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

by N.T. Wright

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.