Posted on by Jack Kilcrease

Christ’s Offices and the Foundational Nature of Substitutionary Atonement

Christ’s work of atonement and reconciliation is threefold because His offices of king, priest, and prophet are threefold.  In his work Christus Victor, Swedish Lutheran theologian Gustaf Aulén famously outlined three major atonement motifs: Conquest, Substitution, and Moral Influence.1 The conquest, or Christus Victor, motif deals with Christ’s conquest of demonic forces (sin, death, and the Devil).2 The substitution motif deals with Christ’s payment for sins (whatever form that may take) in the place of fallen humanity.3 Finally, moral influence theories of the atonement deal with Christ being a good example or making a transformative existential gesture to humanity.4 

Throughout the history of Christian thought, theologians have often chosen one motif and excluded the others. Therefore, we should recognize that all three motifs have a valid basis in the New Testament. Moreover, each motif corresponds to an office of Christ: as king, Christ wages the Father’s apocalyptic war; as priest, Christ atones for sin; as prophet, Christ reveals the testament of the gospel to humanity, and gives humanity the Spirit. The Spirit, in turn, helps believers follow the moral example of faith and self-sacrificial love Jesus revealed on the cross.

The Trinitarian Nature of Christ’s Threefold Office

Christ accomplishes redemption through his kingly, priestly, and prophetic offices. The fullness of God’s glory operating through his human action enables Jesus, as true man, to achieve his. Christ’s divine person subsists in a self-communicative relationship with the other persons of the Godhead. Therefore, in that the human nature anhypostatically participates in the divine person. Christ’s human nature also participates in the subsistent relations that the Logos possesses with the other persons of the Trinity. Thus, the human nature partakes not just in the person of the Logos, but also in the internal relations of the Trinity. 

The internal relations of the Trinity that constitute the person of the Logos find their ultimate temporal expression through the threefold office of Christ as exercised through his human nature. Hence each office corresponds to a person of the Trinity.5 The Father, the font of divinity and the communicator of all sovereignty in the Trinity, gives his divine glory and sovereignty to the Son from all eternity through his begetting and the procession of the Spirit. As king, the man Jesus also receives this glory and is “Messiah,” that is, “Anointed One.” Jesus is Messiah, or Christ, precisely because God anointed him not only with the fullness of divine glory, but also with the Holy Spirit. 

Because God the Son possesses all, he can doxologically offer up both his active and passive righteousness to the Father through the power of the Spirit (Heb. 9:14). When God raised Jesus from the dead, the Father glorified him and returned all things to him. This included reception of the eternal Spirit he had offered up. As prophet Jesus could now give his Church the Holy Spirit. As the Helper, the Spirit became the means by which the apostles and their successors (pastors) delivered the testament of the gospel in the form of unilateral forgiveness of sins: “[Jesus] breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld” (Jn. 20:22-23).  

Not only do Christ’s offices as king, priest, and prophet recapitulate Adam and Israel, but they also counteract the threefold damage done by sin. First, sin is an enslaving force (Jn. 8:34, Rom. 7:7-25). Therefore, a conquering king must overcome it and set its captives free. Secondly, sin is an action that creates debt (Matt. 6:12, Lk. 7:41-50, Rom. 6:23). Therefore, a priest must to pay the debt of sin with sacrifice (Lev. 17:11). Finally, sin presupposes unbelief (Rom. 14:23). Therefore, a prophet must reveal true knowledge of God.     

The Foundational Nature of Substitutionary Atonement

While all three atonement motifs are valid, they do not all have equal value. Rather, the priestly work of Christ is the anchor that grounds both the kingly and prophetic work of Christ. It is the foundation of the work of the other two offices.

This is the case for two main reasons.  First, as Oliver Crisp notes, the major problem with all non-substitutionary models of atonement is that they lack a mechanism that God reconciles to humans. This does not mean that the motifs of conquest and moral influence have no value. For Crisp, the conquest and moral influence motifs give images of the effect wrought by substitution. Nevertheless, they do not explain what mechanisms bring about these salutary effects.6  

To flesh Crisp out somewhat, it is easy to see how the New Testament witness gives precedents for both the conquest and moral influence motifs. However, the biblical authors ultimately make them contingent on the reality of substitution. For example, following the conquest motif, it is correct to say that Jesus defeated Satan. But Jesus’s victory only occurred because he paid the debt of sin that had allowed Satan to function as the accuser of humanity and hold sinners in his power as punishment (Zech. 3, Heb. 2:14-17, Rev. 12:10-11). Likewise, throughout the New Testament we see the depth of God’s love in Christ’s death. This opens believers to living a new existence based on profound confidence in that love. But, again, this is only possible precisely because Jesus decided to suffer the law’s judgment in our place.  

