave, but Jesus, by his death and resurrection death and resurrection enables us to be spiritually reborn as we are made alive with Christ. The Perfect Penitent. We are all aware that our lives are not perfect and that we all need to repent of things we have done wrong, but however many times we repent we will always sin again .Jesus, the perfect penitent repents in our place and so ensures our forgiveness. Moral Influence. Jesus, by his self giving love, as ultimately expressed by his sacrificial death enables us to love God and others more fully as we give our lives once more to God. Powerful Weakness. By becoming totally vulnerable when he submitted to death for our sakes, Jesus reveals God’s love for his creation as well as showing us the true nature of the Kingdom of God – one of sacrificial love. Embodied betrayal – our sin is a betrayal of God and his love and he reveals this to us in the death of his son on the cross. There are even more theories than this in the literature, none of them perhaps entirely satisfactory. Very few Christians have held entirely to one theory at the expense of the others, and it may be that each of them holds some aspect of the truth. In commentating upon emerging theories of the Atonement the Cambridge History of the Bible ( pages 438 and 9 ) the author describes the theologians of the early church as confused and even embarrassed on the subject. They tried to imply that Christ was in full control of the situation and only ‘seemed’ to thirst, sorrow etc for the sake of others. For the purposes of this essay I shall contrast Powerful Weakness and Christus Victor. The former is outlined in the hymn which Paul includes in Philippians 2 :- His state was divine, yet he did not cling to his equality with God but emptied himself to assume the condition of a slave, and became as man are; and being as all men are, he was humbler yet, even accepting death, death on a cross. The idea of powerful weakness is closely linked with the moral influence theory. Christ is both our representative and our substitute. That is to say that Christ, by his example of deliberately chosen sacrificial powerful weakness, has an influence on those who hear of and follow his example. In 2 Corinthians 12 verses 9 and 10 Paul quotes Christ as having said ‘My grace is enough for you: my power is at its best in weakness.’ and in I Corinthians 1 v 27 ‘ God chose what is foolish by human reckoning.’ Sin is seen as sickness which needs to be healed, Unlike the other main theories it does not assume Christ’ s death was what the Handbook of Christian Belief ( page 327) describes as an objective atonement i.e. it does not assume that through the death of Christ is the only way in which God and man can be reconciled. The idea was emphasized by Abelard in the 12th century and Anselm, just before him. Anselm seems to have seen the atonement almost as a business transaction in his Curs Deos Homo of about 1097. Their ideas about the atonement remove the devil from the question.they are sometimes referred to as the Satisfaction Doctrine. George McDonald, in ‘Unspoken Sermons’ said : Christ died to save us, not from suffering, but from ourselves; not from injustice, but from being unjust. He died that we might live – but live as he lives, by dying as he died who died to himself that he might live unto God. In Matthew 5 v 17 Jesus said ‘Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law of the prophets. I have come not to abolish them, but to complete them’ This gave the idea that Christ suffered in order to fulfill the demands of the law and justice. We need to be reconciled to God and put in a right relationship to him, but the law has to be satisfied. This theory means that those who follow Christ are freed by his suffering from the tyranny of sin. We may no longer keep the Jewish laws, but we must seek to keep the spirit of them by following the example of Christ, by emptying ourselves and allowing the Spirit to fill us. Leo the Great, in the 5th century, said in a Whitsuntide sermon:- By the devil’s malice death entered into the world and captive humanity could not otherwise be set free without His undertaking our cause, Who without loss of His majesty should both become true Man, and alone have no taint of sin A study of Philippians shows us that Paul used the example of the earthly life and death of Christ as a means of encouraging Christians to follow his example of sacrificial living in their daily lives: Philippians 2 v 5 ‘In your minds you must be the same as Christ Jesus.’ Yet however hard man tries even the best of men is unable to meet the perfection of Christ. In Judaism blood sacrifices were meant pay for sin, as in Ezekiel 45 v 15 ‘You are to levy one sheep on every flock…….this is to form your atonement’ , but even in the Old Testament we have Isaiah saying in chapter 43 v 2 ‘Do not be afraid, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by your name , you are mine.’ and Psalm 31 v 5 ‘Into your hands I commit my spirit, you have redeemed me Yahweh.’ both of which link back to the ransom theory. In John 10 v 11 we have Christ’s own words on the subject,’ I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd is one who lays down his life for the sheep’. Christus Victor - the term comes from the 1931 book by Gustaf Aulén in which he discusses various theories of the atonement. It is one that Lutherans like, so much so that there are a number of Lutheran churches called ‘Christus Victor’It is almost indistinguishable from the ransom theory, one of the earlist ideas on the subject, which claims that Adam and Eve , God’s creation, by their sin, sold us to the devil and that the just God must therefore buy us back. One version of this theory, described by Professor J.Denny Weaver in his article ‘Violence in Christian Theology gives us a picture of the conflict between Satan and God as a battle. In this war, Gods son was killed, but by his resurrection the victory is God’s over the forces of evil in the universe. This victory is acknowledged by Paul in I Corinthians 15 v 55- 57:- Death is swallowed up in victory. Death, where is your victory? Death, where is the sting? Now the sting of death is sin and sin gets its power from the law. So let us thank God for giving us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. A possible objection to this idea is that it places man in the position of being the victim of sin, rather than accepting that he is a sinner. Yet we are told in Romans 3 v 23 that all have sinned – a statement balanced by one in Romans 6 v 23, ‘The wage paid by sin is death; the present given by God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.’