On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis Tennessee.
King was one of the key leaders of the American Civil Rights movement, and was working tirelessly to bring about racial equality in America.
While this was a tragic moment in American History, some historians of the Civil Rights Movement have noted that, rather than silencing Martin Luther King, his murder had the opposite effect.
At the time of his death—the very week he was shot, in fact—the American House of Representatives was debating the Civil Rights Act. The waves of protest that swept the country immediately after King’s assassination forced lawmakers finally to act.
Charles Mathais, a politician at the time, put it like this: “Members of Congress knew they had to act to redress these imbalances in American life to fulfill the dream that King had so eloquently preached.”
President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into Law on April 11, exactly one week after King’s death.
The way in which Martin Luther King’s apparent defeat actually led to a profound and deeper kind of victory over the evil of racism, is a helpful image for us as we think about theories atonement—our theological answers to the question: “How does Jesus’ death on the cross save us?”
One of the answers the New Testament gives for this question is that in some mysterious way, God actually won a profound, and very real victory over evil, through the Cross.
In one place, it says it like this: “by his death he [has] destroyed him who holds the power of death, and has freed those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” In another place it says, “God disarmed the powers of evil and triumphed over them in the cross.”
This atonement theory is sometimes called the “Christus Victor” theme—Christus Victor being Latin for “Christ the Victor.” And the idea is that human beings are in some kind of spiritual bondange to evil—sin, death and the devil, is how the Bible talks about it. We are slaves to our evil nature and held captive by death.
And because we are unable to free ourselves, God won a decisive victory for us, to break evil’s power over us and set us free from our bondage to death.
Just exactly how the death of a 1st Century Jewish Holy Man could actually be God’s Victory over evil is difficult to explain.
The earliest theologians talked about it in terms of God fighting a spiritual battle with Satan, on the Cross. They sometimes used the metaphor of a fish going for bait on a fish hook. Satan, in this analogy, is the fish, and Christ on the cross was God’s “bait.” Satan believed he had devoured Christ, only to discover the “hook,” that is to say, three days later Christ rose again from the grave.
Modern theologians have developed other ways of talking about Christ’s Victory on the Cross. Some suggest, for instance, that by dying as a perfectly innocent victim at the hands of the World Powers, God in Christ exposed how cruel and idolatrous human power-structures really are. In this way, they say, he broke their power over us.
Other theologians trace human sin back to our fear of death—we exploit others, hoard things, and so on, all because we are afraid to die and we believe that these things will give our lives meaning in the face of death. Through his death and resurrection, Christ replaced our fear of death with the hope of resurrection glory, and so broke sin’s power over us.
Probably none of these explanations gets to the very heart of the mystery, how Christ’s death on the cross could actually mean, for his followers, victory over sin and death, but the writers of the New Testament were pretty convinced that this is one of the things that was happening when Jesus died for us on the cross.
Like the apostle Paul put it: Thanks be to God, who gives us victory through Jesus Christ our Lord.
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