What Did the Cross Accomplish?: A Conversation about the Atonement

by N.T. Wright

Worldviews are inherently religious. Even if one does not believe in a traditional concept of God, one will believe in something that is ultimate. For instance, the term “atheism” depends upon the term “theism” to have any meaning at all. (Even the preferred term of many atheists today, “naturalism,” is juxtaposed with “supernaturalism.”) Because worldviews are inherently religious, they compete and conflict with each other. This is because worldviews are comprehensive; they make sense of all of life, or at least as much as they possibly can. Furthermore, worldviews are also indicative; they purport to tell the truth about the world and life. As a result, they are as much statements about what the world is not like as they are about how the world is.

The task of the Christian theologian is to tell a story that weaves the answers to all these questions into a coherent whole.

Worldviews thus have a component of praxis. They are performed as much as they are professed. In other words, praxis—how one actually lives—is the truth serum of worldview analysis. Vance Havner put it well: “What you do today is what you really believe. Everything else is just religious talk.”

One may disagree with the content he puts into his model, one may reject his conclusions, or one may augment his model. But until one provides me with a more comprehensive model of how to do theology, a model that has more explanatory power and that more effectively translates theory into a mission for life, I remain convinced that, concerning the method and purpose of theology, Wright is basically right.

The doctrine of the atonement is an ideal subject to test what I am advocating. The cross is, after all, the crux (no pun intended) of the matter for Christians. But doesn’t the fact that the cross is the center of the Christian theology seem, if I may say so, a bit odd? Does it not seem odd that when Paul came to Corinth, he was resolved not to preach the greatness of God, or the love of God, or even the law of God, but rather the crucifixion of Jesus, a messianic claimant who had been brutally killed like so many “messiahs” before him? Does it not seem odd that near the end of his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul wrote, “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures”?10 What of the sort of death by which Jesus died? Crucifixion, one of the lowest forms of death in the ancient Greco-Roman world, was so low that Roman citizens were almost never crucified!11 Even though crucifixion was a notoriously inefficient form of execution, it nevertheless was a very effective form of intimidation. Not only did victims of crucifixion die a humiliating and excruciating death, they also were generally denied a proper burial.12 In a culture where the majority of the religions had strict guidelines for what to do with a body after death, this was in effect a declaration: “You may choose your preferred deity, but remember this: Caesar is Lord!” Yet Jesus turned this declaration on its head by dying on a cross a...

Does it not also seem odd that Jesus himself instructed his disciples to partake in a memorial meal that highlighted his death?13 In fact, does it not seem odd that the earliest apostolic teaching on the atonement was performative rather than propositional. Simply put, Jesus’ earliest disciples were engaging in atonement theology every time they took part in the Lord’s Supper. Before any of the Gospels were begun, before any book of the New Testament was penned, even before Paul’s Damascus-road experience, Christians regularly met and engaged in a ritual meal filled with atonement metaphors. Furthermore, if one takes the breaking of bread mentioned in Acts 2:42 and 46 to be references to the Lord’s Supper, then Luke tied the presence and power of the Holy Spirit to the Eucharist equally as much as he connected the Spirit’s power to apostolic teaching and conversions.

The Lord’s Supper was thus practiced from the birth of the church. Furthermore, in 1 Corinthians 11:23, Paul stresses that he and Jesus taught the same thing concerning the meal, when he states: “I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you. . . .”14 Perhaps, then, the place to start in understa...

The earliest form of theology is not necessarily the most correct, authoritative, or complete—especially if one believes in progressive revelation. For example, if one believes, as I do, that the doctrine of the Trinity represents not an evolution (a change from one thing into another) in Christian belief about God’s being but rather the development, fuller understanding, and more complete expression of the truth that was always present in Scripture, then clearly one should not become non-Trinitarian simply because a Nicaean understanding of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is not explicitly stated in the Gospels. On the other hand, one should not assume that the latest form of a teaching is the most complete, correct,...

