I somehow managed not to choke on my falafel. My friend, who was in what you might call stage one deconstruction of evangelical faith, had just told me some of my core beliefs didn’t extend back further than the sixteenth century. The kinds of ideas that I and other evangelicals associate with the work of Christ were, in his opinion, pretty much made up by reformers like Luther and Calvin.
It is a pretty severe charge. Although it was in no way intended personally, it is hard not to take it personally on some level when those ideas have been central to what one has preached for three decades and believed for a few decades longer than that.
Apart from the personal dimensions set out above, I think this issue of the nature of the atonement is important. There are some serious currents of thought flowing presently in the church and around social media amongst pastors and scholars with respect to the atonement. In particular they challenge the idea that in the death of Christ the righteous demands of God’s law were satisfied, enabling sinners to know God as Father on the basis of what Christ has achieved.
The aim
In short, my aim in this piece is to establish that the kind of language and concepts the reformers used in connection with the atonement – legal and moral language and concepts – were current in the church of the day and had been in the church throughout its history. It could also be argued that those language and concepts became dominant in these discussions over the previous thousand or so years.
Not a defence of one view of the atonement over another
My objective in writing this piece, therefore, is not to defend a particular view of the atonement or criticise other views of the atonement. The purpose is more along the lines of exploring the accuracy of my deconstructing friend’s assertions about the historicity – lack of historicity – of an understanding of the work of Christ that proceeds along moral / legal lines as opposed to the currently more popular Christus victor or “victory over the devil” understanding of the atonement.[1]
The merits or otherwise of these different approaches demand separate treatment. I hope that some day I will manage to get around to writing something on the topic. In the meantime, this short piece on the atonement from Michael Bird more or less sums up my outlook.[2] In fact, you don’t really need to read any further if you accept Bird’s arguments; the ultimately important historical link is the one that stretches right back to the New Testament. Having said that, to claim a belief stretches back to the New Testament without having a concern for its appearance or lack of appearance in the history of the church might betray a disregard for the thought and efforts of Christians in previous centuries and their desire to be faithful to the gospel.
Currents of thought in evangelicalism
It is not hard to gain the impression if you read around what is being printed, tweeted or posted by some evangelicals that the church believed in the purchase of salvation by Christ on the cross as primarily if not solely the result of His conquest of the powers of darkness. This was, it is claimed by some, the original understanding of the work of Christ that was somehow pushed to the side in the Middle Ages, supremely by the reformers.[3]
The idea that the reformers were guilty of subverting an understanding of Christ’s work as victory over Satan by substituting a moral / legal approach to the work of Christ is historically inaccurate.
Alister McGrath in his comprehensive survey of the concept of the righteousness of God throughout history, is very helpful in charting how this term has been understood at various points in the church’s story.[4]
McGrath’s analysis very clearly indicates that a moral / legal understanding of the work of Christ was not an innovation of the reformers.
For their part, the reformers did not see themselves as turning their back on church history in a quest for the teaching of the New Testament. The New Testament was indeed the bar at which church teaching should be judged. That was not to say that there was nothing good in the history of the church. Faithfulness to the teaching of the church by stripping back the layers of tradition and ritual that had overlaid it for a thousand years was as much an objective for the reformers as anything else. You don’t have to read too far in Calvin’s Institutes, for example, to find him quoting with approval the church fathers.
Augustine
This was especially the case in connection with Augustine and his teaching on the righteousness of God and justification. His understanding was along the kind of legal and moral lines reflected in what the reformers taught.
Augustine’s teaching had been endorsed by the church at the Second Council of Orange in 529 A.D.[5]
The canons of the Council of Orange somehow were lost to the church for nearly six hundred years and were only rediscovered in the sixteenth century. Despite that, the moral / legal understanding of the work of Christ was alive and well in the centuries prior to the reformation.[6]
Anselm
Anselm of Canterbury’s work Cur Deus homo? (Why did God become man?), in McGrath’s view marked a distinctive break with what he describes as a “mythological view” of the atonement, namely, Christ’s victory over the powers of darkness.[7]
What the reformers taught about the work of Christ was consistent not just with Augustine but also with the direction of Western theology in general.
Conclusion
To recap then, the reformers were not trying to innovate.[8] The concepts and language of their teaching had a long-established history in the church. Additionally, it was not dependant on the voice of one theologian for historical credibility, it stretched back to and through Anselm and numerous scholarly figures who saw the significance of Christ’s work in moral / legal terms rather than in those of a battle with Satan.
I do understand that for some of my readers the above will seem like a very academic argument, with little relevance to very day Christian life. In truth, writing this post felt like that.
However, I do believe we need to curate carefully our own history. It’s too easy to dismiss ideas and doctrines that have a long and worthy tradition through historical ignorance. Some of these teachings have brought hope and comfort to thousands perhaps millions of people. To brush them away because they don’t fit with the prevailing ideas of a specific culture is, to my mind, unwarranted and even reckless. We have no right to rewrite history to suit our own ends.
The historical integrity of evangelical theology matters because people matter. And because the gospel matters. The reformers were people of their time, but their ideas stretched back much further.
Notes
[1] Mark Galli’s remarks in the linked article, about the cultural appeal of this model of the atonement at the present time reflect comments made by Alister McGrath about the age in which the victory over the devil theory was popular. It was an age in which the dominant ideological challenge to the gospel was a fatalistic worldview of the type found in Gnosticism:
“The main external threat to the early church, particularly during the second century, appears to have been pagan or semi-pagan fatalisms, such as Gnosticism, which propagated the thesis that man is neither responsible for his own sins nor for the evil in the world.” McGrath, A., Iustitia Dei: Justification: The Beginnings to the Reformation, Cambridge: 1986, p.20.
[2] I realise that in saying this I have nailed my colours to the mast. I do believe in what’s known as a penal substitutionary atonement. At the same time, I believe that victory over the devil is also a dimension of the atonement. I just don’t see the need to harmonise Romans 3 with for example Colossians 2.15, or vice versa. That being said, I do hope that what follows will indicate that I am not trying to “cook the historical books” in favour of a particular outlook.
[3] The modern classic by Gustaf Aulen, Christus Victor, made the ideas connected with this theory widely accessible to a modern audience when it was first published in the last century.
[4] McGrath, op.cit.
[5] “…it may be asserted that Orange II endorses an Augustinian doctrine of justification” McGrath, op. cit. p.74
[6] “It is a curious and unexplained feature of the history of doctrine that the canons of Orange II appear to have been unknown from the tenth to the middle of the sixteenth centuries” McGrath, op.cit. p. 74
[7] “The theological renaissance of the eleventh century saw the structure being subjected to a devastating theological criticism, particularly by Anselm of Canterbury…It is possible to argue that it is with Anselm’s insights that the characteristic thinking of the Western church on the means of the redemption of mankind may be said to begin.” McGrath, op.cit. p.39
[8] That’s not to say the reformers didn’t innovate. Their differentiation, for example, between justification and sanctification marked a break with the Western theological tradition. See McGrath, op.cit. pp.186-7
James Glass 