The freeing of a slave by paying whatever is demanded by the slave’s ‘owner’. The term came to be applied to God the Father’s gift of Jesus to the world, and then to Jesus’ self-sacrificial submission to crucifixion and death. Originally the ‘ransom’ paid in this way was believed to have been paid by God the Father to Satan, who had held humanity captive, but by c. 1100 CE the focus had shifted to God the Father as the one to whom the ransom had been paid, by Jesus, to give satisfaction for sin. This has had the unfortunate effect of distancing the God whom Jesus called Abba from Jesus himself, posing an acute problem for our understanding of the Good News as rescue of humankind – by the Trinity acting together – from the power of evil.

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