03 — Christus Victor
The oldest Christian account of the Cross is that God in Christ entered death and destroyed it, and that the Resurrection is the content of that victory rather than its proof. This section sets out the patristic material and the liturgical texts in which the Church still proclaims it, and treats the descent into Hades — which in the Orthodox Church is not an appendix to the Resurrection but its very image.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox
A caution belongs at the head of the section. “Christus Victor” as the name of an atonement type is not patristic; it comes from Gustaf Aulén’s Christus Victor (Swedish 1930; English 1931), a work of Lutheran dogmatics cast as a history of doctrine, and its three-type taxonomy is contested among patristics scholars. Nothing in this section depends on the label. The Fathers did not have the term; they had the thing, and they had it from Melito of Sardis onward. The problem with the label is treated at The Scholarly Question and a Sober Assessment.
The second file treats what is, liturgically and iconographically, the centre of the Orthodox doctrine of the Cross: Christ standing on the broken gates of Hades, taking Adam and Eve by the wrist. That the Church’s festal icon of Pascha is an image of the descent rather than of a solitary risen figure is itself a doctrinal statement, and it is the clearest available evidence of what she holds the Cross to have accomplished.
Navigation
| File | Contents |
|---|---|
| The Patristic Core | Melito’s paschal preaching; Irenaean recapitulation; Athanasius on death exhausted in a body it cannot hold; Gregory the Theologian, Chrysostom’s Paschal Homily, John of Damascus; the anaphoras, the Paschal troparion, and the festal icon; what the victory motif does and does not claim |
| The Descent into Hades | The Great Saturday texts; 1 Peter 3:18–20 and the exegetical dispute; the ancient Holy Saturday homily; the iconography of the Anastasis; why the descent bears on the doctrine of the atonement; and the open question of the extent of the deliverance |
See Also
- The Sacrificial Language — the other register, used by the same Fathers
- The Cross and the Christian Life — the Aulén problem, set out in full
- Pascha, the Feast of Feasts — the feast in which this is proclaimed
- Orthodox Eschatology — where the eschatological questions the descent raises are treated