Part Three: Christus Victor

We have seen in Part Two that God's dealings with humanity are rooted on the model of relationship not law, and how sacrifice seen through a relational paradigm takes on an entirely different meaning of the drama of self-sacrificing love. In the following section we will continue to look at the cross from a relational perspective - that of Christus Victor.

In the introduction of this paper I suggested that as a Christian I had always understood the cross on a heart level - I understood deep down in my guts that the cross screamed out how much God loved me. And I experienced in the depths of who I am the power of the cross working in my life - the love of God opened up to me, bringing life into the dark and broken places. Yet while I knew this saving power and reality of the cross as an experiential reality in my life, at the same time I didn't understand in my head how it worked. This is a very common experience among Christians. We find it reflected in the contemporary hymn "How Deep the Fathers Love"

"Why should I gain from his reward? I cannot give an answer But this I know with all my heart - his wounds have paid my ransom "

He simultaneously states that he does not understand the cross from a rational perspective "I cannot give an answer" but at the same time that he does understand it from a heart perspective "But this I know with all my heart" Here he echoes - as songs often do - what many of us also feel about the cross. We get it deep down in our gut, but we cannot express it intellectually. Charles Wesley in his defining hymn asks

" Amazing love! How can it be, That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?" "

and concludes that it is beyond comprehension:

" ’Tis mystery all: th’Immortal dies: Who can explore His strange design? In vain the firstborn seraph tries To sound the depths of love divine. "

We cannot sound the depths of this love with our limited rational explanations and theories. "In vain the firstborn Seraph tries". I want to stress here that I am by no means advocating an anti-intellectual or non-critical approach. We should use the minds God has given us. But part of wisdom is realizing the limits of our human intellect, just as we should be aware of the limits and blindspots of our emotions. Ultimately we want to approach understanding from the head and the heart together as full people, both faculties working in tandem with one another, loving God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind. Wesley is not making an anti-intellectual argument here, he is saying that the love of God reveled on the cross is just too profound to fit into a theorem or a formula.

Indeed we shouldn't try to squeeze it into a formula, to domesticate it, because in doing so - in explaining and categorizing - we automatically reduce it to much less than it is. We need to think of these things in analogies, we need to seek to understand and explain, this is good, but we need to also realize that these are always just two-dimensional pictures of something much bigger. We should never mistake our limited explanation of something for the reality itself. Modern science is fond of describing human beings by the things that determine us, whether those are psychological, sociological, or biological factors. But in explaining human beings as only the sum of these factors we make them less than human, we make them mechanical. All thoughts of character, responsibility, freedom, dignity, and morality are lost if we are just pre-determined systems. Human beings thus can never be fully "explained" because we cannot put freedom into a predictable system. And if this is true for us limited relative humans, it is all the more true of the ways of the unlimited absolute God. We cannot fit God into a box, we cannot understand exhaustively, but we can understand and know relationally, we can understand in the language of the heart. Thus Wesley in the last verse speaks of how he experiences the reality of the cross:

" Still the atoning blood is near, That quenched the wrath of hostile heaven. I feel the life His wounds impart; I feel the Savior in my heart. "

"I feel... in my heart". It is something that can only be understood through the dramatic voice, through the pen of the poet, the artist, in the language of the heart, in the language of the lover. Most Christians, whether they realize it or not, understand the cross in this way - they have heard its message through story, through song, through drama, and they have "got it" deep down. Whether we see it dramatized in a hymn, or a passion play, in a painting, or in a film, we have seen the powerful imagery of a man, broken, carrying a cross through spit and mud, of nails hammered into flesh, of blood mingled with tears, and where deep speaks to deep we do in fact understand.

This is the power of story. Story is how human beings have always communicated what they value and what is meaningful. In the past the tribes would gather to hear the leader tell them their stories, today we have our culture's values communicated to us when we go to the movies or listen to the radio. Go to just about any film with Meg Ryan in it and you will learn the western cultural myth of romance as the way to true fulfillment. Go see an action film with Bruce Willis or Arnold Schwarzenegger and you will learn the Western value of individualism, and how violence can overcome evil. The reason that President George W Bush's "war on evil" looks more like a Schwarzenegger film then it looks like the way that Jesus confronted evil is quite simply because he - like us - has had that story of the redemptive value of violence hammered into his head until it is the only solution he can imagine, the only solution we can imagine, until we half think it is the "Christian" response. The way of the cross, of "loving your enemies" of "overcoming evil with good" is something that we are virtually illiterate in. And the way we learn it is by rehearsing it in story.

