The argument about Christus Victor divides cleanly into two arguments that are often run together, and separating them is the first step to reading the literature.
The historical argument concerns Aulen's claim about the fathers. Specialists in patristics have objected that the classic idea is a construction: that Irenaeus, Origen, the Cappadocians and Augustine were answering different questions in different settings, that victory language sits alongside sacrificial, medicinal and pedagogical language in the same writers, and that sorting all of it into one type flattens the evidence. A parallel objection is made about Luther, that Aulen read him through the concerns of the Lundensian school to which he belonged. Defenders of Aulen concede that the typology is tidier than the sources and hold that the substantive point survives, since the victory language is genuinely abundant and had genuinely been neglected.
The theological argument concerns whether victory is a sufficient account on its own. Critics ask what exactly the powers are, and whether the model can say anything precise about personal guilt, which the penal and satisfaction accounts address directly. If the human problem is captivity rather than culpability, they ask what happens to culpability.
Its advocates answer from the other end, and this is where the position is most alive today. Theologians working on structural evil, on colonialism, and on the social conditions of oppression have found in Christus Victor a language for a predicament that is not reducible to individual wrongdoing, and have argued that models built entirely on personal guilt cannot name what they are trying to name. That argument is being conducted now. It is one of the reasons the atonement literature has grown rather than settled, and the atlas records the disagreement rather than adjudicating it.