Should the West Consider Christ’s Victory?

We are pleased to offer another guest post by blogger Mark Citadel.

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In Gustav Aulén’s 1931 book Christ the Victor, he writes, “the work of Christ is first and foremost a victory over the powers which hold mankind in bondage: sin, death, and the devil.”

Such a concept is unsurprisingly alien to most Western readers who have for so long been believers in a very different theory of atonement, that is, what exactly occurred at the metaphysical level during our Savior’s crucifixion. While Aulén’s theory would not have been at all controversial before the turn of the first millennium after Christ, when the east and west were divided, the western portion of the Occident was heavily influenced by the works of St. Anselm of Canterbury and his book Cur Deus Homo?, which was published in 1097. It’s important we understand what this model puts forth.

In the World but Orthogonal to It

If you’ve got infinite power on your side, what can possibly defeat you?

Any finite number presupposes infinity. So infinity is mathematically necessary; it must exist, somehow or other, in order for there to be such a thing as any finite quantity.

However infinity exists, it must at least be actual. If infinity did not actually exist, then it could not exist mathematically. If it did not exist actually, then its mathematical existence would be illusory – not an accurate reflection of reality. There would then be no such thing as quantity, and mathematics would have nothing to do with truth. But it does. So infinity actually exists.

To say that infinity actually exists is to say that it is, or is a property of, some concrete real. It is also to say that it is an actual fact – which is to say, the factuality of an act. And this is all to say that infinity is a fact of an act of existence of a concrete being. Whatever else that being is, he is infinite.