Christ our Champion: Christus Victor

So far in this series on different ways Christians have understood the saving work of Jesus, we’ve looked at one of what we might call a historical filter (Recapitulation) and two metaphors (the Passover and the Bridegroom). But none of these ever reached the complexity of what we might properly call an ‘atonement theory’. Today I’d like to talk about the earliest motif that was developed in any kind of systematic way, the perspective that overwhelmingly dominated the first thousand years of Christian history, and remains the most import motif in the Christian East: what has since the twentieth century become known as the ‘Christus Victor’ motif.

Despite this tradition’s significant internal diversity, all ‘Christus Victor’ understandings share the core belief that Christ is our Champion, a conquering hero who defeated Satan, death, and sin once and for all. While this idea was later developed in dramatic and fantastical ways, its origins are found in the both the Old Testament and the earliest layers of Christian teaching. The more mythical parts of the Hebrew Bible shared with the broader Ancient Near Eastern world a vision of the world and its creation as a cosmic battlefield, in which the well-ordered world we know emerged from, and was under constant threat from, the forces of chaos as embodied in hostile waters, gods, and monsters. In scattered texts, this more dynamic account of creation from what we know from Genesis has the primordial waters “afraid of”, “rebuked by”, and “fleeing” God, while God “tramples the waves of the sea,” “pierces the fleeing serpent”, and “breaks the heads of the dragons in the waters,” while pinning the waters into their appointed places and setting a guard upon them (see Psalms 77, 104, 74, and Job 7 and 9). Beyond these creation references, God’s greatness is also prominently connected to military victory, and particularly the defeat of the Egyptians in the Exodus story. This is best seen in Psalm 136, in which the horrors befalling the Egyptian army are recounted at length, with an intervening refrain of “His love endures forever!” Also important for our story is the popularity of Apocalyptic literature in late second-Temple Judaism. As we saw earlier this year, this form of literature believed that behind the everyday world that we see lies a cosmic battlefield, in which the forces of God were at war with the forces of evil, leading up to one dramatic event in which God would decisively defeat evil once and for all. If we put all of these together, the first Christians came to their experience of Jesus with a strong built-in sense of God as a hero, a mighty warrior who demonstrates love and care by defeating the chosen people’s enemies, both cosmic and political. While they believed these opposing forces are formidable and dangerous, they were even more convinced that God’s ultimate power over them was never in doubt. God’s victory was a question of ‘when’, not ‘if.’ What set the first Christians apart from their more typical Jewish neighbours was their conviction that the ‘when’ had already happened, specifically in the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

The idea of spiritual warfare is all over the New Testament. Luke, for example, casts Jesus’ birth as an invasion, accompanied by God’s angelic armies (Luke 2.13), and recognized by the faithful as the decisive act of salvation (Luke 2.22-38). During the years of his ministry, Jesus made constant contrasts between God’s Kingdom and the “kingdoms of this world,” cast out demons, and framed healings in terms of freeing Satan’s captives (Luke 13.16). He claimed his mission was to drive out “the ruler of this world” (John 12.31), described it as the violent overthrow of a strongman (Luke 11.21f), and bested Satan in a battle of wits for forty days and forty nights. An active spiritual realm is also assumed in the Epistles, as we can see from its references to forces such as principalities, powers, rulers, authorities, dominions, cosmic powers, thrones, spiritual forces, and elemental forces, in addition to your run-of-the-mill angels and demons (see: Romans 8:38; 13:1; Galatians 4.3, 8-9; 1 Corinthians 2:6, 8; 15:24; Ephesians 1:21; 2:2; 3:10; 6:12; Colossians 1:16; 2:8-10, 15). Again, these forces were believed to be real and dangerous, but ultimately powerless before the power of God.

