Christus Victor

Aulen's book is short and its structure is a classification. He proposed that the Western discussion of the atonement had been running on an inadequate map, one with only two positions on it, the objective and the subjective, meaning Anselm and Abelard. On that map every account either changes something outside the human being or changes something inside one, and the whole argument becomes a choice between them.

Aulen argued for a third, which he called the classic or dramatic idea and which he held to be older than both. In it God is the actor throughout. God is not the object that receives a payment and not merely the exhibitor of a display; God in Christ enters the field, is subjected to death, and defeats the powers that held humanity, so that the atonement is continuous with the incarnation at one end and the resurrection at the other. The reconciliation is real and objective, as in the Latin type, but it is achieved by conflict rather than by satisfaction.

Two further claims did most of the work in his argument. The first was that this dramatic idea was the characteristic view of the early church, obscured but not extinguished afterwards. The second was that Luther held it, and that the Lutheran scholasticism which followed him did not, so that the Reformation itself had been misread on the point.

Whatever one makes of those claims, they had an effect that is not in dispute. Before 1931 an English-speaking theological student met the patristic material, if at all, as a set of curiosities superseded by Anselm. Afterwards it was a position with a name, a case and a bibliography. The phrase Christus Victor entered the general vocabulary and is now used by writers who have never read the book and who would reject parts of it.

The argument about Christus Victor divides cleanly into two arguments that are often run together, and separating them is the first step to reading the literature.

The historical argument concerns Aulen's claim about the fathers. Specialists in patristics have objected that the classic idea is a construction: that Irenaeus, Origen, the Cappadocians and Augustine were answering different questions in different settings, that victory language sits alongside sacrificial, medicinal and pedagogical language in the same writers, and that sorting all of it into one type flattens the evidence. A parallel objection is made about Luther, that Aulen read him through the concerns of the Lundensian school to which he belonged. Defenders of Aulen concede that the typology is tidier than the sources and hold that the substantive point survives, since the victory language is genuinely abundant and had genuinely been neglected.

The theological argument concerns whether victory is a sufficient account on its own. Critics ask what exactly the powers are, and whether the model can say anything precise about personal guilt, which the penal and satisfaction accounts address directly. If the human problem is captivity rather than culpability, they ask what happens to culpability.

Its advocates answer from the other end, and this is where the position is most alive today. Theologians working on structural evil, on colonialism, and on the social conditions of oppression have found in Christus Victor a language for a predicament that is not reducible to individual wrongdoing, and have argued that models built entirely on personal guilt cannot name what they are trying to name. That argument is being conducted now. It is one of the reasons the atonement literature has grown rather than settled, and the atlas records the disagreement rather than adjudicating it.