Are All Atonement Theories Equally Valid?

The phrase “theories of the atonement” has always struck me with the same kind of bad taste as its parallel phrase “theories of truth.” On its surface the language seems to do violence to the obvious meaning of the word in question. What else is atonement in the context of salvation if it is not God making right what was most fundamentally wrong with sinners? Obviously that begs the very questions that set these different theologies on their divergent paths toward the cross. However, the last question that should be begged is whether or not each theory is really talking about an “atonement” at all.

On the other hand, we could overreact and ignore some other important dimensions. If some wrongheaded views cast the peripheral against the essence of the truth itself, we could make the opposite mistake of cutting off as merely peripheral some valuable end for which Christ died. In the name of recovering the root, we may come to dismiss the fruit.

Metaphors aside, what are the main theories of the atonement of Christ that have been proposed throughout church history? The following are the main contenders:

1. The ransom to Satan theory.

2. The example theory.

3. The moral influence theory.

4. The governmental theory.

5. The satisfaction-substitution theory.

6. The hypothetical universalist theory.

7. The Christus Victor theory.

There may often be overlap between a few of these. The first and last are placed as they are because of the chronology of when they arose. Not much more should be assumed about the order of the rest. In one form or another, they have been around for a while. Historians of theology who plant their whole flag in the circumstances in which each theory arose may be bringing up an important point, or they may be committing the genetic fallacy. We will not likely discover which by simply taking their claim at face value.

The Theories Briefly Summarized

One of the earliest explanations of the atonement has gone by the name “ransom to Satan,” though we must observe that there are more and less orthodox versions. While Gregory of Nyssa and Cyril of Alexandria could legitimately speak of how the cross was used to “bait” the devil, and confound what, to the eyes of the flesh, appeared to be a victory for darkness over light, others, such as Origen, pressed the notion that sinners were held captive to Satan. Thus the work of Christ freed these captives by the very same reckoning that paid for the sins that were punished by death. Proponents could point to where the Scripture says, “that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery” (Heb. 2:14-15). On a popular level, one might think of that place in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which C. S. Lewis’s own affinity for this theory comes out. The White Witch rides into Aslan’s camp with Edmund as her slave, announcing his treason and striking a deal for his release.

Some will collapse the example theory and the moral influence theory into one. After all, the way that Christ holds himself out as an example is what morally influences humanity. But this misunderstands the two kinds of influences that have been discussed. One belongs to ethics, the other to gospel.

The example theory tends to arise in contexts in which Christianity is conceived in its “horizontal” moral function—that is, as a way of life in this world. Such a model of the atonement would have been attractive to those who bought into Pelagius’s arguments in the early fifth century, and it became even more attractive within the context of modern liberalism. Here Jesus is conceived entirely as a good teacher, a martyr, or even the “first Christian.” His death on the cross is the ultimate in self-sacrificial love. He is turning the other cheek. He is resisting power over others. The point is that something that Jesus did is a model for us, as in Peter’s words: “because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps” (1 Pet. 2:21).

The moral influence theory more specifically sees this action of Jesus as proving God’s love to us as individuals. This influence exerts itself upon our prodigal hearts and moves us to return to our Father in heaven. So when John writes, “In this the love of God was made manifest among us” (1 Jn. 4:9), or when Paul does the same, “For the love of Christ controls us” (2 Cor. 5:14), they were discussing the death of Christ for us.

Anselm of Canterbury most famously laid the foundation for the satisfaction view. It is often said that Martin Luther and John Calvin rounded out the picture only by giving it a legal framework—each of those magisterial reformers having their start in law—whereas Anselm was operating within a feudalistic context of honor and mutual duties. At any rate, Anselm challenged the idea that our sin debt could be owed to Satan,1 and instead, proposed that a perfectly just God must uphold His own honor.2 Conversely, the honor due to God and the sin committed by man spells a double-problem.