The theology present in the Lord’s Supper may have been the reason why the early church, to say nothing of the earliest church, apparently thought that the work of Christ was clear but that the person of Christ was mysterious! Council after council addressed the Son’s nature and constitution, yet no ecumenical council dealt explicitly or primarily with Christ’s work. Perhaps the reason the Fathers didn’t address the work of Christ was not because they were clear on it but rather that there simply wasn’t much controversy where it was concerned. “In Christ God was reconciling the worl...

One thing that we must be clear on is this: the conciliar church is not the earliest church: the canonical church is.15 Historically speaking, Nicaea was further from Jesus than we today are from George Washington. One benefits from reading patristic theology, but the earliest written Christian theology is found on the pages of the New Testament. This means that the wrong way to teach about the atonement is to start with a survey of atonement theories. The study of atonement theories is useful, but theories are not the best starting place.16 In fact, the use of the term “theory” for the doctrine of the atonement is, historically speaking, a relatively recent phenomenon. To my knowledge, no pre-Enlightenment theologian ever spoke of his teaching on the cross as a “theory.” Instead, they professed what they understood Scripture to teach concerning the significance of Jesus’ death. There is a heuristic benefit to classifying theories of the atonement so long as one is conscious of the fact that theories are nothing but shorthand terms for ease ...

There is also a difference between studying the history of a doctrine and studying the history that produced the doctrine, the context out of which the doctrine began. One approach seeks to understand a process, which is a “how” question: “How did theologians teach the doctrine of the atonement down through the years?” The other approach seeks to find an explanation, which is a “why” question: “Why did Jesus tell us to celebrate his death in this way?” Theories are thus not the place to start: Scripture is where to start!17 Scripture carries more authority than tradition. In fact, tradition has no intrinsic authority. This is not to deny that tradition is extremely important. Tradition informs our present theology and thus allows us to enter into a conversation with a larger, older, and more diverse community. Scholars should always ...

The first thing to notice is the great but not verbatim consistency between Paul’s relating of Jesus’ words and actions in mandating the ritual found in the Synoptic Gospels. There are differences, but the agreement is far more obvious than the differences. The idea and language of substitution is present in all of them, although in Luke it is most obviously communicated through Jesus’ words concerning the bread, “This is my body, which is given for you” (22:19), and also in his words for the cup, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood” (22:20).18 The language of substitution is tied to the bread in the Corinthians passage, “This is my body, which is for you” (11:24); in Matthew and Mark it is voiced through Jesus’ words concerning the wine. Still, it is there. But more than substitution is present in the Lord’s Supper. The concept of covenant mercy is also front and center. Sharing the cup shows recognition of the covenant (or new covenant).

The ritual is intended to remind believers of what Jesus did for them, yet also to remind them of how God has kept his promises and thus shown his covenant faithfulness.

The context in which Jesus inaugurated the meal was Passover. There is little doubt that he intended his disciples to understand that he was the sacrificial lamb whose blood would cover them from God’s wrath and deliver them from bondage. There is no explicit statement of penal substitution in Israel’s exodus from Egypt, but that does not mean that the idea is not present. The wrath of God was displayed agains...

Fundamentally, however, the Lord’s Supper, like the Passover, is about deliverance. The focus of the exodus story is on God’s delivering Israel from bondage in Egypt because he is faithful to his covenant. God gave Israel a ritual meal to remind them of his faithfulness. Jesus gave his disciples a ritual meal to remind them of how his death delivered them from bondage to sin. Deliverance, however, can come in multiple senses. A criminal pardoned from a legal penalty or judgment experiences forensic deliverance. Such a criminal is delivered from the consequences of unlawful actions. An addict experiences a different sort of deliverance from bondage. That bondage is not a consequence of a legal verdict; the addict is in bondage even if never arrested! Such deliverance is rather an internal change that affects the person’s desires while going from a physical and emotional state of slavery to one of freedom. When delivered from the addiction, the former addict experiences not simply a change in status but also becomes a new person. Externally, sinners are forensically guilty; internally, they are spiritually broken and slaves to misdirected drives. Furthermore, there is also the bon...

