Atonement

We opened by sharing in pairs either our testimonies or the gospel message. No surprise, most people chose to share their testimonies instead of an academic exposition of the gospel. Our testimony is merely our personal understanding of the gospel. The gospel message has been neatly summarized in a number of forms: The Four Spiritual Laws, The Bridge or the "Roman Road" (Romans 3:23, 6:23, 5:8, 10:9, 5:1, 8:38-39).

"Atonement" was a word coined by William Tyndale when he tried to translate the concept of salvation into English. It comes from making "at one" between humanity and God. Webster's defines it as “the reconciliation of God and humankind through the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ”. Of course, today, we have expanded atonement's definition to include the title of an Oscar-nominated film. The word is one of the few words in the English language that is uniquely Christian and theological, not coming from Greek, Latin, or otherwise having other meanings.

What is the gospel can be neatly summarized. The harder question is why did an omnipotent God choose Jesus and the cross as his mechanism for atonement? There is no one simple easy answer. From p 180 of our textbook, "Precisely how the cross deals with human sin is not tied down with any single absolute theory, but we are given a number of models or metaphors": As a ransom that needs to be redeemed (Matt 20:28, Mark 10:45; 1 Tim 2:6), as a sacrifice in line with the Old Testament teachings (Rom 3:25, Lev 16, Lev 1:4, Is 53:6), as a Law court (Col 2:13-14, Is 42:21) and as a reconciled relationship (2 Cor 5:19, Rom 5:10, Col 1:20) eventually leading to adoption into God's family (John 1:12).

Given our class objective to write our own personal statement of faith, our homework challenge was to write your own "theory of atonement" coming up with your own metaphor for your own personal understanding of how Jesus made us "at one" with God. Comments to this post or direct emails welcomed!