Redemption

“In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace.”

— Ephesians 1:7

Redemption is the deliverance of sinners from the guilt and bondage of sin through the payment of a price: the blood of Christ. The English word translates New Testament Greek terms for buying something out of another’s possession, especially lytroo, used of ransoming a slave or captive by paying for their release.¹ Scripture names that price as Christ’s own blood, given as a ransom (Mark 10:45; 1 Pet. 1:18-19), and its effect as freedom from the guilt of sin, the curse of the law, and sin’s dominion (Gal. 3:13; Rom. 3:24; Col. 1:14).

Confessional Witness

The Westminster Confession (1646) and the Second London Baptist Confession (1677/1689) open their identically titled eighth chapters, “Of Christ the Mediator,” the same way:

“It pleased God, in His eternal purpose, to choose and ordain the Lord Jesus, his only begotten Son, according to the covenant made between them both, to be the mediator between God and man… unto whom he did from all eternity give a people to be his seed and to be by him in time redeemed, called, justified, sanctified, and glorified.”²

The two confessions agree here because the Baptist confession followed Westminster’s chapter on the Mediator almost word for word, reserving its own distinctive language for baptism and the church.³

The 1689 goes on to name what that redemption accomplished:

“The Lord Jesus, by his perfect obedience and sacrifice of himself, which he through the eternal Spirit once offered up unto God, hath fully satisfied the justice of God, procured reconciliation, and purchased an everlasting inheritance in the kingdom of heaven, for all those whom the Father hath given unto Him.”⁴

Three things are bound together in that one sentence: the satisfaction of divine justice, reconciliation with God, and the purchase of an inheritance. The confession adds that this redemption is not left merely accomplished but “certainly and effectually” applied to those for whom it was obtained,⁵ the distinction between redemption’s accomplishment and its application that later Reformed writers would treat as its own topic.⁶

Biblical Basis

Scripture presents several Old Testament deliverances as types of redemption in Christ. Israel’s exodus from Egypt is called a redemption: God promised to “redeem” his people “with a stretched out arm” (Ex. 6:6), and their deliverance from “hard bondage” pictures the deliverance of sinners “who, through sin, are weak and unable to fulfill the law.”⁷ When Israel was numbered, each man paid a half-shekel “atonement money” as a ransom for his life, “paid alike for a rich man, as a poor man” (Ex. 30:12-16), just as Christ’s people, “though some may be redeemed from more and greater sins than others,” are all “redeemed from all their sins, and with the same price, the price of his blood.”⁸ The law’s provision for a poor Israelite sold into servitude to be bought back by a near kinsman (Lev. 25:47-49) likewise pictures Christ as the kinsman-redeemer of his people, “the near Kinsman of his people,” who alone “can give to God a ransom to deliver from wrath to come.”⁹

The New Testament states the reality these types anticipated. Christ “gave his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45; Matt. 20:28), and believers “were ransomed… with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot” (1 Pet. 1:18-19). Paul writes that believers “were bought with a price” (1 Cor. 6:20; 7:23), that Christ “redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Gal. 3:13), and that “in him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses” (Eph. 1:7; Col. 1:14). This redemption is “in Christ Jesus,” who was “put forward” by God “as a propitiation by his blood” (Rom. 3:24-25), tying redemption to the satisfaction of divine justice rather than to a payment extracted from any other party.

Doctrinal Significance

J. I. Packer summarizes the doctrine’s classic Reformed shape: “Christ’s actual substitutionary endurance of the penalty of sin in the place of certain specified sinners, through which God was reconciled to them, their liability to punishment was for ever destroyed, and a title to eternal life was secured for them.”¹⁰

Redemption’s source, according to Gill, is not any merit in those redeemed but “the everlasting love of God,” the same love that gave Christ to be a Redeemer before he was ever sent: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.”¹¹ Because that love is unmerited, redemption cannot be earned or forced from God; it “is at the bottom of our redemption by Christ,” not a transaction he owes his creatures.¹²

What redemption accomplishes, on this same account, is a cluster of further blessings rather than one bare effect: it satisfies divine justice, procures reconciliation and peace with God, secures the believer’s adoption as a son, and grounds ongoing sanctification, “that he might redeem them from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people zealous of good works” (Titus 2:14).¹³ Because redemption is one accomplished work with several applied effects, later Reformed writers distinguish redemption’s accomplishment at the cross from its application to the believer through effectual calling, union with Christ, and the other steps of the ordo salutis.⁶

