34 - Theories of the Atonement

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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All right, so last week, for those who are visiting, we are,

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I've been working through church history. I believe we are somewhere around Lesson 33 or 34, as I recall.

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Thirty -four. Thirty -four. Well, thank you. Lesson 34. Well, and I'm a little concerned.

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I didn't hear, I didn't get verification from Brother Sean whether last week's actually got recorded or not.

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So, that would be a hole in, a hole in, the black hole of church history, all due to whether we did or did not get it recorded last week.

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I don't know. But he was gone, so things happen, I guess. And I know last week we covered some of the rest of the

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Christological controversies after Council of Nicaea and started into early church theories on the subject of the atonement.

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And if you will recall, since I'm not sure whether that got uploaded or not, at least we can make the atonement section complete,

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I had introduced you to a book, The Development of Christian Doctrine by Louis Burkhoff, and I had given you a quotation from Burkhoff.

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I'll go ahead and repeat that just to refresh the memory or to just get us going along those lines.

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Did we, were we able to find last week's? No. Okay. Well, for those wanting the whole section of church history, we missed the

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Council of Chalcedon and Christological controversies after. After that, that's a shame.

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I should have double recorded on my iPad and I did not. And so I apologize for that.

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But there's not much we can do about it because we can't exactly go back and fix that.

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So my apologies. Maybe that's covered. I know it was covered under the old church history section.

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Maybe we can put a link in or something or find that old. I know I still have the recordings of the old, the old, old, old stuff, really, really bad audio recordings from the 1990s on church history.

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Maybe we can track that down, but my apologies for that. Quoting from Louis Burkhoff, Irenaeus who, and I remember

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Irenaeus, we're talking about the end of the second century, who stands midway between the East and the

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West, agrees with the apologists, Justin and others. In contemplating man as enslaved by the powers of darkness and looks upon redemption partly as deliverance from the power of Satan, though he does not look upon it as a satisfaction due to Satan.

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His idea is rather the death of Christ satisfied the justice of God and thus liberates man.

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At the same time, and this is very important, he gives prominence to the recapitulation theory.

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Now since I have my cool markers here now, recapitulation theory, that's a big one.

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The recapitulation theory, the idea that Christ recapitulates in himself all the stages of human life and all the experiences of these stages, including those which belong to our state as sinners.

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By his incarnation in human life, he thus reverses the course on which Adam by his sins started humanity and thus becomes a new leaven in the life of mankind.

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He communicates immortality to those who are united to him by faith and affects an ethical transformation in their lives and by his obedience compensates for the disobedience of Adam.

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Evidently, Tertullian pretty much follows this line as well. The idea of recapitulation is central to Irenaeus' arguments against the

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Gnostics. Remember he wrote a number of books against the Gnostics toward the end of the 2nd century.

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It was in that context that I mentioned to you that if this is going to be the case, if Jesus is going to recapitulate various aspects of man's life and his own life, he couldn't have lived only like 33.

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So Irenaeus is the one who tells us for the first time to use the language of apostolic tradition where he claims that the

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Apostles taught something and then passed that tradition down orally rather than in scripture.

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And what did the Apostles teach? That Jesus was more than 50 years of age when he died. So it's very significant to me in light of later claims about apostolic tradition, especially within Roman Catholicism today, that the first example we have of this, no one, including

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Roman Catholics, believe that it's accurate. So if the very first person to go, oh, I got this from the

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Apostles, didn't have it right, how about the people 1 ,800 years later? How much chance do they have?

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Oh, we've got something there written down, but it came from the Apostles. It doesn't seem overly likely, and it came from the reality that Irenaeus has this overriding theology of recapitulation.

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And so even though the biblical text doesn't give us any reason to believe that Jesus was 50 some odd years old or more, or more than 50 years of age, when you have this overriding idea, well,

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Jesus is recapitulating everything, so he had to at least enter into what would be considered somewhat of an old age for him to fulfill these things.

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Well, you don't really need to derive it from Scripture. You can force it onto Scripture, which is what he does.

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Now Clement of Alexandria, remember, when we talked about Clement of Alexandria, you might have gotten the sense from me that Clement isn't the most, well, once in a while I'll do some reading from early sources just simply to do reading from early sources.

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He's not my favorite guy to go to. But Clement of Alexandria goes even farther away from the biblical pattern, embracing at points a rather Gnostic idea, for he sees the

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Atonement as a payment of debt by the teaching of true knowledge.

