Loading…

The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views is unavailable, but you can change that!

A long history of biblical exegesis and theological reflection has shaped our understanding of the atonement today. The more prominent highlights of this history have acquired familiar names for the household of faith: Christus Victor, penal substitutionary, subjective, and governmental. Recently the penal substitutionary view, and particularly its misappropriations, has been critiqued, and a...

be at times emphasized over others, these people argue that we should not attempt to defend any one view as more fundamental than others or attempt to fashion the various models into a single coherent framework. I’m deeply sympathetic to the sentiment. Yet it seems to me perfectly natural and, if carried out with an irenic spirit, potentially beneficial to strive for an encompassing conceptual model that might reveal an “inner logic” to all aspects of Christ’s work. Consider that every advance we
Page 24