In the Image of Christ Crucified

In the Beginning, God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, and in our likeness.” Jesus Christ, who is the Image of the Invisible God, is the fulfillment (Colossians 1:15). But it is Christ as the Crucified One who reveals God to us. How is this so? St. Paul shows us in Philippians 2, and it is the very heart of the gospel.

Have the same attitude toward one another that Christ Jesus had, who though he existed in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking on the form of a slave, by looking like other men, and by sharing in human nature. He humbled himself, by becoming obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:5-8)

Though he is God, our Lord Jesus Christ did not consider it something to be exploited to his own advantage. Rather, he emptied himself, humbled himself, sharing in our humanity, giving himself over for our sake even to the point of shameful death on the cross. This indeed is the fullness of the Godhead in bodily form, God reconciling all in heaven and on earth to himself through Jesus Christ, having made peace by the blood of the cross (Colossians 1:19-20).

This is what it is to be God — and what it is to be human. By sharing in human nature, Christ defines it for us. To be truly human is to participate in the self-giving, other-centered, cross-shaped love of God, and so to take part in the resurrection of Christ as his body, the Church.

Or do you not know that as many as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him through baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may live a new life. For if we have become united with him in the likeness of his death, we will certainly also be united in the likeness of his resurrection. (Romans 6:3-5)

I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So the life I now live in the body, I live because of the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20)

My confident hope is that I will in no way be ashamed but that with complete boldness, even now as always, Christ will be exalted in my body, whether I live or die. For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain. (Philippians 1:20-1) 

May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that matters is a new creation! (Galatians 6:14-15)

To be created in the image of God 
is to be created in the image of 
Christ crucified and risen. 

Our True Identity Is In Jesus Christ

Human nature is not something we can manufacture for ourselves. Neither is our identity. These can only be revealed to us, and only through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ — Christ in us, the Hope of Glory (Colossians 1:27).

In the Beginning, when God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, and in our likeness,” Jesus Christ is the fulfillment, who is the Image of the Invisible God (Colossians 1:15). He is the Logos of God — the Reason, the Meaning, the Way of God — who became human being, dwelt among us and revealed the glory of the Father to us in bodily form (John 1:14). 

Our nature is not simply biological existence but the image of God revealed in Christ. It is only in union with Christ that we are made complete and become partakers of the divine nature (Colossians 2:9-10; 2 Peter 1:4). See the many ways Scripture affirms it:

Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure. (1 John 3:2-3)

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! (2 Corinthians 5:17)

For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. (Ephesians 2:10)

 Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. (Colossians 3:2–4)

By this love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment, because just as Jesus is, so also are we in this world. (1 John 4:17)

And the varied ways the early Church confesses it:

He became what we are that He might make us what He is. (St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 54)

You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. (St. Augustine, Confessions, I.1)

For the glory of God is a living man, and the life of man consists in beholding God. (St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.20.7)

For we believe that a logos of angels preceded their creation, a logos preceded the creation of each of the beings and powers that fill the upper world, a logos preceded the creation of human beings, a logos preceded everything that receives its become from God ... This same Logos, whose goodness is revealed and multiplied in all the things that have their origin in him, with the degree of beauty appropriate to each being, recapitulates all things in himself ... Each of the intellectual and rational beings, whether angels or human beings, through the very Logos according to which each was created, who is in God and is with God, is called and indeed is a portion of God through the Logos that preexisted in God. (St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 7)

Christ who is the Logos of God is also our logos, our true reason, meaning and purpose — the way of our being. To live in communion with Christ is to come into our true identity, who we really are. Apart from him our identity is fragmented and distorted. Christ, the Logos of God, is expressed in each one of us, and each one of us is expressed in him. 

Our inherent nature and identity is in Jesus Christ alone. 
Only in him do we discover our true selves, 
so to become who we are. 

My Identity in Christ is Not So Fragile

Here is a trustworthy saying, St. Paul writes: “Christ came into the world to save sinners — of whom I am the worst” (1 Timothy 1:15). He saw no contradiction between Christ saving sinners, and himself being not only one of them but the worst of them. If Christ came to save sinners, then please let me be counted among them, even the worst of them — that I might be saved. This is not an encouragement to sin but quite the opposite. St. John said: 

My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an Advocate with the Father — Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world. (1 John 2:1-2)

Again, John sees no contradiction between Christ being the atoning sacrifice for the sins of the whole world and the recognition that it is yet possible for us to sin. And if (when) we do, we have an Advocate with the Father — Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. That is a wonderful promise and comfort, and an encouragement to bring it all before the Lord. To confess our sins, to admit how screwed up we are, how poorly we behave, does not offend the Lord. It honors the Lord and appropriates his promise. Every week in the Anglican Church we make this Prayer of Confession:

Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent. For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we may delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of your Name. Amen.