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Remember the Gnostics, how do you advance and move toward freeing the true inner spirit from this prison of the physical body?

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It's through the gaining of true knowledge. And so Clement, when he doesn't have a real biblical theology, but he's still fighting forms of Gnosticism, gives in at points and sort of borrows categories from them.

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And then good old Origen. Well, you can imagine, given what we've said about Origen in the past,

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Origen presents a number of ideas, never really putting them into a consistent whole.

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Most importantly, he presents the idea known as the ransom to Satan theory.

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The ransom to Satan theory. See, I'm writing stuff down for you there.

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My wife always says she appreciates when I write on the board. So that's what we're doing.

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Thirty -five years, I've figured out. Suggest that, that's good.

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Quoting Burkoff, Satan was deceived in the transaction.

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Christ offered himself as a ransom to Satan, and Satan accepted the ransom without realizing that he would not be able to retain his hold on Christ because of the latter's divine power and holiness.

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Satan swallowed the bait of Christ's humanity and was caught on the hook of his divinity. Thus the souls of all men, even those in Hades, were set free from the power of Satan.

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Now remember, Origen is a universalist. Even Satan himself will eventually be saved.

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So this is trickery on God's part, basically.

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Catching Satan, and he doesn't see what's going to happen and doesn't realize what's going to happen, and so you get this ransom to Satan theory.

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Now, Athanasius, remember Athanasius, the eventually Bishop of Alexandria, 328, very important in defending the

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Council of Nicaea, provides us with the first in -depth discussion of the entire subject and presents the biblical substitution concept more clearly than anyone before him.

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Now remember, he's writing mid -fourth century. So I've often said the first real treatise we get that has at least what we would hope to be sort of a meaningfully biblical level of argumentation to it, middle of the fourth century.

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That's a long ways down the road. I mean, that's if, you know, if you consider time period between when you've got

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Hebrews being written and the first meaningful treatise reflecting some of that, that would be as far as from now until Star Trek, you know, 2317 or something like that.

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Down the road, a little bit of time has passed. But he also presents, and I think this is important to cover,

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Athanasius also presents something called, now, what would, what would you, how would you translate that?

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Theosis. That's sort of hard to, yeah. It's, it's,

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I know what the concept is. I'm not sure exactly how you'd translate it though. Like God?

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Yeah. Theosis is, well,

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Athanasius gives us sort of the earliest version of it and then it's going to grow after that and it becomes very important in eastern orthodoxy.

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It really doesn't end up having much of a place in western theology.

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But some people have made a connection between this and what famous reformed writer, let me see if anyone's tracking with me if you're all just sort of going, eh,

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I'll just write it down and we'll worry about it later type of thing. Anybody know who I'm referring to? No one?

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You can make the argument, so Theosis, Athanasius, it becomes very important in eastern orthodoxy and then sort of maybe,

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I think there's some element to this if you read it carefully within the proper parameters and stuff like that, but if you've done much reading in a very, very well known

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American theologian, Jonathan Edwards.

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Jonathan Edwards has this idea.

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But what is Theosis? Well, Athanasius said something along the lines of God became man so that man might become

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God. And you might say, he was a Mormon! No, he wasn't. No one in the ancient church, no one in the modern church, was by talking about Theosis denying monotheism, you weren't going into monism, the idea that all is

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God and God is all or anything like that. The idea is that what takes place in union with Christ, in light of him being the

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God man, is more than anything

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Adam ever would have experienced if Adam hadn't fallen. And so there is a transformation and change of the very nature of the creature in union with Christ.

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Not that that person ever becomes deity or is absorbed into God or anything like that, but there is in the, you know, they focus, of course, upon the term that's found in scripture of glorification.

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And so what does that, what does glorification mean? There is a participation, we'll use

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Peter's terms, a participation in the divine nature. The creature doesn't cease to be a creature because the creature came into existence at a point in time.

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So something that's basic to the very nature of God, eternality, can never be attributed to the creature.

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But still, there is something more than, because of union with Christ, because of union with the

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God man, there's something more than anything Adam ever would have experienced if he had remained in an innocent state.

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And so it's an expansion of, sort of a speculative expansion of, the concept of glorification.

