Theological Journal - March 17: Atonement
“No merely theoretical understanding is possible, for abstract theoretic understanding does away with the essential mystery by insisting on the continuity of merely rational explanation. But that is just what we cannot give of the awful fact of the descent of the Son of God into our hell and the bearing by the Son of God of divine judgement on our behalf, for all rational explanation must presuppose a basic continuity here between man and God, but that is just what the atonement reveals to be wanting by the very fact that God himself had to descend into our bottomless pit of evil and guilt in order to construct continuity between us and God” ( Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ , 4). As we draw nearer to Good Friday and the horror at Skull Hill we begin to think again of what happened in the death of Christ. To often in the church’s history the metaphors and images scripture used as raw material to fashion a “doctrine” of atonement. In such a doctrine the images and metaph...