Gustaf Aulén, in his seminal work, argued that Christus Victor depended upon a metaphysical imagination that modern Western theology increasingly rejected. That metaphysical worldview presupposed a world populated by real spiritual powers and a dramatic cosmic conflict in which the devil plays an active role in salvation history. Aulén describes how this was received in modern theology:
[Modern theologians] inclined to be critical of the forms in which the patristic teaching had usually expressed itself. They disliked intensely the ‘mythological’ language of the early church about Christ’s redemptive work, and the realistic, often undeniably grotesque imagery, in which the victory of Christ over the devil, or the deception of the devil, was depicted in lurid colours. Thus the whole dramatic view was branded as ‘mythological.’ The matter was settled. The patristic teaching was of inferior value, and could be summarily relegated to the nursery or the lumber-room of theology.
What is being described here is a loss of a metaphysical imagination. The Christus Victor vision is dismissed as “mythological” because the enchanted world it assumed was no longer tenable. And so, we pivoted to atonement after enchantment.
Atonement after enchantment would need to be less metaphysically freighted. Especially in response to the Protestant Reformation. Western theology gravitated toward accounts of salvation that could be framed without an enchanted cosmology. Salvation began to be described in the categories that remained viable: legal, forensic, and consequential frameworks. Penal substitutionary atonement became the most well-known and infamous expression of this broader shift away from the enchanted world of Christus Victor
In short, the movement from Christus Victor to forensic visions of atonement was less a theological evolution than a symptom of a metaphysical loss. Forensic views of the atonement proclaimed a gospel for a disenchanted world.
Atonement after enchantment.
