Atonement After Enchantment
As many people know, for the first thousand years of church history the dominant soteriological framework was Christus Victor. To be sure, forensic and substitutionary perspectives regarding atonement were always present, so the shift was one of emphasis. Still, what caused this shift?
Gustaf Aulén, in his seminal work, argued that Christus Victor depended upon a metaphysical imagination that modern Western theology increasingly rejected. That metaphysical worldview presupposed a world populated by real spiritual powers and a dramatic cosmic conflict in which the devil plays an active role in salvation history. Aulén describes how this was received in modern theology:
[Modern theologians] inclined to be critical of the forms in which the patristic teaching had usually expressed itself. They disliked intensely the ‘mythological’ language of the early church about Christ’s redemptive work, and the realistic, often undeniably grotesque imagery, in which the victory of Christ over the devil, or the deception of the devil, was depicted in lurid colours. Thus the whole dramatic view was branded as ‘mythological.’ The matter was settled. The patristic teaching was of inferior value, and could be summarily relegated to the nursery or the lumber-room of theology.
What is being described here is a loss of a metaphysical imagination. The Christus Victor vision is dismissed as “mythological” because the enchanted world it assumed was no longer tenable. And so, we pivoted to atonement after enchantment.
Atonement after enchantment would need to be less metaphysically freighted. Especially in response to the Protestant Reformation. Western theology gravitated toward accounts of salvation that could be framed without an enchanted cosmology. Salvation began to be described in the categories that remained viable: legal, forensic, and consequential frameworks. Penal substitutionary atonement became the most well-known and infamous expression of this broader shift away from the enchanted world of Christus Victor
In short, the movement from Christus Victor to forensic visions of atonement was less a theological evolution than a symptom of a metaphysical loss. Forensic views of the atonement proclaimed a gospel for a disenchanted world.
Atonement after enchantment.
Interesting that so many Christians in recent years are yearning for re-enchantment. I'm currently writing a PhD about the subject: the whys, the features, and the possible remedies.
I'm not so sure that the various atonement theories are at odds with one another. When you read Romans to understand the salvation that Jesus provides, you get the penal, forensic, and justification through faith elements there in chapters 4 and 5. But later in chapters 6 through 8 you get the 'mystical' union of being baptized into his death and going on into his ressurection to become one new man, Christ in the church and the church in Christ. I don't see any conflict here. They are different facets of the full-orbed miracle of salvation and new birth Jesus provides us.