The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news! – Mark 1:15

What’s the good news about the kingdom?

Almost a hundred years ago, Gustaf Aulén published a book called “Christus Victor”, or Christ the Victor. He said that for the first thousand years of Christendom, the primary view of Christ’s atonement was a dramatic victory over the powers of sin, death, and the devil.

• Irenaeus of Lyons (2nd century) – “That He might destroy sin, overcome death, and give life to man…. through the Second Man He bound the strong one, and spoiled his goods, and annihilated death, bringing life to man who had become subject to death. For Adam had become the devil’s possession, and the devil held him under his power, by having wrongfully practised deceit upon him, and by the offer of immortality made him subject to death. For by promising that they should be as gods, which did not lie in his power, he worked death in them.”

Here’s a quote from a great article on the Christus Victor view, contrasting it with our more recent perspective on what Jesus came to do:

One of the foremost problems with the western church today is that people understand what Jesus came to accomplish in legal terms. God is viewed as an austere and angry judge who wants to send us to hell, we are seen as guilty defendants deserving of hell, and Jesus is viewed as our defense attorney who wants to find a way to “get us off the hook” from going to hell. So he works out an arrangement whereby the Judge gets to vent his wrath, receiving full payment for sin, yet the guilty defendants are freed from their eternal sentence.

Now, there’s many problems associated with this legal-arrangement view of Jesus (such as, if the Father gets payed by Jesus’ death, did he really forgive our sin?). But what concerns me most is that this view easily divorces justification from sanctification. That is, so long as a person believes Jesus died as their substitute, they’re off the hook. How they actually live isn’t central to the legal arrangement. Given this view, it’s hardly surprising that there are millions of people in America who profess faith in Jesus but whose lives are indistinguishable from their pagan neighbors.

The Christus Victor understanding of the atonement avoids this completely. In this view, what Christ does for us cannot be separated, even theoretically, from what Christ does in us. One either participates in Christ’s cosmic victory over the powers or they do not. If they do, their lives by definition will be increasingly characterized by the ability and willingness to overcome evil with good as they imitate the Calvary-quality life of Jesus Christ (Eph 5:1-2). The idea that one is “saved” by intellectually believing in the legal transaction Jesus allegedly engaged in with God the Father can thus be dismissed as magic.