Atonement Theory

Overview

Recall questions on atonement and soteriology, the sacrificial model, the victory model and Aulén's account of it, Anselm's satisfaction theory, penal substitution and its critics, and the moral exemplar model.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What does the word atonement mean?

   Model answer

   It was coined in English to mean at-one-ment, the making of two parties one again. In Christian use it names both the restoration of the broken relationship between God and humanity and the act of Christ, particularly his death, by which Christians believe that restoration is achieved. The question every theory tries to answer is what exactly the obstacle was and how Christ's life and death removed it.

2. 2

   How does soteriology differ from atonement?

   Model answer

   Soteriology is the wider study of salvation as a whole: what human beings need saving from and for, how grace works, what justification and sanctification are, the place of faith, the Church and the sacraments, who is saved, and what final salvation involves. Atonement is one part of it, focused on the reconciling work of Christ. A student can hold a firm atonement theory and still face open questions about the rest of soteriology.

3. 3

   Why are there competing models of atonement rather than one defined doctrine?

   Model answer

   Because the Church defined the person of Christ at Nicaea and Chalcedon but never gave the same conciliar definition to how his death saves. The New Testament itself uses several pictures drawn from the temple, the battlefield, the slave market, the law court and the family, and different eras have drawn on different ones. Most theologians now argue that no single model exhausts the reality and that the images are complementary rather than rivals.

4. 4

   Explain the sacrificial model.

   Model answer

   It reads Christ's death through the sacrificial system of Israel: offerings that purify what has been defiled, the Day of Atonement, and the Passover lamb whose blood marks out a people for deliverance. Christ is presented as the offering that deals with sin once and for all, and in the Letter to the Hebrews as both the priest who offers and the victim offered. Its strength is that it is deeply biblical; its difficulty is that sacrifice is now an unfamiliar and, to many, repellent idea.

5. 5

   What is the victory model, and how did the early Church picture it?

   Model answer

   It presents the whole movement from incarnation to resurrection as God's decisive victory over the powers that hold humanity captive, principally sin, death and the devil. Patristic writers sometimes told it as a ransom paid to the devil, or as a trap in which the devil seized a man he had no right to and thereby forfeited his claim. Its strength is its drama and its refusal to treat evil as merely personal; its weakness that the imagery can seem mythological and the ransom idea gives evil a status Christians deny.

6. 6

   Outline G Aulén's contribution to the study of atonement.

   Model answer

   Aulén argued in the 1930s that the victory theme, which he called the classic idea, was the dominant view of the fathers and was recovered by Luther, and that it had been unfairly displaced. He sorted the alternatives into an objective type, exemplified by Anselm, and a subjective type, exemplified by Abelard. His decisive point was that in the classic idea God is the sole agent throughout, whereas in satisfaction theories something is offered to God from the human side.

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