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. While often this means looking at the Gospel from the perspectives of groups who have not historically had a seat at the theological table, or at the intersections of Christianity with contemporary ideas, sometimes the most powerful and challenging alternatives to the theology with which we’ve been raised are from within Christianity’s own past. 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.

In this series from the Fall of 2023 I looked at the many ways how one of the most important areas of Christian doctrine, the atonement, has been understood across the ages.

The ideas I covered group into the following eight categories: