Ask pretty much any evangelical Christian anywhere why Jesus died on the cross, and they will invariably tell you, “Jesus died to pay the price for our sins,” or words to that effect. It’s an idea that has become so deeply rooted in Christian belief that most Christians automatically assume that it is one of the foundations of the Christian faith, passed down from generation to generation.
So, it might surprise you to learn that for much of Christian history, Christians didn’t hold this view.
As a former evangelical, I was shocked when I learned that Jesus’s death might have been for something other than the forgiveness of sins. I mean, from the time I was knee-high to a grasshopper, I had that “truth” drummed into me in Sunday School, then youth group, and then, from the Bible-thumping preacher in the pulpit.
But, as it turns out, there are a whole bunch of different theological perspectives, ALL supported to some degree by Scripture, on what the death of Christ actually achieved. And the idea that Jesus died for our sins was not the most prominent one for most of Christian history. So, what are the other theories? I’m glad you asked.
Let’s start from a place of agreement
Anyone who calls themself a Christian, and even many who don’t, would agree that the death of Christ was not for nothing. His life wasn’t pointless, and neither was his death.
So, what was the point?
Well, there tends to be a general agreement in most Christian circles from liberals to conservatives that somehow, through Christ’s death, humankind was reconciled with God. We call this process the atonement. The word atonement implies making peace, becoming “at one” with or “to be in harmony with.” The atonement, then, was humankind’s reconciliation with God through the death of Christ.
Ask all of the world’s two billion or so professing Christians, and they’ll most likely agree with that much.
Then we come to a fork in the road.
Christ may have done something to make peace between God and humankind, but the question is, what exactly? Here are a few of the different perspectives:
Number 1: Jesus died to pay off Satan
Let’s start with what most Christians believed for the first thousand or so years of Christianity. Most Christians believed that because of the fall of humankind in the Garden of Eden, humanity was held captive by Satan himself.
Kind of like a hostage situation.
So, in this scenario, Christ became the ransom paid to Satan in exchange for releasing humans from Satan’s grasp. Only the soul of perfectly innocent Jesus would be an acceptable payment for the return of humanity to the Father. But unbeknownst to the devil, Jesus was also God. So after three days, Jesus left Hell and returned to heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father while Satan was left in a crying puddle in the corner because he had fallen victim to a “bait-and-switch” maneuver by God.
The strongest biblical support for this theory, known as the Ransom Theory of atonement, comes from the words of Jesus himself: “Just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” — Matthew 20:28 (see also Mark 10:45 and 1 Timothy 2:5–6).
The idea that Jesus’s death was a ransom to the devil might seem strange to us, but this was not a fringe view back then. In fact, this was the main view of the atonement — the opinion of the leading thinkers of the day. To be honest, it’s not such as crazy idea when you take a look at the culture at that time. As one historian notes, it was not uncommon in late antiquity that “marauding gangs” would roam about “capturing travelers and demanding payment for their release.” Yeah, hostage and ransom situations were fairly common.
Who would have thought that the culture of the day might have informed the church’s understanding of God? Crazy!
Critics of the Ransom Theory claim that it threatens the very sovereignty of God. They argue that, in some respects, it makes Satan equal to God. Otherwise, why would God have to pay Satan anything? Why would He be in debt to Satan?
Number 2: Jesus died to pay off God
The idea that God would somehow be in debt to Satan proved so troubling that in the 11th Century, a guy named Anselm of Canterbury, a philosopher, and theologian of the Catholic Church, came up with a new idea.
In his theory, it was not God who owed a debt to Satan, but humankind who owed a debt to God. The theory goes that God’s honor was so offended by our sin that that offense could not go unanswered. God’s honor had to be restored. But humankind, being so much less than God, was incapable of restoring that honor on its own. The answer then is found in the sacrifice of Christ: fully human, he could atone for man, fully God, he could restore God’s honor.
Once again, the culture of the day certainly influenced the church’s understanding of the nature of God and the purpose of Christ’s death. About the same time as Anselm was crystalizing his theory that God demands satisfaction, the feudal system was emerging in Europe in the late middle ages. In this new system, society was built on the idea that everybody owed somebody something. The surfs who worked the land owed their protection to the lords and knights who owned it, who, in turn, owed their loyalty to a regional lord or sovereign. The system of order was based on personal (or at least semi-personal) relationships rather than a strict code of laws. If you did something wrong, you offended the honor of the person above you. The nobler the person you offended, the greater your reparation needed to be.
And well, since God is God — and you can’t get nobler than that — a great price had to be paid to restore God’s honor, far greater than what people could afford. So, Christ becomes the substitute payment for restoring God’s honor on our behalf.
Now, if this idea of Christ being a substitute sounds somewhat familiar to you, that’s because you’re about to see how it evolves.
Number 3: Jesus died to take our punishment
Five hundred years after Anselm suggested that Christ’s death was a substitutionary payment to restore the honor of our deeply offended God, the thinkers of the reformation, most notably John Calvin, would go even further.
To them, it was not just that God’s honor was offended. It was that God, the ultimate judge of the universe, could not let human sin go unpunished. Do you see how that takes it one step further? It was no longer about someone paying a price to restore honor, but about someone being punished to appease God’s sense of justice. In Anselm’s theory, punishment was avoided. In Calvin’s theory, punishment was central.
A modern conservative theologian might describe it this way: God, because of his love for human beings, sent his son (who offered himself willingly and gladly) to satisfy God’s justice, by taking the place of sinners — that’s you and me, by the way. The punishment and penalty we deserved was laid on Jesus Christ instead of us so that in the cross both God’s holiness and love are manifested.”
