REstory 5: Why it's Fun to Learn More Options for Atonement Theory (a super brief history)

And why it can be pretty lame to inherit bad ideas from fallible people from 500 years ago...

Charles Deluvio on Unsplash.

Welcome to History Nerd Week! The goal of this post is to give you a very brief overview of why we think what we think about the atonement. As you will see, research is one of my love languages. What follows below will basically be like a “who said what when” to give you a survey of the playing field. I’ll start with the widest lens and broadest definitions, and then we will zoom in closer a few times. Check the footnotes of this post or last week’s post or google the names and key terms to get started on your own rabbit trail!

Definition

Even the English word ATONEMENT means very different things when it hits different people’s ears. When the word was coined in the late period of Middle English, it was literally a mashup of At–One–Ment with the broadest meanings of reconciling two (or more) to become one. But now for many people, hearing the word atonement carries the connotation of an obligation of restitution or sufficient penance required to appease the offended or injured party.

Some theologians would keep “atonement” to the broadest definition of “reconciliation,” but it has become the title of a whole field of discussion summarized (by some) with the question “Why did Jesus have to die?”¹

Overview Round One

Most brief treatments of “atonement theory” in the past century will start with three names and three theories: Anselm of Canterbury lived in the 11th century, as did his contemporary (nemesis?) Peter Abelard, and they disagreed pretty sharply on this question 1000 years ago. More recently, Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulen revisited this debate between Anselm and Abelard and argued that they were both wrong. Here’s a summary:

1. Anselm’s Legal Satisfaction atonement theory argues for the metaphor that human sin requires a legal debt to be paid to God, and furthermore that God’s huge honor is so greatly offended by human sin that no human could pay that honor debt except a perfect God-man, which Jesus vicariously pays the debt that humans owe to God’s honor.²

2. Abelard’s Moral Influence atonement theory disagrees and claims that the work accomplished by Jesus on the cross was instead to demonstrate the love of a God who was willing to suffer. That demonstration of crucified love then becomes the moral influence that can work transformation in humans.³

3. 500 years later, Legal Satisfaction takes a sharp forensic turn with John Calvin and his followers and becomes what we now know as Penal Substitutionary Atonement theory (PSAT — “penal” means punishment and “substitutionary” means taking our place). PSAT (in this case, not a stressful exam you took in High School) claims human sin is more like a crime that has to be punished by God to maintain justice. In this scenario, Jesus vicariously receives the punishment that sinful humans deserve. ⁴

4. Aulen claimed that the Christus Victor model was “classic” because it was how the early church understood Jesus’s work on the cross, which would make it much, much older than Anselm’s and Abelard’s theories.⁵ Christus Victor claims that Jesus’s work on the cross is actually a cosmic victory where God is conquering evil and all demonic forces. 

5. Another category usually mentioned in brief summaries of atonement theories is Ransom Theory, claiming that the work done by Jesus is a rescue-by-ransom. There are variations of this theory; Jesus could be paying a ransom to Satan, to God, or to humans themselves. Sometimes Ransom Theory seems like a variation of Christus Victor if the rescue is told with a victory flavor, but with other authors, Ransom Theory can almost feel like a version of Legal Satisfaction if the vicarious nature of the ransom payment is emphasized.⁶ (Sometimes this theory can sound like a mash-up done by different artists to combine the source material of the previously mentioned theories, emphasizing different elements.)

Most summaries of atonement theory will categorize the different models as either Objective or Subjective. Christus Victor, Ransom, and Legal Satisfaction (and its unfortunate, but strangely popular child Penal Substitution) are usually categorized as Objective, meaning Jesus’s work on the cross accomplished something outside of humans. Moral Influence theory is usually categorized as Subjective since it’s claiming to accomplish something inside humans. 