Historical Development

Patristic ransom theory

The earliest sustained Christian account of Christ’s redemptive work, associated above all with Irenaeus of Lyons in the late second century, reads it as a rescue from the devil’s power rather than primarily a transaction with God. Drawing on Jesus’s words about “binding the strong man” (Matt. 12:29), Irenaeus described Christ as conquering the devil who had held humanity captive since the fall: “He bound the strong man, and set free the weak, and endowed His own handiwork with salvation by destroying sin.”¹⁴ In the third century, Origen sharpened this into an explicit ransom transaction, arguing from Matthew 20:28 that Christ gave his own soul as a ransom, though he insisted the ransom could not have been paid to God: “To whom did he give his soul a ransom for many? Certainly not to God. Was it perhaps, then, to the evil one?”¹⁵ Origen’s followers developed the theme into outright deception of the devil. Gregory of Nyssa, in the fourth century, pictured Christ’s humanity as bait concealing his deity as a hook: “the hook of the Deity might be gulped down along with the bait of flesh,” so that the devil, seizing what he thought was a man, was instead caught by God.¹⁶ Augustine used a similar image, calling the cross “the devil’s mousetrap.”¹⁷ The view was not universal even in this period; Bavinck notes it was “repudiated by Gregory of Nazianzus.”¹⁸

The medieval turn to satisfaction

Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur Deus Homo (1098) redirected the doctrine away from any transaction with Satan and toward the satisfaction of divine justice. Bavinck credits Anselm with being “the first to understand, and to understand most clearly, that the redemption accomplished by Christ was a deliverance, not primarily from the consequences of sin, from death and Satan’s power, but above all from sin itself and sin’s guilt.”¹⁹ This shift, sharpened further by the Reformation’s own emphasis on sin as guilt before a just God, set the terms in which later Reformed theology would state the doctrine of redemption.²⁰

Particular Baptist systematization

Among Reformed Baptist theologians, John Gill gave redemption its fullest systematic treatment, devoting three chapters of his Body of Doctrinal Divinity (1769) to the word’s meaning, its causes, and the identity of its objects.¹ Gill’s careful distinction between the price paid to God’s justice and any supposed payment to Satan reflects a settled Reformed judgment reached well before him and maintained after him, including by Charles Hodge, who argued that Scripture nowhere grants Satan “any claim in justice to hold mankind as his slaves” and that his role is only “the office of inflicting” the law’s own penalty.²¹

Opposing Views

Two questions have historically divided views of redemption from the Reformed account stated above. The first concerns its mechanism: Abelard and the later Moral Influence theory of atonement locate redemption’s effect in the change it produces in the sinner’s own heart, rather than in any transaction affecting God or Satan. The second concerns its extent. Gill argued that redemption and election “are of equal extent,” so that “no more are redeemed by Christ than are chosen in him,”²² the position stated in Limited Atonement; Arminian theology instead holds that Christ’s redemption was intended for every person without exception, the position stated in Universal Atonement.

Objections and Responses

If redemption is a ransom, doesn’t that imply the price was paid to Satan, who must therefore have held some rightful claim over sinners? Reformed theologians have consistently denied this. Gill argued that “the power of Satan was only an usurpation; he had no legal right to hold them captives,” so that deliverance from Satan comes “by power and not by price,” while the price of Christ’s blood was paid to the justice of God, which alone “had a legal right to shut them up, and detain them as prisoners, till satisfaction was given.”²³ Hodge makes the same point from the New Testament’s own language: Satan’s role is limited to inflicting the law’s penalty, not to holding any independent claim on the sinner that a price could be owed to satisfy.²¹

Doesn’t describing salvation in commercial terms, buying, a price, a ransom, reduce God’s grace to a transaction he is bound to honor rather than a free gift? Gill’s answer is that the same love that fixed on the price also supplied it: redemption “is of free grace,” and this “cannot be attributed to any merit or desert in those for whom Christ died; since they were without strength, ungodly wicked sinners… and enemies in their minds, by wicked works.”¹² The commercial language states how the debt of sin was actually paid, not a constraint God submitted to; the willingness to pay it, on this account, was itself free and unearned grace.

Related Doctrines

References

John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book 6, chap. 1, “Of Redemption by Christ”: “In other places lutroo, is used, or others derived from it; which signifies, the deliverance of a slave, or captive, from his thraldom, by paying a ransom price for him.” ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 1. ↩
Carol Man Fen Chen, A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 109-110. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 5. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 8. ↩
John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955), 86-94, quoted in Matthew Michael Barrett, “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 21-87. ↩ ↩²
Gill, Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book 6, chap. 1. ↩
Gill, Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book 6, chap. 1. ↩
Gill, Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book 6, chap. 1. ↩
J. I. Packer, introductory essay to John Owen, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1959), 7. ↩
Gill, Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book 6, chap. 2, “Of the Causes of Redemption by Christ.” ↩
Gill, Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book 6, chap. 2. ↩ ↩²
Gill, Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book 6, chap. 2. ↩
Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), chap. 11, “Binding the Strong Man,” 119, quoting Irenaeus, Against Heresies. ↩
Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 121-122, quoting Origen, Commentary on Matthew 16.8. ↩
Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 123-124. ↩
Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 124. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 15, “The Servant Savior.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 15. ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 15. ↩
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), chap. 9, “Theories of the Atonement,” 563-564. ↩ ↩²
Gill, Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book 6, chap. 3, “Of the Objects of Redemption by Christ.” ↩
Gill, Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book 6, chap. 2. ↩