Christus Victor
by Donald Robert Clasen
April 2, 2015
I have often used the phrase “death by a thousand cuts” to describe my relationship to the Church world. It’s not something I’m fully satisfied with since I still attend Church, enjoy the fellowship of Christians and do not feel “dead” to traditional Christianity in any way. Quite the contrary, I see myself as a very orthodox Christian, not in the sense of identity with the Eastern branch of the faith, but in the sense of someone who stands for the absolute, inviolate truths that make up the message of the Kingdom.
But that phrase still conveys some sense of the alienation, marginalization and frustration I feel in relationship to everything. As a semi-trained theologian (or is that a trained semi-theologian?), called since 1975 to be a teacher in the Body of Christ, I have always felt an acute sensitivity to doctrine that’s false or distorted in any way, and cannot understand why other people don’t feel the same level of alarm about it. The sloppiness at best if not outright distortion or perversion of the everlasting Gospel never ceases to amaze me, and there are times when everything seems to converge into such a cacophony of absurdity that it makes my fingernails want to go looking for the nearest blackboard.
The World Always Beats Up On Jesus
The coming around of Easter every year is one of those times. I should not be surprised that the season is accompanied by the indefatigable efforts of The World to once again seek to discredit Jesus Christ and the profound, history-changing “work” He did on the cross. These efforts, usually in the form of essays in prestigious magazines or History Channel-type TV specials, pull out all the stops to come across as scholarly attempts to undermine the Biblical account and meaning of the cross. Therein He is damned with faint praise through misleading titles or “hooks” to try to reel in a gullible and Biblically-illiterate public.
One of them this year is a TV special called Finding Jesus or something like that, as if they really cared or really knew how. All I can tell them is good luck with that. Better minds than theirs have tried to escape the Gordian Knot of evitable conclusion His claims drove them to, that this most unusual man really was the Son of God Who died for the sins of the world and rose from the dead to prove it.
When you probe long enough and deep enough, you will often find that such productions are either funded by Zionist financial sources or Talmudic intellectual sources or both, so searing is their hatred of Him. But they always have plenty of feckless Gentile non-believers to collaborate with, and invariably the collective goal is to portray Jesus as a delusional and confused failure who finally admitted while on the cross (after it was too late), that He really had failed. This is done pretty easily. After having planted so much empirical doubt about His story in your head, they make sure to not leave out reference to His problematic cry, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”
The Church Piles On Too
If it’s bad enough that the world is so eager to beat up on Jesus this time of year, why then would The Church want to pile on too? The worst of this is found in Word of Faith circles which came up with the novel phrase that when Jesus died and went down into hell, there the Devil “beat Him up” for three days to complete His punishment/atonement. This is an improvement I take it upon the traditional explanation that He “descended” there to both bring the Old Testament saints up from Paradise into Heaven (Eph 4:8,9) after having “preached” to the disobedient spirits, angelic, human or both, “in prison” (Pe 3:19,20). I don’t see anything there about Him getting “beat up” or “tortured,” thank you.
Yet this is typical of the ghastly and mangled theology of the “Word” movement. I spent eight long bone-crunching years in Tulsa in the 1980s in the virtual capital of all this, there “on assignment” by the will of God, having to sit through one “revelation” after another like this, chipping away at the Truth of the Ages. In time I came to give it a nickname, Hillbilly Theology, even though I still have a proud hillbilly friend down there whose godliness embarrasses me.
Hollywood Understands Image, Why Not Us?
But now I’m a sophisticated Los Angelean where “my” people, the more mainstream Protestant/Evangelical churches have their own radio stations and where every Easter their preachers great and small try their level best to bring God in on the festivities. Yes, that’s right, they all seem to outdo one another in their insistence that even God had to beat up on Jesus too! They don’t put it quite that crudely of course but there is no doubt that they make a point of it to “explain” that no, Jesus was not confessing to failure on the cross, He was just suffering the wrath of God once the sins of the world were placed upon Him. Why wouldn’t the world lean toward the “failure” thesis if that’s all we got?