Jamie Street on Unsplash

Overview Round Two

So far we’ve named Legal Satisfaction and Moral Influence theories from the 11th century, Penal Substitutionary Atonement Theory from the 16th century, Christus Victor which many claim is older, and Ransom Theory whose date shifts depending on who’s describing it. Atonement resources that go a little deeper should also introduce a few more conversations:

6. Scapegoat Theory/Mimetic Violence Theory relies on the work of French literary critic Rene Girard and emphasizes how among human societies, underlying competitive desires of wanting what others want (“mimesis”) always leads to violence. Civilization evolves ways to limit and check group violence, but the pressure continues to build until the society releases that violence on a scapegoat (individual or group). Myths evolve to explain why the scapegoat had to be killed, but Girard saw in the Hebrew Bible and Christian Testament a brightly contrasting narrative that points to the innocence of the victims, exposing the violent lies of other frameworks and myths.⁷

7. Historical theologians point out that early church thinkers from the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th centuries like Athanasius and Irenaeus emphasized what is sometimes called the Recapitulation Model. “Recapitulation” means a renewed head or new captain; these streams of thought focus heavily on the Incarnation and portray Jesus as the new Adam. Jesus is BOTH the “eternal Word” from the mouth of God (like the Creation Source Code) AND a human being, so as a human Jesus’s body can die, but because he is also the Word of Life from the mouth of God, God’s life within him is bigger than death and therefore defeats death. In this way of thinking, Jesus’s humanity serves as a door for God to enter death and defeat it from the inside with life, which opens the way to New Creation. Since God can’t die, death is extinguished when it comes in contact with God’s-Life-in-Jesus. The incarnation of God-in-Jesus is a profound act of relational identification; God wants to be with humans, and the communion of “being in Christ” is a new way to be human (which is much larger than the metaphors of legal or forensic transaction).⁸

8. Another perspective from the first few centuries of the early church is to describe the meaning of Jesus’s death in terms of Kenosis and Theosis. This conversation emphasizes how Jesus’s pouring-out (“kenosis”) of his own life is meant to show us what God is actually like. When we imitate the self-sacrifice of the God that Jesus shows us, we are participating in God’s life (“theosis”).⁹ This is such a radically different view from all our misunderstandings of what a deity is supposed to be like. In the trajectory of Israel’s narrative, joining this God-is-like-Jesus story in order to imitate a suffering God can be described as inaugurating a New Covenant.¹⁰

Overview Round Three: Final Round!

We’re almost done! I want to say here that *all* atonement theories use scripture for support, and *all* atonement theories emphasize some scriptures over others. We’ve covered eight main categories so far, and as we continue to dig deeper and reach wider, we can access even richer conversations:

9. All of these discussions should be taking place with a healthier understanding that Gentile Christians are guests in Israel’s story. It is meaningful to remind each other that Jesus’s death and resurrection happen on Passover weekend, not Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).¹¹ I will write about this more in a future post, but for now we need to wrestle with Passover being the main interpretive category for the death and resurrection of Jesus. Passover is a liberation story (not an appease-the-distant-disinfected-deity story).¹² This is just one reason why Christians from dominant empires should be letting the main voices in Liberation Theology lead the conversation of why liberation-from-oppression should be a primary lens for interpreting Jesus’s death and resurrection. (This is emphasized even more when we remember that most of scripture was curated by people under the boot of empire, not holding the reins of power). With the perspective of Liberation Theology, Jesus is identifying first with those who are enslaved and killed by death-wielding empires. When salvation is defined primarily as liberation, we see that Jesus cares for the whole person and the whole community and offers to lead the way out of empires of death, including ones that kill people slowly with economies built on exploitation.¹³