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And for Athanasius, what was important about this is it is attached to the concept of atonement because his argument was that if Christ was not truly the

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God man, then there could not have been an atonement. He truly needed to be man, but he truly needed to be

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God as well. And so because of union with the God man, there has to be a change of our own nature, an elevation of our own nature.

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Edwards is going to put this more in the future, in the contemplation of the divine being, the experience of eternal life, and ever growing more like Christ and participation in the divine nature in that fashion.

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So when you hear theosis, the Mormons do like to use this. They try to say, see, here's evidence of what we believed.

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That's a real misuse because Athanasius and those who followed him in the

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East certainly never, ever denied monotheism. They never, ever denied there are only three divine persons, any of those types of things, which, of course,

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Mormonism does. So the idea that this is the same thing, but how balanced is this when you look at it from the

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New Testament perspective? I mean, you do have phrases such as partaking of the divine nature, being made like unto the

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Son of God, et cetera, et cetera. What does exactly that mean? When is it? Is it something that's solely future?

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If we're looking at glorification, what's the now and the not yet aspect of these things?

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We've been seated in the heavenly places in Christ, yes, but we still exist upon this earth and you have all those things going on.

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So theosis comes out in Athanasius' materials, and it's good to,

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I think, know that it's there so you don't get blindsided by it because generally it's not explained in an overly balanced fashion and that can be a bit of a problem.

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So after Athanasius, then in the middle of the 4th century, then Augustine comes along writing at the end of that same century, in the beginning of the 5th, so around the year 400, he provides us what might be called an orthodox summary, deemphasizing those elements in earlier writings that are the most unbiblical and emphasizing the

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Pauline concepts of justification, substitution, and forgiveness. But even at that point,

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Augustine, again, is, Augustine does not have an in -depth handle on the

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Greek language. He's primarily reading the scriptures in the Latin, and as a result, there are weaknesses in, for example, his understanding of what justification means, what the dikaio, dikaiosune word grouping means in the original languages.

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And so while you can see a more biblical element to his argumentation, it's really, and there will be further developments in this area, not much, but there will be some further developments in the medieval period with Anselm and Abelard, we'll get to them later on, but there's no question that the most biblically based, textually based discussion and teaching on the subject of the atonement comes post -Reformation.

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And you might say, well, why? I mean, if it's part of the very central aspect of the teaching of the church, why would there just be something that would come so much farther down in history?

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And that is, I think, something that's worth asking that question. There we go.

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And I've sort of alluded to this before, but I think primarily it's due to the fact that the biblical categories of atonement are always so deeply expressed in the language of the

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Old Covenant, in the language of sacrifice, in the language of the Book of Hebrews. I mean, what's the whole realm of the

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Book of Hebrews discussion of Jesus' sacrificial death? High priesthood, the offering on the

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Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, et cetera, et cetera. And once Origen does his deed in disconnecting us from the

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Old Testament as an equal source of theological revelation as the

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New, and that's what he did. I mean, let's just be honest. That's what took place.

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And even when people weren't as unbalanced as Origen, the necessary deep connection to the

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Old Testament text and the knowledge of the Old Testament text, we'll tell you the story at just before the

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Reformation of the first individual to write for us a

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Hebrew grammar so that Christians could start reading the Old Testament in Hebrew again had to risk his life.

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First of all, he had to find a Jewish rabbi that would be willing to teach him because the

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Jewish rabbi was risking his life to do this. And the Christian was risking his life to do this.

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They had to do it at night. And this is just simply to write a basic Hebrew grammar to start the process of allowing any

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Christian scholars to even be able to read the Old Testament's original language again. That's how bad it was going to become.

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And so when your knowledge of the Old Testament is solely upon a secondary translation and your fundamental approach to it is that this needs to be read allegorically, it's not overly shocking that it's only once the

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Reformation takes place and origin is moved out of the way and the phrase ad fontes, anybody know what that means?

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To the source, to the sources, becomes the battle cry of the

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Renaissance and hence of the Reformers. And therefore, not the

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Vulgate, we go to the Greek, we go to the Hebrew, et cetera, et cetera. It's not till then that you get back to a point where you can now do the kind of biblical exegesis that's going to allow you to really go in depth on the issue of atonement and do so from a fully biblical perspective where you have all of Scripture functioning rather than only a portion of Scripture functioning.

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And the other reason it becomes so important really to the second and third generation

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Reformers is because once the initial battle on justification has been put out there and all the positions have been clearly expressed, then you start getting the questions about the foundations of justification which takes you to the atonement of Christ.

