When people ask me what theory of the atonement I hold, my answer is always yes. Scripture gives us a handful of metaphors to help us understand the work of Jesus on our behalf, from a number of different settings (the courtroom, the slave market, the battlefield, etc.). To rely on only one of these metaphors is to hold a partial view of God’s saving work. The atonement is like a multifaceted diamond, each surface necessary to reflect the light from different angles. (For more on these see John Stott’s masterpiece The Cross of Christ and Scot McKnight’s excellent A Community Called Atonement).
But as I’ve written elsewhere, it concerns me to see some younger evangelicals diminishing or dismissing the idea of substitutionary atonement and relying only on other biblical metaphors. To do so is to diminish the picture Scripture gives us of God’s saving work, and is no wiser than those they criticize who hold only the substitionary metaphor. One never corrects the pendulum swinging too far in one direction by swinging it all the way to the other side.
I love the way Dr. Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Seminary, summarizes this in an excellent article he recently posted:
Here’s my worry about contemporary talk, especially among some younger evangelicals, about atonement theory. They rightly say that the atonement is more than substitution. But they often proceed then as if it were less than substitution. (read the entire post)
