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.
