Christus Victor

by Andrew Wilson


King’s Church, Eastbourne, UK

He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, triumphing over them in him (Col. 2:15)

There’s only ever been one victory. Literally. In all of history, there has only ever been one contest that you could look back to centuries later and agree it was won, permanently and definitively, by one side. Just one. In millions of attempts.

Empires come and go

Think about the contenders. The Assyrians beat all their rivals in the eighth century BC, but then lost to the Babylonians in the seventh, who lost to the Persians in the sixth, who got wiped out by the Greeks in the fourth, who crumbled in on themselves in the third, and so on. The Romans crushed all before them for four centuries, but they eventually lost too – just like the Vikings, the Mongols, the Spanish, the British, and everybody since. IBM were dominant for a generation, but then lost to Microsoft, who now look like they might well lose to Apple. England defeated all comers in the 2003 rugby World Cup, and then lost pretty much to everyone. True victory – conquering rivals completely and lastingly – is unheard of.

With one exception. In AD 30, a three-day campaign was waged by God against all of his most powerful enemies, sometimes referred to as ‘rulers’, ‘authorities’, ‘principalities’ and ‘powers’. The main confrontation took place on a rubbish dump outside Jerusalem, where God, in his son Jesus, met Satan, sin and death head on. A mocking enemy, who since Eden had been used to humans capitulating to his taunts, was met by a defiant ‘Go ahead, make my day’ from the Son of God, and within six hours the one-sided battle was over, the victory was triumphantly announced with the words ‘It is finished.’ On the third day, the victory parade began, as the risen Champion came out of the tomb to the amazement of earth and the applause of heaven. As Paul describes it in Colossians 2:15, God obliterated his enemies in Jesus, took away their armour, and made a public spectacle of them by parading their corpses through the streets.

The stranglehold broken

The Latin phrase for this – although why theologians continue to use Latin words for this sort of thing is a mystery – is ‘Christus Victor’, which means ‘Christ the winner’, or perhaps ‘the Conquering Messiah.’ You may remember the opening battle scene of Gladiator, where the Romans fight the Barbarian armies of Germania. It is a far from even contest, so vast is the might of Rome, but when the cavalry arrives the Barbarians’ fate is sealed, and as the camera pans round the dead bodies, a bloodied Russell Crowe raises high his sword and cries, ‘Roma Victor!’ The cross was such a moment, only more so, because it still lasts today, sixteen centuries after the collapse of Rome. At Calvary, the stranglehold of sin was so smashed, and the dominion of death so decimated, that all those watching could do nothing but raise high their arms in triumph and cry, ‘Christus Victor! Christ has conquered!’

The Cross an act of conquest

Strangely, considering how often this picture of the gospel appears in Scripture, it is not one that many of us are used to thinking about. In England, we traditionally preach a gospel of individual forgiveness, and a cross that saves us from the wrath of God. This explanation of Jesus’ death, of course, is completely true, as you will see from the other articles in this magazine. But there is more to the cross than that. It can be described not just in terms of the law-court, but in terms of the battlefield. We can worship God not just for his act of compassion, but for his act of conquest. And we can focus not just on what Jesus did to us (made us right with God), but on what he did to Satan, sin, and death itself (conquered them utterly). Such an understanding of the cross will not only keep us in line with the Bible, but it will also help us make sense of what Jesus is doing now. ‘For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet’ (1 Cor. 15:25).

We must be careful not to underplay the victory of Christ. Because we continue to live in a world where the rule of Jesus is not yet seen as it will be – a world where sin continues, and sickness exists, and people die – it is easy to live as if Colossians 2:15 were not true. We can think of the cross as God’s opening gambit, the means by which we will defeat Satan rather than the means by which he already has. So everything in our lives, from our evangelism to our growth in personal holiness, becomes a question of completing a victory that has not yet been achieved. A widely-used illustration of this idea presents the cross as like the D-day landings in 1944: the battle is not over, but the result is virtually assured, and all that remains is for us to press on until victory is complete.

That picture can be a helpful one, and I have used it myself in the past. But I think it underplays the picture of Christus Victor, Christ the winner. After all, the New Testament’s theology of evangelism, let alone of sanctification, is not based on completing a victory but on recognising one. Paul’s exhortations to live holy lives in, for instance, Romans 6:15–23 and Ephesians 5:7–10 are not founded on completing Christ’s victory over sin, but on acknowledging it. And Peter’s preaching of the gospel in Acts 2:32–36 is not about establishing Jesus’ dominion over the nations, but about announcing it.

Don’t live under a false world view!

As such, the gospel of Christus Victor means that our evangelism is less like defeating the last few battalions of the Axis army, and more like proclaiming the end of the war to the last Japanese soldiers hidden in the Philippine jungle. You may have heard about Lt. Hiroo Onoda, who refused to believe that World War II was over, and remained in hiding from 1945 until 1974, when he was finally reached by a college dropout called Norio Suzuki. He had lived under a false view of the world, pledging allegiance to a long-defeated power, for twenty-nine years. Suzuki proclaimed to him the good news that the war was over (another term for this is ‘preaching the gospel’), and Onoda finally brought his life and his behaviour in line with the truth. That proclamation of the truth – that the war is over, that the enemy is defeated, and that all men can now live in the good of the victory of Jesus – is what evangelism is all about.

So if you feel the responsibility of establishing Christ’s victory over darkness in the lives of your unbelieving friends, or if you are struggling with whether or not you will ever be able to overcome the ongoing power of sin in your own life, you need to lift your head, and reflect for a while on Christus Victor, the only true winner in the whole of history. In other words: ‘Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered’ (Rev. 5:5).