The first records of the initial Christian message from the Acts of the Apostles openly frame Jesus’ resurrection in terms of God’s victory over such powers. In Acts 2, for example, Peter says that God raised Jesus, “having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power” (Acts 2.24). Later in the same speech, he continues:

This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you both see and hear.  For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says, “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.’” Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.” (Acts 2.32-36)

Here, Peter quotes Psalm 110, which seems like an obscure reference to most of us today, but was actually the most commonly quoted passage of Scripture in the New Testament. It is a hymn of praise to the victorious power of God exerted through God’s Anointed leader — in the context of the Psalm, the king of Israel, but through their Christ-coloured glasses, to the New Testament writers the Messiah, Jesus. This is an important point that is rarely commented upon: When the Apostles were trying to understand how Jesus fit into their Jewish worldview and traditions, what came most often to mind for them was a hymn of power and victory. This is in keeping with the general sentiment about Jesus throughout the Epistles:

• “The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil.” (1 John 3:8)
• “…so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.” (Hebrews 2.14f)
• “Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” (1 Corinthians 15.24-26)
• “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them.” (Colossians 2:15)
• He has forged a path in which the faithful “may escape from the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him to do his will” (2 Timothy 2.26).

And, that greatest of all New Testament passages about the power of God revealed in Jesus:

In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8.37-39)

I could go on, but this is enough to demonstrate just how pervasive this idea that Jesus represented God’s ultimate victory over the forces of evil is in the New Testament, at the deepest layer of the Christian tradition. Now let’s see how this basic idea was developed over the next few hundred years.

To begin, let’s return to one of the passages from Irenaeus which we looked at in the post on Recapitulation:

He has therefore in His work of recapitulation, summed up all things, both waging war against our enemy, and crushing him who had at the beginning led us away captives in Adam … the enemy would not have been fairly vanquished, unless it had been a man [born] of woman who conquered him. … And therefore does the Lord profess Himself to be the Son of man, comprising in Himself that original man out of whom the woman was fashioned, in order that, as our species went down to death through a vanquished man, so we may ascend to life again through a victorious one. (Against Heresies 5.32.2)

Here Irenaeus frames the atoning work of Jesus as “waging war against,” “crushing,” and “vanquishing” an enemy who had unjustly (a point emphasized earlier in the chapter) taken humanity captive.

In the generation after Irenaeus, ideas about the nature of Christ’s victory over death started to take on a more dramatic flair. The third-century juggernaut of Biblical interpretation Origen of Alexandria, leaned into the ransom metaphor, which Paul had used in 1 Corinthians 6-7 (”you were bought with a price”), and which is a concrete expression of the redemption/bondage/freedom motif common in both the Old and New Testaments. Here, Christ’s death is the price set by humanity’s captor (death and sin, personified in the figure of the devil) for our release:

If then we were “bought with a price,” as Paul asserts, we were doubtless bought from one whose servants we were, who also named what price he would for releasing those whom he held from his power. Now it was the devil that held us, to whose side we had been drawn away by our sins. He asked, therefore, as our price the blood of Christ. (Origen, On Romans 2.13)

What this turns out to be is a further ‘battle of wits’ between Jesus and the devil. Just as he outsmarted him in the desert, so too does Jesus outsmart the devil in this ultimate battle for the fate of humanity:

The Evil One had been deceived and led to suppose that he was capable of mastering the soul [of Jesus], and did not see that to hold Him involved a trial of strength greater than he could successfully undertake. (On Matthew 25.1, 8)

By the time of Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century, the scene had developed into full-blown caper, with the powers of God using every scheme and deception to trick the bad guys:

In order to secure that the ransom in our behalf might be easily accepted by him who required it, the Deity was hidden under the veil of our nature, that so, as with ravenous fish, the hook of Deity might be gulped down along with the bait of flesh. (Great Catechetical Oration 24)

Some of the ways this story was told ended up being quite entertaining. It seems clear that it was a hit with listening audiences. These embellishments are far from necessary, however. While the fantastical developments get the most attention, throughout history the vast majority of interpreters and theologians working within the Christus Victor framework were content simply to assert that Christ’s divinity was too powerful for the devil to contain. He thereby filled the realm of death with life, destroying it once and for all. The problem, if there is one, comes only when theologians move from theological motif to theory. This movement shifts attention away from the fact of Christ’s victory to the question of how it was won, and this in turn led to theologians overstepping the bounds of the biblical story and reading quite a bit into it. This is a criticism we’ll see again with later atonement theories. The movement from motif to theory always does a disservice to the ‘facts on the ground’.

