ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 73 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Thank you for your answer. I've been thinking about Dr. Scaer's discussion on atonement. Can you relate our understanding of atonement to this section of Article IV? >> DR. DAVID MAXWELL: Well, David, that's where the two sections of the course really intersect. And that is what Christ did for us, in fact, what brings about this righteousness from God that Paul was talking about. And so I would like to actually review some of the things that Dr. Scaer talked about for a number of reasons. I think it's helpful to appreciate the scriptural diversity and the way that it describes the atonement. And it describes what Christ accomplished, which is afterall what is being delivered to us in the doctrine of justification. But also because I think that diversity helps in preaching so that you don't always have to say the Gospel exactly the same way. If you get to the Gospel in your sermon and every Sunday that's going to be "Jesus died for you," then you're going to put people to sleep because you're saying it the same way every time. So I think it's helpful to appreciate different ways in which the Bible talks about salvation and atonement. And this discussion of the three different kinds of -- or three different theories of atonement comes from a book by ***Gustaf Alaine. The book is called "Christos Victor" in which he outlines these three views. So let me go briefly through them again. The first and oldest, according to Alain, is the Christos Victor view in which Christ is portrayed as the victor over sin, death and the Devil. Especially over the Devil actually. And in this view, which is very common in the church fathers, the stress is on the cross as the point of Satan's defeat. And the imagery that is used in this particular view of the atonement is that of the battle imagery. So any time you see texts describing Christ's accomplishment in terms of battle or victory, you can suspect that what you've got there is more of a Christos Victor way of describing the atonement. And this is very common in our hymnity, as well. Let me give you one example from the Easter hymn "At The Lamb's High Feast We Sing." This is Stanza 3 of that hymn. It reads, "Where the paschal blood is poured, death's dread angel sheaths the sword. Israel's host triumphant go through the wave that drowns the foe. Alleluia." Now, you can notice a couple of things in this stanza. First of all, the language of foe and triumph is -- plays into that battle imagery that we've talked about. So that would be a key to identifying this hymn as following the Christos Victor way of describing the atonement. Another comment I would like to make from this hymn is that it refers to the exodus. "Israel's host triumphant go through the wave that drowns the foe," that refers to Israel being taken out of captivity from Egypt and going through the Red Sea where at the Red Sea he drowns their Egyptian captors as they chase them. And I think that's a very appropriate reference for a hymn that's going to talk about the Christos Victor kind of atonement. Because, in fact, the exodus story in the Old Testament is fundamental for the Christian understanding of what salvation is. Even in the New Testament. But also on into the church fathers. It's really that Exodus image that is going to be key to describing what Christian salvation entails. And if you think about what that would mean, that would mean that Christ has accomplished our deliverance from captivity from slavery. But instead of slavery to pharaoh, it's slavery to Satan and sin -- sin, death and the Devil, if we want to expand that out into the way we normally speak. And so using the exodus as your paradigm of describing salvation is going to lend itself to this Christos Victor motif. And that's exactly what the hymn "At The Lamb's High Feast" is doing. And so what that means then to Article IV in the Augsburg Confession is that when we talk about justification happening for Christ's sake, that means that our righteousness or our justification before God is brought about by Christ's victory over the Devil, by Christ's triumphing at the cross. And so what you -- the way to connect the atonement to Article IV of the Augsburg Confession is to say what Christ achieved in the atonement is what we receive in justification. So Christ achieved victory in the Christos Victor way of explaining it. And therefore, that victory becomes ours in justification. So we, too, have a share in the victory over Satan, a victory over death. So that would be the Christos Victor. Now, the second of these views, which is articulated most fully by ***St. Ensam, is the vicarious satisfaction view which is probably where most Lutherans are at home. Now, instead of battle imagery, the vicarious satisfaction way of explaining the atonement depends on more law court imagery. So the language of absolving, the language of there being a charge against us, the language of having an advocate or a defense lawyer or this sort of thing, that would all fit in with this vicarious satisfaction theory. So that says that Christ took our place and suffered for us to absolve us from the charge that was against us. That is vicarious means he took our place. And the satisfaction part means that he suffered our punishment on our behalf so we don't have to suffer the punishment. And that is the language of Romans 3 and 4. I mean, even the term justification implies a law court scene. So this is another way. It's not only in St. Ensam, although he gets credit for fully articulating that and developing that. But you still have this law court imagery in the New Testament itself. In our hymnity an example of that one would be that Lenten hymn "Glory Be To Jesus." And here Stanza 4 reads, "Abel's blood for vengeance pleaded to the skies but the blood of Jesus for our pardon cries." So there you have -- it casts more in legal terms. There's vengeance and there's pardon. Those are the kinds of things that happen in a law court or in that kind of an environment. So both of those views are represented in our hymnity. And as Dr. Scaer noted, both of them are also present in Luther's explanation of the second article of the Creed. That Christ has delivered us. And that's the Christos Victor theme. That he's purchased and won me. It's a winning. A triumph. But how does he do it? He does it not with gold or silver but with his holy precious blood. And there's that vicarious satisfaction. So when you combine those two, you get the victory. But it's not a normal kind of victory. It's not a victory, an exercise of power. But rather, it's a victory that's brought about by the vicarious satisfaction. Now, Dr. Scaer also discussed the examplarist view of the atonement in which Jesus is as an example. And I'm going to pass over that one. Because that one does not actually fit into the doctrine of justification. That would be -- when we start talking about following Jesus' example, that would be more a sanification one. And that belongs in another course. So I'm going to pass over that for now. But here again, the idea is in the atonement, what Christ accomplished in the atonement, we receive in justification. So he accomplished forgiveness by his vicarious satisfaction. We receive forgiveness in justification. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***