We pray this not because we do not believe the grace of God or the gospel of Christ but because we do. We are counting on it. We want God’s help to delight in his will and walk in his ways, because we find so often — daily, not just weekly — that we don’t. Even if I am unaware that I have sinned in thought or word or deed this week, in what I have done or have left undone, I take it as a given that I have — which is much more likely than that I haven’t — and look to God’s forgiveness and help concerning it.

We often tend to think of sin as the infraction of a law, but it is really the brokenness of a relationship, turning away from God, from others, even from ourselves, from who we truly are in Christ. It is a curving in upon ourselves and away from others. We often leave behind us a trail of broken relationships. Broken by things we have done, or said, or thought about others; or by things we ought to have done but failed to do, because of thoughtlessness or neglect, or indifference toward the plight of others.

My identity in Christ is not so fragile that I cannot admit I am still screwed up and need his help daily. Indeed, my identity in Christ is not fragile at all — precisely because it is in Christ. It is his doing, not mine.

Lord, have mercy and help me, 
because I want to be like Jesus, 
to live as he lived and love 
as he has loved. Amen. 

The Irony of Forensic Justification

There is a distinction between Law and Gospel, of course, and an important one. St. Paul says that the Law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good (Romans 7:12). “Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faithfulness” (Galatians 3:23-4). As we will see, and as Paul spoke about earlier in this letter, the faithfulness by which we are justified is that of Jesus Christ.

Beginning with the Reformation, some made such a sharp distinction between Law and Gospel that it became a hermeneutic, classifying and dividing passages as either Law or Gospel, with Law being not a guardian but tyrant driving us to despair. The main problem for humankind was understood to be a legal one, a matter of law. And if the problem were a legal one, then the solution offered by the gospel would need to be a legal one, too.

What of justification, then? Paul does speak of it, and he makes some important points concerning it — but not as a question of Law.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. But they are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. (Romans 3:23-4)

The problem of sin is not the it is infraction of Law but that by our sins we fall short of the glory of God — the glory we were created to share. Infraction of Law is an abstraction, but to come up short of the glory of God is a matter of ontology, a matter of our very being, turning away from God.

And yet, Paul says that we are justified freely by the grace of God through redemption in Christ Jesus. That is the grace by which we are saved — through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. Which brings me to Galatians 2:16:

We know that no one is justified by the works of the law but by the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by the faithfulness of Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified. (NET)

The justification Paul speaks of is not a legal solution. A solution to a legal problem would be a legal one. But Paul denies a legal solution when he says, “not by the works of the law,” for they do not justify. What is needed is not a forensic solution but a transformation. Transformation is what we find a few verses later:  

I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So the life I now live in the body, I live because of the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20 NET) 

Christ now lives in us, and we live by the faithfulness of Christ — the faithfulness by which we are justified. That is justification not as forensic declaration but as transformation.

Those who make the sharpest distinction between Law and Gospel, who see the problem as a legal one, generally insist that justification is forensic — legal in nature. It means that God’s act of justification creates a legal fiction: We are declared to be righteous as a matter of Law, but it does not actually make us righteous; it is a change in status but not a change within our being.

Further, justification as forensic declaration is abstract. It relies on an idea of imputation of righteousness, something not found in either the Scriptures or in the early Church. Righteousness is not actually a transferable thing, nor are there any actual accounts for merits to be credited or debited to or from. 

The early Church had no doctrine of imputed righteousness. In their understanding, the solution the Gospel offers us is one that actually makes us righteous. The justification it brings is transformative. The life of Christ who lives in us and by which we now live actually changes us; it is the faithfulness of Christ by which we are justified actually at work in us. It is not an abstraction, not a legal fiction, not an accounting maneuver. Rather, it is an ontological reality that is dynamic and transformative, changing us to become more and more like Christ, until we are fully conformed to the image of the Son, through whom we become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).

The early Church had no interest in Gospel as legal solution, or justification as forensic declaration. Below are three writings* from the Fathers that, by the nature of their subject, we should expect to see descriptions of a pressing legal problem and how it is solved by Christ — if justification as forensic declaration were of any concept or concern to them.

