Christus Victor According to Gustaf Aulen

I have asked the question in every blog since I began this subject: What is Christus Victor? Without further ado I have sketched this view of Atonement in point form as it is found in Gustaf Aulen’s book, Christus Victor: an Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement, orig. ©1931 (Wipf and Stock ©2003), all page references in the current blog are from this book.

I want to make two points before I sketch this view:

1. This is the Christus Victor view as Aulen sees it (or rather as I understand it through him) and is open to critique and revision. If there are flaws found in the following expression of this view remember that it is not always necessary to throw out the baby with the bathwater. We may hold to the Christus Victor view while not necessarily to every point which Aulen makes.

2. I want to make a confession: I am humbled by the scholastic intelligence of Bishop Aulen, I am so far beneath his thinking that I fear it all too possible that in some way I may have misrepresented him in these following points. I have read through his book twice very carefully and it is with a great deal of caution that I criticize any part of it.

Sketching Christus Victor:

1. Christus Victor views the Atonement through the lens of a cosmic conflict between the forces of good and evil. [4, 11]

2. When the serpent deceived Adam and Eve he earned certain rights over this world, the rights which were originally Adam’s. [48]

3. The devil holds mankind in bondage in sin and death; these are viewed as ‘tyrants’ which need to be overcome. [44]

4. The law is good, but since breaking the law results in sin which in turn also results in death, the law too is a tyrant which needs to be overcome. [108]

5. Because God’s Divine Wrath is poured out on those who are guilty of the law, His Wrath is also viewed as a tyrant who must be overcome. [108, 114]

6. Because the devil has earned certain “rights” over this world which God recognizes, the only way to save mankind from the devils bonds is to redeem us from him. [42, 45]

7. God did this by taking on human form in Jesus Christ and allowing the devil to kill Him. [28]

8. Because Jesus was perfect (He did not break any of Gods laws) the devil had no “rights” over Him to harm him as he did the rest of humanity; therefore the devil stepped beyond his bounds by violating his rights and he lost all “rights” to this world. [45, 51]

9. In this way Christ redeemed us back by offering Himself to the devil as a sacrifice. [30]

10. But had the devil known the plan he surely would not have harmed Christ because it would have meant his certain defeat, so God “hid” Himself in Christ thus deceiving the devil. [103, 110]

11. Death is not merely mortality, but rather death is separation from God; life is not merely immortality, but rather life is fellowship with God. [25]

12. Through the defeat of the devil the bonds which held mankind captive were broken (the sin and death which separated man from God) because man now has fellowship with God. [30]

13. In this way God in Christ reconciled the world to Himself. God is both the reconciler and the reconciled. [4, 30]

14. With the Incarnation came the Kingdom of God and all who follow Jesus become members in that Kingdom. [19]

15. Anyone who lives under the devils bonds (of sin and death) are members of the devils kingdom because they are doing the work of the devil. [1 John iii; 8]

16. Anyone who rejects the devils authority and submits to the authority of God and becomes a follower of Jesus is Justified (forgiven) and sanctified (bonds of sin broken) and therefore are united with God (reconciled). [30, 119]

17. In conclusion then: the Atonement, according to the Christus Victor view, is God reconciling the world to Himself in Christ through his conflict and victory: the Incarnation, life, death (in which the decisive blow was dealt), resurrection, glorification and continued Justification and Sanctification by His carrying on of that conflict and victory through the work of the Holy Spirit are all viewed as one continual act of God - that "In Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself" (2 Cor. 5:19) - Atonement. [4, 30, 107, 119]

This is Christus Victor as it was expressed through the late Lutheran Bishop, Gustaf Aulen, and is not without its faults.

In my next blog I want to examine both “Christus Victor” and “Penal Substitution”; I will argue that while Aulen’s view of the Atonement may need to undergo slight reform, the system as a whole still stands; the antithesis of this is that the Penal System has some fatal flaws which would not survive a reform of sorts and therefore must be rejected as a system, while parts of it may be absorbed into and adopted under the umbrella of the Christus Victor view of the Atonement.

Remain Victorious!

Derek.