Atonement Across the Ages: Introduction

One of the purposes of this blog is to talk about the Christian Gospel from different perspectives or through different lenses than many of us are used to. Sometimes this looks like challenging common assumptions through looking at the theological perspectives of groups that have not historically had a seat at the theological table (such as my series on Black theology, Decolonizing theology, and queer perspectives); at other times, I’ve looked at what insights we may glean from more contemporary movements from broader society (such as positive psychology or Integral thought). But one of the things that people have found most surprising, interesting, and important over the years has been when the different perspectives I talk about are from Christianity’s own past. Most notable in this regard is the series on the history of Bible interpretation, which continues to be among the most consistently viewed on the blog. All too often, Christians (or ex-Christians) simply assume that the Christianity with which they were raised is Christianity, full stop, and have no idea that a lot of what they take for granted theologically would be practically unrecognizable to many or even most Christians throughout history. So, over the next few weeks I’d like to take this same approach and look at how one of the most important areas of Christian doctrine, the atonement, has changed across the ages.

Two years ago, I undertook a similar project, but did it thematically, looking at the wide range of biblical metaphors for sin and how each of them has a corresponding vision of salvation. So, if your guiding metaphor for sin is being enslaved, then your idea of salvation is going to be freedom; if you understand sin primarily as debt, then salvation will be forgiveness; barrenness, then new life. While I maintain that it’s important to keep as many of these images alive as possible in order to have better, more fulsome ways of talking about both sin and salvation, it’s also true that some of these ideas have captured the Christian imagination more at some times than at others, and some of them have at times completely eclipsed the others. This has been particularly the case in much of Protestant Christianity, especially in those parts of Protestantism that have coupled their belief that Scripture alone should determine true doctrine with an insistence that the meaning of Scripture is singular, simple, and certain. In these traditions, one particular way of understanding Christ’s death on the cross, known as ‘penal substitution’, has become so pervasive that to question it is often seen as tantamount to questioning the very foundations of the faith — this despite the fact that it was unknown for the first thousand years of Christian history. So in this series, I’m going to take a historical approach to the doctrine of the atonement, looking at what ideas were prominent historically in different times and places.

The ideas I’ll be covering group into the following eight categories:

• Christ the Fulfillment: The Doctrine of Recapitulation
• Christ our Passover
• Christ our Bridegroom
• Christ our Champion: ‘Christus Victor’
• Christ our Example: Moral Influence Theory
• Christ our Satisfaction
• Christ our Substitute
• Christ our Victim: The Nonviolent Atonement

Regular readers will know that when it comes to this sort of thing, I’m not interested in trying to figure out which of these is ‘best’. I think all of them point to some aspect of truth (though I think some are more helpful than others, and some hide more truth than they reveal!). As long as we don’t take any one ‘atonement theory’ and set it apart as the Capital-T Truth, for the most part they all can play nicely together. They complement each other and together provide us with a deeper, richer understanding of Christ’s redemptive work.