The Bible is about story. It is the story of God's people and his interaction with them in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament it is - as the gospel hymn states - "that old time Gospel story". We as Christians have a part in that story - it is our story too. When we meet another Christian for the first time we will often ask them to tell us their story of how they came to Christ. We find commonality because we share the same testimony of how God has entered our lives, it is how we recognize one another - not by doctrine, but by story. We are all connected because we share the same story as the larger Gospel story - the story of redemption.

In contrast to this there has been a rationalistic tendency in theology to think only in propositional truths and doctrinal statements that we can mine out of the story. So instead of reading the Bible as story, Scripture is seen as a sort of "mother load" source of propositional truth - to coin a phrase from Roger Olsen - from which we can mine the golden propositional truths. So when we read our Bible rather then reading it as a narrative, as story, we look for proof texts, we do "concordancing" where we look up a key word in a concordance, string all the statements we find together, and conclude that this is what the Bible has to say about this topic. Scripture was written primarily as a narrative, the Gospels for instance are all written in narrative form. Yet we have been taught to see this as secondary, and that the "real" content was the propositional truths we can pull out of the narrative. Quite simply put: if the inspired writers of Scripture had wanted to give us propositional truths they would have. When they wrote in narrative form as in the Gospels, or in poetic form as in the Psalms, it is for a reason. If we want to understand fully what the Holy Spirit was communicating through them, then we need to understand it in the context that they are telling it - as story. To do anything else is to do violence to Scripture. Scripture needs to be read in the context that it was written.

This is something that I have had to learn myself. I had learned to think of story as something unnecessary, something to fill time until the person would get to the point. When I would listen for example to a pastor telling an anecdote about his child falling down on his bicycle to illustrate some point, I would find myself thinking "Oh please! just cut to the chase". For that reason I had always related much more to the Nicene Creed then the Apostles Creed. The Nicene Creed tangibly defines who God is "Very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father…" Now there, I thought, is something I can sink my teeth into! The Apostle's Creed on the other hand is more about what happened "born of the Virgin Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again". and while I agreed that it all did in fact happen historically, I didn’t understand what the point was, because I did not understand story. I didn't understand that the creed points to something much bigger - to the actual reality of what happened.

God's revelation of himself, was not in some facts about him, but an encounter with him in the person of Jesus Christ. God's communication to us of who he is was to send a real human being, Jesus Christ, to live among us, die, and rise from the grave. That is what the entire New Testament is about - a testimony of what they had seen and heard. These people had had an encounter with God almighty incarnate and wanted to have us get hold of what had gotten hold of them, so they told us the story of God come to earth, of "God in Christ reconciling the world to himself". As C.S. Lewis argues in his essay "Myth Became Fact", any doctrines we may come up with to try to talk about this reality are only secondary reflection and interpretations of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate - that of the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. That is the substance the Apostle's Creed points to. They were witness to an encounter with God in Jesus Christ that transformed their lives, and their Message , the Gospel they communicated was not mere doctrinal statements, but a life changing encounter with that same living Jesus. That's the real stuff! That's our story.

So the task for us here, if we want to put into words what we have already understood through story about the meaning of the cross on a heart level, is not to pull it out of that drama and into a calculated judicial theory, but to learn to speak and express these things of the heart in the language of the heart, with passion, with the poetic voice, so that we can understand with our heads what our hearts have already taken hold of. The early first century Church Fathers had a way of seeing the drama of the cross that is now commonly referred to as the "Christus Victor" view. Christus Victor is not so much a rational systematic theory as it is a drama, a passion story of God triumphing over the powers and liberating us from the bondage of sin. As the Church Father Irenæus writes

This was the predominant view of the early church until around 1000 AD. While the passionate drama of Christus Victor was rejected in the Middle Ages by a rationalistic judicial perspective, liberal theologians of the 19^th century also rejected the view of the early church because they found the imagery of devils and powers too "primitive" and "mythological". But in doing this they failed to understand the substance behind the powerful motifs and metaphors and only looked at them superficially. As Gustaf Aulen argues:

What they failed to see is that spiritual things must be spoken of in analogy because they are so much beyond our words to capture, and because we need the passion, the drama that these images evoke to get hold of the meaning and depth and gravity of the ideas. These are not just images: we are talking about real things: the reality of evil, the reality of oppression and its debilitating effects on the human heart. These are vital matters of life and death that cannot be expressed in a calculated, fixed dogma but must be articulated poetically as living ideas that move and touch us at the core of who we are.