I tried to touch upon this subject in my recent post about the movie Killing Jesus. I mentioned that the best interpretation I’ve ever found on this (Jesus crying, “My God, My God…”) was in a commentary, I can’t remember by which Bible scholar, who pointed out that good rabbis in those days had a practice of quoting the first verse of a passage and his students would mentally finish it. Jesus obviously in this case was quoting word for word the first verse of Psalms 22 which goes on to describe the very scene before them—the soldiers gambling for His garments, the piercing of His hands etc. I also mentioned for what it’s worth a subjective experience I once had when I felt God the Father confirm this interpretation to me by telling me that He actually never felt closer to God the Son than at that moment.
And yet this simple observation which makes so much sense has never caught on in Evangelical circles. Why is that? Because even though the “abandoned by God” meme plays so easily into the hands of Jesus’ detractors, it also fits neatly into traditional Catholic and Protestant views of the meaning of the death of Christ. This view is called the “Satisfaction” or “Payment Theory” of the Atonement. It dates back to around 1100 when it was proposed by a monk named St. Anselm who wanted to establish a soteriological basis for penance.
Anselm, as was typical of all law-based emphasis inherited from Roman culture, argued that man had incurred this huge “debt” of sin that had to be “paid” before God could or would forgive. The idea was that He was so holy and that the sight of sin so provoked His wrath that someone had to take on a punishment before He could be satisfied and formally forgive. Jesus by making such an exceptional self-sacrifice accumulated excess merits that could then be credited to your side of the ledger, as if this were all just one big accounting problem.
The Volcano God Syndrome
That there are so many things wrong with this should go without saying, not the least of which is the image of God it conveys. It makes it seem as if He has no self-control, that He’s in a perpetual state of rage that must find release, and what better way to satisfy His perfect sense of justice than to take it out on an innocent victim don’t you know, in fact the only innocent one in all of history for that matter.
I call it the Volcano God syndrome and it brings to mind Melman the hypochondriac Giraffe from the Madagascar movie series.
The guilty-looking one. On the right.
I think in the Escape 2 Africa installment, while pining away over his unrequited love for Gloria the Hippo and convinced he’s going to die within a day anyway because he discovers a brown spot on his neck, he decides he’ll do something sacrificial like throw himself into a grumbling volcano to save his friends from incineration. They eventually convince him he doesn’t have to do that, but I am really digressing here.
Seriously, is there any congruence between God as He really is and this theological abstraction summed up in “Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil” (Hab 1:13)? Obviously a verse like that is meant as a Hebraic hyperbole meant to convey the idea of His holiness and purity compared to man. It was not meant to be taken literally since God beholds evil all day long and believe me, He doesn’t have virgin eyes or ears. His eyes are upon the righteous and the wicked constantly (Job 34:21). His wrath is revealed from Heaven alright—most of it a reference to eternal hell, the wrath to come (Ro 1:18; I Thess 1:10). But are we supposed to believe He cannot look upon sin without flying into a rage?
When theologians and preachers insist on taking passages like that literally, I wonder if they are subconsciously posturing before God, trying to convey that they identify with Him. But all it does is come across as a “holier-than-thou” attitude, with the same response He gave then as now–“These are a smoke in my nose, a fire that burneth all the day” (Isa 65:5). I don’t know. All I know is that it’s difficult to get them to let go of this obsession, this box they’ve put Him into just to set up an unnecessary Divine dilemma.
No Wrath of God On Jesus
All the same, one of the many implications of this is a slanderous image of Him in Old Testament days as a “God of wrath” but since the death of Christ He has calmed down so-to-speak because now Jesus has been thrown into the volcano. Hence the age of grace. It is the kind of thing that has played into the hands of heretics like that of Marcion who had such a hard time reconciling the God of the Old Testament with the nature of Jesus that he concluded the former was a villainous “demiurge” and not the God of the New Testament as well.
This portrayal has a two-fold distortion effect, that God’s wrath was gratuitous and unreasonable toward the ancient world on the one hand while blinding men as to just how upset He is with contemporary wickedness on the other. There are days when I could but wish He would pour out His wrath on the wicked. I have a long list of suggested targets. But today, just like back then, He holds it back waiting to be gracious, giving us less than our sins deserve.
