Eucharist and Atonement
by Peter J. Leithart 2.19.16
Early Christians expended huge amounts of energy and intellectual subtlety
in working out the implications of the gospel for their understanding of God
and of Jesus. “Trinity” and “Christology” were the theological monuments of the
patristic era. John MacIntyre (Shape of
Soteriology) points out that we find nothing comparable on the
question of the “relation of Christ's death to our redemption.” Neither creeds
nor theologians produced “a full theory of atonement” but were content to
“employ a selection of the biblical expressions to describe the relation
between Christ's death and our salvation from sin.” When the creeds did mention
the death of Jesus, they didn't link it to the forgiveness of sins (6).
MacIntyre thinks this “so very, very odd as to merit much more
consideration than it is traditionally given in histories of soteriology.” How
are we to explain this absence of formal attention to soteriology?
Read more at
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2016/02/eucharist-and-atonement
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