On Redemption
Q. What is redemption?
A. Redemption is the act of God which sets us free from the power of evil, sin, and death.
Q. How did God prepare us for redemption?
A. God sent the prophets to call us back to himself, to show us our need for redemption, and to announce the coming of the Messiah.
Turning from the problem of Sin, the catechism moves on to the immediate part of the solution in terms of redemption. It is important to note that this section does not actually address the question of “Sin and Salvation” but rather “Sin and Redemption” because it only begins to look at the removal of the negative state the Fall puts human beings in, of the “powers of evil, sin and death.”
It is worth pointing out that it is interesting that the Catechism focuses on “redemption” as a category rather than “atonement” as the process of freeing us from the powers of evil, sin, and death. Perhaps this is an attempt to avoid taking too particular a position on the various so-called atonement theories and thus leave the question open to various interpretations about how we are brought back into right relationship with God. After all, none of the mechanics about how we are freed from the powers of evil, sin, and death. However, I doubt that this is actually what is going on. Redemption was originally principally an economic act: it was the act of paying the price of a slave, often one who had been enslaved as a result of their own debt, in order to free them. It then took on a more expansive analogical meaning, but it always fundamentally is an analogy from some kind of debt bondage. Thus, even in its most expansive sense, which is often the way the New Testament uses it, the notion of redemption is only one image among many in the New Testament for describing the problem and the solution that human beings face with Sin. This is especially true since it does not speak of the condition of bondage as one resulting from a debt to God (which would lead to what we call “substitutionary atonement” of some kind). In fact, this does align with one atonement theory that is commonly differentiated by theologians, that of the ransom or Christus Victor (Christ is victor) model whereby human beings are held in bondage by Satan, or, more generally, the powers of death and evil, and Christ somehow pays the due price to these forces of evil in order to free people from their grip or Christ leads what is essentially a large prison break.
The Catechism could indeed take this model as the understanding of how Christ frees us from the powers of Sin and begins to restore us to what we are properly supposed to be, although it would mean choosing to gloss over the many other images present in the New Testament for what Christ accomplishes for humanity, including bringing about reconciliation, bringing a state of peace, or making a sacrificial offering for Sin. This could be conceivably as corrective to the exclusive focus in some traditions of “Penal Substitutionary Atonement” that focuses on Jesus receiving the just punishment for our Sin in our stead. Theories such as Penal Substitution focus less on being removed from the grip of an alien power and more on how to God can be in a position to justly forgive us.
However, by focusing exclusively on the point about liberation and not on how atonement leads to God’s forgiveness and our reconciliation with God, this section omits a concept found in the Eucharistic Prayers (another source of doctrine for the church), as when Prayer A says that Christ’s life and death served “to reconcile us to… the God and Father of all,” but indeed the very next section on God the Son in which reconciliation is one of the effects of Jesus’ life and death. There is something somewhat amiss in the framing of this section as “sin and redemption” rather than “sin and atonement,” although it is probably best to see it as simply incomplete and therefore filled out more in the next section, rather than an issue of contradiction.
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