The James Bond Gospel

I don't know if you like Bond movies? They used to be a staple on British television over the festive period, though maybe not so much these days. The plot in most of the Bond films is quite straightforward. For me, Goldfinger is the archetypal Bond film and most subsequent Bond films use the same basic plot. An evil genius has a plan to take over the world and James Bond has to stop him (or her? though I don't think there has been a female Bond villain yet).

This plot line is actually a pale reflection of the reality of what the Bible tells us has happened to the world. An evil super-villain, a spiritual being called the devil or Satan, rebelled against God at some point before human beings came into existence. Later, when the first human beings were created, he schemed successfully to lead them into rebellion against God as well and give up their position of God's stewards and viceroys over creation to come instead under his evil influence, control and ownership as slaves of sin. Satan's work was like unleashing a terrible virus into the atmosphere that would then infect and poison the whole of creation.

Something is wrong with the world and with us. Deep down we know it. All human beings are "not quite right." We're not the people we feel we should be. Often we're not the people we even want to be ourselves. The Bible tells us we're right to feel that way. We're not imagining it. And the Bible calls the thing that's wrong with us is a deadly disease called "sin."

Sin is like a virus that infects and affects every part of us - our bodies, our brains, our hearts - and all their functions including our thoughts and our feelings. It is a disease that is, humanly speaking, incurable, and it only has one prognosis - death. In biblical terms, "death" is not just physically dying, but an eternal state of "un-life." Not only that, the symptoms of this disease ravage our behaviour and manifests as pride, cruelty, anger, hatred, lust, envy and many other utterly horrible human traits. All the particular evils trace their origin back to the disease of sin that has infected humanity, and we every single one of us catches the disease from birth. It is inevitable for everyone born into this world that they will be infected, even if there is a latency period during childhood before the disease goes "full blown".

Another horrible aspect of the disease is that it is completely debilitating. We are paralysed by sin. Unable to find a cure. Unable to even want to be cured.

That's the position we all find ourselves in. That's the way the world has always been right from the earliest period of human history.

The story of the Old Testament in the Bible is largely about God calling on one nation, Israel, to be the people through whom the disease of sin would be dealt with and through whom the world would be put right. It is also the story of how that people failed again and again in their mission, finding out that they themselves were infected with the same disease as all the other nations.

The New Testament tells the story of how God came to earth himself, which it turns out had always been the plan, in the person of his Son, his "second self" who was born and lived as a faithful Israelite called Jesus of Nazareth. He showed the character and the wisdom of God, and then in his death he took on himself the entire disease, to rid the world of it once and for all, thereby defeating the Evil Mastermind who was behind it all. He rose from the dead so that not only would the disease have no more power over him, but that the cure he had created and the immunity from it he had gained could be passed on to everyone who wants it for themselves. Not only that, but once we are given the medicine, the power of the disease is broken and we start the long process of recovering from the effects of the disease, knowing that one day we will be totally free of it and able to live forever, even though our body goes through death.

So how do you receive the cure? It's very simple. You trust in Jesus to save you and ask him come into your life and cure you. When you ask him, he will do it. Then you become his friend and stay in a loving friendship with him forever, getting to know him, learning to see what a life without the disease looks like and trying to copying him in your life. You'll also find that there's a great crowd of people who have also been saved and now live in a new kingdom. The group is called the church, which means "the gathered ones." The church gets together to thank Jesus, meet his Father who is now our Father too, and to be energised by his Spirit to live as we should and deep down really want to live. Among other things, we continue to work to help other victims of the disease in practical ways in this world and spread the good news that there is a cure available for everyone.

Christus Victor

Christus Victor
Gustaf Aulen
Wipf and Stock Publishers 2003
(Originally published 1931)

I suspect Christus Victor is one of those Christian classics that more people have talked about than actually read. It is often referred to as the classic book on the theory of the atonement that bears the name Christus Victor, which is essentially that the on the cross Christ defeated and triumphed over all principalities and powers including sin, death, hell and Satan.

Aulen was a Swedish historical theologian in the Lutheran tradition. His thesis in this book is that the dominant "Latin" theory of the atonement that finds its key exponents in Anselm and Aquinas has got it wrong. The Latin theory is similar in many respects to the evangelical Protestant view of the atonement known as penal substitution - that Christ was punished in our place on the cross which enables God to forgive us and accept us into this people.

Aulen goes back to an earlier tradition found in the Church Fathers, and which he also believed was taught by Luther, though not by subsequent Lutherans, which he calls the dramatic or classical view of the atonement. This is the view now known as Christus Victor - that Christ is conqueror, fighting and defeating his enemies through his death and resurrection.

It must be said that the Church Fathers did not all have the same view, nor were their views exactly the same as Aulen's. In the early writers, the dominant theory was probably that Christ defeated evil by paying a ransom to the devil. Aulen moves away from this idea. Rightly so. He sees in Luther the best advocate of this point of view. However it remains controversial whether Aulen actually reads Luther correctly or fairly (or at least completely).

The book is not easy reading, but I found it rewarding. There are few evangelicals who would dispute that Christus Victor is a biblical idea and certainly part of what the cross achieved. Some of us would question if this is all the Bible teaches about the cross however. Aulen fails to explain exactly how the cross works to defeat evil and liberate mankind. The strength of penal substitutionary atonement (PSA) is precisely that it focuses on the how question. Perhaps when the two theories are held together - one focusing on the how, the other focusing on the why - we may get a more rounded picture of the New Testament's teaching. For raising the issue at all, and in such a short and relatively accessible book, we are all in Aulen's debt, even though his claims are in the end unproven. I tend to agree with Henri Blocher whose article "Agnus Victor" seems to me to demolish a lot of Aulen's arguement. Blocher argues that though both Christus Victor and PSA ideas are present in Scripture, the primary idea is PSA and only through PSA can Christ's victory be explained.