Tag Archives: christus victor

warrior ???

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Today’s Celtic Lent thought draws us back to the cross and specifically the removal of Christ’s body from the cross. The account from the gospels that Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea took Jesus’ body off the cross and laid it in a tomb are not realistic. It would have taken more than two people to do this and The Dream of the Rood talks of troops of warriors who came from afar to help their king after the battle.

The Dream of the Rood is, again, looking at the spiritual side of things rather than the physical. I think we might call the warriors spoken of here as angels. Heavily armoured fighting warrior like angels. This reminds me of an incident quite a few years ago when I was director of Gillingham YFC. We ran a drop in coffee shop for young people and many nimby type people were making it difficult for us to exist there. We feared physical aggression rather than just complaints. On a day we expected lots of aggro a couple of the team members, totally independent of each other, came to me to say that that they saw an two angels standing outside the shop. The angels were wearing blue armour and had their swords were drawn in front of their face like the Queens (now KIng’s!) Guards at Buckingham Palace. Both people gave an almost identical account 30 mins apart from each other. Although I went outside and saw nothing I acknowledged we were in a spiritual battle and the expected onslaught never came.

As Christ’s followers says today’s though, we are also called, and become, warriors. I don’t know what you think about that, but I don’t feel very warrior like. For many reasons (which I will go into another time) I feel pretty exhausted, beaten up and thrown aside by individuals and an organisation I loved, and love, very much. To be a warrior is the farthest from my mind at this point in time.

So … what about you?
Where do you see yourself in this epic saga?
Do you see yourself as a spiritual warrior?
If so does this knowledge change your outlook?
If it doesn’t what do you think of the concept?

Substituion Atonement or Christus Victor …?

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Today’s Celtic thought brings us to the teaching of Christus Victor rather than the teaching of Substitution Atonement (I deserve to die due to my sin, Jesus took my place so that I could be made right with God) that many of us have been brought up with. In the early years of the church the main teaching was that of Christus Victor (Christ died on the cross to defeat all the works of evil and to defeat Satan) rather than substitution atonement which only became ‘popular’ in the last 800 or so years.

As we have already seen earlier in our Lent journey, the Celtic Christians understanding was that we were already ‘made right’ with God because we are all, created in the image of God and so God dwells within each one of us, working with us to become the person we were originally created to be.

Whilst there is truth in both teachings, and the Celts would certainly have had an outlook of both/and rather then either/or, the teaching of Christus Victor resonates more with me at the moment. The fact that I, that all of us, are born in original blessing suggests we are already ‘ok’ with God and don’t deserve to die. If we don’t deserve to die then Jesus must have been doing something other than simply taking my place, our place, on the cross. Defeating evil and Satan so that the whole of creation could be what it was originally created to be jut seems to make a lot more sense. The cross is then no longer seen as a place of sacrifice but more a weapon that can be used to protect and save.

This teaching is quite new to many of us, and it is worth a good consideration and I genuinely wonder what others think about this. I wonder, too, why I feel some ‘concern’ even writing this. Concern that challenges ‘am I really a Christian?’ believing something different to what I have been taught across the nearly 60 years of my life.
So …. Substituion Atonement or Christus Victor …. what do you think?