Up until this point of our 6-part series on the atonement I still have not tackled the question of how it is that Christ’s death on the cross was able to defeat the devil. Though space does not permit a rigorous examination of this aspect of the Christus Victor model, I will briefly give some background as to how it has been explained by some of our church fathers and conclude with a summary of Gregory Boyd’s recent revision.

The starting place for the functional Christus Victor in the past has usually been Mark 10:45: “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for man.” “To whom was this ransom paid? Certainly not to God. He would not pay a ransom to himself. Rather, it must have been paid to the evil one, for it was he who held us captive until the ransom, namely, the soul of Jesus, was paid.”¹ How, exactly might this work?

It is at this point I must admit that the two most popular theories in patristic writings leave much to be desired and were probably somewhat responsible for the mass exodus away from the Christus Victor model after Anselm’s publication.

The first theory maintains that God made a deal with Satan: the life of Christ in exchange for the lives of humans. However, after Satan had relinquished control of humanity, God essentially snatched Christ back from the dead and broke his end of the bargain. Two problems quickly arise with this view, however.

First and foremost, the scriptural evidence that backs up this elaborate theory is quite light. As is often the problem when we press Scripture too hard for details that it does not provide, we tend to come to conclusions that are mostly speculative.

Second, this view makes God look deceptive, which ultimately diminishes his infinite wisdom and might. It makes him out to be a cosmic David Copperfield: forced to use trickery because he lacks the intelligence or the brawn to defeat Satan in a fair fight. For these reasons, I reject the “deceptive God” version of Christus Victor.


The second, and even more popular, functional version of Christus Victor took a page from fishing and portrayed God the Father as using Christ as bait. Knowing that Satan could not resist trying to swallow Jesus up, God sends his Son into the world where Satan does assuredly attempt to swallow him whole. However, Christ is too powerful for Satan to stomach and on the third day he raises from the dead, escaping Satan’s clutches and bringing enslaved humanity with him.

Though this model has some important things to say about Christ’s victory, it shares one of the major failures of its counterpart: it is based more on conjecture that on Scripture.

Boyd believes that the answers we can arrive at needn’t be filled with “speculative and mythic features” of the first millennium understanding of Christus Victor. Boyd bases his approach on five Scriptural truths: 1) God kept the cross a mystery until after the crucifixion (Romans 16:25; Ephesians 3:9-10) 2) It’s clear that Satan is instrumental in Jesus’ death (John 13:27) 3) Paul tells us that if the “rulers of this age” would have understood the cross, they never would have had Christ crucified (1 Cor. 2:8) 4) It was by means of the cross that the “rulers” were defeated, and 5) “throughout Christ’s ministry, demons seem to know who Jesus is but have no idea why he’s come into their domain” (Mark 3:11; Luke 8:28, etc.).

Based on these five Scriptural truths, Boyd asserts:

The wisdom of God centered on Jesus dying out of love for the race that Satan and the powers had held captive for ages, and these powers, being evil, apparently lack the capacity to imagine action that is motivated by this kind of self-sacrificial love. The only thing the powers could understand was that, for whatever reasons, Jesus had in fact entered their domain, and this made him fair game. Working with cooperative human agents, therefore, the powers orchestrated Jesus’ crucifixion, only to learn that by doing so they had played into God’s secret plan all along. No wonder Paul says Christ not only disarmed the powers; he reduced them to a laughing stock.2

Though some questions still remain unanswered, it is important that we not stress the biblical data too much, lest we fall into the same snares as the earlier functional versions of the Christus Victor model. Suffice it to say, Christ’s atonement on the cross made a way for us and freed us from the bonds of sin and death. How is it, though, that the atonement he made for the cosmos relates to his incarnation? Our attention now turns to that question.

Tomorrow we turn to what I believe to be the most important aspect of the Christus Victor model: the holistic aspect in which it views Christ's incarnation, life, death and resurrection.

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¹ Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, 2d ed., (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 1998), 811.

² Boyd, Nature, 36-37.

Full bibliography for the entire Six-Part series may be downloaded here in PDF format.