What I write today, though brief, is the culmination of everything we've discussed thus far and the most important aspect of the Christus Victor model of the atonement: the holistic nature of the work of Christ.

It is when stepping back and looking at the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Christ as a unified whole that the Christus Victor model shines brightest. Understood properly, these aspects of Christ’s ministry are inseparable, even on a theoretical level.

It is Irenaeus who wisely points out that Satan’s grasp on humanity was not merely a blight on mankind, but an offense against God that could not be allowed to stand:

Man had been created by God that he might have life. If now, having lost life, and having been harmed by the serpent, he were not to return to life, but were to be wholly abandoned to death, then God would have been defeated, and the malice of the serpent would have overcome God’s will. 1

As Irenaeus shows, Satan’s continued control over mankind would be more than a divide in the relationship between creator and creation: it would have constituted a defeat of God at the hands of the Great Deceiver. God, being perfect, just, and invincible then steps in not only for the sake of restoring the relationship but also for his name’s sake. We can affirm, then, that Christ’s redemptive work in defeating Satan still falls firmly within the overarching motivation for everything that God does: the preservation and exultation of his glorious name! God is not “forced” into a showdown by Satan or by the actions of sinful man. Rather, by his very decision to create and because of the goodness innate in his being, God has chosen to bind himself to his creation in such a way that when they inevitably fall privy to sin, he will engage in sacrificial battle in order to free them from the Satanic chains that they have chosen to shackle themselves with. Not because of any goodness in the heart of man, but because of the outrageous love of the Lord of Lords, God chooses to create and thus chooses to die a gruesome human death on a cross—inflicted by his creation.

And so the redeeming and victorious work of God is seen throughout every facet of the work of Christ. He takes on human flesh because it is necessary for him to live a life of perfect human obedience. In so doing, the “disobedience of the one man, which inaugurated the reign of sin, is answered by the One Man who brought life . . . The obedience is the means of His triumph”² and is thus just as integral to the Christus Victor model as Jesus’ death on the cross. So as Christ is living a perfect life in obedience to the Father, he is defeating the power of sin and refuting its stranglehold on humanity. As he is healing the sick and the afflicted and giving sight to the blind, he is ushering the authority of death from this world. As Christ is sharing his meals with tax collectors and prostitutes; as he is befriending Samaritans and providing a desperately needed affectionate human touch to the lepers he is tearing down the sinful social constructs and demonic barriers that have kept humanity from relationship with one another and with Him. And as Christ is having the skin ripped from his flesh with each crack of a whip, he is disregarding the shame because he knows it’s only Friday…and Sunday is coming. The day of atonement, the day of reckoning, the day of restoration, and the day of victory for Christ Jesus is just around the corner and the cosmos will never be the same.

Whereas other models of the atonement tend to isolate the meaning of Jesus’ death from other aspects of his life, the Christus Victor model sees every aspect of Christ’s life—from his incarnation to his resurrection—as being most fundamentally about one thing: victoriously manifesting the living kingdom of God over and against the destructive, oppressive kingdom of Satan. 3

We'll wrap the series up over the weekend with a brief recap and a couple of concluding remarks.

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¹ Irenæus, Adv. Har., III., 21.10; 22.4

² Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement, (Eugene, Org.: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1969), 29.

³ Boyd, Nature, 40.

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