• St. Irenaeus, in his book, Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, gives extensive example about how the gospel as it was handed down from the Apostles was preached in his day (mid to late 2nd century). There are a couple of significant things to note about it. First, virtually every point about the gospel is drawn from the Old Testament, revealing our Lord Jesus Christ throughout. Second, through he does speak of the Law, it is preparatory to the Gospel; and though he does speak of justification, it is not about a forensic declaration. He sees justification as a matter of faith, not of Law, and it is transformative, for in justification we receive a new heart and a new spirit.
• St. Melito of Sardis, in his book, On Pascha, also in the mid to late 2nd century, writes what appears to be the oldest known Passover Haggadah, fully on the death and resurrection of Christ, that he is our Pascha, our Passover. Yet he says nothing about a forensic declaration of justification being secured — or even necessary.
• St. Athanasius in, On the Incarnation, describes the pitiful condition of humankind and asks what was God to do about it. But the problem he lays out is not about a detrimental legal situation we were in, nor is the solution he identifies in the Incarnation and the Cross. He shows no interest in justification as forensic declaration. For him, Incarnation and Cross are about our transformation: Christ was incarnate that we might be made divine.

For the Fathers, the gospel and justification are transformative in nature: Christ became human being so that we could be divine, becoming by grace what he is by nature. 

So, it is ironic that those who are most insistent on a sharp distinction between Law and Gospel are also most insistent that justification is forensic. Such an idea was not known in the Church until about the 16th century.

* These three books, by the way, are a great place to begin reading the Church Fathers.

The Church Fathers and Lordship Salvation

The debate between “Lordship Salvation” and “Easy Believism” was quite the “tempest in the teapot” for a certain segment of evangelicalism — it just so happened to have been in the segment of which I was a part, as a student of the particular Bible college I attended in the mid-70s. The names, “Lordship Salvation” and “Easy Believism,” were the designations each group used for the other, and were generally applied pejoratively. The latter represented what has come to be known as the “Free Grace” movement; the former was a new name for how the Church has understood the nature of faith and salvation all along, even among the Reformers. 

In a recent conversation, someone who attended the same Bible college I did — which vigorously promoted the “Easy Believism” view — wondered what the early Church might think of this modern debate. I thought that was a good question, so I put it to ChatGPT. Below is my question and the answer I got back:

Q. What might the early Church Fathers say about the late 20th century debate between “Lordship Salvation” and “Easy Believism”?

A. Great question. The debates in the late 20th century between “Lordship Salvation” (John MacArthur, et al.) and “Easy Believism” (Charles Ryrie, Zane Hodges, et al.) were framed in very modern, Protestant terms — but if we ask how the early Church Fathers might have looked at this dispute, their testimony points clearly in certain directions.

1. Faith as Obedience and Fidelity

For the Fathers, faith (pistis) was not a mere mental assent or one-time decision, but a lived trust expressed in obedience.

• St. Irenaeus speaks of faith as obedience to God’s word (Against Heresies 4.16.2).
• Clement of Rome (1 Clem. 35) exhorts believers to show faith by “hospitality, humility, and perseverance in good works.”
• Origen: “To believe in Christ is not merely to say ‘I believe,’ but to live in accordance with his words” (Commentary on John 19.6).

They would not separate confessing Jesus as Lord from actually living under his lordship.

2. Cheap Grace vs. Transformation

The Fathers consistently reject the idea of a bare, inactive faith.

• St. James (canonical text): “Faith without works is dead” (Jas 2:26), repeatedly cited by Fathers.
• St. John Chrysostom: “Faith without works of love is not faith at all” (Homilies on Romans 18).
• St. Basil: warns against thinking that baptism or confession alone saves apart from a transformed life (On Baptism 1.3). This lines up more with the Lordship Salvation insistence that true faith brings forth fruit than with Easy Believism’s worry that demanding fruit compromises grace.

3. Salvation as Ongoing, Synergistic

The Fathers saw salvation as a dynamic process of cooperation with grace (synergeia), not a punctiliar event.

• St. Athanasius: “The Word was made man in order that we might be made God” (On the Incarnation 54). This implies transformation, not mere status change.
• St. Maximus the Confessor: salvation requires our free cooperation with divine grace in obedience.

Thus, they would likely object to the “one-time decision, forever settled” framework of Easy Believism.

4. Assurance and Perseverance

The Fathers rarely speak of assurance the way modern Protestant debates do. Instead, they emphasize watchfulness, repentance, perseverance.

• The Didache: “If you are able to bear the whole yoke of the Lord, you will be perfect; but if you are not able, do what you can” (6.2).
• Hermas, Shepherd: stresses repeated repentance and obedience, warning that faith without moral transformation is worthless.
• Augustine: genuine grace transforms the will, and perseverance to the end is God’s gift (On the Gift of Perseverance).

