Atonement Models: Not in the Early Church Writings - David Bercot

There's a quote here from Irenaeus I really liked that I thought kind of, um, showed the early Christian spirit. Okay, he says this, talking about Christ, "His suffering gave rise to strength and power for the Lord through means of suffering, ascending into the lofty place." He's now quoting, uh, from, uh, scripture, "Ascending into the lofty place led captivity captive, gave gifts to men." That's, you know, in Ephesians, "And conferred on those who believe in him the power to tread upon serpents and scorpions and on all the power of the enemy." That's from Mark. That is of the leader of the apostasy, and that's Satan he's talking about. He said, "Our Lord also by his passion," that means his suffering, his death, "destroyed death, dispersed error, put an end to corruption, and destroyed ignorance.

At the same time, he manifested life, revealed truth, and bestowed the gift of incorruption." I mean, see, he just goes on and on. It's not one thing. It's like all of this stuff happened, and we need to keep that in mind. And, um, so there's a little bit of Christus Victor in there about trampling on Satan, but, but yeah, I mean, he's not thinking that's everything. That's just part of it. And likewise, penal substitution, uh, even if it were correct, which I don't think it is, it doesn't adequately cover all that happened for our salvation, all that happened with Christ becoming man and his death on the cross and all of that. There were so many things at work here.

I don't, I honestly don't think there is a model or a theory that covers it all. So, yeah, the theory is not the important thing. And I know you shared a, you ended your interview with Dean on a quote from C.S. Lewis. If you've got that, yeah, maybe you can. So I was hoping to ask you the same thing because I read that quote with Dean and say, you know, what do you think of this? And I want to ask the same back to you. So C.S. Lewis wrote in his book, Merit Christianity, and I'm quoting here, "We are told that Christ was killed for us, that his death has washed out our sin, and that by dying he disabled death itself."

That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ's death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary. Merit plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself. I'm curious how you would respond to that. Oh, I mean, absolutely, absolutely. Now, C.S. Lewis isn't right about everything. He said a lot of things wrong, and when he's wrong, I mean, he can be really wrong. Yeah. But when he's right, yeah, he has a way of saying things that are so memorable and just, you know, hits the nail on the head.

And this would be one of those examples. So absolutely, that's the whole thing. The important thing is we believe in the atonement, that we embrace it, that we know Christ died for us and we're redeemed through his blood. Now, what model helps us to grasp all of that? That's not the important thing. If it helps us, as he said, if that helps us, you know, hang all of this on something fine, where it becomes bad is then we take our model, and I condemn you because your model is a little different than mine. And so then we have to become enemies because you've got one model that makes sense to you, and I've got a model that makes sense to me.

And the irony is we both believe in the same atonement. We both believe in the same Christ, the same work of Christ, and all of that. Yeah, we're arguing for nothing. These are the models just help us to understand, maybe, but if we get too caught up in them, then actually I think they can end up doing more harm than good, which is what he's saying. You know, don't get too caught up in the model. So the important thing is that we believe all the things that scripture teach. Now, if you believe all the things that scripture teaches, you know, not adding or taking away from it, then that's what counts. And how you frame all of that, um, that's not what is important.

And, you know, my whole thing, of course, our ministry has been trying to help people grasp the historic faith, the early Christians, what they believed, and their whole spirit is so, it is really odd to be talking in a debate form about like what the early Christians believed in the atonement because that whole spirit is so foreign to them. I mean, they wouldn't have cared how you framed it. They would have cared if you didn't believe what scripture says.

Interesting though, because like, isn't the tendency to systematize and build frameworks and say, this is how things are, this is the theological box for this, this, and this. Isn't that the tendency? Today. Yeah, it wasn't the tendency then. See, that's why when someone, you know, thinks they're summing up early Christianity by saying Christus Victor or the ransom theory or even penal substitution, whatever you want to do, it's a different mindset. They lived 2000 years ago in a different world, okay, a different culture. They didn't think they have to tie up all the loose ends of things. Just, hey, this is what we believe, this, this, this, this, this. Well, how does all that work together?

Who knows? We just believe it. There's definitely an element of mystery in what you're describing then, right? Where they, oh, here's all the different pieces, but we're not going to try to tie every single loose thread. It's okay if we don't have it all tied up perfectly. There were no arguments about the atonement from anyone. No one wrote a work on the atonement, okay? So you need to understand that we're talking about the early Christians. No one wrote, you know, the closest you would get to is in this long work of Irenaeus against all heresies, and there's maybe a chapter of that where he gives his particular view of the atonement. He didn't, his intention wasn't that this was, this did everything, but it's called recapitulation and more dealt with the incarnation and how we're also saved through the incarnation, that this plays a part in the atonement.

And that's maybe the longest single stretch I can think of in any of the early Christian writings. So yeah, when people talk about, oh yeah, Chris, yeah, you got to realize that's, you know, one little paragraph, usually in a discussion about something totally different. Well, I think that's what surprised me a bit too, actually, as I started digging into this. It's like, yeah, it's talked about, but it's not like there's just an overwhelming amount of material necessarily, and like all these different opinions flying around and frameworks being built. It just didn't seem like that to me. Now, I haven't read the entire set, which you can see, there's the Anice Father set. Like it's a large chunk of text.

Right. It's like an encyclopedia, a small encyclopedia set, right? There's a lot of stuff in there, right? But there's not, like you're saying, these works on atonement theories. No, you get that later on after Nicaea, then you start getting the theologians and, okay, we got to nail this and that down. Now, in some senses, yeah, Origen was a theologian. He was anything but systematic, number one. Number two, anything but dogmatic. I mean, so often in his works, he'll say, he'll give this explanation of something and he says, well, that's the best I can do. Maybe someone who's got better understanding can see. Interesting. Okay. I love that spirit, you know, of, hey, they could talk about things without everybody pulling out their swords and saying, well, you're a heretic and all of that.

You had to be teaching something way off base, like the Gnostics were before you got labeled as a heretic by the early Christians. And so when you're talking about, yeah, the early Christians believed in the penal substitution or this and that, you got to realize they just don't work in those kind of tight boxes. That's foreign to their way of thinking.