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Gustaf Aulén

Gustaf Aulén (1879–1977), Swedish Lutheran theologian and bishop of Strängnäs. His book Christus Victor (English translation 1931) argued that the early church saw the atonement as Christ’s victory over evil, and gave Christus Victor its name.

History

Life

Gustaf Emanuel Hildebrand Aulén was born on 15 May 1879 in Ljungby parish, Kalmar County, the son of a pastor. He studied at Uppsala, where he took his doctorate in theology in 1915 and lectured in dogmatics from 1910, during the years when Nathan Söderblom held the chair of the history of religions there. In 1907 he married Kristine Bjørnstad, a Norwegian (Wikipedia, secondary).

In 1913 he became professor of systematic theology at Lund. With his younger colleague Anders Nygren he built what came to be called the Lundensian school, later joined by Ragnar Bring and Gustaf Wingren. Aulén’s dogmatics, The Faith of the Christian Church (Swedish 1923; English 1948), went through several revised editions and became the standard Swedish textbook of its generation.

Christus Victor came out of Aulén’s Olaus Petri lectures at the University of Uppsala and appeared in Swedish in 1930 as Den kristna försoningstanken (Christianity Today, 1957, secondary). A. G. Hebert’s English translation (1931) made Aulén known well beyond Scandinavia.

In 1933 he was consecrated bishop of Strängnäs, an office he held until 1952. In 1945 he sat on the board of Samfundet Nordens Frihet, a society that opposed Nazi influence in Sweden; in 1944 he ordained exiled Norwegian priests in Strängnäs Cathedral, and in 1946 Norway gave him the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav for his services to Norway’s cause during the war (Swedish Wikipedia, secondary). He was also a serious musician: he wrote the tune for the hymn “Fädernas kyrka,” worked on the committee for the Church of Sweden’s 1937 hymnal, and was president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music from 1944 to 1950.

After retiring he returned to Lund and kept writing into his nineties. Late books include Eucharist and Sacrifice (1956; English 1958), Reformation and Catholicity (1959; English 1961), The Drama and the Symbols (1965; English 1970), a study of Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings (1970), and Jesus in Contemporary Historical Research (1976). He died in Lund on 16 December 1977, aged 98.

Context

Aulén’s theology was a reaction against nineteenth-century German liberal Protestantism, which he thought had reduced Christianity to ethics and religious feeling. He criticised Friedrich Schleiermacher often and praised Martin Luther constantly. The Lund theologians shared a method later called motif research: instead of judging doctrines by modern standards, they tried to identify the basic “motif” that made a theology Christian and then trace it through history. Nygren’s Agape and Eros (1930–36) applied the method to love. Christus Victor applied it to the Atonement.

Influence

Christus Victor changed how the atonement is taught. Its threefold scheme of “classic,” “Latin” and “subjective” views became the standard frame in textbooks, and its title became the usual name for the classic view. Through the twentieth century the book gave Eastern Orthodox writers, Anglo-Catholics, and later Anabaptist and peace-church theologians a vocabulary for resisting the dominance of Penal Substitution in Western Protestantism. Aulén’s later sacramental and ecumenical books, especially Eucharist and Sacrifice, also shaped Lutheran contributions to postwar dialogue with Roman Catholic theologians.

Key ideas and contributors

Three types of atonement. Aulén argued that Christian history holds three distinct ideas of the atonement. The “objective” or Latin type, classically stated in Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo (c. 1098, CCEL), has Christ as man offer satisfaction to God. The “subjective” type, associated with Peter Abelard, has Christ’s love move human hearts to repentance. The “classic” type sees the atonement as “a Divine conflict and victory”: Christ fights and defeats the powers that hold humanity in bondage, namely sin, death, the devil and the condemning law.

The classic view was the church’s first view. Aulén claimed the classic type was the dominant teaching of the Early Church for its first thousand years. His central witness was Irenaeus, whose Against Heresies presents Christ as recapitulating and undoing Adam’s defeat (CCEL). He found the same theme in Athanasius, Augustine and the Greek fathers, and in texts such as Colossians 2:15, Hebrews 2:14–15 and 1 John 3:8.

