You Need a Better Atonement

Tony Jones is a co-founder of Progressive Youth Ministry conference and is the author of Did God Kill Jesus? He encourages us to live into a better theology of the atonement than the commonly held penal substitution model.

My problem with the atonement started in youth ministry. Not when I was a youth, mind you. No, back then I was gobbling up Josh McDowell books as fast as he could say the same thing and give it a different cover and title. The struggle didn’t happen until a decade later, when I was a seminary student at Fuller and a part-time junior high director at Pasadena Covenant Church.

As I recount at the beginning of Did God Kill Jesus?, it took an overzealous evangelical preacher to awaken me to the inner inconsistencies of the Payment view of the atonement — aka, the “satisfaction” or “penal substitution” theory. Therein, God made us (knowing we would sin); God is pissed at us for sinning; God cannot possibly let us into heaven, being that we’ve sinned; but Jesus takes the bullet for us, saving us from eternal, conscious torment (if and only if we invite him into our lives as our personal lord and savior).

Maybe it was because this preacher was so overtly blood-obsessed, or maybe it was because I was hearing his message through the ears and eyes of the inner-city kids I’d brought with me to Alpine Covenant Conference Center. Or probably it was a combo of the two. In either case, that night I heard the Payment view of the atonement for what it is: a terrible distortion of the God of the Bible, the Father of Jesus.

When I was in full-time youth ministry myself, I experimented with ways to communicate about Jesus’ death, ways that portrayed God as loving, not wrathful. I sought new metaphors and attempted to understand theories that had been disparaged when I was in seminary. Later, I wrote blog posts, I published an ebook, I gave talks, and I ultimately published Did God Kill Jesus?.

It’s Good Friday. Maybe you’ll be seeing some of the kids from your youth group at services tonight. Or maybe you’ll be talking to them about Jesus’ crucifixion in coming days. As it comes up, remember that there are progressive readings of Jesus’ death. Talk to them about it. Give them alternatives. And make sure they know that God was not against Jesus, and God is not against us.