Model Cars Are Not Cars (And Theories of Atonement Are Not Atonement)

If you mistake a model car for a real car, you’re going to have problems. I spent much of my life making that mistake in my thinking about atonement. I had read that “God’s justice requires that a penalty be paid for every sin” and that “to atone is to suffer the penalty for sins, thereby removing the effects of sin from the repentant sinner and allowing him or her to be reconciled to God.” I was in my mid-thirties when I discovered that this penal substitution idea is one of many different theories of what atonement is all about. Furthermore, there were welldeveloped criticisms of penal substitution theory—and they were good ones. I became desperate to find out what atonement really meant. I’d like to write about what, for me, was a major step forward in this struggle: realizing that I’d been conflating models of atonement with atonement itself. Many readers may have separated those two things much earlier in life than I did, or even take that separation for granted, but for me it was a difficult paradigm to break out of. Even after I started studying theories of atonement, I treated them like competing descriptions of some historical event—like conflicting eyewitness accounts of