No one metaphor, model, or theory can adequately make sense of the cross. This is obviously the case: otherwise Jesus would not have given his followers a ritual that contained multiple metaphors for his work on the cross. Might one metaphor or model be dominant and the others flow from it? Perhaps. That question needs to be left for another day. The multiplicity of metaphors in the Lord’s Supper requires that a full-orbed doctrine of the atonement will provide answers for how Christ’s death has addressed the dual problems of sins (multiple individual misdeeds that render one guilty before God, and thus need to be forgiven by God) and Sin (cosmic, nonhuman forces, whether satanic or institutional, operating on humans and dominating humanity). N. T. Wright and Simon Gathercole both allow for multiple metaphors of atonement in their respective works on the doctrine, albeit in different ways. We shall see how each scholar understands the atonement and how they interact with each other in the dialogue that is at the center of this book. Readers who pay close attention to each man’s position will be richly rewarded.

In closing, when we consider the cross of Jesus, we likely are faced with a mystery that is too great to be fully comprehended, yet it can be apprehended.21 In reflecting on the cross, both the greatness and the goodness of God are revealed, so that we see both God’s holiness and God’s love. At the cross, God’s glory and grace meet. At the end of our study, perhaps we still cannot entirely understand what God has done for us through the cross because of our human limitations. And maybe that’s okay because God is greater than any human mind can fully comprehend. Why should we expect fully to comprehend God’s work when we know that we cannot understand God fully?22 Maybe we can know what we need to know even if we cannot plumb the depths of God’s work. Still, I know this: when I partake of the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist, I am truly grateful. Perhaps the best response is not theology but rather doxology. Isaac Watts’s classic hymn says best where our doctrine of the atonement should end.

When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of glory died, my richest gain I count but loss, and pour contempt on all my pride. Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast, save in the death of Christ my God; all the vain things that charm me most, I sacrifice them to his blood. See, from his head, his hands, his feet, sorrow and love flow mingled down; did e’er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown? Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were a present far too small; love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.

(I should also say that there is an online course based on this book, which is among those offered at www.ntwrightonline.org.)

My first point is this: atonement isn’t a “thing.” It’s a shorthand. We use the word “atonement” in Western theological discussions as though there were one thing that we all know we’re talking about, even though it is hard to say what exactly it is. The word “atonement” occurs in English Bibles at various points, but that is misleading, as word studies of technical terms will bear out. The term “atonement” is not well served by being seen as the name for a “thing,” one specific truth. It is shorthand for a story.

All doctrines, you see, are portable stories. We fold the stories up, like clothes for a trip, and we pack them into a suitcase so we can carry them easily into and out of discussions. But the point of carrying a suitcase isn’t because I like having a suitcase in my hotel room. (I wrote that sentence before this meeting, unaware that my suitcase was not going to be delivered by Delta Air Lines at the time of my arrival.) The point of having a suitcase is so that I can carry clothes, books, and personal items all together. The word “atonement” is a suitcase into which the longer biblical story is folded up. This is already done by Paul when he summarizes the gospel message in 1 Corinthians 15:3, beginning with “the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures.” It would be difficult to have discussions in which we replace the single word “atonement” by that eleven-word statement, still less its completion with Jesus’ burial and resurrection—just as it would be difficult to carry all my clothes, books, and other stuff onto the plane without the suitcase. So we pack it away, zip it up, call it “atonement”—then off we go into a hundred different discussions that are o...

My second point is this: The four Gospels are the primary witnesses, not just for the events of Jesus’ life, but a...

It is astonishing to see the extent to which the four Gospels have been marginalized in discussions of atonement. Generations of readers have found it hard, however much (as in my earlier illustration) they have folded them up, to fit them into the suitcase they have called “atonement.” They have therefore salvaged only such small fragments as will fit into hand luggage, such as Mark 10:45, “The Son of Man came . . . to give his life a ransom for many.” Gospel scholarship has followed and produced experimental methods and theories. There has been an implicit theological consensus that the Gospels are about Jesus’ life, his teaching, and about the circumstances surrounding his death, but not primarily about the meaning of that awesome event. The Gospels may be, from one point of view (as people have said), “passion narratives with extended introductions”; but even those who have said that have not usually seen the theological point. Even my dear friend Richard Hays, in his wonderful recent book Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels,2 focuses almost entirely on the question of who the writers of the four Gospels think Jesus was and is, rather than on the meaning o...