So in an effort to recover the insights found in the first century church's understanding of the cross as a victory over the powers, the following section offers a sketch of what the drama of Christus Victor could look like in a language accessible for us today. Theology if it is at all meaningful must lead us to worship God better with our understanding. It must open our eyes to see the transcendent, the Eternal, the Real. It must lead us to turn our heads towards heaven and look up at invisible places. So as you read this next section I ask that you do so prayerfully and devotionally, with both your heart and mind.

The Early Church did not have a set doctrine of the cross, it was more of a collection of images and dramatic metaphors. Their main focus theologically was on the incarnation and what they saw in the cross flowed out of their understanding of the incarnation. The Early Church saw Christ as God come among them. John writes in his Gospel,

" The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world...The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only who came from the Father full of grace and truth. (John 1:9,14) "

This was the reason Jesus came - to reveal God's heart by what Jesus did and who he was. Jesus was Love's face and Love's hands. Or as the Church Father Gregory of Nyssa writes in his Greater Catechism

Love entered our world and went to the broken and the rejected, the "throwaways", and told them they were loved. Purity touched the untouchable, and made them whole and clean again. In doing this Jesus directly subverted the societal and religious authorities of the time. By associating

He crucified what would condemn us and keep us captive, he took the monopoly away from the temple, tearing the curtain in two. He broke the vicious cycle that death had us in.

with those who were considered sinners and unclean he showed that these people did not need to let the authorities define their worth, because God had seen them, and called "worthy" what the world had called "the least". This was extremely threatening to the people in religious and societal power because Jesus, in empowering and loving the small and the least, had directly undermined the Powers' own oppressive authority. So the Powers set out to shut him up. Hatred and Oppression set out to kill Love.

But Jesus would not back down. He stood up for love, for the small, for you and me. even though he knew that it would cost him his life. So the Powers stripped him naked, exposed him and shamed him. They crucified him as a common criminal to show that no one can oppose the System. But when the people saw that the Powers had killed Love, they realized what a travesty of justice this was. The people realized what a sham the oppressive System was. As Love hung on that cross the authorities were exposed, unmasked in their hatred. The illusion was lifted.

By the cross God triumphed over the System and crucified it, he nailed the law to the cross.

He crucified what would condemn us and keep us captive, he took the monopoly away from the temple, tearing the curtain in two. He took away the power of condemnation to keep us oppressed. He broke the vicious cycle that death had us in. God in effect said to the Powers and Authorities: "Death, this child is mine, you have no rights over her. You will not define who she is anymore. She doesn't belong to you" . 

It is often hard for our modern minds to understand the early Christians' focus on the "victory over death, sin, and the devil" as the earlier quote from Irenæus expressed - it seems so superstitious. But the focus is extremely important once we can get past the imagery and understand the substance. We tend to want to blame someone for our oppression, to project the problem onto some outside group rather than directly addressing the dominating power of abuse and oppression at work in our own lives: Blame it on the church, blame it on our parents, blame it on the Jews, blame it on the liberal media.- just don’t look inside. But the real "enemy", the New Testament tells us, is not any particular human, or group, or system, but the power of evil itself at work in all of our lives and our systems. Our real struggle is with our own images of false authority and power - with the spiritual and psychological power of lies to dominate and determine our identity and our worth. Thus Paul writes,

We are inclined to think that this view reflects  a "devil made me do it" irresponsibility, but the opposite is the case. Seeing evil as separate and detached from our lives is a modern phenomenon which came as a reaction to Materialism's all-out denial of the spiritual. In reaction to this, theologians during the Enlightenment conceded the natural world to the sciences and conceived of the "supernatural" world beyond the natural and immune to the hands of science. In doing so they lost the integrated perspective of the ancients. In the worldview of the biblical writers (and of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Babylonians, Egyptians, etc.) the spiritual realm of angels and demons were not seen as something detached from us, but as a parallel world connected to our own. The earthly realm and the heavenly realm interacted and influenced one another. What happened on earth was a reflection of the heavenly realm and vice versa. So a focus on the workings of evil and the devil did not reflect a "devil made me do it" irresponsibility, but a hard and honest look at the power of destructive lies at work in our lives and in our world, a naming of the systems of oppression and the power games we can get sucked into.

