Christus Victor in 1 Corinthians 15

What did Paul mean when he wrote, “Christ died for our sins”? [1 Cor. 15:3; italics supplied.] This is part of our study for this Saturday (March 29). As a preview, this is a little of what Ken Bailey writes in Paul Through Mediterranean Eyes.[1]

“Christ died because of our sins” is the preferred (legitimate) Arabic translation of this text…

Theologian Miroslav Volf has written,

“Let us beware that some accounts of what it means for Christ to have died on behalf of the ungodly—what theologians sometimes call his “substitutionary” death—are deeply problematic. If we view Christ on the cross as a third party being punished for the sins of transgressors, we have widely missed the mark…”

William Temple points out that the New Testament always starts with the love of God, not his wrath. He writes,

“… So the forgiveness that Christ wins for us is not chiefly a remission of penalty; it is the restoration to the affectionate intimacy of sons with their Father…”

God is angry at sin, but, as Temple argues,

“[God’s anger] is not anger, if by anger we mean the emotional reaction of an offended self-concern; it is anger, if by anger we mean the resolute and relentless opposition of a will set on righteousness against a will directed elsewhere… He seeks to abolish sinners by winning them out of their sin into the loyalty and love of children in their Father’s home… It is only through preoccupation with thoughts of punishment that people have come to invent doctrines of transferred penalty…”

Suffering is the divine choice in which we participate. Temple writes,

“There are two ways of expressing antagonism to sin; one is to inflict suffering on the sinner, the other is to endure suffering…”

The issue is the reform of the sinner. Temple concludes,

“Fear of punishment might deter me from sinful action, but it could not change my sinful desires… But to realize what my selfishness means to the Father who loves me with a love such as Christ reveals, fills me with horror of the selfishness and calls out an answering love… We plead His Passion, not as a transferred penalty, but as an act of self-sacrifice which re-makes us in its own likeness.”

What Bailey describes by quoting Volf and Temple is Christus Victor – where the atonement is not about paying the penalty but about love transcending the demands of the law, and where love transforms wrath into grace and mercy, so that sinners may recognize and accept the power to transform into Christlikeness. The resurrection is the most vital part of the gospel because it is proof that love has conquered death and the grave.

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[1] Bailey, locations 5118-5169.

Paul does not teach substitutionary atonement

I realize this entry jumps far ahead into 1 Corinthians, but as it has to do with the past Easter weekend I felt I had to post this. The following is from Kenneth Bailey’s commentary on 1 Corinthians, Paul Through Mediterranean Eyes. The excerpt is from the chapter on 1 Corinthians 15:1-20. Through it Dr. Bailey appears to affirm the Christus Victor model of the atonement.

Two works I recommend on further study of Christus Victor include Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement and Healing the Gospel: A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross.

Excerpts were taken from the Kindle edition of Bailey’s commentary, found at locations 5097 through 5121.

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It is impossible to deal with this text without noting the work of the medieval theologian Anselm (b. A.D. 1033), who developed the widely influential substitutionary theory of the atonement… For Anselm "Christ died for our sins" meant that Christ was a substitute for sinful humankind. One of the major difficulties with this theory is that it has allowed the word for to take on commercial overtones. [Examples of commercial exchange of goods for payment]…

Anselm developed this theory in the eleventh century… How then did Christians for the first millennium become believers when they did not have the substitutionary theory of the atonement to help them understand the cross? The simple answer is, the early Christians did not need Anselm… [Reference to parable of good shepherd, Lk. 15:4-7.] The focus is on the rescue, not the penalty.

The father in the parable of the prodigal son thought only of his love for his son when he humiliated himself in public by running down the crowded village street to reconcile his son before the son reached the hostile village. As he ran he was offering a costly demonstration of unexpected love. He was not paying a debt…

In Luke 15, along with other parables and dramatic actions, Jesus was indeed interpreting his own cross. The father in the parable was able to reprocess anger into grace and offer a costly demonstration of unexpected love to his yet self-confident son. The son planned to “work and pay” for his sins. He thought the issue was the lost money, and surmised that if he could get job training he would one day be able to pay back everything that he had squandered. It was only when he saw the depth of his father's suffering love that he understood the depth of his sin, and only then could he accept to be found and restored by an act of pure grace.

"Christ died because of our sins" is the preferred (legitimate) Arabic translation of this text. Our sins caused his death. The grave danger in much popular reflection on the atonement relates to the introduction of a third party. The theory, in its simplest form, is as follows: God is angry over sin, and he could justly punish us. But Jesus enters the picture and takes the punishment for us. So far, so good. In this sense Jesus is rightly understood as a substitute for us. But is Jesus a third party? Is God the Father a separate God from God the Son?

To affirm for this view is to create a strong whiff of Zoroastrianism, where there is a good god (Ahura Mazdah), and an evil god (Ahriman), a god of light and a god of darkness. The believer's task is to serve the good god, who protects us from the evil god. But not so the New Testament. Paul writes, "God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us" (Rom 5:8). He also wrote, "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them" (2 Cor 5:19). There is no third party. God is the one who acts in Christ out of love to reconcile us to himself. There is no split in the heart of God, with God the Father opposing God the Son.