do this, we will not begin at the beginning—not in Jerusalem with the death and resurrection of Jesus—but in Sweden in 1930. Gustaf Aulén, a Swedish theologian, sought to move past the division he perceived between the rationalistic Lutheran orthodoxy and the liberal theology of his day. To do so, he developed a historical and theological account of the atonement, positing three major periods in the history of the church.2 In the first millennium (and in the writings of