Before moving on, let’s pause to look at how the Christus Victor perspectives answer our big questions:

What does it say about God?	God is almighty
What does it say about humanity?	Humanity is enslaved to powers beyond our control
How does it define sin?	Sin is a spiritual condition that impairs our ability to remain faithful and therefore causes us to die
How does it define the problem?	Evil holds sway over the world and its systems and structures, leading to a state of death and decay.
What does it say about Christ?	Christ is God-made-flesh, whose divinity conquers Evil’s hold over the cosmos
What does it say about the cross?	The cross is essentially a heist: Christ’s death tempts Satan with total victory but ends up being his downfall
What does it say about the resurrection?	The resurrection is God’s victory over Evil/Sin/Death/Satan
How does Jesus remedy the problem?	Jesus breaks the power of Evil/Sin/Death/Satan by filling it with Goodness/Faithfulness/Life/Divinity
What is the result of this for us?	We are restored to our true, free humanity and to eternal life

The thing that stands out most here is that this motif has strong answers for all of the questions. Unlike the other motifs we’ve looked at so far, it places the strong, apocalyptic emphasis on the Resurrection that the New Testament witness demands. But it does this without in any way minimizing Christ’s incarnation, ministry, and death. In fact, all four of these elements are really well integrated All are ways God gained ground in the cosmic war: The Incarnation is an invasion of occupied territory; Christ’s teaching and especially healing ministries loosen Satan’s grip on the world, one person at a time; his death takes the battle into Satan’s own home, filling death with life, evil with goodness, and faithlessness with faithfulness; and his resurrection is the sign and symbol that Satan’s hold on humanity has been destroyed once and for all. And I think this is why this way of understanding the atonement has been so popular, dominating all of Christian theology for the first thousand years, and remaining the preferred motif in the Christian East to this day. Simply put, it works.

But if it works so well, why was it to a large extent abandoned in the Christian West? I’m not sure this is an answerable question, but I think it’s fair to say that as time went on, the West simply started asking different questions, questions which put a spotlight on different aspects of what the New Testament said about Jesus, sin and salvation. One of the shifts was a movement away from understanding sin as a general state of oppression to forces beyond our control, towards viewing it primarily in terms of personal actions, responsibility and culpability. (The New Testament talks about sin in both ways.) In this perspective, Christus Victor understandings of the atonement could be critiqued for ignoring individual sins. It’s all well and good to say that Jesus defeated Satan and sin’s control over us, but there is still a sense that something has to be done about our actual sins: Jesus may have blown the doors off the Treasury, but the account books are still there and have to be reckoned with. Next week, we’ll look at the major theological traditions that tried to handle this problem. But, of course, one need not go down this road. Again, ancient Christian thought wasn’t really interested in creating theories of everything, but was happy to have different ideas supplement one another. And, there are certainly ways Christus Victor can — and does — handle the question of personal sin. It’s simply not the road the West chose to take in the Middle Ages. Additionally, by the Middle Ages, the best-known versions of the story Christus Victor tells were the fantastical ones, which turned the story of Jesus into something of a cartoon. This went a long way to discrediting it in the eyes of later theologians.

All in all, while not perfect and not a ‘theory of everything’, I think it’s fair to say that the Christus Victor motif is the primary approach to understanding the saving work of Jesus found in the New Testament. It rightly focuses on Christ’s work as God’s ultimate victory over evil and sin, and allows all aspects of his mission — incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection — to work together for that one common goal.