Rethinking the atonement

[hrmjustin]

Chuck Queen

Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) was the first to expound the theory that Jesus’ death was necessary for the satisfaction of God’s honor. This evolved into the theory of penal substitutionary atonement, perhaps most elaborately developed by Princeton theologian Charles Hodge (1797-1878).

This theory became so popular in Western Christianity that it came to be equated with “the gospel” preached in the Great Awakening, and in more recent times by renowned evangelist Billy Graham.

Today, a growing number of evangelical and progressive Christians are questioning the truthfulness and viability of this theory. Why is this so?

Two reasons are most often given by interpreters. First, it is suggested that this theory of the atonement makes God look small and petty. What kind of God requires the violent death of an innocent victim? And if God demands a violent atonement, then violence must in some sense be redemptive, which a growing number of Christians believe contradicts the good news of God’s nonviolent rule that Jesus proclaimed and embodied.

http://www.abpnews.com/opinion/commentaries/item/28460-rethinking-the-atonement#.UyNOwzHD9cs

[struggle4progress]

1. I'm overjoyed to see this coming from a Baptist source: I'm afraid I have had a very bad tendency

to regard the Baptists as being synonymous with the conservative Southern Baptist "fundamentalists," whose theology has never made very much sense to me

[hrmjustin]

2. I suppose because the southern Baptists is such a big denomination that the other Baptists

get little attention.

[AtheistCrusader]

3. Dostoyevsky laid it out pretty well in the Brother's Karamazov.

I will not share in the profits from the murder of a person. I also reject the arrangement, as constructed from the start, wherein humans are commanded to be obedient, but left stupid and unawares, in the presence of the most devious being ever created by the hand of god.


But that aside, I disagree with a premise the author made:

"And if God demands a violent atonement, then violence must in some sense be redemptive, which a growing number of Christians believe contradicts the good news of God’s nonviolent rule that Jesus proclaimed and embodied."

I don't believe it follows that violence itself is redemptive, from its employ. It is the act of a pure scapegoat, taking the sins of the world upon itself, that is the redemptive mechanism.