5. Likely Patristic Evaluation of the Debate

• They would reject Easy Believism outright as a distortion: reducing faith to a mental act apart from obedience would sound to them like the gnostics who claimed salvation by secret knowledge without transformation.
• They would agree with the Lordship Salvation concern — that to confess Christ is to submit to him as Lord, and that genuine faith shows itself in obedience and holiness.
• At the same time, they would be uneasy with any suggestion (sometimes found in Lordship Salvation rhetoric) that salvation is reducible to moral performance — for them, it is always grace working in us, not human effort alone.

In Summary:

The Fathers would not recognize a dichotomy between “faith” and “obedience.” To them, faith is entrusting oneself to Christ as Lord, which necessarily issues in obedience and transformation. They would strongly criticize Easy Believism as antinomian, and would support the Lordship position—though always with the caveat that obedience is not a human achievement but the fruit of grace.

The Revelation of Divinity and Humanity

What does it mean to be God — and how would we even know? We might think we have a pretty good idea by picking up hints from creation or gleaning shadows from the Mosaic Law, but do we really? And do  we even really know what it means to be human? Looking at the goings on in the world around us, it would seem that we do not. 

When we come to the Incarnation, the Word of God becoming flesh and dwelling among us (John 1:14), the temptation is for us to take what we think it means to be God, mix it with what we think it means to be human, and suppose that gives us a pretty good idea of what it means for God to become human. But again, not really.

Jesus Christ is the full and final unveiling of what God is like, “the radiance of his glory and the express image of his being” (Hebrews 1:3). He is “the image of the invisible God,” in whom “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Colossians 1:15, 19). He said of himself, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).

The Incarnation is the full revelation of what it means to be God. And it is also the full revelation of what it means to be human, “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness” (Colossians 2:9-10). Our completeness as humans is found only in Christ, in whom all the fullness of God dwells in bodily form. And in him we become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).

This is what we were made for: to participate in the divine nature, to bear the image of God — to be like God (Genesis 1:26-27). When God said, “Let Us make Humankind in Our image, to be like Us,” Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of that. For he is the Image of the Living God, and God predestined us to be “conformed” (symmorphos) to the image of the Son — which is to say, formed together with him (Romans 8:29).

This understanding is echoed in the early Church, among such Fathers as St. Irenaeus of Lyons, St. Athanasius of Alexandria, and St. Maximus the Confessor.

It was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and he who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God. (St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.19.1) 

He was made man so that we might be made God. (St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 54). 

In Christ, God is made man and man is made God, so that the Giver and the receiver might be one and the same, wholly God and wholly man, and known in both. (St. Maximus, Ambigua 5)

Yet, what does it mean to be God? And how is it revealed in Jesus Christ? St. Paul shows us in Philippians 2, where he enjoins us:

You should have the same attitude toward one another that Christ Jesus had, who though he existed in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking on the form of a slave, by looking like other men, and by sharing in human nature. He humbled himself, by becoming obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross! (Philippians 2:5-8) 

Our Lord Jesus, in his very form and nature, is God — eternally so. Yet, he did not consider it something to be plundered and used to his own advantage. Rather, he emptied himself, humbled himself, sharing in our humanity — and by so doing redefined it — giving himself over for our sake in cross-shaped love. He did not come to be served, but to serve and to hand his life over for ours (Mark 10:45). This is precisely what it means to be God.

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:9-11)

If we would know what it means to be God, however, we must understand this: Christ’s humility on the Cross was not a means to divine glory but was the very expression of it. When we see the humility of Christ in his deep descent, we are not seeing the divine glory in recess but as it is most fully revealed. 

We see that this is also what it means to be human. It is to empty ourselves, humbling ourselves, giving ourselves in cross-shaped love for one another. For Paul entreats us to have the very same mindset toward one another that is in our Lord Jesus Christ. Then we will see what it is to be truly human, and that it is to be like God.

Were it not for the Incarnation, we would not know what God is like — or what it means to be human. These are revealed only in Jesus Christ crucified and risen.

The Mystery of Incarnation and Being

The mystery of the Incarnation, the union of Divinity and Humanity, of God and Humankind is not by halves. That is, our Lord Jesus Christ is not half-God, half-human. He fully shares our humanity so He may fully heal it. This union is not partial, but complete in both natures. He was truly made man, and is said to be of the same nature with us according to the flesh. He is consubstantial — of one substance, of one being — with the Father, and he is also consubstantial with humankind. His consubstantiality with us is as real and complete as His consubstantiality with the Father, and it is for this reason that his Cross and Resurrection are of saving benefit for us.

