A Multifaceted View of Christ’s Atonement

The atonement is a multifaceted reality that cannot be reduced to a single theory, since different models capture distinct aspects of the biblical narrative, including substitution, victory, participation, and restoration. Humanity faces a twofold problem: corruption resulting from sin and the penalty of death. This requires a twofold solution: Christ both restores humanity to incorruption and bears the penalty of sin. Early Christian sources, especially Athanasius and other church fathers, contain both forensic and participatory language rather than supporting a strict division between them, showing that later theological traditions often flatten or selectively emphasize certain themes. Examination of patristic writings, liturgical texts, and theological arguments reveals recurring elements of substitutionary atonement alongside themes of deification and victory over death, indicating that these concepts are historically intertwined rather than mutually exclusive. 

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Michael Heiser: I see all views of the atonement as contributing something to understanding the atonement. I feel no compulsion at all to pick one.

Anthony Delgado: So can all atonement theories be right? I'm going to say yes, but not in every detail. My concern is that there are trends in systematic theologies, particularly ecclesiastical theologies, that hold a view they believe is right. It's sort of an ad hoc fallacy. They say, well, my atonement theory is right, and therefore everything else is wrong.

And so they begin to flatten all of their theology into a single view of either the atonement or a view of how to achieve, I guess you could say, right standing before God. I think biblical theology, which is really a narrative analysis of the scripture, is being influenced very much by systematics, where even those who say they're doing biblical theology are using their systematics—this flattened atonement view—as a guardrail for how they are willing to do biblical theology.

And a lot of folks don't know where the boundaries are. If you look at the PSA crowd, the penal substitutionary atonement crowd—that really is broadly evangelicals—they do this. They flatten everything into penal substitutionary atonement in order to say there's nothing else atoning in the narrative of Christ. And so they've flattened everything into PSA, including the gospel itself.

You see this in Eastern Orthodox and in Roman Catholicism. They do it with their ecclesiastical theology. They have certain views of how things go, and then they form and morph the scriptures and their interpretation of them around their systematic perspective.

The Christus Victor folks even do this, and you know that Christus Victor is only really a formal development around a couple hundred years, and yet churches that have adopted this view have really started to make everything about victory. Believe it or not, there are churches that do this with the ransom theory of atonement.

So the late, great Michael S. Heiser didn’t see it this way, where it’s just one view and everything else is out, and I think that makes a lot of sense. Let’s watch this clip and see what he had to say about it.

Trey: Does Mike believe that the material he covers in Unseen Realm and Reversing Hermon gives more credence or viability for the Christus Victor theology stance versus the satisfaction theology stance? Which view, in his opinion, stays more in line with his understanding of the Second Temple Jewish era of thinking and the early church?

Michael Heiser on Multifaceted Atonement

Michael Heiser: I’m not actually sure precisely what this question is about. It sounds like it’s about the views of the atonement. Christus Victor theology—depending on what you're talking about—is that the ransom theory? Is it something bigger than just the atonement? I don’t know. I can’t tell by virtue of the question.

Satisfaction theology—does that refer to the penal substitution atonement view? Again, I don’t know. It looks to me like this is a question that gets into the same old debate about atonement views.

I see all views of the atonement as contributing something to understanding the atonement. I feel no compulsion at all to pick one.

Typically, though, people want to land on a view of atonement that isn’t penal substitution, and I’m presuming satisfaction is pointing to penal substitution. They do that, frankly, to avoid penal substitution because they have bought into the rhetoric of not just militant atheism, but maybe they just feel uncomfortable that it’s like human sacrifice.

That is terribly wrongheaded. It’s just terribly wrongheaded to look at it that way. But anyway, I don’t feel any need to avoid penal substitution. Substitution really can’t be divorced from the atonement, but that isn’t the only way to think about the atonement. All the other views contribute something.

So if you’re interested in this, it’s actually really short—it’s like a hundred pages—but a really good book by Simon Gathercole defending penal substitution. It’s excellent. Gathercole is a seasoned New Testament scholar. Again, he’s not going to argue that this is the only way to see things, but it is quite wrong to say that the atonement can and should be understood without penal substitution as an element.

