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Today we come to what is undoubtedly the most well-known and popular perspective on the atonement in Christianity today, substitutionary atonement, the belief that on the cross, Jesus took on himself the punishment from God that we deserved. It’s so common that for many contemporary Christians, questioning it is tantamount to questioning the faith itself. … Continue reading Christ our Substitute

In today’s post in this series on the history of the doctrine of atonement in Christianity, we turn primarily to the thought of one man, St. Anselm of Canterbury, an eleventh-century theologian whose thought revolutionized Western ideas on the subject. For the first thousand years, Christians had always conceived the problem of sin in a … Continue reading Christ Our Satisfaction: Satisfaction and Government

There’s an old saying that history is written by the victors. And this is true in theology no less than in the world of geopolitics. Controversies are all too often defined by the winning side, leaving the losing side not only voiceless but misrepresented and misunderstood. I say all this to start today’s post because … Continue reading Christ our Example: The ‘Moral Influence’ Corrective

So far in this series on different ways Christians have understood the saving work of Jesus, we’ve looked at one of what we might call a historical filter (Recapitulation) and two metaphors (the Passover and the Bridegroom). But none of these ever reached the complexity of what we might properly call an ‘atonement theory’. Today … Continue reading Christ our Champion: Christus Victor