26 The Question of an Eternal Hellmission fee" (AvTpov, lytron) given to purchase the release of
slaves held in bondage in death's household. It was a delight to
me to discover various reflections on the part of theologians
of the early centuries regarding whether it was proper to say
that this fee had been paid to the devil, or only to death, or to
no one as such at all (in the way that someone who lays down
his or her life for another has "paid the price," even if there is
no particular recipient for the fee thus rendered); and it was an
even greater delight to discover that none of these same theo-
logians had even momentarily considered the bizarre idea that
this fee was a price paid to the Father-the coin of some sub-
limely circular transaction wherein God buys off God in order
to spare us God's displeasure (rather like a bank issuing itself
credit to pay off a debt it owes itself, using a currency it has
minted for the occasion and certified in its value wholly on the
basis of the very credit it is issuing to itself).
Even those, like Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 297-373),
who saw the death of Christ as being also a kind of expiatory
penalty that God took upon himself in our place, still did not
understand that death as a sacrifice offered to avert or appease
the wrath of the Father; it was simply the discharge of a debt
we owed to death for our estrangement from God, yielded over
on our behalf when we lacked the resources to do it for our-
selves, so that God could reclaim us for himself without in -
justice. For the earliest and greatest of the church fathers in
general, the story of salvation was really quite uncomplicated:
We were born in bondage, in the house of a cruel master to
whom we had been sold as slaves before we could choose for
ourselves; we were born, moreover, not guilty or damnable in
God's eyes, but nonetheless corrupted and enchained by mor-
tality, and so destined to sin through a congenital debility of
will; we were ill, impaired, lost, dying; we were in hell already.