Religion: Why Did Jesus Die?

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It was this last model that first caught on. For roughly a thousand years, the church fathers seem to have viewed Christ's suffering and dying less as salvation's all-important tragic fulcrum than as one more necessary step in God's triumphant campaign into the human world and, eventually, the devil's precincts. They saw the incarnation and the Resurrection as far more important to reconciliation and a new start for humanity. In fact, a position close to this is still maintained by the world's 250 million Eastern Orthodox Christian believers, rendering them less susceptible than most to extended images of Christ's agony of the sort Gibson presents. Says Frederica Mathewes-Green, who has written several books on Orthodoxy: "It's like a fire fighter who goes into a building and comes back out covered with wounds and scars but carrying in his arms a baby he was able to grab from the crib. The victory is that he did snatch eternal life out of sin and death. And that's what Orthodox Christians focus on."

When the early church fathers did pick up on the scriptural language of Christ's death as a ransom, the payee was not God but the devil, who some felt had legitimate claim on humanity because of Adam's fall. But others preferred another scenario: to see the Crucifixion and Jesus' subsequent descent into what they called Hades as a kind of divine bait-and-switch scheme, whereby the devil thought he had claimed a particularly virtuous human victim only to discover he had allowed into his sanctum the power that would eventually wrest humanity back from his grasp. St. Augustine likened the devil to a mouse, the Cross to a mousetrap and Christ to the bait.

Still others (current Orthodoxy included) were content to leave the transaction's precise nature a mystery. But they were emphatic in their understanding of a decidedly nonvictimized Christ as a great champion against an evil that is a real and formidable supernatural force--of invisible kingdoms battling above our heads and below our feet. That conception survives in Martin Luther's great hymn A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, in the Revelation-based Left Behind books and in the eerie getting-to-know-you scene between Christ and the devil that opens Gibson's film. But it did not come to define Western Christianity's majority understanding of the meaning of Christ's death. That honor went to a theory developed by Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who in 1098 wrote one of the most influential theological tracts ever penned, "Why God Became Man."

A QUESTION OF HONOR