Likewise, when we frame this conflict in the terms of a struggle against the system and oppression, of a  liberation against the powers that be, we must be careful not to fall into the trap of making a scapegoat out of that system - a monster to blame "over there", so we can sit and feel superior or play the victim. The paradox of healing is that although we cannot help the environment that has made us who we are, we are still responsible for what we do with our lives now. Rather than blaming our oppression and victimhood on the system, the New Testament calls us to acknowledge our own complicity in that system, our own identity in it, and break out of the cycle. We all play a part in the game, and so we also must face ourselves and deal with this in our lives.

The language of the New Testament talks about a victory over "Death" and the "Powers".  This formulation is of course highly symbolic,  so we need to ask "What these symbols mean, what could such a victory look like in our lives?" In this section and the next we will be  looking at several illustrations of how this could take shape in our lives in contemporary language. For instance consider a

Our Liberation, our salvation, must involve the healing of the broken spirit that has adopted an identity of victimhood.

girl who has been constantly told by her parents that she is worthless. In time she begins to internalize this and really believe she is. This is the cycle of abuse:  She has come to accept the lies that have been told by the authority of her parents, the "Powers", so to speak, as her reality. They now define her as a person. She may respond to violence not by identifying abuse as abuse and therefore as unjustified, but by thinking that she must somehow have deserved it.  Or take for example the many people who are raised to believe that God is angry with them and demands a passive, unquestioning complacency in order to avoid punishment and Hell - a subservient denial of their dignity is required in order to avoid the disapproval and rejection of the detached authority figure. So they are taught to swallow their dignity, to disappear, to submit. As the authority figure of a judge in the sky is hammered into their head, a false image of  a terrifying God is created.  People's instinctive reaction to this hateful God-image is to respond in kind. They may be angry at life, their trust may be so damaged that they become incapable of receiving love from another, or they may internalize this hatred and develop destructive patterns of behavior.  Whether the person becomes the abused or the abuser both are trapped in the same game, both are caught in the system.  The salvation that Christus Victor illustrates is precisely a victory over the Powers that steal our lives and crush the human spirit. It is a liberation from the prison of our minds, from the living hell of an estranged identity.

It is not enough to simply expose these patterns and false authorities, to unmask the lies. Our liberation, our salvation, must involve the healing of the broken spirit that has adopted an identity of victimhood.

Through experiencing and living in the love of God we replace the hurtful identity of estrangement and learn to see ourselves as God does. Being loved heals

There is a saying: "you can take a girl out of the city but you can't take the city out of the girl" . Abuse works the same way: you can remove someone from abusive surroundings, but their broken identity needs to be healed as well or it will continue to dominate their reality and define their experience. You can take a person away from the hurt, but the hurt needs to also be taken away from the person. So to escape that enslaving destructive "world" we are trapped in, we must mirror Christ's death and resurrection: we say to that old identity of hurtfulness and victimhood "I am dead to you. I don't belong to you anymore" and we are raised to a new identity as God's loved children. By dying to what has killed us we say to that abusive system, to that hatefulness in us, that we will no longer be its victim. Thus Paul writes,

Having died to the grip of that hurtful identity, we are then are "resurrected", raised up into a new identity - born again. Practically, that means we let God's love into our lives in a personal relationship, and as we grow in that relationship with God, learning to open our lives to his love, God's love forms how we see ourselves. Through experiencing and living in the love of God we replace the hurtful identity of estrangement and learn to see ourselves as God sees us: as his beloved child. This is what the New Birth is about - being loved heals.

As illustrated in these examples, the cross declares spiritually and publicly that the things that killed us, the system, the law, our own destructive and hurtful behaviors, our own self-hatred, the whole vicious cycle of being hurt and hurting that is called reaping and sowing or "justice" in the conventional sense of "getting what we deserve" is broken, and grace comes in, liberating us from the hold of sin and death. When we were estranged and lost  God reached out to us.