This mystery is central to the understanding of the Church Fathers, and indeed, to the Christian message. It is enunciated in the Nicene Creed that our Lord Jesus Christ is of one being with the Father, and that for us humans, and for our salvation, he came down from heaven and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became Human. It is affirmed by the Fourth Ecumenical Council (Chalcedon, in AD 451) in its Definition of Faith: that our Lord Jesus Christ is at once complete in divinity and complete in humanity, truly God and truly man, of one substance with the Father regarding his divinity, and at the same time of one substance with us regarding his humanity. 

Here are a couple of brief quotes from St. Gregory the Theologian (Nazianzus) and St. Athanasius, and an extended one from St. Cyril of Alexandria, whose writings on this are foundational to the theological understanding of the Christian faith.

That which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved. (St. Gregory Nazianzus, Epistle 101.5)

He became what we are, that He might make us what He is. (St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 54)

Following in all points the confessions of the Holy Fathers which they made (the Holy Ghost speaking in them), and following the scope of their opinions, and going, as it were, in the royal way, we confess that the Only begotten Word of God, begotten of the same substance of the Father, True God from True God, Light from Light, through Whom all things were made, the things in heaven and the things in the earth, coming down for our salvation, making himself of no reputation, was incarnate and made man; that is, taking flesh of the Holy Virgin, and having made it his own from the womb, he subjected himself to birth for us, and came forth man from a woman, without casting off that which he was; but although he assumed flesh and blood, he remained what he was, God in essence and in truth. Neither do we say that his flesh was changed into the nature of divinity, nor that the ineffable nature of the Word of God was laid aside for the nature of flesh; for he is unchanged and absolutely unchangeable, being the same always, according to the Scriptures. For although visible and a child in swaddling clothes, and even in the bosom of his Virgin Mother, he filled all creation as God, and was a fellow-ruler with him who begot him, for the Godhead is without quantity and dimension, and cannot have limits.
     Confessing the Word to be made one with the flesh according to substance, we adore one Son and Lord Jesus Christ: we do not divide the God from the man, nor separate him into parts, as though the two natures were mutually united in him only through a sharing of dignity and authority (for that is a novelty and nothing else), neither do we give separately to the Word of God the name Christ and the same name separately to a different one born of a woman; but we know only one Christ, the Word from God the Father with his own Flesh. For as man he was anointed with us, although it is he himself who gives the Spirit to those who are worthy and not in measure, according to the saying of the blessed Evangelist John. (St. Cyril of Alexandria, Third Letter to Nestorius)

The Incarnation means that our Lord Jesus Christ, 
who is of one being with the Father, 
is also of one being with us. 

Christ and the Cross of Our Deliverance

The Gospel is not about sinners in the hands of an angry God, but about sinners in the hands of a loving God, God in the hands of angry sinners, and how God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting our sins against us. For the Word did not become human to satisfy divine anger or settle divine accounts but to confront the powers that enslaved humanity — to destroy death and bring us to life.

Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death — that is, the devil — and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. (Hebrews 2:14-15) 

This is not the appeasement of an offended deity, but freedom from the enslaving power of death, the fear of death, the devil — and so, also, from the power of sin.

Having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. (Colossians 2:15)

The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. (1 John 3:8)

For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Romans 6:9-10)

He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. (1 Peter 2:24)

This early Church Fathers understood the atoning work of Christ to be not one of divine penalty or appeasement but of divine victory over everything that stood against us.

St. Irenaeus, in Against Heresies (5.21.1), “He has therefore, in His work of recapitulation, summed up all things, both waging war against our enemy, and crushing him who had at the beginning led us away captives in Adam, and trampled upon his head.” 

St. Athanasius, in On the Incarnation (2.10), “For by the sacrifice of His own body He did two things: He put an end to the law of death which barred our way; and He made a new beginning of life for us, by giving us the hope of resurrection. By man death has gained its power over men; by the Word made Man death has been destroyed and life raised up anew.”

St. Gregory of Nyssa, in his Catechetical Orations (§24), speaks of  how Christ deceived the devil by offering himself under the veil of our human nature, like bait to a greedy fish, “the hook of divinity might be swallowed with the bait of the flesh, and thus when life came to dwell in death and light shone in the darkness, that which is understood as the opposite of light and life might be utterly destroyed.”

St. John Chrysostom, in his Paschal Homily, tells how Christ destroyed death by enduring it, and Hades by entering into it. “It is in an uproar because it is now made captive. Hell took a body, and it discovered God. It took earth, and encountered Heaven. It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.”

Christ did not go to the Cross to deliver us from 
God but to rescue us from the power of death, 
the power the devil, and the power of sin.