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And you've got the issue of the mass and you've got the Roman Catholic traditions on these areas. And so once you put aside the idea of the mass, now you have the ground laid for doing the kind of work that needs to be done and understanding what the

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Scriptures say concerning the atonement itself. And so that's one of the reasons why it really takes a fairly long period of time before you get some of the most in -depth reflection upon and work upon these particular subjects.

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And if we don't recognize the currents of church history and things like that, it can be real easy for us to go, well, that just must not be an important subject then.

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No, it's a vitally important subject. But we need to recognize what was going on in the

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East and the West. And I suppose I should comment on this before we go to Augustine because that's our next subject.

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But we have up here the phrase, and as some of you know, recently there has been a little more reflection upon Eastern Orthodoxy.

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Like I said, we're about to look at Augustine. And so Augustine is not viewed very highly in Eastern Orthodoxy.

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He is the very poster child of the West. And Eastern Orthodox don't find much to be overly excited about in Augustine.

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And there's no one outside of Paul who has influenced the categories of thought of Western Christendom more than Augustine.

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There just isn't. I'm talking about historically speaking. Has Calvin and Luther?

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Yeah, they have. But anybody who reads Calvin and Luther knows they were deeply influenced by Augustine.

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So at best, they're secondary beyond that. So when most of us consider

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Eastern Orthodoxy, we just automatically categorize it as popeless

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Catholics on the other side of Greece. It's basically about as far as most of us go.

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There are very, very few Western Christians who have almost any meaningful knowledge of how real

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Eastern Orthodox thought functions. It is very difficult to even begin to try to explain any of this to Western thinkers, because we do not think in the categories that they think, and they don't think in our categories.

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So they look at us as popeless

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Catholics too. We're just rebels against the Bishop of Rome. But when they look at what we argue about, they would say, you're all just the same coin, just one side, the other side, and you're a different coinage than we are.

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They don't get why we ask the questions that we ask. What do you believe about justification?

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Do you believe in the imputation of the righteousness of Christ? When we debate with Roman Catholicism, we can go to certain documents.

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You know, for hundreds of years, you would go to the

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Council of Trent. You've got the Cairns Decrees of the Council of Trent, and it said this, and it says this, and you can go to paragraph this and sub -paragraph that, and there you go.

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And you compare that with the Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter one, paragraph, and it's straightforward.

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It's very forensic in the sense of it has a very strongly legal aspect to it.

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It's all laid out in systematic theologies. There is no systematic theology in East Orthodoxy.

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We can sort of sit back and try to create one, but they don't. Oh yeah, there's been some books in the

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West written, but in real East Orthodox thought, especially

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Eastern in the sense of Russian, Ukrainian, you know,

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Greek Orthodoxy is sort of stuck in the middle to where they butt right up against the

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West, and so there's a little more structure there, but there's a tremendous amount of mysticism, and you and I think of mysticism as New Agers with crystals and weirdo stuff like that.

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That's not really what I mean when I refer to mysticism amongst Eastern Orthodox.

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For the Eastern Orthodox, when you ask them what they believe, their answer is very straightforward. Well, listen to us pray.

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Watch us worship. It's the liturgy that defines the theology, and so we don't need a book that puts it into paragraphs and sub -paragraphs.

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You just listen to the prayers, and you just watch what takes place, and you've probably heard the attraction of Eastern Orthodoxy described as smells and bells, smells and bells.

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Why? Well, if you go into a... How many of you have ever been in an

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Eastern Orthodox church? Well, I know Brother Callahan has one, two, just a few people. Just a few people.

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As most of you know, I was just in Ukraine, and so one day

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I got to go visit the World War II Museum in Kiev, and as we were walking to the underground to get where we were going, there is a fairly large

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Russian Orthodox church, Ukrainian Orthodox church, Orthodox church, whatever.

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So we stepped in, and you're immediately assaulted by the smells of the incense, big issue, as we'll see later on, regarding icons of the various saints and things like that.

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And the service had just begun, so there was singing and the bells, and it was incredible singing.

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My friend that was with me said, it's normally not that good, but this one was really good.

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I mean, recording level good, but it wasn't recording. They weren't playing a

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CD. It was the actual choir. But these services will go for three hours.

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They will go for three hours, and nobody cares, and no one's actually expecting that you're actually really paying attention to what is being said.