In other words, the death of Christ has most to do with recompense.3 Hence this view—which classical Reformed theology holds as the correct view—is called by the names “penal substitution,” or “vicarious sacrifice,” or simply “satisfaction,” or some other variation of those words. Christ’s work, as Charles Hodge said, “perfectly, from its own intrinsic worth, satisfies the demands of justice.”4 This was principally,

to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus (Rom. 3:25-26).

In other words, God does not simply wink at sin with the coming of Christ. Sin must be dealt with, and so it was. The just Judge can forgive sinners because He does in fact punish sin to the fullest—either on the cross paid in full (Jn. 19:30) or in hell everlasting (Mat. 25:46).

Two other views already in existence in the Middle Ages asserted themselves again during the era of Reformed orthodoxy. Working out the logic of the classical satisfaction doctrine lends itself to what Calvinists have called—or, what has been associated with them, for better or worse—limited atonement. When the actuality and the particularity of the work of Christ comes to the forefront of one’s mind, so too does something like the dilemma set forth by John Owen, namely, that if Jesus paid for every single one of the sins of a particular sinner, such a one cannot justly pay for these again in hell. This principle is often called double jeopardy in courts of law.

Thus the Canons of Dort said,

In other words, it was God’s will that Christ through the blood of the cross (by which he confirmed the new covenant) should effectively redeem from every people, tribe, nation, and language all those and only those who were chosen from eternity to salvation and given to him by the Father.5

In order to avoid such particularism, those two other already existing views were pressed in their modern form. Their proponents insisted upon having equal status among the Reformed. The first was the governmental view, articulated most famously by Hugo Grotius. Christ on the cross upheld the integrity of the law. In this view, justice is “done” in that a most serious punishment is inflicted. It is severe and it makes the pardon for sin possible because the punishment is made. As in the other views, one must have faith in Jesus and this faith along with good works are made conditions of being in God’s grace. This would form the foundation for Richard Baxter’s view later on in the seventeenth century.

The second view had representatives at Dort, most notably John Davenant. Here Christ is said to have died for each and every human being. As with the other Reformed views, faith is required as a condition of the covenant in which the benefits of Christ are possessed by the believer. Unlike the Arminian version, which sees both predestination and redemption to be functions of the believer’s faith, this hypothetical universalism places itself in the tradition of Peter Lombard, for example, who argued that Christ died “for all with regard to the sufficiency of the price, but only for the elect with regard to its efficacy, because he brought about salvation only for the predestined.”6 The practical motivation here is that the offer of salvation to any and all be genuine, which it would not seem to be if such was not for the audience in question.

The Christus Victor position was articulated in a book by that title by the Swedish Lutheran theologian of the twentieth century, Gustav Aulén. It is not difficult to understand. By the cross, Jesus defeated the powers of darkness. It was not simply that this ransomed captives from the devil, but that the sum of Satan, sin, and death—in other words, the whole of the curse—had been undone, at least at the root. Aulén himself claimed to have recaptured what was the earliest view of the atonement, and that the so-called “ransom to Satan” theory was less about personal sin in the divine courtroom and more about the cosmic effects of that sin.

This position was bound to gain popularity in the post-war era of the twentieth century. In this landscape, theology was made to answer to a universalist morality and politics. God was pulled down from the heavens to suffer with we who had seen unique levels suffering; and the gospel was edited to grapple with evil in “the real world.”

Let us circle back to the dawn of the modern era. Advocates of those minority views among the Reformed will take exception to the notion that theirs “differs” from the satisfaction view, since they also believe in satisfaction. The trouble is that this “satisfaction” comes to mean something else in their theories—something which strains the concept to its breaking point to say the least. For this we must bring into a view a criterion which is perhaps the most important of its kind when it comes to this doctrine.

The “Cross-Direction” Criterion

Let us ask the question of each of these theories: Toward what does each view most immediately direct the work of Christ on the cross? Some theories may hold that the cross has multiple ends. They may work out the relation of these ends, both ultimate and subordinate, very well in the minds of the theologians who hold to them. But our question is specific: Who or what is the immediate object of Christ’s work?

