Three years ago I was sitting in a college class on the Apostle Paul and trying to fight off sleep. It's not that the class wasn't interesting, but I'd been up until 3 a.m. playing video games (Halo, specifically) with my roommates and it probably would have taken Paul himself walking through the door to snap me out of my lethargy (although even that might not have been enough).

Toward the end of the lecture my professor posed a series of questions that actually perked me up:

1. What is it primarily that Christ accomplished on the cross? His death accomplished much (for a short and helpful overview of this, see John Piper's Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die), but when all is said and done what is the framework, the primary feat, by which we are to understand the accomplishments?
2. Why did Jesus have to die for God to consummate His purposes?
3. Is the most widely-held view of the atonement's primary function (propitiating or satisfying God's wrath in order to forgive human sin) too focused on mankind? Does it fail to take into account the full breadth of the incarnation, Christ's earthly work, and his sinless life? Does it do justice to the cosmic significance of Christ's death and resurrection?

These were all great questions and I really didn't have any good answers for them at the time. What followed was a study that is still going on today, but I'd like to share the fruits of that labor thus far. This is Part 1 of what will be a 6-part series of short essays examining the conclusions I've come to thus far. Some will find this helpful, some will disagree, and others won't really have much interest: that's okay. Despite all of that, I would like to share with you an ancient way of understanding the atonement that was the dominant view of the church fathers and the church universal for the first one thousand years of church history: Christus Victor.

When evangelicals speak of the exalted Lord, they often do so in terms of strength, might or power. Rarely do we allow ourselves to be taken aback by his wisdom, his trustworthiness or his infinite intelligence. When our eyes gaze intently at the cross, however, we begin to get a glimpse of the awesome intuition of our God. The incarnation of Christ, coupled with his life ministry, death and resurrection, accomplished multiple objectives in one fell swoop: it satisfied the wrath of God, freed humanity from the bondage of sin, restored the world to its rightful owner, served as an example for us to follow, and defeated Satan and his demons. Much more could be said but the point is clear: God’s initiative in entering our world and his willingness to die for the very ones who were crucifying him accomplished more than we can ever hope to fully understand. That fact, however, certainly has not stopped us from trying.¹

“Given the multifaceted design of Christ’s life, death and resurrection, it is not at all surprising that over time the church created a diversity of conceptual models of the atonement.”² These conceptual models branch off into even more specific versions of themselves until the amount of sheer atonement data, theories and literature is overwhelming. Many of the models have suffered due to over-complexity and a desire to press for details where few or none are to be found. What I desire to accomplish in this series of short essays is to present a lean model of atonement based on a Christus Victor (Latin for "Christ is Victorious) paradigm. I will argue that though Christ accomplished many things through his incarnation, death and resurrection, they are best understood when seen in light of an overall framework provided by the Christus Victor model of atonement. Finally, having established a model of atonement with which to work, I will relate Christus Victor to what I perceive to be the metaphysical necessity of the incarnation.

The central central of the Christus Victor model of atonement, also known as the ransom theory, is that “through the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Christ, God defeated the devil.”³ Everything else that was accomplished on the cross (salvation for mankind, appeasement of God’s wrath, etc.) should be seen in light of the glorious victory that Christ won over sin, death and Satan. Though this model of the atonement may be very new for some, it claims a very long and diverse background of scholarship by the Christian church.

We'll take a brief look at this history tomorrow in Part 2, so be sure and check back.