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

by N.T. Wright

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 Creator God really was, is, and will be. Thus, fifth, Jesus’ death launches, as a great act of cosmic and global revolution, the new world in which—with the grip of the powers broken—freedom, forgiveness, and new creation can flourish and abound, confronting all the power systems that still depend on id...