God is the actor from start to finish. For Aulén the decisive difference was who acts. In the classic view God himself, in Christ, comes to rescue the world, and the work is “continuous” from God’s side. In the Latin view the offering is made to God by Christ as man, so the work is “discontinuous”: God is the one who receives satisfaction rather than the one who saves. Aulén thought this split set the Father and the Son at odds and made the scheme legal and rational where the New Testament is dramatic.

Luther revived the classic view. Aulén read Luther as the great recoverer of the classic type, pointing to the battle imagery in Luther’s hymns and in his commentary on Galatians, where curse and blessing, sin and righteousness, meet in Christ in a “mighty duel” (comment on Galatians 3:13, CCEL). On this reading, Philipp Melanchthon and later Lutheran orthodoxy slid back into the Latin type, and Lutherans lost what Luther had found.

Dogmatics as faith’s own account. In The Faith of the Christian Church Aulén treated theology as the description of what Christian faith actually confesses, organised around God’s victorious love, rather than a system built from philosophical premises. Motif research was his tool for that description.

Key controversies

Too neat a history. The most common objection is that Aulén’s types are tidier than the sources. The fathers used many images side by side: Athanasius’s On the Incarnation speaks of Christ paying the debt of death as well as defeating it, and Irenaeus can speak of propitiation. Critics argue Aulén chose the victory passages and treated the rest as secondary, so that his “classic type” is partly his own construction. Wikipedia’s own article flags its account of Aulén as possibly original research (Christus Victor, secondary).

Anselm and the Latin type. Defenders of satisfaction theory say Aulén caricatured Anselm. In Cur Deus Homo it is God who becomes man to make satisfaction, so the work does start from God’s side, and the Father and Son are not opposed: the Father wills reconciliation and the Son offers himself freely. Defenders of Penal Substitution make the same reply for their view.

Victory or substitution? John Stott, in The Cross of Christ (1986), accepted that Christ’s victory is a real New Testament theme but argued it is the result of the cross rather than its mechanism: Christ defeats the powers by bearing sin in our place, so conquest depends on substitution. Many evangelical writers since have argued for holding the two together rather than choosing, as in the debate collected in The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views (2006), edited by James Beilby and Paul Eddy.

Luther. Lutheran scholars objected that Aulén’s Luther is one-sided. The same Galatians commentary that describes the “duel” also says Christ became the greatest sinner and bore the curse of the law for us, which is substitutionary language. Critics argue Luther held victory and penal substitution together, and that Aulén’s story of decline after Luther cannot stand.

The devil and the myth. Aulén admitted that the patristic ransom imagery, with the devil deceived by the bait of Christ’s humanity, could look grotesque. He kept the drama while treating the imagery as symbolic. Critics asked what then remains: if the powers are not taken literally, the victory risks becoming a metaphor without content. Colin Gunton’s The Actuality of Atonement (1988) took up this question of how the battle language refers. Later writers pushed Aulén in directions he did not take: J. Denny Weaver’s The Nonviolent Atonement (2001) used “narrative Christus Victor” to reject any violence willed by God, and related arguments link the view to Liberation Theology and Black Theology.

Motif research. The Lundensian method itself came under criticism, including from Wingren, who in Theology in Conflict (1954) faulted Nygren’s approach for imposing a scheme on the sources. The same worry stands behind most objections to Christus Victor: the types explain a great deal, but they also decide in advance what the sources are allowed to say.

What remains unresolved

Almost no one now denies that victory over evil is a central New Testament way of speaking about the cross, and Aulén deserves the credit for putting it back on the table. The open question is whether it is one image among several, a result of substitution, or the frame that the others fit inside. That depends on how the fathers, Anselm and Luther are read, which is exactly where Aulén’s history is most disputed.