For the earliest Christians, the story of salvation was entirely one of rescue, all the way through: the epic of God descending into the depths of human estrangement to release his creatures from bondage to death, penetrating even into the heart of hades to set the captives free and recall his prodigal children and restore a broken creation. The sacrifice of Christ was not a “ransom” paid to the Father, but rather the “manumission fee” (λύτρον, lytron) given to purchase the release of slaves held in bondage in death’s household.
Hart continues a little further down:
"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 ourselves, so that God could reclaim us for himself without injustice. 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 mortality, and so destined to sin through a congenital debility of will; we were ill, impaired, lost, dying; we were in hell already. But then Christ came to set us free, to buy us out of slavery, to heal us, to restore us to our true estate. In pursuit of those he loved, he invaded even the very depths of that hell we have made for ourselves and one another—in the cosmos, in history, in our own hearts—so as to drag us to himself (to use the actual language of John 12:32). Whatever variations were worked upon this grand, guiding theme in the early centuries of the faith, none of them ever incorporated the discordant claim that innocent blood had to be spilled to assuage God’s indignation."
