The Winnipeg Free Press faith reporter John Longhurst asked me to put some thoughts together on the subject of atonement to assist him in an article he was writing for Holy Week. Longhurst’s column can be found here. He has also posted the reference article I wrote for him in its entirety on his blog, here.
Tag Archives: Crucifixion
Jean Vanier and the Wounds of Jesus
Earlier today, Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche movement, died at the Maison Médicale Jeanne Garnier in Paris. The official announcement from L’Arche can be read here and reports from various new agencies are beginning to appear, including that of the CBC here. Continue reading Jean Vanier and the Wounds of Jesus
Proclaiming the Crucifixion
The following is the conclusion to a lecture I recently gave, entitled “Parsing the Grammar of Atonement.”
All of the biblical metaphors for atonement are needed. They serve as necessary imaginative windows into the utterly irreducible reality of the reconciliation accomplished in the person of Christ. “The metaphors,” Colin Gunton observes, “are the means by which it is possible to speak of the meaning of the gospel narratives taken as a whole.”1 This quotation from Gunton is helpful as it gestures towards two significant aspects of how metaphors function, both of which are sometimes forgotten when the metaphors are pressed in an overly theorized direction. Continue reading Proclaiming the Crucifixion
- Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 42. ↩