No matter, to today’s Church world they have it all worked out. “Of course Jesus suffered the wrath of God on the cross” they insist. It makes for one great big neat package deal worked out between Him and the Father, the fine print of which you don’t need to know. “Just ‘accept Jesus’ cause all your sins past, present and future are paid for,” as if it were one big financial transaction. But the life Christ bids men to is relationship-based, not simply “accepting” a worked out legal deal. He always told people to “Come, follow Me,” and He knew the difference between those who did and those who didn’t.
It seems to me that if He was suffering anything on the cross it was the wrath of man and the Devil. This is what happens when you recognize a legal problem (how can God forgive without seriously weakening His law and authority) and proposing a legal “solution” (an innocent man gets the punishment). Why not a gracious solution for a legal problem? Is this not what the Good News is, grace offered to condemned human beings?
But the Evangelicals won’t “go there.” They won’t take seriously the Psalms 22 explanation because they’re too invested in someone having to get punished. It sounds more like something the law-based Pharisees would come up with than God. But Christ’s “work” on the cross was not designed to change God but to change us. It was not God in Christ reconciling Himself to the world but “reconciling the world unto himself” (II Cor 5:19).
He Doesn’t See You, He Sees Jesus? Seriously?
As the Reformation grew they came to see that they differed with Rome so much that they needed a complete break with medieval theology, but they didn’t re-think the basic error of Amselm’s thinking. The idea of Christ having a supposed “super-erogation” (excess) of merit built up certainly smacked too much of penance and was rejected in favor of a straight imputation of Christ’s own personal righteous to the account of the believer.
But it is a distinction with very little difference. This is how invested they are in the idea of the need for an exact satisfaction and the language of an accountant. This was not a financial problem that Jesus “paid” for, but a legal problem that He died for. Nor does the New Testament teach that Christ’s personal righteousness was transferred to us, just that God is willing to consider us righteous if we believe, per Abraham’s example (Rom 4:3). Nor that it has to be, since God as Judge is greater than His own Law and can set it aside any way He wants. It’s not “Great is Torah which giveth life,” (as a famous Pharisee saying put it), but God the Judge and God the Father (Gal 3:21).
Many would object that what I am suggesting is the mere “Moral Influence” theory of the death of Christ but it’s not. This was a real Atonement, a fulfillment of the Passover Lamb typology, a relative satisfaction of the law through a substitute sacrifice (Christ), a substitute penalty (Christ’s temporary suffering for our eternal suffering), and a substitute for absolute justice (our eternal damnation). As an expression of the love of God to the nth degree, it was designed to reconcile man to God, not the other way around.
Jehovah Tsidkenu, The Lord Our Righteousness
It was also a blood covenant that He cut with God per the example of what Abram did with God in Genesis 15. This is where Word of Faith people get confused, trying to stick healing and prosperity into the death of Christ, which was strictly and only for sin. But in this New Covenant, Jesus Christ does takes on covenant names such as Jehovah Rophe (“the Lord our Healer”) and Jehovah Jireh (“the Lord our Provider”), etc., of which we become beneficiaries in the will and timing of God.
My stance on this subject is not my thinking alone but was planted by the efforts of my theology teachers, especially Harry the Engineer. (Yes, it is a part of my Hollywood mystique that I was raised by wolves in the wilderness and trained in theology by a half dozen engineers and scientists. I liked their precision.) The reference above is to Harry Conn, a uniquely colorful individual in my early days. Harry was a world-renown engineer who studied theology on the side. He had a library of 250 books on the Atonement alone, a subject that he called “the heart of the Gospel.” It was Harry, Gordon Olson, Winkey Pratney and others who taught me not just what to think but how to think, not for the sake of novelty or discounting better minds than mine throughout history, but to provide the best apologetic for the Gospel for my generation that I can muster.
There is so much more that can be said about this subject. I just wanted to point out this much for now. Tomorrow’s a Blood Moon and I have to go worry about that for a while, and maybe if I’m lucky, find a blackboard somewhere. If you never hear from me again, please know that I’m not feeling suicidal.