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There is actually, in real

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Orthodox theology, the idea of centers of religious energy, almost, where you have it.

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The idea is get people together at these places, and they will be energized.

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They're really big into, words that we translate work, but they would say it's not really work, it's energy, it's power.

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When the church gathers, there is power in the gathering, and in the location, and in the liturgy, and it's not so much communication of divine truths.

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From their perspective, that's just dry academic forensics. It's the idea of participation, theosis.

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There's a strong de -emphasis upon any concept of original sin at all.

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There really isn't any idea of total depravity in that sense. It's interesting, therefore, that in Eastern Orthodoxy, the emphasis is upon the incarnation, not the crucifixion.

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If you look at Western Christianity, there's not much emphasis upon the incarnation.

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I mean, Christmas is sort of a modern thing, but strong emphasis upon crucifixion, but in Eastern Orthodoxy, much stronger emphasis upon incarnation, and less emphasis upon crucifixion, because of this theosis idea, participation, energy, that kind of thing.

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As far as authority issues go, in the

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West, when you talk to Eastern Orthodox folks in the West, they will sound very much like Roman Catholics in arguing against Sola Scriptura, because they don't believe in Sola Scriptura.

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In essence, and believe me, this is extremely surface level, and very basic, and obviously subject to all sorts of qualifications, depending on who you're talking to.

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I even hesitate to even talk about Eastern Orthodoxy, because it's so hard to get out, to get

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East and West, even anywhere near where we can start talking to one another, because the categories are just so different.

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But the liturgy and the traditions of the church are the ultimate authority, and the scripture is to be interpreted within the tradition of the church, which sounds very much like Roman Catholicism, yes.

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But the tradition is basically frozen in time in what

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I would identify as the 8th century. John of Damascus, Maximian, some of the biggest, biggest names in Orthodoxy are writing around that time period, and that's pretty much where they're stuck.

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There really can't be much in the way of, you don't have John Henry Cardinal Newman and the development hypothesis, which you end up with in Roman Catholicism.

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You basically have an ancient church perspective from right around the time of the rise of Islam, John of Damascus, people like that.

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And that tradition, in places like Ukraine, Russia, where you end up with a state church, it just becomes a hotbed of nominalism, or should we say a coldbed of nominalism.

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I guess coldbed would probably be better. And anytime anything becomes a state religion, it's a bad thing.

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But especially when you take 7th century tradition, crystallize it, and then turn it into state religion, it's a breeding ground of a dead nominalism.

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When I first started going to Ukraine, the first thought that crossed my mind was, well, hey,

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I sort of do this almost everywhere I go, but any possibility of getting one of the local orthodox priests, we can have a dialogue, debate about justification or sola scriptura, and they just sort of looked at me like, no.

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I'm like, well, why not? They don't have any interest in anything like that at all.

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Evangelism? No, no, no, they don't. It's completely outside the categories in thinking.

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Reach out to these schismatic evangelical weirdos?

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No, no, no, not going to do it. So I was like, oh, well, okay.

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I guess that's the way it is. So only here in the

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West, basically, where you get Antiochian orthodoxy, where you get people who have converted to orthodoxy from Roman Catholicism or from Protestantism, they tend to be apologetic, and they tend to, not apologetic as in,

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I'm so sorry. No, apologetic as in giving a, you shouldn't be an evangelical because of this, this, and this.

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But that's sort of a weird response to being here in the

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U .S. where there's so much religious freedom and ability to have interaction. It doesn't flow naturally from how the orthodox think in orthodox lands.

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So there's sort of a Western Eastern orthodoxy, and then an Eastern Eastern orthodoxy.

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And they're not necessarily the same thing. So if we just simply go, ah, it's just Roman Catholicism with a few changes, it's not really true.

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I know that's the easy way to do it, and it takes a tremendous amount of work to actually see what the real differences are.

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And because it's a way of thinking that's just totally different than our own way of thinking.

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And as soon as we start asking them the questions that are most important to us, that immediately manifests itself. Because they're like, but that's not what's important to us.

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And with all the negatives about sufficiency of scripture and imbalances in regards to gospel and things like that, you do have to give the

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Eastern orthodox one real strong kudos. They are

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Trinitarian to the core, and they know what they believe about that.

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That's one thing that there's no confusion about. And sadly, almost any catechized

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East North Ox person would put almost any evangelical to shame in their knowledge of Trinitarian doctrine.

