Atonement: the Rite of Healing

There has recently been a number of books on the Christian understanding of atonement. What has been fascinating for me is the extent to which these books do, or more often do not, use the Old Testament material on atonement as the basis for what they have to say. The New Testament speaks in a variety of ways about atonement, and this has become the centre of Christian dogmatics; but this ‘atonement’ is only loosely related to its Old Testament roots. Did the first Christians, then, radically alter what was understood by atonement, or was this radical alteration made by subsequent expositors of their ideas? The latter is more likely; in other words, the original model for New Testament theology has been lost.