For many this sense of sin is something that is hard for us to understand today. Our generation is characterized instead by a feeling of emptiness. People's problems are with self-worth. People struggle with trying to learn to love themselves and often feel like they are so messed up, so broken, that they can never be well. God does not define us by our lack; he sees all of us, and he sees someone he loves dearly. God does not have a hard time loving us, but we have a hard time accepting love. A common thought is, "Who am I that God would love me?" That is the need of our day.  In earlier generations their need was a deep sense of guilt. This is why in the writings of Christians of the time - Martin Luther being a primary example - the focus of salvation was on the forgiveness of guilt. They wanted to live moral lives and found themselves unable, and in their dilemma discovered God's grace. Just as our generation has a problem with really accepting that they are loved, theirs had a problem with really accepting that they were forgiven. That was the need of their day; it was what was blocking them from life.

In addition to struggling with self-worth, another equally common reaction to a hurtful environment is to react violently to it. Take the earlier example of a person raised in an oppressive religious environment: This person may "escape" from a repressive religious environment but still carry its scars. They feel extremely threatened by the hurtful image of authority and God they were taught, and to protect themselves they erect a defensive wall that keeps out hurt, but keeps out love as well. They become "strong" in order to survive. Weakness cannot be allowed, need cannot be admitted. They remain a victim, a captive, because the place has changed but their heart has not. In their struggle against the oppressive image of authority they come to see God as a threat, an enemy seeking to crush them, and in reaction  to this they hit back in rage, hurting themselves and others. The term "sin" which is so problematic for our generation simply describes all these different kinds of alienation to Life.

I realize that this may seem threatening for some readers, so I want to clarify that these conditions can just as easily describe someone inside the church as someone outside. This is not a matter of being converted to a religion, but being reconciled to Life. Many people inside the religion of Christianity still are estranged from life and alienated from God's love,

God does not need the cross to forgive us. But some of us needed the cross to be able to really accept that forgiveness. God does not need the cross to love us. But many of us needed the cross to really grasp that love.

often times precisely because of a toxic faith environment encountered in the church. God seems distant to them; they feel condemned and unfulfilled. I know many people like this, people who are trying to break free from the yoke of legalism and spiritual abuse and enter into a grace-oriented understanding of Christianity. Whatever religious credentials we possess, whatever our condition is, God looks at our hearts and encounters us individually, personally, just as we are.

Even if we are hostile to God, reacting destructively towards life, violently reacting to the authority images we struggle with - God's response as revealed in Jesus is not to crush us as we might expect, but to break the cycle of estrangement and rivalry with the transforming power of love. We see on the cross, in Richard Rohr's terms, "the naked God". ,God is made small, stripped naked, arms stretched out, so that our false image of a threatening judgmental God is taken away and God's heart of love for us is revealed. The threat is removed; we have nothing to fight against. God surrenders first so we can give up the fight too and come home. The cycle of rivalry and violence is broken through the weakness of God on the cross.

God does not need the cross to forgive us or love us. Jesus forgave and loved people before the cross. But some of us needed the cross to be able to really accept that forgiveness. God does not need the cross to love us: God has always loved us. But many of us needed the cross to really grasp that. God does not need the cross to be reconciled to us. But many of us needed the cross to be reconciled to Life, to break the cycle of rivalry and to heal our estranged authority image. The cross speaks to us at the point of our need. And while these are not God's problems, but our alienation, still for us that alienation is very real. So to the one wracked with guilt God says through the cross, "I take the blame. I pay the price." To the one who is locked in self-hate God says through the cross "I love you so much I would give my life defending you." To the one in rebellion to life God says through the cross, "See me here. I am not a threat; I am love."

Perhaps the major message of "the naked God" revealed on the cross, and that

When we see God so transparently and openly, we see that we ourselves can be real, transparent, and unafraid.