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That's just a fact. And they will say that Western Christians are basically just monotheists with a lot of confusion past that.

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And the reality is that's true. I've lamented many times that if we were to give a quiz to everybody walking out of church on a good old, do it right across the

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Bible belt if you want. Limit it to good old

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Baptist churches in the Bible belt. How many of them would test modalistic? Modalist heretics as they walk out of church?

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The vast majority of them. And it's not because that's what's being taught from the pulpit. It's just pure ignorance.

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There's nothing being taught about it. It's just never talked about. It is part and parcel of everything in Eastern Orthodoxy.

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So at least on one level you got to chapeau. At least they've got that right.

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But that doesn't excuse everything else. So the subject is a huge subject that is rarely addressed in a meaningfully and in fair fashion.

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Mainly because I don't know how in book form you can provide the worldview transition from our constant way of thought to a very, very different way of thought.

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It's sort of like when I try to study, I've tried to study Buddhism and Hinduism.

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I really have. I've listened to hours and hours of lectures from some of the best Christians on the subject of Buddhism and Hinduism.

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It's like I've just got a whole bunch of bad sectors on my hard drive.

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And it keeps trying to write to those sectors and nothing will save. It just,

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I just, and it's probably just because I haven't sat down and talked with people from that background enough to start hearing and figuring it out.

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I just can't make heads or tails out of it. And so it just, it doesn't save in the hard drive.

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I think that's, I think the difference is I have spoken with Eastern Orthodox folks at length enough.

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And with some of them that were, some of them who knew enough about Western Christianity to sort of help get into the communicate.

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It's pretty rare. It's pretty rare. It's tough to get people to, to really communicate.

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And like I said, over there, so many are nominal. It's just, it's just what you are there. It's not, it's not a strong, heartfelt thing.

42:50

Yes, sir. Oh no.

42:56

Yeah, no. They have a full sacramental system, not quite as fully developed as Rome's, but they have a full, full sacramental system.

43:04

They, they're, yes. Oh yes. Yeah. But again, even then, you know, exactly what is understood by all the categories that Rome would put into the sacramental system in regards to grace or things like that.

43:23

So much of the language sounds the same, but it's not necessarily the same background behind it. It makes it very, very difficult.

43:29

It makes it very, very difficult. And like I said, Augustine, who is our next topic whenever we get a chance to do this again,

43:37

Augustine is sort of the dividing point here because the

43:44

East looks at Augustine and it's like, eh, no thanks. And so really right there at the beginning of the fifth century, you really start seeing the division that's eventually going to lead to one of the biggest dates in church history.

44:02

One that would be, you know, certainly if we were to have a test someday, if we were, would be one that you'd need to know along with the date of the

44:17

Council of Nicaea, which is 325. And that's 1054

44:22

AD. And that's the date of the split of the East and the

44:28

West. I didn't even know these fell down. The split of Eastern and Western Christianity, the mutual anathematizing on the part of the

44:42

Pope and the, I think it was the Archbishop of Constantinople or something like that.

44:47

But the East and the West anathematizing one another and you have the split.

44:54

You can sort of see the development and it goes back to how they view

45:00

Augustine. And so that's where you start seeing those changes, those differences manifesting themselves.

45:07

And does anybody remember the theological thing from last week? I guess I did mention this last week and didn't get recorded.

45:14

The difference between East and West in the Nicene Creed, the filioque clause, right?

45:23

Where the East, I'm sorry? So son and, so and the son.

45:40

And so it's the idea of the spirit filioque, filioque, filioque. So the son proceeds from the father,

45:49

I'm sorry, the spirit proceeds from the father and the son in Eastern Orthodoxy only proceeds from the father.

45:56

Yeah. Yeah. So that's one of the theological things, the fact that in the

46:02

East, priests can be married. And then the diffusion of ultimate authority amongst the

46:09

Archbishoprics rather than the focusing of authority in the one person, the Pope. These are some of the fundamental differences between East and West that eventually lead to that split in 1054.

46:21

Okay. All righty. Let's close our time with the word of prayer. Father, once again, thank you for this freedom that we have to look back and to remember what you have done in the past.

46:33

May we always be thankful that you have been building your church and may we use this time to have the opportunity to look at ourselves and to pray,

46:43

Lord, that we will be faithful to the calling you've given to us in your word. Be with us now as we go into worship.