The atonement — what the cross actually achieved

Atonement is one of the few theological terms coined in English rather than imported. William Tyndale needed a word for the Hebrew kippur and made one: at-one-ment. Being made one again with God, after a rupture.

The question is how a rupture of that kind gets repaired.

Why a death

Two facts create the problem.

God is just. He "will by no means clear the guilty" (Exodus 34:7). We should want this. A judge who released the guilty because he was fond of them would be corrupt, not kind.

God is merciful. He is "not wishing that any should perish" (2 Peter 3:9).

Both are true of the same God, and they appear to point in opposite directions. Sin has to be dealt with; the sinner is loved. Paul frames the resolution as the great problem of the universe and answers it in one clause: God put Christ forward as a propitiation "so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus" (Romans 3:26).

Not just instead of justifying. Just and justifying. In the same act.

The pictures Scripture uses

No single metaphor carries it all. The New Testament uses several, drawn from different areas of life, and each shows something the others do not.

Substitution — from the law court. "He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities... the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all" (Isaiah 53:5-6). "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin" (2 Corinthians 5:21). The innocent stands in the place of the guilty and takes the sentence. Note that Isaiah wrote this seven centuries before the crucifixion.

Propitiation — from the temple. Hilastērion (Romans 3:25) means the turning aside of wrath. The word is uncomfortable and the New Testament uses it anyway. Divine wrath is not petulance; it is the settled opposition of a good God to what destroys his creation. A God without wrath at evil would be morally indifferent.

Redemption — from the slave market. Apolutrōsis — a price paid to secure release. "The Son of Man came... to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45). "You were bought with a price" (1 Corinthians 6:20). The question of to whom the ransom is paid is one Scripture does not answer, and speculation about paying Satan is a road the church has generally judged a mistake — the debt is owed to justice, not to the captor.

Reconciliation — from relationships. "While we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son" (Romans 5:10). The estrangement is personal, so the remedy is personal.

Victory — from the battlefield. "He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him" (Colossians 2:15). The cross looks like defeat and is a conquest. This picture — Christus Victor — dominated the first thousand years of Christian thought and is often underplayed in Western preaching, to its loss.

Example — for the imitator. "Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps" (1 Peter 2:21). True, and insufficient on its own: an example cannot forgive anyone. But Peter says it, so it belongs.

The exchange

"For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Two transfers in one sentence. Our sin credited to him; his righteousness credited to us. Double imputation.

Notice what the verse does not say — that Christ became a sinner, or that we became righteous by improving. The language is accounting language. Something is reckoned to an account that did not generate it.

Luther called this the joyful exchange and compared it to a marriage: a bankrupt bride's debts become the wealthy groom's, and his estate becomes hers, at the moment of the wedding, before she has done anything at all.

What happened at the cross

The physical brutality was real, and it was not the worst of it. Thousands were crucified by Rome; the Gospels are strikingly restrained about the physical details.

The centre is the cry: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46).

The Son, who had known unbroken communion with the Father for all eternity, experienced its rupture. Whatever else hell means, it means separation from God — and that is what was borne there. Not merely pain. Not merely death. Forsakenness, absorbed voluntarily, so that it would not have to be borne by anyone else.

And when it was done: tetelestai — "It is finished" (John 19:30). A commercial term, written across paid invoices in the first century: paid in full.

Finished means finished

Hebrews sets the two systems side by side. The Old Testament priest stood daily, offering the same sacrifices repeatedly, which "can never take away sins". But Christ, "when he had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, sat down at the right hand of God" (Hebrews 10:11-12).

He sat down. There were no chairs in the tabernacle, because a priest's work was never finished.

This has an enormous practical consequence. If the sacrifice was complete, nothing can be added to it — not penance, not achievement, not sufficient sorrow. "By a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified" (Hebrews 10:14). Perfected, past tense, permanently, for people who are still in progress.

And so it is not a transaction you observe from a distance

The cross does not merely settle an account. It shows what God is like.

The cross is the blazing fire at which the flame of our love is kindled, but we have to get near enough to it for its sparks to fall on us.— John Stott, The Cross of Christ

"God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). Not when we improved. Not when we asked. While we were still opposed to him.

Which is why the correct response to the doctrine is not agreement but worship.