How Does Christ Save Us? Making Sense of the Atonement | Prof. Ross McCullough

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

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Summary

Prof. Ross McCullough systematically explores the major models of the atonement-including Christus Victor, ransom theory, and divinization-showing how each interprets Christ’s saving work and how Aquinas’s distinctions can help organize these diverse approaches into a coherent theological architecture.

This lecture was given on October 16th, 2023, at University of Texas, Austin.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speaker:

Ross McCullough is an assistant professor of theology at George Fox University and faculty fellow in the George Fox University Honors Program. He has academic publications on the doctrine of hell, the Eucharist, the hermeneutics of Scripture, and liberation theology. Dr. McCullough's first book, Freedom and Sin: Evil in a World Created by God reconciles traditional Christian commitments to, on the one hand, God causing all that is and, on the other, God in no way being responsible for sin. Dr. McCullough lives with his wife and four children in Newberg, Oregon.

Keywords: Atonement Models, Christus Victor, Divinization, Historical Theology, Passover Typology, Ransom Theory, Salvation in Christianity, Systematic Theology

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.2	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:12.7	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.0	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:22.5	to mystic institute.org. Okay, so I've done a version of this talk before, but I haven't done it
0:29.2	with this handout, which I'm hoping will expedite some of the delivery of the material. You can see
0:34.3	to be a little bit busy, but we'll work through some of this and then
0:37.8	hoping that this will allow us to push a little farther and get to some things beyond the handout, too.
0:44.6	Is there a clock in this room so I can kind of monitor at time? Maybe not. Is that by design?
0:49.4	The strategy is to put it where teacher can see it, but the students can't. So it should be,
0:52.9	it belongs back there. I will use my phone if my... Okay, here we go with that analog. Thank you, Zach.
0:59.7	Okay. So, this is a talk on the Atonement, on Christ's work to save us.
1:07.9	The Atonement is a slightly weird as a central doctrine of Christianity because unlike, say, the doctrine of the Trinity or the doctrine of Christ's person, there's no dogmatic definition of what the Atonement is.
1:22.5	So the Trinity, there's one nature of three persons, right?
1:25.8	And then there's sort of unpacking that.
1:28.9	Christ is two natures in one person. And there's dogmatic sort of hedging around what you can and can't say as a
1:35.6	Christian. The doctrine of Christ's work, the atonement, doesn't have that. There's no counsel that
1:41.2	gets together and says, you have to think this about how Christ
1:44.2	saves us. You can't think that about how Christ saves us. And what that means is that Christians,
1:49.3	both through time and now, have tons of different models about what Christ is doing on the cross.
1:55.4	So there's a kind of pluralism of models, which I take it in the church in her wisdom as allowed because the different
2:02.1	models give us different sort of accesses to different facets of what Christ is doing.
	...

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