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Description of  Suffering, not Power: Atonement in the Middle Ages

1683595998 epub Correcting a popular view of the atonement. Was Christs death a victory over death or a substitution for sin? Many today follow Gustav Aulns Christus Victor view, which portrays Christs death as primarily a victory over the powers of evil and death. According to Auln, this was the dominant view of the church until Anselm reframed atonement as satisfaction and the Reformers reframed it as penal substitution. In Suffering, Not Power, Benjamin Wheaton challenges this common narrative. Sacrificial and substitutionary language was common well before Anselms Cur Deus Homo. Wheaton displays this through a careful analysis of three medieval figures whose writings on the atonement are commonly overlooked: Caesarius of Arles, Haimo of Auxerre, and Dante Alighieri. These individuals come from different times and contexts and wrote in different genres, but each spoke of Christs death as a sacrifice of expiation and propitiation made by God to God.