Anthony Delgado: So I loved a couple of quotes in that clip. He said, “I see all views of the atonement as contributing something to understanding the atonement. I feel no compulsion at all to pick one.” I absolutely love and agree with that quote.

He also said in there that substitution can't be divorced from the atonement. That isn't the only way to think about the atonement. So I like that he's not willing to throw out anything that looks like PSA, penal substitutionary atonement, because I think those themes are there in the scripture. But at the same time, he doesn't want to flatten everything else in the Bible into it. Absolutely love that.

That's, in fact, the thesis, in a way, of my book, The Gospel Is Bigger Than You Think. This is really an analysis of all of Christ's gospel work, and then looking at how it influences things like the atonement—what we think about the gospel and all of that. So take a look at The Gospel Is Bigger Than You Think if you're really interested in this conversation. I think you're going to really like that work.

Alright, our next video clip that I'm going to play for you is from a Lutheran theologian named Jordan B. Cooper, and he is comparing Lutheranism to Eastern Orthodoxy. He's not Eastern Orthodox. Some of the issues with the atonement theory of the Eastern Orthodox Church he kind of butts heads with because of his Lutheran theology, even though he agrees in large part with the Orthodox perspective.

So he's able to say, hey, this Protestant view and this Orthodox view, they actually work really neatly together. So let's take a look at that clip now.

Jordan B. Cooper on Eastern Orthodox Atonement

Jordan B. Cooper: We are going to be talking about Eastern Orthodoxy today, and Eastern Orthodoxy is something that everyone asks me to talk about constantly. This is a book that I'm going to be talking about today. It's called Changing Churches: An Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran Theological Conversation.

Vicarious satisfaction tends to be a satisfactio victoria, the Latin phrase that you'll sometimes hear. That tends to be the kind of language that Lutherans use about the atonement. And throughout this essay, later, Rober is going to be quite critical of the entirety of this notion of Christ kind of paying a penalty for us in his death.

But I want to look at Saint Athanasius and say, does Athanasius have room for a kind of legal theory of atonement, or a kind of satisfaction theory of atonement? Now, my argument that I've laid out in a number of books—so you can read my book Christification: A Lutheran Approach to Theosis—is that salvation is forensic declaration, and then we have union with Christ, salvation as participation.

My argument is that we find forensic language and participatory language together in the New Testament, and we find this language together in the church fathers, so that this silly opposition—East versus West, which is legal versus participatory—is silly because these are both biblical themes. They're both patristic themes. There's no reason why we cannot just have both of these themes.

We don't need to pick one set of biblical texts over another set of biblical texts. We don't need to debate whether you use, you know, 2 Peter talking about partaking of the divine nature as paradigmatic, or if you take Paul's discussion of justification in Romans 3 and 4. They're both consistent themes that extend throughout the Old and New Testament.

Which is some of the reason why I find it frustrating to deal with some Eastern sources in their Protestant polemics, because a lot of it just doesn't apply to the model that I'm even taking soteriologically. And I think that there's often this setting up of these false dichotomies. We don't need to have this false dichotomy of forensic versus participation.

So I'm going to look at Athanasius here on On the Incarnation, because that's what Rober goes to—is Athanasius on the incarnation. This text is often set up by the East, when they're talking about theosis, as the foundational text of their soteriology. And Athanasius has the famous phrase, “God became man that man might become God.” Alright, great.

But if you read Saint Athanasius, On the Incarnation, his theory of atonement that he lays out is not only theosis. That's not the only thing he says. He doesn't only talk about the resurrection, and he doesn't only talk about the impact of the incarnation, but he has a lot to say about the death of Christ in a way that would really set the foundation for what becomes the Anselmian doctrine.

So my argument is that Athanasius has the forensic and participatory within it. But I want to look at some parts of the argument. Now, similar to what Anselm does, Athanasius' book—he starts with creation and the fall. But essentially what he's trying to do is say, why is it that the incarnation happened? What's the purpose of the atonement?