Jesus revealed with his whole life, is that when we see God so transparently and openly, we see that we ourselves can be real, transparent, and unafraid. We can come as we are without need to pretend. When we are allowed to be honest, we all know that we have needs and dark places in our lives. Jesus was never about degrading people, but about restoring them to worth. There is no need for guilt trips or false humility here, just the freedom that love gives us to be real and honest. On the cross God in Christ took on our sin. That means he at once bore the weight of the harm that we have done, and also bore the pain of the victims. This was not, as Satisfaction-Doctrine would say, God punishing the human Jesus, but the incarnate Jesus revealing the compassionate heart of God to us. On the cross we see that God suffers with those who suffer, and always has. God carries the pain of every victim of rape, incest, torture and starvation. as Christ cries out "my God my God why have you forsaken me" God shows his solidarity with every person so overwhelmed with

The cross does not change God at all, but it demonstrates very vividly who God is and always was.

doubt they don’t have the will to believe anymore.  On the cross God took on both the villain and the victim, both rapist and the raped, so that we would know, whatever our condition, that he knows it intimately. There is no need to hide or pretend. We can come as we are. Honestly, unafraid, unmasked.

On the night before his arrest, Jesus washed the disciples' feet, and a shocked Peter refused. This kind of humility and servitude was not worthy of his Lord! Throughout the centuries people have reacted similarly to the God that Jesus reveals, the God who suffers with those who suffer, who bends down to serve, whose strength is revealed in weakness. That kind of openness and closeness is something that is at the same time wonderfully liberating, and terribly threatening. It is threatening because it unmasks our own weakness and vulnerability. We feel a need to present ourselves as if there was no lack, no need in our lives, no broken or dark places. We hide because we are threatened by the judge image of God. But the crucified God shows us a God who is not a threat to us. God became small, God in Christ was stripped naked, revealed, so we could finally see who God really is and come to him as we really are.

In the above section I have attempted to illustrate in vivid terms how the cross is tied to the incarnation. The entire life of Jesus, which culminates at the cross revealing a radical transforming picture of who God is. The incarnation is the story of God come into our world in Jesus, loving the forgotten, healing the wounded, and liberating those oppressed by darkness and oppression. The critical difference between the incarnation based view of Christus Victor and the legal based view of the Satisfaction Doctrine is that Christus Victor is God-to-man while Satisfaction Doctrine is man-to-God. While Christus Victor focuses on God in Christ come among us to save and reconcile the lost and the broken, Satisfaction Doctrine focuses on the man Jesus living a perfect life and thus bringing the perfect sacrifice to appease God's justice - a sacrifice offered from man to God and worked out in legal theory. In contrast to this the early church saw Christ as God come to them in their need - God to man expressed in passionate imagery and motifs of God's victory over evil. Furthermore while Satisfaction Doctrine is very anthropological, centering around man's problem and how it can be solved, Christus Victor is much more broad sweeping, focusing on God's victory on a cosmic scale over "things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible" (v16) and as a result of that complete victory we have been redeemed into God's kingdom. The passage in the first chapter of Colossians that the above quote is taken from is a song of the deity and supremacy of Christ.

"He is before all things and in him all things hold together...so that in all things he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and though him to reconcile to himself all things" (Colossians 1:18-20)

What does it mean to make Christ supreme? To make his way, who he was and what he embodied ours. The way is Christ. And having Christ as our image and revelation of who God is means a radical reformation of our fallen image of God into the image that God has revealed of himself in Christ. The point of the incarnation is not so much to describe the God-like qualities of Jesus but much more to describe the Jesus like qualities of God. God is like Jesus. Jesus reveals God's heart, the core of who he is. Jesus is the face of God. If you have seen him, you have seen the Father. What is God like? He is like Jesus.

This is crucial because there is a tendency to want to take Jesus and to squeeze him into our fallen limited images of God rather then letting him blow the roof of how we see God through him and begin a revolution in us. Jesus as the "image of the invisible God" is not merely a concept or an idea such as seeing God as justice or God as love. The revelation that Jesus gives us is of an entire life. So that in answer to the question what is love? We can say , Look at the life of Jesus - that is love. Similarly if we want to know what Godly justice is about, Jesus is our model of that. Moreover Jesus was not just a life long ago, but is alive now. He is not a static life trapped in a book but is the living Word of God. Jesus is a slippery, dangerous, and utterly remarkable reality who refuses to be captured and tamed, whether it be the Moral Majority or the Jesus Seminar scholars who wield the whip and chair. The reality of who He is defies any box we might wish to place Him in. Jesus is the Truth. We can never have a monopoly on Truth, but Truth should have a monopoly on us. And we do this by living in a constant relationship of openness and listening, continually letting the real living Christ transform us. You cannot tame this river.

