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Images of the Atonement

The Bible talks about salvation as help in the midst of trouble. It may also mean "to heal". The Bible also talks about deliverance from slavery or liberation through ransom. Paul most often talks about salvation in relational terms: as being reconciled to God, making peace with God, and having sin forgiven.

Paul also uses the legal term "justification," and that's the term which has come to dominate systematic theology in the Augustinian tradition, and so in the Western church, especially the Protestant world. In using the term justification as a primary term, we're already committing to the legal metaphor as primary. Tertullian was a great advocate of this image.

Here are some more ways of understanding salvation.

The Financial Image - "Jesus paid it all, all to him I owe."
The Sacrificial Image - Jesus is the high priest, offering sacrifice, and also the sacrificial lamb.
Christ as Victor - Jesus is the conquering hero, who charges to the rescue when I am held captive by the devil
The Healing Image - Sin is a sickness. Jesus says he has come to heal those who are sick. Paul Fiddes suggests that The Healing Image is especially appropriate for our age. A problem with this image is that it doesn't inherently include any idea of Christ's suffering. T. S. Eliot uses the image in a way which includes Christ's suffering when he writes of Jesus as "the wounded surgeon" who heals us from the disease of sin.

Here's a selection from Eliot's poem cycle The Four Quartets, section IV from the quartet East Coker:

The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions each distempered part;

Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

The sharp compassion of the healer's art

Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease

If we obey the dying nurse

Whose constant care is not to please

But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,

And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital

Endowed by the ruined millionaire,

Wherein, if we do well, we shall

Die of the absolute paternal care

That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

Gustav Aulen says that most images of the atonement may be characterized as essentially objective (having to do with a change in God's attitude toward us; typified in Anselm) or subjective (having to do with a change in us; typified in Abelard). In contrast, he wanted to propose a dramatic view. This sort of view is objective, in that it has to do with God's attitude to us, but differs from typical objective understandings by introducing the person of Satan or the forces of evil into the story. Whereas Anselm's view has to do with God satisfying his own justice, suggesting (to Aulén, at least) that God is divided among the three persons of the Trinity, with the Father being the angry one and the Son doing the work of appeasing him, the dramatic view presents all three persons of the Trinity as united from first to last in a cosmic struggle against the work of Satan. A problem with this approach is that it seems to give Satan quite a bit of power.


				Nancy Zylstra