It's the first book in the history of the church that really gives an extensive kind of explanation of why the Christ event occurred. Obviously, you have people talking about this before in larger works, so Irenaeus in Against Heresies and whatnot, but Athanasius is the first to really devote a treatise to answering this very central, most central Christian question.

And it's a wonderful book. It's a wonderful little book. It's pretty short. So if you want to understand what Athanasius says, don't just take my word for it—just read the book. Read the book in context, read the entirety of the argument. And I think when you do read the entirety of the argument, you start to see pretty clearly that you've got the forensic substitutionary themes and you've got the participatory themes, and they all kind of come together, and there's no inherent contradiction between any of these things.

Alright, so he's talking first about the nature of creation and what's wrong. So it says, God created man for incorruption as an image of his own eternity, but by the envy of the devil, death entered into the world—that’s from the Wisdom of Solomon.

Then he says, when this happened, men began to die in corruption, and corruption ran riot among them and held sway over them to an even more than natural degree because it was the penalty which God had forewarned them for transgressing the commandment.

What do we have set up in the very beginning? Sin brings the penalty of death and corruption. So this is a penalty that God forewarned them about. So he says, if you transgress the commandment—that’s his argument—there is a penalty for transgressing the commandments. And what is that penalty? It is death.

Now, does he just talk about the penalty that God imposes upon man for sin? No. He talks a lot about corruption, and he talks about going in—because the East is going to emphasize this language of progress. Man is created in a way that man is moving toward righteousness and holiness, and the fall kind of reverses this direction.

So no longer are we moving toward righteousness and holiness. Because of the fall, we are in a kind of march toward corruption and sin and death. That language is used by Athanasius here, absolutely. But he also speaks about death as a penalty for sin.

So here’s the problem. The problem is twofold. The first part is that we are moving toward corruption—we’re in this negative process where we are moving farther away from God and toward corruption. And then the second part is that we have this penalty of death that hangs over us.

We have two elements that have to be redeemed in us. One is that movement toward corruption, and the second is the penalty of death. So redemption is going to involve the solution to both of those dilemmas. We might say it’s the two kinds of righteousness—it’s the solution to both of the dilemmas.

So then he talks about how God, because of God’s character and nature, cannot just leave us alone and leave us toward sin. But Athanasius makes the argument that in order for God to do something to change this dilemma, he cannot just ignore the penalty that he had imposed upon man.

So he says it is unthinkable that God, the Father of truth, should go back upon his word regarding death in order to ensure our continued existence. So he’s saying God cannot just ignore what he had imposed upon man because he already said death is the punishment. And if God is truly just and truly tells the truth, he can’t just say, “oh well, forget it.”

So death has to come as a punishment because that’s what God determined would happen. So he can’t just ignore it. There has to be a payment of something to cover death, which was the punishment for sin.

Then later in the same section, he talks about repentance. So you might say, well, what about repentance? Repentance does bring us from that negative state of moving in the direction toward corruption. Repentance is a turning around—now we’re moving toward incorruption, toward God.

So Athanasius says, why couldn’t God just call us to repentance? Why did Jesus need to come in the first place? Doesn’t repentance do that changing of direction that we need, bringing us back toward what Adam was doing?

Well, that would be the case if there were no penalty. But now he goes back to that notion of a penalty. So he says, repentance would not guard the divine consistency, for if death did not hold dominion over men, God would still remain untrue.

So he’s saying God would not be consistent with his word if he just said repentance was enough, because the debt would not have actually been paid. And God said that was the punishment for sin. So someone had to take the punishment.

So then he goes on to say at the end of this section, Jesus alone, being the Word of the Father and above all, was in consequence both able to recreate all—bringing about new life, bringing us back in that direction toward incorruption, toward eternal life—and second, worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be an ambassador for all with the Father.

So suffering on behalf of all, taking the penalty of death for all—that’s the logic of Athanasius’s argument. This is not significantly different from what we would call vicarious satisfaction.

