Mark over at Jesus Manifesto is asking the age-old questions about the atonement of Christ. He has some good thoughts as usual:

Want to know what I think? I think the penal substitutionary view of the Atonement as it currently is articulated by conservative evangelicals is a profound distortion of the Biblical telling. Basically, evangelicals tend to have a bad habit of reading things through bad lenses. When you read the Old Testament and the Gospels through Paul, who you read through the lense of Luther or Calvin, who you read through the lense of American Evangelicalism, who you read through the lense of individualism, you’re going to see things off kilter.

To believe that God had to use violence to save the world is making the ultimate mistake of a Niebuhran dichotomy. Throughout the years, there’s been dialogue regarding atonement and other deep theology among those of us who believe the revolutionary Jesus was indeed promoting a transcendently peaceful Kingdom.

I remember first reading J. Denny Weaver’s excellent book The Nonviolent Atonement. While I did not actually fully agree with his final conclusion, the questions he asks and dares to ask are excellent and provocative. I’m no scholar on the atonement, but to ask exactly how Jesus atoned for the world may be the wrong question altogether. Maybe we should be considering questions such as

• “If Jesus did nonviolently atone for us, how do we nonviolently atone for others?”
• “How should we live if we have been atoned for ‘with a high price’?”

and less questions that tend to go in circles such as

• “Is a sovereign God tied to a “system” of atonements (blood sacrifices, substitution, etc)?”
• “Is God violent or nonviolent?”