. A slightly different version of this theory is also outlined by Weaver i.e. the devil held the souls of men captive. God handed Jesus over to Satan as a payment, a ransom, in order to ensure the release of captive souls. The devil killed Jesus and was apparently victorious. He is deceived, however for in raising Jesus from the dead, God triumphed over the devil, and the souls of humanity were free once more. It is victory through the act of resurrection that gives the theory the name Christus Victor, a theory still in favour in the Orthodox church, but an ancient one also endorsed by early church fathers such as Ambrose, Gregory the Great and Augustine. It has the weakness of not actually expalining just ho w Christ won this universal victory.The theory can be summed up as claiming that Christ came , lived and died primarily to set the world free from its captivity to the devil and so set people free from the power of sin in the universe. Philippians 2 v 10 ‘All beings in the heavens, on earth and in the underworld should bend the knee at the name of Jesus.’ In his writings it is clear that Paul sees the victory as not just over cosmic powers, but over the law, death and sin, e.g Colossians 2 v 14 and 15:- He has overridden the Law, and cancelled every record of the debt we had to pay; he has done away with it by nailing it to the cross; and so he got rid of the Sovereignties and Powers. The Ransom theory is based upon Mark 10 v 45 ‘For the Son of Man did not come to be served , but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many’, and upon I Timothy 2 v 4-6 God our Saviour, he wants everyone to be saved and reach full knowledge of the truth. For there is only one God and there is only one mediator between God and mankind, himself a man, Christ Jesus, who sacrificed himself as a ransom for them all. Some versions of this theory, as proposed by Origen in the third century, for instance, place God in the untenable position of tricking the devil but. Gregory of Nyssa suggested rather that it was the devil was only being repaid for his own deceptions. Although the church very early on in its history defined quite definitely who it believed Jesus to be there has never yet been one fixed idea as to exactly what it was he did for us. Despite this doubt whatever the theory those who accept Christ as Saviour believe that, in some mysterious way, the Atonement did take place. The New Testament clearly shows and emphasizes that by dying on the cross the sinless Jesus makes possible a reconciliation between the perfect God and sinful men. Christians accept as true the words of John 3 v 16:- ‘God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in Him may not be lost but may have eternal life.’ These words will fit into several atonement theories – the ransom’, the ’moral example’ and Christus Victor among others. Those who accept these words as true accept salvation as something that has already happened. It can be experienced in the here and now and will come to its completion in the future when we enter heaven. All the theories are agreed on one point – that the atonement must begin on God’s side. Romans 5 v 8 ‘Christ died for us while we were still sinners’ and Romans 5 v 1 ‘Through our Lord Jesus Christ, by faith we are judged righteous and at peace with God.’ The earliest records we have of the teaching of the church are to be found in Luke’s record of the Acts of the Apostles do not just mention the death of Christ but include the whole of what ‘The Oxford Companion to the Bible’ calls ‘the Christ event’ ( page 363) as being of salvation significance. Pre-incarnate Word, manger birth, spiritual battles, crucifixion, victory over death, empty tomb, Christ’s high priestly role, his eventual second coming.. All were seen as having equal importance. Christianity is about having faith in Christ. In this case, as Paul says ‘We are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror’ – I Corinthians 13 v 12, but , although we may not fully understand, we have to accept that the atonement has happened - Ephesians 2 v 5,6 :-‘God …was generous in his mercy: when we were dead through our sins, he brought us to life with Christ – it is through grace that you have been saved’. Each of the atonement theories helps us understand a little more of the work of Christ. They are not necessarily in opposition one to the other and whatever the theory the outcome is the same – a restoring of relationship between God and man – a reconciliation initiated God himself. They also remind us that the church has a role to play – to explain to those who do not know him that God loves them and to help in building bridges between God and man, a task exemplified in the Great Commission - Matthew 28 v 19 ‘Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations.’ References ANSELM , Curs Deos Homo, circa 1097 AULEN.G. (transl. by A. G. Herber)1977 Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement , New York, Macmillan ENGLISH,D. et al ( editors) 1982, The Lion Handbook of Christian Belief, Hertfordshire, Lion Publishing PLC JONES, A. ( General Editor) 1974 , Jerusalem Bible , Aylesbury, Darton, Longman and Todd McDONALD, G.1899, Unspoken Sermons, 3rd Series, London, Longmans , Green and Co METZGER,B and COOGAN,M. ( editors) 1993, New York, Oxford University Press Electronic Sources Leo the Great, Sermon LXXVII, Christian Classics, Ethereal Library, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf212.ii.v.xl.html accessed 13th April 2008 WEAVER,J.D.2001, Violence in ChristianTheology, Cross Currents, http://www.crosscurrents.org/weaver0701.htm accessed 11th April 2008 Read More