Evangelical Christianity and Atonement

Evangelical Christianity and Atonement

*Note to would-be commenters: If you choose to comment, be kind and civil, not argumentative, and do not misuse my blog to promote your own alternative opinions. Respond to my expressed opinion with a comment and/or question. Please keep your comment relatively brief (no more than 100 words) and include no links or pictures. Do not misrepresent what I wrote.*

I have studied evangelical Christianity, the ethos, not only the American movement, for at least fifty decades. I am generally regarded as a leading evangelical theologian. I edited an evangelical scholarly journal published by fifty evangelical colleges and universities; I served as an editor of the evangelical publication Christianity Today; I taught theology in three major American evangelical universities; I have written several books about evangelical Christianity. This blog, now about twelve years old, is about my evangelical “musings” and I have written and published here about 1700 essays.

Here is what I have to say today: Substitutionary atonement has always been more or less taken for granted by American evangelicals—as essential to the gospel if not necessary for orthodox Christianity. I grew up saturated with its symbolism and imagery in so-called “Easter season passion plays,” in sermons and songs, and in books of evangelical theology and devotions.

*Do not ask me how something can be essential to the gospel but not necessary for orthodox Christianity. Just think about it; you’ll understand it, or not. Keep trying.*

Only sometime around the 1980s did I begin to hear rumors of evangelical defections from substitutionary atonement. Until then, criticisms of substitutionary atonement seemed to come only from liberal Protestants such as famous liberal preacher and writer Harry Emerson Fosdick who called it “slaughterhouse religion.”

To me, personally, substitutionary atonement is inescapable for evangelicals; defection from it signals something aberrant within and away from evangelical Christianity. I cannot help regarding such defection as liberal (theological) infection.

THAT IS NOT TO SAY other aspects, dimensions of Christ’s saving work are false! Not at all. There is truth in “Christus Victor,” “moral example and moral influence” and the Rene Girard revelation of Christ unmasking the powers. I do not doubt that there is real value in bringing out these other dimensions and aspects of Christ’s saving work. But I am appalled that so many evangelicals, especially young, progressive ones, are throwing out substitutionary atonement without (IMHO) fully understanding it. And even if they do fully understand it, I am appalled that it does not move them to tears as it has me for decades, even since I first became aware of what Christ did for me, for us, by his voluntary death on the cross.