January/February 2001 Religion & Theology Features

ARTICLE TOOLS

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With this essay we begin a series devoted to the atonement. Perhaps no doctrine has been more central to evangelical theology, yet today among evangelicals, as among orthodox Christians more generally, one often hears that the classical understanding of this doctrine is deeply flawed, that we must "rethink the atonement." Is that really so? The essays in this series will consider such questions.

It has become a fairly common practice in recent years for scholars to criticize traditional Christian doctrines for the ways in which they purportedly promote and reinforce unhealthy human practices. This mode of critique is especially attractive to those thinkers who like to probe beneath the surface of what to many of us are the obvious meanings of theories and stories, for what they insist are the "subtexts" in which the operating motives and projects are made plain. Marxism has long thrived on this kind of analysis. Its adherents have insisted, for example, that while oppressed people who sing hymns about the afterlife may sincerely believe in a glorious future heavenly existence, what is "really" going on is that they have internalized a story that is designed to make them passively accept the political-economic status quo. The Freudians employ a parallel strategy for understanding religious belief, insisting that, for example, the desire for divine forgiveness is a conscious effort to resolve an unconscious Oedipal conflict. And it is not unusual these days to encounter folks who reject, say, the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, not on the grounds that it is "unscientific" to believe in a miracle of that sort, but because it promotes an image of passive and servile femininity. Or the idea of divine transcendence will be attacked ...