(For earlier installments see here, here, and here.)
In addition to being a revelation of God’s love and a sacrifice that effects reconciliation between humanity and God, Christians have always seen the Atonement as the act whereby God redeems us from the powers of sin and evil. In ancient times, redemption meant literally to purchase someone’s freedom. According to Christianity, we are enslaved to the powers of sin and death, and on the cross God “purchases” our liberation.
This is perhaps the point at which Christianity departs most sharply from the view of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thought sees human beings as fundamentally rational and capable of being good on their own. At most the life of Jesus may provide a kind of supreme moral example, but this is only an accidental, not essential, condition for spurring us on to virtue.
Christianity, by contrast, sees humanity as deeply enmeshed in sins, both personal and corporate, sins from which we cannot free ourselves. Whatever else we might mean by the “principalities and powers,” the phrase at least refers to social, political, and economic systems of violence and exploitation in which we are all deeply implicated. We often benefit from unjust systems, and the structures of those systems often make it nearly impossible for us to avoid evil. For instance, a CEO may find it nearly irresistable to exploit third-world workers, not from personal greed, but because if he doesn’t take advantage of such an opportunity, his competitors will.
And within each of us, we find a nearly irresistible pull toward sin – toward taking the easy path, the path of self rather than self-giving. St. Paul himself was no stranger to this struggle:
I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do–this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. (Romans 7:15-20)
Sin here is not just making the wrong decision, but something like a sickness, an alien power that infects us and creates a fundamental orientation whereby the self is “curved in on itself” in Luther’s fine phrase. In order to be good, we need a fundamental re-orientation of the self, something that’s outside of our power to secure.
Added to this is the fact that humanity and creation as a whole suffer from decay and ultimately death. Christian tradition has always seen a connection between sin and death, even though our modern ways of thinking treat death as completely “natural.” Death may be “natural,” but it is not part of God’s original intention for his creation.
The Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection are the means by which God enters human history and disables the powers of sin and death, liberating us for lives of genuine freedom, which is orientation of the self toward God.
How is this accomplished? First of all, Jesus lives a perfect life of self-giving under the conditions of sin. The “powers” are unable to defeat his intention to live in perfect obedience to the Father’s will, even unto death. Rather than lashing back and feeding the cycle of violence, Jesus takes the world’s violence onto himself, ultimately defeating the powers on the cross. The cross is a victory precisely because the powers were not able to coerce Jesus into sinning.
The Resurrection is the vindication of Jesus’ life and the sign that the period of the powers’ dominion over human life is at an end. It is also, most dramatically, the defeat of death and the demonstration that God’s love is more powerful than the forces of decay and dissolution.
Jesus’ Resurrection inaugurates a new age; his perfect self-offering elicits the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which becomes the agent that empowers the new community formed around him to live a life of resistance to the powers of sin and death. The Church becomes the first fruits and sign of the redeemed creation where sin and death no longer hold sway. The consummation of this redemption takes place only at the second coming, but in the “age between the ages” we can be taken up, if only partially, into the life of the Trinity, which is one of eternal blessedness and mutual self-giving love.
A Thinking Reed 
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