Struggles with the concept of Christus Victor

In part 2, he talks about the centrality of Christ in a scheme of cosmic redemption as being how to present Christ to the postmodern world. I saw a discussion on Wikipedia about the difference between Christocentric and Theocentric, so I am aware of that. I am having a minor side struggle with that.

The major struggle I am having is with the discussion about the nature of the atonement. He mentions three ideas about the atonement: sacrifice, victory, and example.

All my life I have heard the substitutionary atonment, which he calls a theory, presented as fact. The idea was that Christ took our place on the cross, taking our sin and our punishment on himself, paying our sin debt and satisfying the righteous demands of God and His broken law, and imputing his perfection and righteousness to us. Until fairly recently I never heard any other view.

Some years ago, I heard that there was an alternative concept of the atonement, that of Christus Victor, and heard that Luther held to that view. I had read in the Bible that Christ triumphed over Satan and the powers of evil on the cross. But I never had considered that this might be the main purpose of the cross, and that that is how Christ provided our redemption. Now I am reading in this book that that was the main understanding of the atonement for most of the early history of Christianity. Webber says that it was St. Anselm who first proposed the "satisfaction theory" and that it grew out of the social structure of the middle ages rather than from the Bible.

Now I find my thinking shaken to its roots. I am going to have to do a thorough Bible study (no doubt a good thing, and a reproach to me that I have not done so recently) to try to sort this out.

I am looking for some meaningful discussion of all this. If anyone reads this, I would appreciate any thoughts you would care to share, any resources you could direct me to.

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