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.

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.

Few would deny that Christus Victor was the dominant view in the early church. Indeed, great church fathers and thinkers throughout the first millennium of church history held this doctrine almost exclusively. Origen, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa and Irenaeus all shared the Christus Victor view of the atonement and wrote about it at great length.

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...