10. Within Liberation Theology, James Cone is an important voice, and his 2018 book The Cross and the Lynching Tree shows why we should see Jesus’s death on the cross with the lens of lynching, since it was a first-century instrument of terror and shame (there were other ways the Roman empire could execute “more honorable” people).¹⁴ The conversation continues with responses from Womanist Theology.  Kelly Brown Douglas and Delores Williams, however, aren’t satisfied with “redemptive suffering” where James Cone leaves off. Douglas continues the conversation by insisting that the Resurrection of Jesus is meant to translate into the justice and ethics of actual lives, and Williams expands the liberation category of Passover-out-of-Egypt by reintroducing us to Hagar. Abraham and Sarah enslaved an Egyptian long before Egyptians enslaved Abraham’s descendants.¹⁵ Williams challenges hasty metaphors of Jesus as a vicarious substitute because of its resonance with slave surrogacy. Slave surrogacy was rape and forced pregnancy by enslavers — one part of the horrors enacted on bodies of enslaved Africans on plantations whose owners assured them their suffering would be rewarded in heaven. In that context, surrogacy has elements of “vicarious substitute” enacted violently by those in power; we should reject it, and we should raise sharp concerns over any analogy that smells like that. The conversation continues with further theologians dialoguing with Williams’ material; for now we will insist that God’s salvation coming among humans in Jesus rejects the horrors that humans inflict on each other and shows us a God who wants to liberate us and heal us of violence forever.

Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Where can we go from here?

Remember that the orienting question underneath many atonement dialogues is “Why did Jesus have to die?” We also said that the modern English word “atonement” has a broad meaning of reconciliation but the meaning assumed by most people is appeasing an offended party with penance or restitution. We’ve surveyed ten categories of atonement conversation: Legal Satisfaction, Penal Substitution, Moral Influence, Christus Victor, Ransom, Scapegoat/Mimesis, Recapitulation, Kenosis/Theosis (New Covenant), Liberation Theology, and Womanist Theology.

It may feel overwhelming to face ten categories of atonement, especially if this is new territory, but if we’re going to find a way forward we need to have a sense of the map as a whole. I will describe some resources for navigating these options in a post coming soon. For now, I will say with these rich and varied understandings from Jesus followers over the past two millennia, it is irresponsible for any leader to continue to minimize the “Gospel” to just Legal Satisfaction or Penal Substitutionary Atonement (Like when people say “Jesus died to pay the price/take the punishment for your sins”). Many churches have been promoting Satisfaction/Substitution only, which means that many people’s understandings of God are held hostage to that punitive category.

People trust their ministers, elders, and leaders to help them see Jesus more clearly,  not to be hiding important things about God from them. Yet that is what is happening week in and week out in many churches when leaders emphasize only one version of atonement, denying those in their care a fuller picture of God, and this breaks my heart. We don’t have to stay there! Both ministers and members can work together to liberate their conversations about Jesus into the wider historical witness. It requires courage to leave too small stories and Go Out In Joy.

© 2024 Ladye Rachel Howell. All rights reserved.

1. It’s important to realize that we are already inserting an interpretive layer here when we add the “Have To.”

2. See Anselm of Canterbury - The Major Works . I will share my thoughts on this in a couple weeks!

3. See Abelard's Commentary on Romans

4. Calvin leans on his interpretation of Isaiah 53, see his Institutes of Christian Religion 2.16.10

5. See Aulen’s book Christus Victor. A related conversation concerns “the powers;” Walter Wink’s trilogy is helpful.

6. Augustine describes salvation in Ransom metaphors in his Commentary on Psalm 96 and Sermon 80

7. See Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Beginning of the World

8. See Athanasius’ On the Incarnation and Irenaeus’ Against Heresies 1.10.1

9. See Michael Gorman’s Inhabiting the cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul's Narrative Soteriology

10. See Michael Gorman’s The Death of the Messiah and the Birth of the New Covenant

11. See Preaching a Better Atonement

12. See My Leviticus research on Atonement

13. See Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited and Gustavo Gutierrez’s We Drink From Our Own Wells

14. You should buy James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree for your preacher

15. See Resurrection Hope by Kelly Brown Douglas and by Delores Williams’s book Sisters in the Wilderness. It is Hagar the Egyptian who is the only woman in scripture to receive a double theophany, and the only person in all of scripture who names God.