In contrast to Satisfaction-Doctrine which focuses so much on Jesus' death that it makes his life seem almost irrelevant - as if Jesus came just to die. Christus Victor sees Christ's life and death in complete harmony with one another. Christ gave his life standing up for what he had stood up for his whole life - caring for the least. The first-century church's understanding of his death and resurrection was a parallel to his life: Love had stood up to Death and overcome it. His whole life he had stood up for the voiceless, touched the untouchable, loved the forgotten, the rejected, the abandoned. And as he had done this, the people had seen that it was really God touching them, loving them, defending them, seeking them. Jesus reveals for us the heart of God, in his life and on the cross.  In seeing God's heart revealed, our upside-down world is set right - our estranged identity is reconciled to Life, our twisted image of authority is pointed back to God's way of compassion. We are liberated from the hold of an oppressive environment and our own self-hatred and reconciled into a loving, intimate relationship with the living God.

Jesus framed his entire ministry in the terms of the "kingdom of God" against the "kingdom of Satan" . Scholars universally agree that the message of the kingdom was the central theme of Jesus' teaching. Whether he was touching the untouchable, fellowshipping with the rejected, bringing hope to the broken, or healing the afflicted, all of these acts were framed in the terms of the kingdom - liberating people from Satan's grip. For example, Jesus diagnoses a crippled woman  as one "whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years" (Lk 13:11,16) and says to her "Woman, you are set free from your infirmity." (v 12) The word translated here as "infirmity" is mastix and literally means "scourging" or "whipping" Whether Jesus is involved in exorcism, healing, or fellowshipping with the outcast, all of these acts are understood by him as a frontal assault on the "kingdom of Satan" to advance God's reign of compassion. He had come to heal the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, freedom to those in prison.

Thus the early church's understanding of Christ's death and resurrection as "overcoming death, sin, and the devil" was parallel to how Jesus understood his entire life ministry. The cross was the culmination of Jesus' entire life ministry to advance the kingdom of Heaven.

Although Jesus' life and death was not the fulfillment of a legal system, it was the fulfillment of the relational model of love. Jesus fulfilled the true law by modeling perfect humanity. Jesus shows us what it means to be truly human by modeling what a life lived in submission to the God of love looks like. Jesus' way was the way of love, and Jesus knew full well that if he stayed on the road he was on, defending the poor and confronting spiritual corruption and evil,

God did not require Jesus' death. Hate killed Jesus when he stood up for love. But God used this tragedy to bring about life.

that this course would inevitably mean his death. The cross was no accident. God had a plan. God did not require Jesus' death. Hate killed Jesus when he stood up for love. But God used this tragedy to bring about life. Through the way of suffering, Life overcame Death. Jesus was not just a martyr for a cause, his death was the way that led to resurrection - the restoration of all things. It was the way of the cross that led to life and the resurrection and victory. In Aikido one uses the force of an attacker's blow to

In God's economy evil was defeated not with violence but with nonviolence, not with the power of hate but with the power of love.

throw them, and God did exactly this on the cross. In God's economy, evil was defeated not with violence but with nonviolence, not with the power of hate but with the power of love. Life defeated Death. God raised Jesus from the dead so we could see that in the final analysis love is stronger than hate and death. It is this way of the cross that leads to our being liberated from the trap of the Powers - raised up out of a life governed by Death to a new identity ruled by Life. We enter this liberation as we embrace God's gift of grace and enter into Life by following the way of the cross - dying to what has killed us and being raised to a new identity - seeing ourselves through Jesus' eyes.

This being raised up , this resurrection, was the central focus of the early church. This was the victory. Sin was overcome, not through a payment to satisfy the Powers, but by God triumphing over the Powers. It is not a sterile transaction but a drama of rescue where the tyrant is robbed of its authority over us and God frees us from our prison of alienation. Hell and Death are not the punishment we receive in a legal system but the enemies that God fights against. The drama of the resurrection is of Life defeating Death - God fighting for us, and liberating us from Death's debilitating hold over us.

Unlike Satisfaction-Doctrine which focuses on the death of Jesus, the pivotal event of Christus Victor is the resurrection. It was through the resurrection that death was overcome and where love emerged as victor. It was in the power and hope of the resurrection that the first-century church set their hope that they too would be raised up. That it was worth it to believe in love in a world that could be so loveless; to fight for justice and reform in a world that could be so unjust, to believe in yourself in a world that calls you the least. The resurrection was God's definitive yes to life.  It said that in the final analysis love conquers all, and nothing, not death or hell or trouble or persecution or sword can separate us from that love. This is Christus Victor. It is about liberation. It is about revolution. It is about God's battle to break through to us with his love.