The importance of this will be noticed at once.

In the case of the example theory and moral influence theory, we can plainly see that Christ’s work has the hearts and minds of individuals in its direct aim. In the case of the ransom to Satan and the Christus Victor views, it is the devil who is the immediate object. These are all clearly deficient. When one thinks it through, these seem to take us far away from the salvation of sinners, and, even in the case of that ransom to Satan that is a kind of salvation, it is the devil that comes to the forefront and God recedes into the background. He may have all power to rescue us in Christ, yet it is a rescue from oppression. Some negative relationship is assumed between the devil and the sinner. How God and the sinner stand at odds is inexplicable. In short, sin is morphed from treason against God to a self-destructive force. Our victimization at the hands of evil forces outside of us—or, at any rate, evil forces that begin outside of us—show a radically different view of what sin is, and therefore what salvation is.

The remainder of the views may seem all to have God in view, yet the way in which each does will be telling.

The governmental view will speak in lofty terms of divine justice upheld. Yet how is a real justice upheld if concrete sins are not punished in concrete persons? And if one counters that they are in the concrete Person of Christ, it only moves the same question back one step to discover for which concrete sins of which concrete persons Christ undergoes punishment. The notion of “the sin of the world” must take into account what the whole Bible teaches about sin and the sacrifices for sin. Those words in John 1:29 are not an abstraction, but rather an aggregate. The reason that the satisfaction cannot be for an abstraction is that not once has a single soul ever sinned but concretely and as an individual. Grotius and Baxter analogized God’s government of this universe to human government of an earthly realm, but the analogy breaks down very quickly when we begin to consider everything that both Scripture and nature teach us about right and wrong. For our purposes, we only note that the work of Christ, so conceived, has as its immediate object a demonstration or vindication of justice having been done.

The hypothetical universalist view claims to more directly embrace the satisfaction of God’s justice, yet it must make the blood and righteousness of Christ merely “sufficient” for the sins of the whole world. In the formula—sufficient for all, efficient for the elect—the actual effect is to make the work on the cross itself of efficient for none. Why hypothetical universalism does not end in inevitable universal damnation cries out for explanation, and any explanation given will have to reach even further outside of the resources of the Reformed tradition.

The representatives of Dort, and Owen following the majority (or hardening their categories, if one wants to argue that), would agree with proponents of this position to the idea of an infinite intrinsic value, but then refine the question as to God’s design.

Owen wrote,

It was, then, the purpose and intention of God that his Son should offer a sacrifice of infinite worth, value, and dignity, sufficient in itself for the redeeming of all and every man, if it had pleased the Lord to employ it to that purpose; yea, and of other worlds also, if the Lord should freely make them, and would redeem them. Sufficient we say, then, was the sacrifice of Christ for the redemption of the whole world, and for the expiation of all the sins of all and every man in the world.7

Whether one’s hypothetical universalism is a strict Arminianism—rejecting both unconditional election and particular redemption—or is a modified Calvinism—accepting unconditional election yet severing its connection to the union of the elect to Christ in His death—the criterion of the cross’s immediate direction must be faced. Does Christ’s oblation, as Owen used the word, directly satisfy God’s justice for all of the particular sins of the elect? If one replies that it does so upon belief, then nothing of worth to the discussion has been added, as the particular redemption position also believes that belief is a condition that will be met and is inseparable. But that was not the question. The question has instead been avoided for the sake of other questions which Owen’s position (and Dort’s standards) already handle perfectly well.

Valuable Dimensions—Not Alternative Theories

Let us steer between two doctrinal ditches.

On one side is the presentation of alternative theories of the atonement, in which one is just as valuable as another, having no more claim than the others to the title of orthodoxy. On the other side is the overreaction to that which now cannot afford to recall the maxim that Every lie is a twisted truth. So every heresy is birthed in an exaggerated defense of some neglected truth. We should not fail to notice how each of these theories has real passages of Scripture on its side. There is a good reason for that. It is not that “the theory” has something going for it after all. It is rather that the particular truth was there all along and that we should pause before we assume that it needs us to cover up some other truth for its sake.

