"The doctrine of the atonement, which is at the heart of the Christian good news, is sometimes preached in terms which seem to set it apart from anything recognizable in ordinary experience ... At worst it is told as a positively immoral story - an angry God needing to be propitiated, and accepting by way of propitiation the sacrifice of an innocent victim in lieu of the guilty. This is, of course, a pernicious travesty of the Gospel, and the first step towards putting it right is, no doubt, to see that God and Christ are one in being, so that the sacrifice of Christ is a sacrifice made by God, not made to him. But over and above this, is it not vital to recognize that what is happening on the cross is not something apart from human life but is only the climactic fulfilment and perfecting of what, in its measure - its incomplete measure - happens whenever there is a reconciliation between two estranged persons ?"
- from "Preaching the Atonement", chapter 2 of Forgiveness and Reconciliation by
an Evangelical scholar, the late Revd Professor C.F.D.Moule.
I heard another Evangelical, the late Bp David Sheppard (the cricketer), preach the "Three Hours" on Good Friday one year in Chester Cathedral. He said that the doctrine of a penal substitutionary atonement had indeed brought him to Christ but yet he had come to see it as quite inadequate. Later he kindly sent me a copy of this sermon as preached subsequently in a parish church. His path has been followed by a considerable number of younger Evangelical Anglicans. (A defence of the very conservative Evangelical understanding can be found, of course, e.g. in our own Leon Morris's The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross.
Thomas F.Torrance is the subject of a new book by Paul D.Molnar, reviewed by another Evangelical, Peter Foster, Bishop of Beverley, in the Church Times of the 28th May, 2010. He notes that Torrance "believed that a false view of Christ's humanity lay behind the common mistake in Evangelical theologies of the atonement, wherein it is asserted that God is reconciled to the world, rather than that the world is reconciled to God. He regarded the idea that, in the atonement, God is reconcilised as a sub-Christian reversion to older pagan ideas of a God who needs to be appeased and placated. God is always the subject of reconciliation, not the object." "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself." 2 Corinthians 5.19
This writer admits that according to Article 2, Christ died "to reconcile his Father to us" but this, he would contend, is not true and not Scriptural. Fortunately, as Dean Arthur Stanley showed, after a long campaign, the requirement of subscription to every statement in the Articles was abolished as long ago as 1865. Since then, only a general "assent" was required, "assent" never legally defined - the situation still in the Church of Australia, though the requirement further changed now in the Church of England.
The Atonement has been understood in various ways, even in the New Testament itself. Does S.Luke, for example, even have a doctrine of atonement at all if we take the "shorter" version of the Lucan story of the Last Supper as the original (my own view) ? (He omits the Marcan reference to Jesus dying to give his life as a ransom for all.) As a liberal Anglican, I myself have found most helpful the study of the various theories by Hastings Rashdall in The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology, but there are innumerable books on the subject. And certainly none of us can never fully comprehend the Mystery of our Redemption. We know only "in part" !