The biblical phrases "the hope of salvation" and "the hope of the resurrection" are used interchangeably to mean the hope of this liberation to Life, of being set free from the hold of sin. It is a language of empowerment, calling us to live "on earth as it is in heaven"; to see ourselves as Abba sees us, reconciled and loved. Today we tend to think of resurrection as only referring to a future heaven, but it meant much more in the worldview of the first-century Christians. Heaven was not some disconnected place in the future, but something that should inform how we live now.  Resurrection is about being liberated in every area of life from a hurtful and destructive identity to one where we are truly free, truly alive. It is not simply that we have hope of life after death (we do), but that Life is alive and at work in us now , even as we are still in a world that is not redeemed and even as we ourselves are not fully redeemed. Thus the resurrection, rather than promoting escapism, tells us that it is part of ushering in God's kingdom to work for the reconciliation of all things - in every area of our lives, our relations, our societies, and our world.

But living in this fallen world, a person can get to feel so worthless, so powerless in an environment of abuse, in a world that seems to be filled with injustice. It can so cloud our vision and so completely define how we see

Sin was not overcome through a payment to satisfy the Powers, but by God triumphing over the Powers. Hell and Death are not the punishment received in a legal system but the enemies that God fights against.

ourselves that it's all we can see. Seeing life in this clouded way, though, does not reflect an empirical fact, but rather our own captivity to hurt. We have been taught to see this way, taught to identify as a prisoner, a victim, as worthless, as powerless. The resurrection acts like a window opened up in heaven letting God's Reality burst into our gray world. Just as Jesus led the captives out of Hell, Love grabs hold of us and pulls us out of that destructive identity. It does not change our situation: we may still experience a hurtful world of injustice and suffering. But we have hope in this dark world, like an anchor for our soul, holding us to Love, connecting our hearts with God's heart. (cf Heb 6:19-20). We know that, in the final analysis, love is stronger than death, so we can have the courage to risk loving scandalously in a dark world. Our eyes are opened to see the whole picture - enabling us to live fully and freely. It is not escapist but fully life-embracing. It is a faith that does not take us out of the world, but overcomes the world, and places us in that world fully engaged, daring to care for ourselves and others, working to alleviate suffering and fighting injustice. We live between the "already" and the "not yet" of the resurrection. We see in Christ the first fruits of the victory of the resurrection and have hope in a world at war still very much subject to sin and suffering. It is like a letter received behind enemy lines saying, "You have not been forgotten. I love you. I am coming to get you out. " (compare Jn 14:18-20,27). We long for the resurrection of all things, the transformation of our lives and of society into God's reign of compassion, for an end to suffering and death. But we do this knowing the outcome is clear. Satan has been dealt the death blow on the cross. Love is stronger than death. That is the hope of the resurrection.

The hope of the resurrection is a protest, a declaration for life - and that requires courage. The courage to embrace life with both hands, to risk caring, loving, reaching out.  It is a holding on to hope in spite of our brokenness, in spite of trouble or hardship or doubt, because we realize how incredible this love is that has taken hold of us. The hope of the resurrection is the hope that comes when all hope is gone. As Peter Gomes writes,

That is the bold hope of the resurrection. It is the courage that Jesus demonstrated when he, on the cross, abandoned by his friends, mocked and misunderstood by the onlookers, overwhelmed with pain and torn with sorrow called out in despair, "My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?" and heard nothing - the heavens absent of comfort, as black as night. And there, in that darkness, Jesus, in one final act of courage and trust, set his hope on grace and cast his spirit into the mystery of God: "Father, into your hands  I commit my spirit"

It was that sacrifice, that faith, that holding on to love in the blackness of night that defeated death and raised Jesus from the grave. Sown in weakness, raised in power. This is the way of the cross, and there is power there. Nothing, not even death, can stop that kind of power. It is the power of love.  The victory of God.

This website and its contents are copyright © 2000 Derek Flood, All Rights Reserved. Permission to use and share its contents is granted for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit to the author and this url are clearly given.