More commonly known as the Penal Substitutionary theory of atonement, this was the one I was taught in Sunday school — and the one you will likely still hear in many churches today.
Critics of Penal Substitutionary atonement say that God the Father comes out looking like a pretty angry kind of God who needs a place to take out his anger, which ends up being on his son in an act of needless bloodlust. It fails to address the obvious question: Why would God — the same God who created the universe and set the laws of the universe in motion — somehow decide that the wages of sin (even the smallest of sins) had to be death? Couldn’t there have been another way?
One modern theologian describes both Anselm’s God and Calvin’s God as a “status-paranoid power-monger who deliberately humiliates and infantilizes human beings under the guise of justice.” Further, a thinker and theologian who lived around the time of Anselm, the French philosopher, and ethicist Peter Abelard, wrote this:
Abelard went on to develop quite a different view of the atonement. Let’s take a look at it now:
Number 4: Jesus died to set an example
Abelard came to quite different conclusions about the parts of the Bible that conservatives would later use in support of penal substitution. From his ideas was developed what is known as the Moral Influence theory of the atonement.
The basic gist of Abelard’s theory is that Christ’s life, death, and resurrection demonstrate the beauty and wonder of God’s loving nature and that, in and of itself, is enough to turn human beings back to God. It maintains that the power of the cross speaks to us is in its ability to draw us to God (atone) — without the need for some kind of transaction on God’s behalf. Christ then becomes “an example of man’s best rather than the bearer of man’s worst.”
One theologian describes it this way:
And just as every theologian has a Bible passage in support of their ideas, so to so the supported of moral influence theory, notably 1 Peter 2:22, “For this, you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps,” as well as various passages in John (see John 13:13–16 and John 15:9–17).
Critics of moral influence atonement argue that it doesn’t answer the question, “what do we need to be saved from?” One theologian described the lack of an answer in moral influence atonement this way. Imagine sitting safely on a pier, in a deck chair, when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a man flings himself into the ocean and drowns. You later learn he did this because he loved you. You would probably think the man was a lunatic. But if, on the other hand, you yourself were drowning in the ocean, and a man came out to save you, succeeds, but drowns himself, you would understand, yes, this is love.
However, I would counter this by saying that it assumes that “sin” is the only “ocean” that one can find themselves drowning in. When I found myself drowning, it was in false piety and religious legalism. Ultimately, everyone needs to be saved from themselves to some extent.
Number 5: Jesus died to defeat the forces of evil
In 1930, Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulén published an altogether different theory of atonement known as Christus Victor. Translated from Latin, Christus victor means “Christ as conquerer” or “Christ as victor.”
Borrowing heavily from Ransom atonement theory, the idea of Christus Victor is that the earth and heaven are locked in a cosmic struggle between good (God) and evil (Satan). Christ was sent to battle with and triumph over the elements of darkness in his kingdom. All of us are standing in the middle of a cosmic war zone.
Supporters of this idea point to several parts of the New Testament where Satan is called the ruler of this earth, and everything Jesus was about centered on vanquishing this empire, taking back the world that Satan had seized, and restoring humans to their rightful position of guardians of the earth.
The one thing that makes this theory different from the rest is that its emphasis is not on personal salvation but rather the collective salvation of the entire universe. We are reconciled to God because the entire cosmos has been reconciled to God, and because the forces of evil have been put in their place, we can be presented ‘holy and blameless’ before God.
Sounds a bit like Star Wars, doesn’t it?
Of course, with Christus Victor, we are left with a number of questions. For example, how exactly did Christ defeat Satan through the Cross? What was it about the cross that defeated all the elements of evil throughout the universe? And further, if we are freed from evil and sin, why then do we keep sinning?
So which is it?
The fact that you want a black and white answer proves just how human you are. The fact of the matter is that ALL of these theories can be supported by various parts of the Bible.
Go figure.
By the way, there are even more theories than the ones I’ve listed here. And, what is even more strange is that all of these theories, when pressed too hard, tend to crumble. No atonement theory seems complete or absolutely correct, at least to human understanding.
If you were to ask me which view of atonement I believed in, I would say, “all of them, and none of them.” In fact, most theologians who vocally support one theory will readily admit the other theories hold some validity. For example, a conservative theologian who ardently supports penal substitution does not deny the cosmic significance of Christ’s victory on the cross, nor does he deny the importance of Jesus as an ethical model for all humankind.
Atonement, it seems, is much like the elephant that three blind men are asked to describe by touch and then insist the part of the elephant they can feel is that inherent defining aspect of the elephant.
Beware anyone who thinks they’ve got the answers. Such a man knows in part but won’t admit as much. Anyone who claims to know all that was achieved by Christ’s death on the cross claims something that the best theologians in history have been able to fully explain or agree on.
So what are we left with?
Well, we are left with a divine mystery. How unsatisfactory, and yet how marvelous. We believe that somehow the death of Christ reconciles all of humanity to God, and yet we can’t explain how. It’s almost like God is calling us to faith in that which we cannot see or understand.
Maybe we should just enjoy what is… instead of trying to explain why it is how it is.
—
This post was previously published on Backyard Church.
***
You Might Also Like These From The Good Men Project
Join The Good Men Project as a Premium Member today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
A $50 annual membership gives you an all access pass. You can be a part of every call, group, class and community.
A $25 annual membership gives you access to one class, one Social Interest group and our online communities.
A $12 annual membership gives you access to our Friday calls with the publisher, our online community.