There is in fact something else going on here, something a bit more sinister than simply a failure to notice scriptural quotations and their significance. Especially in the works of Bultmann’s followers like Conzelmann and Käsemann, and those influenced by them, it became axiomatic that Luke had falsified the gospel by turning it into a historical narrative. This meant that he couldn’t have held any “atonement theology,” since in the presuppositions such scholars were working with, a “historicized” gospel stands over against the meaning of the cross. Here we see the same false antithesis between the gospel and history that has bedeviled recent discussions of so-called apocalyptic (see part II of my Paul and His Recent Interpreters).4 This spurious antithesis of gospel and history has grown like Japanese knotweed over the last two generations, and it urgently needs to be dug out. In fact, Luke—like the other three evangelists, but not like the so-called Gospel of Thomas and other similar documents—tells the story of Jesus as the focal point and climax of the story of Israel. It is in particular the climax of the story of Israel in exile, needing the good and sin-forgiving news of the kingdom, as in Isaiah 52–53. Still more specifically, Luke presents the story of Israel as the focal point of the story of humans and of the world. Ultimately, it is the story of Jesus’ death as the climax and effective instrument of that kingdom-bringing, salvific mission. All four Gospels str...

My third point is that the story the Gospels tell is a standing rebuke to our tendency to divide “atonement” up into different “models.”

Such an idea is wooden and disjointed, appearing almost deliberately to distract attention from what the Bible is actually saying. It is as though someone were to analyze Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony by saying, “Well, in this piece Beethoven sometimes presents us with a dramatic rhythm; at other times he uses woodwinds to good effect; often he plays striking tunes on the strings,” and so on. That might all be true; but the listener is still waiting to hear the music. The different supposed “models” all mean what they mean within the larger biblical narrative, which comes in five “moments.” I shall briefly summarize these moments as follows. The first moment is the claim that the long-promised exile-undoing new exodus has arrived. This brings, second, God’s kingdom-establishing victory over the dark powers that had usurped his role. This is effected, third, through the representative, substitutionary death of Israel’s Messiah, which dealt with the sin through which the powers had consolidated their grip over idolatrous humankind. Thus and only thus, fourth, the cross simultaneously provides the moral example of suffering love and also reveals, in a dark blaze of glory, who the Crea...

We should specifically note that in this narrative, which fits together snugly and satisfyingly, the elements that are normally played off against one another actually depend on one another for their overall meaning. These elements, as is well known, include (1) the Christus Victor theme, which has often been played off against (2) “substitution”; (3) the notion of Jesus as the “representative,” as “incorporating” his people, which again is often taken as an either/or with “substitution”; and (4) the notion of Jesus’ death as a moral example, a sign communicating, “That’s what love will do,” which has been played off against all the above. Get the story right, however, and all these four models will fit. It all depends, as I have argued more fully in the book, on the nature of idolatry and sin, with idolatry recognized as the root of sin. Paul’s charge against the human race in Romans 1:18 concerns asebeia, “false worship,” meaning idolatry; and then adikia, “injustice,” meaning the fracturing of God’s world and of human beings and their relationships. When we humans worship idols, we behave in subhuman ways, missing the mark of genuine humanness: “missing the mark” is hamartia, which we normally translate as “sin.” That sin then constitutes the means by which the idols enslave us. Victory over the powers is thus achieved through sin being dealt with in substitution, which in turn depends on Jesus’ representative messiahship.

The Gospels thus offer us the narrative of victorious kingdom inauguration through representative substitution. This is, of course, substantially the story told by Isaiah 52 and 53, which itself draws into a single narrative the many other biblical stories of the great acts of redemption. The Gospels offer this as the focal point of the entire canonical witness to the meaning of Jesus’ death and its role within the overall biblical story.

My fourth point is recognizing the language of sacrifice as part of the resultant story, not part of the story of “Jesus’ bearing our punishment.”

