This is part of the healthy way that the church has evolved throughout its history in a continual effort to find new and meaningful ways to talk about their faith. That process of cultural evolution has continued.

Substitutionary Atonement
The predominant metaphor that is heard today as the evangelical church talks about the atonement is one we call substitionary atonement. Sometimes we call it vicarious atonement or propitiation or judicial theory or penal substitution, but all of these subtle variants are a form of a metaphor that paralleled the development of the modern legal system. This framework focuses on the divide from the diagram earlier (see Part 1). Paul writes to the Roman church and says, “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” and we are disconnected from God by those shortcomings. The theory of substitutionary atonement lines this reality up against the model of the developing legal system. We have transgressed the standard that God has set for membership in his social order much the same way a criminal transgresses the social order that society has set for itself. Similarly to when someone breaks rules and must be penalized through fine or imprisonment, God has set a penalty for our transgression, and that penalty is death. Now that is a bit of a kludge on the metaphor, which has been articulated much more eloquently to reflect the nuances of the relationship between God, law and sinner by better theologians. However, in its most basic form, substitutionary atonement is a legal picture of our relationship to God. The twist comes in because God sends his son, to pay that penalty for us. In his death he saves us from the consequence of our own actions by stepping into the gap for us.

This idea was first articulated in the 11th century by Anselm of Canturbury in what he called Satisfaction theory. You can feel the 11th century in the language. God has been offended or insulted and he demands satisfaction. I can almost see God slapping me in the face with his white glove before drawing his rapier and declaring, “on guard”.

The major theme though is that the price for our mistakes or our sins, if that language is still meaningful to you, is too high for us to pay on our own. The idea of the connection between death and sin has a rich history. It is first developed in the language of the Old Testament. The high priest of the Jews would sacrifice a spotless lamb every year as a payment for the sins of the people. When Jesus is referred to as the Lamb of God in the scriptures he is being compared to that picture. Even beyond that one symbolic moment each person was required to provide sacrifice to atone for their transgressions. The picture of death in those sacrifices was meant to continually remind people of the very serious and consequential nature of their personal decisions. This time though, God himself is making the sacrifice for us. The spotless lamb is pictured in the sinless man, his death a covering or atoning sacrifice for our mistakes.

This picture of the atonement is incredibly important because it shows us the significance of the choices both that Jesus makes on our behalf and of the choices we make for ourselves as we choose or choose not, to live the life we were intended for.

The danger is that sometimes this becomes the only picture we talk about in less rooted Christian traditions and without the multiplicity of lens through which to see the mystery of God’s atonement our language becomes incomplete, starts to break down and becomes open to criticism or even ridicule.

This picture of substitutionary atonement while, very important can become unhelpful. Picture this metaphor in a slightly different, albeit crude, context.

One day a father is sitting inside his living room watching television, enjoying his day off when a baseball comes crashing through the window shattering the serenity of the moment and the glass of the window. The father is enraged by what has happened and storms out the front door of his house, down the steps and onto the lawn, where he can see the neighborhood kids playing in the street. He demands to now who threw the ball through his window. One of the boys puts up his and hand and admits to the accident. The father calls to his son who is playing with some other kids in the backyard and proceeds to spank him in front of everyone until he feels his anger subside. He then tells his son to go back to playing in the backyard, tells the kids across the street that all is forgiven and goes back inside to finish watching his show.

This is not the picture that substitutionary atonement is trying to convey. However, without the balance of our other metaphors it can start to look suspicious to someone on the outside looking in. Substitutionary atonement is not about cosmic child abuse, a slavishly legalistic deity or even divine courtroom. It is a picture of the personal responsibility each of us have for our actions and decisions and of the great lengths to which God is willing to go to bring us back no matter how far we have strayed from what we were intended to become.

Jesus saves us by experiencing the consequences for each of our mistakes.

Mosaic
Humanity made at one with God. You and I, able to sit down again, with our God. All of creation reconciled to its creator. This is a picture that is bigger than my personal salvation, although it is that too. My journey toward God is part of a story that encompasses all of history and all of creation. Personal choices, eternal truths, environmental realities and social contexts, all of these brought back into alignment with God. This is why all of these pictures are important for us. When we speak of the atonement we are talking about the mystery of the universe, we are talking about THE story of everything. The way in which all of these different pictures or lens or metaphors interact is what gives this story its incredible magnitude, depth and beauty.

Let me go back one last time to a quote from CS Lewis
We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself. All the same, some of these theories are worth looking at.

It’s important for us to try to come to an understanding of this story. However in that attempt we need to keep some sense of mystery there. The atonement is so big and so important that my fear is any attempt we might make to have it appear easy or concise will necessarily lose some of the significance. At the same time, an idea as central to our faith as this, can’t be ignored or left alone. It is something that calls each of us to continually come back to it, to study it, to marvel at it, to be thankful for something so beautiful in our lives that we will never be able to completely frame it. The truth is, the atonement is all of the ideas we’ve looked at and in some sense it is none of them. It is simply the mystery that God has offered each of us the place of at-onement. All of the ways we talk about that idea simply add to the beauty of what that means. To finish I go back to where we started. All of these ideas need each other. You can’t talk about the death of Jesus without taking about his life and you can’t talk about his resurrection without talking about his death. So when we look at the ideas around the atonement we need to realize that we can’t talk about his taking our place unless we talk about his influence on our lives and we can’t about his victory unless we talk about his sacrifice.

