Over the past few weeks, I've been trying to broaden and deepen our understanding of sin and salvation by looking at the variety of metaphors the Scriptures use to describe them. While it wasn't really my intention for it to be an all-out attack on models of substitutionary atonement, since that is the dominant understanding … Continue reading Substitution – and more! – in Paul
This series, which has attempted to normalize sin (without minimizing it) by exploring all the wide ranging metaphors the Scriptures use for both sin and salvation, stalled out a couple weeks ago when trying to figure out what the solution envisioned for sin as law-breaking might be. For the past thousand years, Western Christianity has … Continue reading Law-Breaking and Mercy
Today is the last Sunday of the liturgical year, a day known as 'Reign of Christ' or 'Christ the King' Sunday. In light of my ongoing series on different images the Scriptures use for sin and salvation, today's theme offers an opportunity to remind ourselves of one of the most common images for salvation in … Continue reading A Kingdom Not of This World: A Reflection on Sin, Salvation, and John 18.33-37
For the past couple of weeks I've been writing about the nature of sacrifice in the Bible, and how it relates to different ideas of sin and salvation. So far we've seen that the picture is a lot more complicated than the traditional Western Christian ideas of substitutionary atonement would suggest. The Scriptures of both … Continue reading Sacrifice in Romans 3.21-26
As we saw last week, for the past thousand years, the Western Christian imagination has understood Jesus' death primarily as a sin sacrifice, almost to the exclusion of other biblical metaphors for sin and salvation. Specifically, Western theology has been dominated by a specific interpretation of what sacrifice meant and means, substitutionary atonement: In sacrifice, … Continue reading A Survey of How the Bible Talks about Sacrifice
Matthew Root 