I didn’t talk much about this in The Day the Revolution Began because it would have doubled the length of the book, especially by including a discussion of the Letter to the Hebrews. What I need to say here again subdivides, this time into four subpoints. The first subpoint states that the Levitical sacrificial system is not about animals being punished. Unlike pagan sacrifices, Israel’s sacrificial animals were not killed on an altar, and the purpose of the blood ritual was to cleanse the sanctuary. The blood, the God-given sign of life, was the purgative agent through which all traces of death, including sin, which points in the direction of death, could be rinsed away so that the living God could do what he had promised: coming and dwelling among his people. How could he do that if the sanctuary was polluted because of their sin and impurity?

Sacrifices then mean what they mean within the true, larger biblical story, which is not about how sinners can go to heaven, but (as Rev. 21 makes clear) abou...

The second subpoint about sacrifice is this. In early Christian thought we find the strange, otherwise unprecedented, early Christian combination of imagery from both Passover and the Day of Atonement. This is to be explained in terms of the exile. Unlike the slavery in Egypt, Israel’s extended Babylonian exile was the result of idolatry and sin; accordingly, the victorious rescue (the new exodus) of the new Passover is accomplished through the great act of, yes, “atonement.” But the point here is that through Jesus, as the resurrection and ascension insist, what is effected is not just the...

The third subpoint about sacrifice, therefore, is that the tradition developing during the long years from Anselm to the present, the last thousand years of Western theology, has made an illegitimate transfer of the language of t...

This has had a massive effect on (for instance) our reading of the vital passage in Romans 3, as I have suggested in the book and in a more detailed article in the Festschrift for Richard Bauckham.6 In Romans 3:23 Paul says that “all sinned and fell short of God’s glory.” But in the Bible, the divine glory is the glory revealed in the temple. Here Paul takes the same kind of charge leveled against Israel in Ezekiel 8:7–13 (as echoed in Rom. 1:23) and Psalm 106 and applies it to the whole human race. So, when the solution has been offered, Paul expresses the result precisely in cultic language: “We have been allowed to approach, by faith, into this grace in which we stand, and we celebrate the hope of the glory of God” (Rom. 5:2). This points ahead to the conclusion of Romans ...

This then leads to my fifth main point, which could be expanded into a whole monograph in itself but must here be stated with simple brevity. When Jesus wanted to explain to his followers what his forthcoming death would mean, he didn’t give them a theory, he gave them a meal.

The Last Supper, with all its sacrificial overtones (understood in the way I have just outlined), was Jesus’ own final and definitive interpretation of the meaning of his death. This, of course, introduces an entirely new element into the discussion, moving us away from mental models and into the realm of the church’s habitual praxis.

The distorted retrievals of Romans again provide the sharpest test case. We have assumed that the point of the argument is how to get to heaven, when for Paul it quite clearly is how God rescues and renews his creation. But the “getting to heaven” narrative, which is still massively popular and influential, is the teaching of middle Platonism, not the Bible. You will find it in Plutarch (e.g., in his treatise On Exile), not in Paul. Nor is this simply a matter of saying, “Oh well, let’s adjust the destination; then everything else will stay the same.” No! If you imagine you are a sinful soul needing to go to a holy heaven, your reading of the Bible, from Genesis onward, will be in terms of a moral scheme, in which—not to put too fine a point upon it—Western theology has put the knowledge of good and evil before the knowledge of God.

Although no self-respecting theologian or preacher would ever imply that God needed to kill someone, anyone, and it just happened to be his own Son, widespread testimony confirms that that is indeed what a great many, including young people, now assume that Christianity teaches. I do not believe in only teaching what people would like to hear. The scandal of the cross remains a scandal, but at least let us understand and preach the true scandal. As long as we persist in versions of the essentially pagan caricature, those who recognize it for what it is will either reject the whole story or they will do their best to find other approaches that play “Christus Victor” or “representation” or “moral example” or whatever off against substitution—or indeed, insisting on “substitution” and supposing that one must deny all other models in order to gain that point! Thereby they collapse the biblical narrative once more into a low-grade smorgasbord of “models,” from which one then needs to pick and choose.

