Atonement, again
Posted by Brian April 03, 2007
Actually, I wasn’t worrying about it this Sunday; my Dad has been with me at church for the past several weeks. So I was caught off guard when Ed said, “Jesus did not die for your sins.” Yikes! (Though Dad didn’t say anything about it; maybe he didn’t hear. 
)
I think what Ed was really trying to do was to deny the Penal Substitution theory of the Atonement. I’ve mentioned before my own discomfort with this theory, which says that an angry God could not forgive our sins without punishing somebody, and so he killed Jesus as our substitute.
Apparently there’s been a flap in England over this very topic recently, so I guess it’s a good time to revisit it, especially since it’s Holy Week, with the Great Three Days of our redemption coming up.
The bottom line is, even though it’s very popular today, the idea of Penal Substitution as the meaning of the cross has not always been the dominant idea in Christian thought. In fact, it’s fairly new.
Father Jake has a good synopsis of some of the various atonement theories which have been proposed through the years. Here’s another summary. And here’s an article I like by Frederica Mathewes-Greeen discussing Orthodox ideas of the Atonement.
Father Jake quotes C.S. Lewis:
We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself…
(I might humbly suggest that saying “Jesus did not die for your sins” is not the best way to phrase a denial of penal substitution.)
Great article by Frederica. And I see that the Telegraph article quotes one of my favorite theologians. (No, not Jeffrey John.) Here’s another good article on the subject from an Orthodox perspective:
http://orrologion.blogspot.com/2007/03/some-modest-thoughts-on-atonement.html
Having learned substitutionary atonement as _the_ gospel theory back in high school, it was quite an eye-opener when I started studying Orthodoxy (and, by extension, theology in general; in Churches of Christ one doesn’t get much of that) and discovered it was only a thousand years old. It’s much easier to sing “trampling down death by death” at Pascha with true joy when it means victory over Satan, rather than victory over God’s wounded pride.
So do you still know Hebrew?
Hey, Ryan.
I’m sorry to report that my Hebrew is worse than my Greek. And the last time I got out my Greek NT was at Pentecost last year, because various people read the Gospel that day in different “tongues.”
But if you need some C++, VB, Java, or Ruby, then maybe I can help.
Nah, I’ve already got VB and C#. Sounds as though, upon graduation, your train of thought wasn’t far different from mine: “So here I am with a Biblical Languages degree. Now what am I going to do to earn a decent living?”