It’s in the interplay between all of these myriad ideas that we find something of what it his death means for us, that in all these ways we are saved we are saved by Jesus.

Moral Influence
CS Lewis, among others, wrote a lot about this concept I’m calling moral influence. Lewis described the very appearance of a moral objective standard as an argument for God. At the same time his belief was that this appeal to an objective moral standard could not be explained as mere instinct, because it does not always win out, nor as mere social convention, because it appears to transcend and is appealed to across cultural divides, nor as a law of nature because the very idea of morality is prescriptive for our world rather than descriptive of our world. Therefore he argued that morality, in and of itself, points us towards not only God, but his intervention into the human story. Jesus steps into that story to bring us a more full picture of what a human life can be. This divine example of humanity becomes an influence on us of unequaled proportion. In fact, Jesus demonstration in his life and in his death is so perfect, and so powerful that it has altering effect on the course of human history helping to point us towards God.

One of the ways I like to imagine this idea is to think of life on a spectrum between our two outstretched arms. Without the story of Jesus we have an imagination of what life can be that spans the distance from our right hand to the tip of our nose. This is the imagination of the range we have to aim at in life. The story of Jesus opens us up to the possibility of an expanded spectrum of humanity, a spectrum than spans the distance between our two fully outstretched arms. Where once the best we could aim for stopped halfway across the spectrum the story of Jesus opens us up to the possibility of a more than we could have imagined on our own. This shift in perspective fundamentally alters how we see ourselves and our world. It’s not just that Jesus is some great moral teacher, with some helpful ideas to think about. This is the idea that Jesus as divine, as the creator present in creation, gives us an example of what a human truly can be, and example that transcends anything we could have ever seen or understood on our own.

He saves us, by removing the limits on our limited perspective.

This leads us into another major lens that we have seen the atonement. This one comes from very early in the Christian movement, in fact it finds it roots in the words of Paul the Apostle.

Ransom Theory

For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all men.
1 Tim 2:5-6

The basic idea being communicated here is the idea that humanity is caught in slavery to sin (and to Satan if that language is meaningful for you). We find ourselves in a situation where we simply can’t pull ourselves out of this position.

In narrative form this metaphor paints a drama to help us understand the atonement. Jesus in his death is making a deal with the devil (somewhat literally) that works like this; him for us. Essentially like a ransom. Now the term actually refers more to the idea of buying a slaves freedom than it does to Mel Gibson’s kidnapping movie of the same name, nut essentially Jesus and us swap places in his death. Now the drama isn’t over because on the third day Jesus pulls a fast one on the devil and rises from the dead, too powerful to be contained in the way we had been. Everyone lives happily ever after, expect presumably, for Satan.

If you’ve ever seen a Christian drama where the devil is celebrating as Jesus dies, it’s coming from this tradition, the idea that he never saw it coming because he was, essentially, double crossed by Jesus. Serves him right, I suppose.

Now we don’t use this metaphor as much today (for somewhat obvious reasons), although, it is still around in a strong way in more charismatic circles.

The real central idea here, communicated in this narrative, is this; that there is a part of ourselves that we can’t defeat on our own. We need help to become the person we want to be, the person we were created to be and somehow Christ, through his death, is the means through which we’re able to step past the limitations of our own story. In Christ death, in his decision to go past the limits that we would probably set for ourselves, his commitment to the right choice and then the next right choice, you and I can find the strength to make our next right choice. Even in the areas that seemed to be immoveable, or intransient, we find a measure of victory through Christ over our worst tendencies, and most difficult internal struggles, that we couldn’t have discovered on our own.

He saves us by overcoming what we couldn’t on our own.

This moves us along to the next lens

Christus Victor
This one comes to us as the major theme of the early church for the first few centuries of our development. We call it Christus Victor.

The major focus in the first few centuries of Christianity was surviving in the middle of terrible persecution. The Emperor Nero would literally tie Christains to stakes and burn them to use as torches at his parties. Domitain was the Emperor who started using the early Christians as entertainment and putting them in the Coliseum to watch them be eaten by animals. I mean this was a terrible time to be a follower of the story of Jesus. So part of the way that these early Christians talked about the death of Jesus was to express a measure of victory in death. They largely understood that they were not going to escape and that, more than likely, they would face a similar fate to their savior. So they began to take solace, in fact more than solace, they took courage and strength from the story of Jesus death. The story that Jesus had once faced death as well but had not only faced it with courage, had overcome death in his resurrection. They understood Jesus as the first –fruits of the next life and that through him, while they would face death, they would also find resurrection into the next life. In Christ death they found victory over the limitations of this life and the limitations of the immediate story they found themselves in. Historians record the idea of Christians facing death and reciting the phrases that gave them strength and courage. Christus Victor is this kind of lens on Jesus death.

He saves us by inviting us into his victory over the finality of death.