Three Persons, One Problem
The atonement theories on offer all address a god who is not quite the God of the gospel.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
“By his stripes, we are healed.”
“It is finished.”
What exactly is finished at Golgotha?
And how is his (their?) work made complete?
What is God yet doing as we make Mary’s boy Pilate’s victim?
With Palm Sunday ahead, the church’s attention will turn to a mystery that is noticeably not an item of dogma in any of her creeds, the doctrine of the atonement. While the Gospels devote an inordinate balance of their narratives to reporting the final days and moments of the LORD’s life (a signal that the manner of his death was problematic in the early church), they nevertheless do not say how the cross of Jesus Christ makes sinners at one with the God to whom they require reconciliation.
In a little essay on the subject, my teacher Robert Jenson offers both a confession and a diagnosis when it comes to the church’s failure to establish ecumenical consensus on her understanding of the death of Jesus Christ. According to Jenson, the doctrine of atonement has not risen to the level of dogma— required orthodox conviction— not because of the scriptures’ reticence to answer the question but because of a structural error within Christian theology itself, a founding mistake that has, from the beginning, guaranteed the inadequacy of every proposed solution. Put simply, they fail to attend to the fact that the God to whom we require atonement is three person’d.
All atonement theories, classical and modern, fail to attend to the fact that the God to whom we require atonement is three person’d.
God, after all, is not a name but a generic noun.
The proper, personal name of the true and living God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
This is the LORD with whom atonement theories must content.
The atonement theories on offer all address a god who is not quite the God of the gospel.
