The earliest Christian understanding of salvation took shape within the first centuries of the Church. It was not framed as a “theory” but as the lived experience of rescue, God entering humanity to free it from death. The Apostle Paul wrote, “He gave His life as a ransom for many” (Romans 5:8; Mark 10:45), and early believers understood this as God’s act of liberation.
In this ancient view, humanity was bound by the power of sin and death. Christ entered that bondage to set creation free. Orthodox theologian Frederica Mathewes-Green explains that the word ransom was never meant to describe a literal payment. It was an image, a way to say that God rescues. In the Orthodox mind, this remains the heart of salvation: God delivers humanity from the principle of death. Sin and death are one and the same condition; Christ breaks their hold. The Orthodox Church continues to see this not as one of several “atonement theories,” but simply as salvation itself, the victory of life over death.
In the twentieth century, Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulén revived this ancient idea in his classic work Christus Victor. Drawing deeply from the early fathers, he described the cross and resurrection as one act of divine conquest. Here, Christ is not paying off a debt but conquering the powers of sin, death, and evil. Aulén called this the “classic” view of the atonement, the story of God’s victory through love.
While the long standing tradition held to this vision of rescue and victory, another line of thought began to form in the West. In the eleventh century, Anselm of Canterbury reframed the meaning of the cross through what became known as the Satisfaction Theory. Anselm proposed that sin dishonored God and disrupted moral order. For humanity to be restored, God’s honor must be satisfied. Christ’s obedient death accomplished what humanity could not. For the first time, the need for atonement was seen as something within God, a divine requirement to set things right. Centuries later, in the sixteenth-century Reformation, this line of thought deepened into the Penal Substitutionary Atonement model. Here, the focus shifted from God’s honor to God’s wrath and justice. Sin was seen as a penalty that must be paid; justice demanded satisfaction.
God provided what His justice required: His Son bearing sin’s punishment in our place. The phrase “Jesus paid it all” expresses this view well. It remains the dominant perspective in much of Reformed, and evangelical christianity today. Running alongside these developments was another less popular frame, the Moral Influence or Moral Exemplar Theory, first articulated by Peter Abelard in the twelfth century. Abelard emphasized not divine transaction but divine transformation. The cross, he said, reveals God’s love so profoundly that it awakens a response of love in us. Salvation begins as the human heart is changed by seeing the depth of God’s compassion.
Across two millennia, these currents of thought have formed a tapestry of meaning: rescue, victory, satisfaction, substitution, transformation, each seeking to name the same mystery: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself.”