At the center of Christ’s work on the cross is atonement; and atonement, as some old thinkers liked to say, is an act of “at-one-ment.” In other words, it rights what is wrong. It recompenses. It satisfies that which has been, in some sense, injured or dishonored. The satisfaction view, unlike all the others, is uniquely and sufficiently sturdy to uphold the branches of the other views that really are true. They are true precisely because they are branches from these roots in a God who is at once holy and loving and just and merciful and so forth. Classical theism begets a readiness to see the atonement in exactly this sort of “at-one,” since the God who is simple is not divided between such aims in the incarnation. Why? Because that which is in God, which moves all subordinate ends in time, toward an ultimate glory in Him, cannot be so divided. But the order matters in the priorities set forth by the ordered decree.

Even Christ’s defeat of the devil must be understood—as least so far as each sinner’s relation to the devil is concerned—in terms of divine satisfaction. Anselm explained this:

Subject the matter to strict justice, and judge accordingly whether man may give recompense for his sin to a level commensurate with his sin, if he does not give back, by conquering the devil, what he has stolen from God by allowing himself to be conquered by the devil. Just as, through the fact of man’s defeat, the devil took what belonged to God, and God lost it, so, correspondingly, in the event of man’s victory, the devil would be the loser and God would regain what he had lost.8

The very logic of the incarnation points the cross toward God’s justice being satisfied. Here again we must recall Anselm’s summary of how salvation “cannot be the case if the recompense of which we have spoken is not paid, which no one can pay except God, and no one ought to pay except man: it is necessary that a God-Man should pay it.”9

Moreover, what good would a moral example be that we as sinners cannot perform to God’s standard of perfection? What good a moral influence upon a heart that is dead in sin? Let us suppose that by the cross, Christ did defeat all His foes: Is it not as plain as day that you and I would be among the vanquished along with the hosts of hell and the reprobate? All such would fail to rise to the level of good news—unless, that is:

In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 Jn. 4:10);

and that,

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21).

If this is what was accomplished by the cross—if all of our sins are washed away and the record of debt is cancelled—well, then such a forgiven, innocent, righteous, adopted child of God can also take to himself the example, can now feel the moral influence, can now celebrate the victory over the devil, can now proclaim the upholding of justice in God’s moral universe, and so forth. The other emphases are proper in their place, but their place is not at the center. They are not the blazing sun of the cross, but the rays of its light.

We may now answer our opening question: Are all atonement theories equally valid? Put in this way, we must answer No. If the question had been whether each atonement theory captures something—even if by badly perverting something—important that the Bible does in fact teach, well, in that case, we could give a different answer. But the theories are what they are precisely by insisting that something is central to the atonement that is not in fact its central point, or that some truth ought to be believed to the exclusion of something else which is true.

More often that not, the truth excluded by such theories is that most central truth of satisfaction. This is especially true of modern varieties. The aberrant theory, in fact, was designed from the start in such a way as to get beyond that thorny old gospel center. Because this is so, we must reject all other theories of the atonement that do not have as their very root, the death of Christ as it was designed to ransom a people for God, by standing in their place and actually accomplishing the satisfaction of divine justice for their salvation.

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1. Anselm of Canterbury, Why God Became Man, I.7 in The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 272.

2. Anselm, Why God Became Man, I.13 [286].

3. Anselm, Why God Became Man, I.15 [289].

4. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, II:482.

5. The Canons of Dort, Point II, Article 8.

6. Peter Lombard, The Sentences, Bk. III, d. xx, 5.1 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2008), 86.

7. John Owen, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, IV.1.1 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth), 183-84.

8. Anselm, Why God Became Man, I.23 [308].

9. Anselm, Why God Became Man, II.6 [320].