Does he talk about appeasing the wrath of the Father with this language? No, but that’s not really the point. It’s this debt that the law requires that has to be paid. That’s what Jesus does. That’s the logic of Athanasius’s argument.

And what I’m saying here is that too often arguments based on the fathers are just isolated quote versus isolated quote, because you can find things that sound Lutheran, and you can find things from the fathers that sound Roman Catholic or Orthodox or whatever. 

We can all do this. The Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses try to do this by taking things completely out of context, but we can all take isolated statements from the fathers. The most important thing to do when reading the fathers is to read the texts in context and ask, what is the flow and nature of the argument?

What I’m saying here is that if you read the whole book, the whole nature of the argument points toward this twofold problem of sin and the twofold solution, which includes both Jesus paying a debt—in other words, forensic or legal—and Jesus, God becoming man that man might become God, being restored to that divine image. Those two elements of both sin and redemption are both there.

Anthony Delgado: Yeah, I really loved the work that Cooper did in this video, just to see how he analyzes this great work that every tradition of the church reads, called On the Incarnation by Athanasius. Athanasius is an Eastern church father, and yet he’s widely influential in Protestantism, even in Roman Catholicism.

What I want you to pay attention to is the idea that the Eastern Orthodox reading of Athanasius is really a flattened reading. They’re reading Athanasius, their own church father, and saying, well, he’s not talking about substitutionary atonement, all he’s talking about is theosis. But that’s really not what the church originally thought. That’s really a modern Eastern Orthodox reading of Athanasius.

But if you consider Athanasius himself to be an Eastern father, he clearly believed in something like substitutionary or forensic atonement.

Okay, let’s look at one more. This is a guy—his name is Pastor Joshua Schooping—and this is a clip from a video on Gospel Simplicity. He became Eastern Orthodox, but then left because of this flattening of the gospel or flattening out of the atonement.

So listen carefully. He’s not just suggesting two kinds of atonement. He’s not saying PSA and also theosis. He’s actually going to see a category for Christus Victor and ransom theory, and also PSA and theosis all working together, which again is really what you’re going to see in the book that I wrote. So let’s look at this clip.

Joshua Schooping on Atonement Theories

Joshua Schooping: The first problems that I had were not with the Eastern Orthodox Church per se, but with present-day Eastern Orthodox witness and how they would discuss the theology surrounding the atonement.

The theology surrounding the atonement was a very frustrating point for me, because while I’m in seminary—I don’t know if this was between my first and second year or what—but I’m reading through the fathers, and of course nobody’s going to tell me that there’s substitutionary atonement language in the fathers.

Nobody minds if you are just Christus Victor all the way. So I’m reading writers like Saint Simeon the New Theologian, who predated Anselm, and I’m finding this language of wrath. I’m finding this legal, forensic language, but the forensic language is tied with existence itself.

So it’s not just arbitrary law, but the moral law—God’s divine law—is woven into the fabric of nature itself and human nature. So for us to violate the law is a very profound thing. And so the idea of Christ’s suffering in our place and on our behalf, and essentially absorbing the wrath of God, so to speak—I’m finding it in Simeon the New Theologian.

And he’s supposed to be this mystic par excellence. I thought, why am I finding this? I thought that was the legalism of Western Reformed Baptists. So I’m getting a little bit stymied here.

So I take it to a priest and say, look at this. It looks like there’s this atonement where Christ is in some way taking the penalty of sin, which is suffering and death. He’s taking the penalty of sin. It’s substitutionary—he’s doing it for us, in our place and on our behalf—and it atones for our sin.

Because it’s starting to dawn on me that Christus Victor doesn’t atone for anything. It defeats death, but it does nothing with sin. So I ask the question, and he says, well, you can’t just go by what one father says. I say, fair point.

And he says you’d have to find it in our hymns. Because of course, the hymns in the Eastern Orthodox Church—probably the lion’s share of them—are written in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries.

If John Chrysostom got into a time machine and went to a contemporary Eastern Orthodox Church, he wouldn’t recognize perhaps the order of the service, the architecture, or the iconography, and perhaps wouldn’t recognize any of the hymns. So the idea that John Chrysostom could get in a time machine and everything would be unchanged is just not accurate.