Moreover, when we sever the conquest and the moral influence motifs from substitution, they become incoherent. When we do this, we talk about an effect without a cause. For example, if with no reference to substitution, we simply say that Jesus somehow fought demonic forces on the cross, we know nothing about why or how this conquest of demons was effected. 

The moral influence theory is even more inadequate in this regard because it never explains why the cross is a demonstration of divine love. The Liberal Protestant Jesus who dies horribly to communicate love, or to show his faithfulness to his mission (Ritschl),7 dies rather pointlessly. As John Stott noted, if a person runs into a burning house for no reason, we see folly. But if he runs into a burning house to save another, we see love.8 Hence, if Jesus does not die to achieve something despite the great cost to him (i.e., the satisfaction of divine justice), then we are left with someone who dies for seemingly no reason. Even worse, we are left with a God who cruelly allows Jesus’s horrifying death to give an object lesson.  

Secondly, as F.A. Philippi, Gottfried Thomasius, and Theodosius Harnack observed in their struggle with Johannes von Hofmann’s rejection of penal substitution in nineteenth-century Germany,9 justification through faith presupposes that the law is fulfilled by Christ and that his righteousness is imputed to us. Enslavement to demonic forces is a reality and a punishment that God has imposed because of sin. Sinful humans’ refusal to obey the law is the root problem. If Christ had not dealt with the primary problem, then invariably the role of fulfilling the law would have to fall to humans (as in some moral influence theories).

Thirdly, the ultimate difficulty with both the conquest and moral influence models taken on their own is that they drift back into the dialectic of antinomianism and legalism. They do not take the need for Christ to fulfill the law on the behalf of humans seriously. Therefore, they result in humans remaining within the framework of the law. Hence, taken on its own, the conquest model might lead to the antinomian belief that one is enslaved to demonic forces by no fault of one’s own. 

As a result, one gets a type of Gnostic or Chaoskampf myth of God. In this version, Christ would become a being among beings who has to struggle with other quasi-divinities to free hapless human victims. When severed from substitutionary atonement, the other motifs result in a form of legalism (moral influence) or antinomianism (conquest). As Luther affirms in the Antinomian Disputations, only fulfillment in Christ can end the law’s accusations.  

  1. Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement, trans. A.G. Hebert (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 1-16, 143-159. ↩︎
  2. Aulén, Christus Victor, 16-60. ↩︎
  3. Aulén, Christus Victor, 81-95, 123-133. ↩︎
  4. Aulén, Christus Victor, 95-97, 133-142. ↩︎
  5. See similar approach in: Robert Sherman, King, Priest, and Prophet: A Trinitarian Theology of Atonement (New York: T & T Clark International, 2004). ↩︎
  6. Crisp, Participation and Atonement, 55-94. ↩︎
  7. Albrecht Ritschl, “Instruction in the Christian Religion,” in Three Essays, trans. Philip Hefner (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005), 239.  ↩︎
  8. John Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012), 216. ↩︎
  9. See: Theodosius Harnack, Luthers Theologie besonderer Beziehung auf seine Versöhnung und Erlösunglehre, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1969); F. A. Philippi, Dr. v. Hofmann gegenüber lutherischer Versöhnung- und Rechtfertigungslehre (Erlangen: Theodor Bläsing, 1856); Gottfried Thomasius, Das Bekenntniss der lutherischen kirche von der Versöhnung und die Versöhnungslehre D. Chr. K. v. Hofmann’s: Mit einem Nachwort von Th. Harnack (Erlangen: Theodor Bläsing, 1857). ↩︎

From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).

Cover image from John Barber, “Prophets, Kings and Priests,” JRB Publications, May 9, 2020, accessed June 23, 2024, https://jrbpublications.wordpress.com/2020/05/09/prophets-kings-and-priests/; other images from Vincent Uriel O. Tacujan, “THE THREEFOLD OFFICE OF CHRIST (MUNERA CHRISTI),” Vincent Uriel Religious TV, July 20, 2022, accessed June 23, 2024 https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=582393956781738&set=a.100236414997497; Kaleena Fraga, “What Happened When Jesus Was Crucified? Here’s What The Historical Evidence Says,” All That’s Interesting, last updated March 14, 2024, accessed June 23, 2024, https://allthatsinteresting.com/crucifixion-of-jesus; and Dennis E. McFadden, Philip Melanchthon Ap. 5:110 quotation meme, Facebook. www.facebook.com.

2 Replies to “Christ’s Offices and the Foundational Nature of Substitutionary Atonement”

  1. I really appreciate your work. This entry, in particular, helps illustrate by contradistinction both the “background” and “foregoround” of the image of justification painted by a Tillich devotee and ELCA pastor/theologian whom I know. Like many of his background and training, as far as I can tell he regards his own intellectual family tree as the true Luther-loyal outgrowth… and orthodox Lutherans as those who left Luther and became something different or at least adjacent.

Comments are closed.