Hopping Around Easter Doctrine

Written By Jonathan Krogh

Dear Resurrection Researchers:

With another Resurrection Sunday behind us, while I’m nibbling on Robin’s Eggs (my favorite Easter confection gifted to me in tremendous quantity by a good friend), I thought I would muse today about what just happened. Through the centuries, theologians have come up with a variety of descriptions for the reasons and efficacy of Christ’s death and resurrection; some may be familiar, others esoteric. These descriptive schemas are known as doctrines of the atonement. The one thing they hold in common is the centrality of Good Friday and Easter Sunday as the defining moment of Christianity. I hope you don’t find it disappointing that none of these theoretical descriptions explain why bunnies deliver colored eggs on the first Sunday after the first paschal moon after the vernal equinox—some things remain a divine mystery.

As with all summaries, scholars will find my explanation for each of these doctrines wholly insufficient; but space and my growing sugar buzz keep me from a more thorough explanation. I mean here only to open the understanding that Christians do not all think of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection in the same way. Conceiving these themes differently does not make one a bad Christian. 

Perhaps the most familiar doctrine held by most Protestant Reformers is known as substitutionary atonement. This theory postulates that human sinfulness requires a sacrifice sufficient to meet the penal demands of God’s righteousness. Jesus’ sinless condition meets the fullness of the punishment humanity deserves, and as a result, Jesus takes the cosmic spanking we all deserve. The resurrection confirms the sufficiency of that sacrifice. By God’s grace, Christ’s punishment is applied to the debt of our sinfulness and God’s holy demands are satisfied, and so we are saved.

Historically, the earliest interpretation of Easter’s purpose came to us from Irenaeus (born c. 130 ACE), the Greek-born Bishop of Lyon. Irenaeus proposed that Adam’s life of disobedience was countered by Jesus’ consistent obedience. Through his life and death, Jesus ‘undid’ the sins performed by all descendants of Adam. In this first theological draft, God is not an angry judge who requires satisfaction; instead, Jesus is the cosmic “do-over” who got it right. This is known as recapitulation atonement.

About a century after Irenaeus, Origen of Alexandria proposed that Satan held power over the destiny of humanity. In his smug overconfidence, Satan believed he had retained ultimate victory over everything by winning the game at the crucifixion. But God held the ultimate victory by raising Christ from the dead, thereby snatching humanity from Satan’s grasp. This is known as ransom or Christus Victor atonement.

Somewhere at the beginning of the second millennium, Anselm of Canterbury suggested that human sinfulness besmirched God’s honor. In disobedience, we made God look bad for having created such degenerate souls. In the perfect life and obedient death of Jesus, God’s honor was restored, and God gave Christ infinite reward for accomplishing this great gift. Christ, who needed nothing, shares that reward with humanity, and so we are saved with forgiveness and eternal life. Known as the commercial theory, we are the inheritors of a transaction. Christ’s reward is transferred to our indebtedness.

Peter Abelard, a near contemporary of Origen’s, believed humanity’s greatest problem was a deep moral neediness. We ache to know we are loved. In Christ, Abelard believed, we are compelled by the evidence of God’s great love for us. The gift of Christ’s death demonstrates the degree to which we are loved. Our deep inner longing is met by God’s even deeper loving sacrifice, by which we become whole and morally reconciled. Abelard’s proposition is referred to as moral atonement theory.

Following the Age of Enlightenment, theologians were completely rethinking the nature of the human mind and soul. Doctrines which presumed eternal punishment and a transactional satisfaction of a grumpy God made less sense to early modern thinkers. Enter Friedrich Schleiermacher, who suggested that the atonement was a mystical transformation of our relationship to the divine. Schleiermacher’s relational atonement theory suggested that the human problem was the result of a deeply alienated identity. Our engagement with Jesus’s perfect God-consciousness through study, fellowship and prayer led us to be transformed on a subconscious existential level. Needless to say, Schleiermacher’s rejection of God’s moral holiness has troubled traditional theologies ever since.

In the 20th century, German theologian Karl Barth (d. 1968) reconceived atonement by conceiving Christ’s death on the cross as an act bringing salvation to all who are destined for death. That sentence alone explains why Barth was denounced as a universalist, even though Barth maintained that the atonement was exclusively and efficiently applied to “the elect”. Fundamental to Barth’s doctrine of effective election was the sufficiency of the cross to cover all sin—either Christ’s death was sufficient or not. This seemed squishy to those who needed more certainty that some souls were definitely going to hell. What’s the point of salvation if it isn’t somehow an exclusive club? 

There are more theories of The Atonement sprinkled through Christian history, and doubtless there are conditions in the future which will generate more doctrinal creativity. My thought here is how the event history of Jesus’s life as the Christ, his death and resurrection, is not contained in a single narrow explanation. At various times I’ve found comfort in a variety of doctrinal interpretations of the faith, and at the same time, have found them all to be insufficient to the day. In the end, we are bonded by this shared account; given the diversity of those whom God loves, we should certainly grow in comfort with a diversity of understandings.

Feeling a little bit woozy after all this theology, I’ll pause my Robin’s Egg intake and remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor

Jonathan Krogh
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