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: Crucifixion
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Exploring the Meaning of Jesus’s Death
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Jean Vanier and the Wounds of Jesus
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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. Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 42.] 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. (more…)