Finally, to conclude, the meaning of the cross is the revelation of the divine love in action. Nobody is likely to disagree with that, but if you say this after offering the pagan soteriology, the darkness attains a new bitterness. When an angry, powerful person beats up someone else while saying, “I love you,” this is the stuff of nightmare, of sadism. Of course, what we need is a robust Trinitarian theology, which is what the whole New Testament and all the great theologians have struggled to give us. God was in the Messiah and reconciling the world to himself. “The Son of God loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). Jesus, having come from God and going to God, loved his own to the uttermost (see John 13:1). But this love is precisely the covenant love spoken of in Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and the Psalms, the covenant love of God for Israel and through Israel for all humans—and through humans for all creation. It means what it means within that biblical, Genesis-to-Revelation story.

Speaking of stories, perhaps I should be allowed a concluding one, which reveals the way that the cross powerfully leaps over barriers of incomprehension and becomes, in itself, the strong symbol of Christian apologetic. Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, a Jew by birth, was archbishop of Paris for the last quarter of the twentieth century. He once told a story about three boys in a provincial town who decided to play a trick on the local priest. They went into the confessional one by one, and they confessed to many weird and wonderful sins. The first two ran away laughing, but the priest, knowing what was going on, set the third one a penitence. “I want you,” he said, “to go up to that large statue of Jesus on the cross, and I want you to say, ‘You did all that for me, and I don’t give a damn.’” Off went the boy. This was all part of the game. He said it once, “You did all that for me, and I don’t give a damn.” Then he said it a second time. Then he found . . . that he couldn’t say it a third time. He broke down and left the church a changed person. “And the reason I know that sto...

First of all, the focus: God is reconciling people to himself. Second, the ultimate aim of God in reconciling people to himself: to bring glory to his name. Now I will come back to that ultimate aim at the end, but for the moment I am going to focus principally on this theme of God as reconciling people to himself.

Why have I started with Ezekiel 33–34? These passages exemplify an important tendency in the Bible, a tendency that some modern scholars are not happy about. That is the fact that all the way through Scripture, we see two aspects of God’s saving activity juxtaposed. On one side, we see liberation; on the other side, we see forgiveness of sins. In these passages, Ezekiel 33 records God’s promise: “None of the sins that they have committed will be remembered against them.” Then the next chapter (34) issues God’s declaration: “I am the LORD when I break the bars of their yoke and rescue them from the hands of those who enslave them.” Side by side we have the forgiveness of sins and liberation, breaking the enslaving bars. The Ezekiel passage we just looked at also has an important third dimension to it. That is what we saw in chapter 34, that God has appointed a representative whom he will use to effect this salvation. In this third dimension, David is that representative. “The LORD will be their God, and [his] servant David will be their shepherd.” God will save them, but David will tend the flock. This is not the historical David, who had been dead for several hundred years when Ezekiel was prophesying, but a future Davidic figure. Ezekiel was looking forward to that figure.

The last sentence of the book that I have written on the atonement8 is from the Gospels and is quoted in the old marriage service in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer: “Therefore, what God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Mark 10:9). One of the concerns that I had was to argue that scholars who try to make one of these themes into the main theme make the mistake of thinking that what they have discovered is the most interesting fact in the atonement and that everything else is therefore secondary.

Some make representation the key theme. Some make liberation the key theme. Some make one specific aspect of the Old Testament the key that unlocks the meaning of the atonement. Several of these scholars, and those on whom I focus in the book, argue that there is a particular key theme in the atonement, which therefore means that substitution cannot really be one of the central aspects of the atonement. What I try to do in Defending Substitution is to show that substitution is actually an integral part of what is meant in the atonement in the New Testament. Attempts to say that it is philosophically dubious or that it is morally outrageous—the classic rhetoric about cosmic child abuse or whatever—is just so much useless rhetoric and simply demonstrates the presuppositions and prejudices of scholars rather than having anything particularly to do with the New Testament. Although for many, substitution seems like a natural part of the atonement, in the academic culture in which I live it is something regarded with a lot of suspicion. In fact, one senior scholar has even argued that Paul, in 1 Corinthians, is attacking substitution rather than propounding it. As I was writing this b...