Anyway, that’s an aside. So these hymns in the Eastern Orthodox Church—many of them written by John of Damascus and others—you can find these sources, like the Octoechos, the Festal Menaion, and the Lenten Triodion.

So there are a couple feasts of the cross in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and I’m thinking, well, let me go check—where might I find something about the atonement in our hymns?

And so I go to look at the feasts of the cross. Now I forget which feast it is, which of the two it is, and I’m looking at this like—it looks like penal substitutionary atonement language. It looks like there’s penalty, it looks like there’s substitution, it looks like there’s atonement. I mean, what am I seeing?

So I share this with that priest again. I said, okay, you said I’ve got to be able to find it in the hymns. So I’m sharing with him the hymns—help me to understand this. And then he says, well, what do you even think penal substitutionary atonement is?

And I’m like, good question. I can’t just make assumptions. So from there I start trying to find out, well, who would be able to tell me what penal substitutionary atonement is? So I find an essay by J. I. Packer on the logic of substitution or the logic of the atonement. It’s a great little essay.

I’m reading it and I’m like, yes, this is totally tracking with what I’m seeing in Simeon the New Theologian. This is totally tracking with what I’m seeing in the hymns. So I share this essay with him and say, okay, so here’s what I’m understanding penal substitutionary atonement to be, and this looks like what it is.

And it was J. I. Packer, so he was a mainstream but widely respected theologian, involved in the translation committee of the ESV and part of the NIV study Bible. The guy was widely respected, a Puritan expert, friends with Martin Lloyd-Jones.

And I had only heard of him by name at this point. I remembered that people had mentioned his book Knowing God at the Reformed Baptist Church. I have a book problem—I love books—so I had heard of J. I. Packer. And that was one of the things that helped me to know that this was probably representative.

Then finding out more about him—Anglican, a good Anglo-Catholic kind of guy, but more on the Reformed side—I share this with this priest, and he immediately accuses me of being a J. I. Packer fanboy and essentially importing baggage from my evangelical background.

I said, I don’t know what baggage you’re talking about. I wasn’t a member of an evangelical church. I wasn’t a member of a Reformed Baptist church. I left the Reformed Baptist church partially because of this issue of the atonement. It was so bothersome to me.

But then I’m starting to believe it because I trust the fathers. So now all of a sudden, the church fathers are teaching me about the atonement in a way that’s different than what the Eastern Orthodox people are telling me. So I’m not having doubts about the Eastern Orthodox Church, but I’m like, what is going on? It just says it right here.

Then I’m starting to accumulate more material. I’m finding it in John Chrysostom—his commentaries on Galatians 3:13 or 2 Corinthians 5—and it’s this notion of Christ accepting the guilt and punishment of sin. It’s being transferred to him, imputed to him.

He’s not using the word imputation, but we know what that means. I’m finding it in John Chrysostom. I’m finding it in Cyril of Alexandria. And now all of a sudden it’s like, wait, this isn’t just a one-off.

I’m finding it in Simeon the New Theologian, but now I’m finding it in earlier fathers that are essentially unimpeachable. John Chrysostom is the scripture commentator par excellence in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Cyril of Alexandria is essentially untouchable.

No one’s going to say Cyril of Alexandria is dead wrong on something so profound as what touches our salvation and what Christ accomplished. You can even find some of this language in the ecumenical council he was involved in against Nestorius, where some of this atonement language starts to be hinted at.

And if you read the rest of Cyril, you can see where his mind is moving—God’s wrath, substitution, and so on. So I’m starting to have a question about what contemporary Eastern Orthodoxy is even teaching.

Anthony Delgado: So the atonement, and further the gospel, I hope we’re seeing by now, is really multifaceted. There’s a lot to it. And if you want to know more about that, please do check out my book, The Gospel Is Bigger Than You Think. Find it on Amazon. Check out my website, anthonydelgado.net—there are more resources there.

In the meantime, remember Christ is king, and that changes everything.