Talk:Christus Victor

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).

[edit] Overall Quality

This article does not cite its sources where it says that this was the predominant view of the early Church and supported by nearly every Church Father. The article also seems biased towards supporting the theory and proponents of it.

By way of response to the above;

Being familiar with Aulen's Christus Victor, I believe that the article is essentially a summary of Aulen's work rather than an engagement with the Christus Victor doctrine within the broader context of Christian theories of atonement. Aulen's intention in his work was to argue in favour of CV as the "classic" view in contradistinction to penal substitution as a later, mediaeval construct. This, I believe, accounts for the article's apparent bias.

It might also be suggested that the article actually DOES cite its one sole source (Aulen's Christus Victor) but not in an appropriate way.

I think what is required here is;

(1) Addition of a bibliography listing Aulen's work as a major source (I know, I know, one book doth not a bibiography make, but then I didn't write the article!)

(2) Clarification that the article as it stands is essentially a "narrow" treatment; presenting Aulen's argument FOR the Christus Victor doctrine and AGAINST penal substitution (or similar) views of the atonement, rather than a "broad" treatment; interacting with other views or responses to Aulen's work.

(3) Some indication of the response to Aulen's work (it has not been uncritically recieved, of course)

And;

(4) Some explanation of the historical context in which Aulen wrote, and why a reappraisal of the widely recieved penal substition position was considered necessary.

Muzhogg 22:16, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Major Rewrite

I did a major rewrite based on the above suggestions and have therefore removed the cleanup flag. Sharktacos 18:21, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ransom Theory

Hi,

I'm working on a clean-up of the Atonement (ransom view) article. Should this article and that one be considered for a merge? jrcagle 15:23, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi Jrcagle, I think the two could possibly be merged into a larger article, however I would stress that Christus Victor and the Ransom view while related are NOT the same theory and so the two would need to be differentiated if they were merged into one larger article. Some of the differences are:
1) Ransom view is held by almost no one today, where as Christus Victor is held by the entire Orthodox church, a growing number of Protestants especially the peace churches, and Catholics because of Liberation Theology. So the history is quite different, Ransom view can be said to be a "seldom held" theory, while Christus Victor is increasingly growing in its popularity and relevance.
2) The focus of Ransom Theory is on a legal satisfaction of the devil, whereas the focus of Christus Victor is about the conquering of the devil (hence the "victor" terminology) or said differently, Christus Victor is about the liberation of humanity from bondage expressed not in legal but in dramatic terms. Therefore all of the critiques applied to the Ransom view that it is "crude" from a legal point of view do not apply to Christus Victor since it is not a legal theory.
If there was a merge, these differences should be clarified in the article. Also there should be a redirect from the removed entry to the new merged one. Because Christus Victor is a view that is still current, I would suggest merging the Ransom article into this one. Sharktacos 17:51, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Hi, thanks for the response. Where would you locate Gregory of Nazianzus' view that the 'ransom' is figurative language? [1] (see sec. XXII). Is he an early Christus Victor-ian? If not, what should we call him? If so, how early should we locate Christus Victor, and how sharply is it distinguished from the Ransom Theory? It would be helpful to users of the articles to be able to see these differences at a glance. jrcagle 19:47, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Hey there. Aulen's claim is not that there are two theories, Christus Victor and Ransom held side-by-side by various people, but rather that the ransom view is a crude and incorrect interpretation of the church fathers and that Christus victor is in fact the deeper correct understanding of what they taught. Aulen calls this the "classic" view and claims not only Gregory of Nazianzus but all of the Greek fathers and a good number of tha Latin fathers (see the article for a complete list). Sharktacos | Talk 02:39, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../c/h/r/Talk%7EChristus_Victor_a6f0.html"