At the heart of the Christian religion is the claim that the death of Jesus of Nazareth saves people.  Depending on your brand of Christianity, you may have been taught that this means a very specific thing…and ONLY that thing.  Most Protestant Christians, and especially evangelicals, follow the logic of penal substitutionary atonement.  A big phrase but easy to break down:

Penal = punishment.  God’s wrath at human sin required punishment, specifically, death.

Substitutionary = exchange.  We were supposed to receive God’s punishment, but Jesus took our place on the cross.

Atonement = at-one-ment.  This action makes us one with God because God’s sense of justice over our sin has been satisfied by Jesus.

If you’ve spent any time in a Protestant church, you have sung about the blood of Jesus, or Jesus taking your place, the wrath of God, you being a worm or wretch, or something about you specifically being the one who nailed Jesus to the cross.  Most evangelicals have come to believe that this is the ONLY way to understand the death of Jesus, even though Christians didn’t really believe this until it was introduced by Martin Luther and fine tuned by John Calvin in the 1500s, and wildly popularized by John Wesley in the 1700s.

The reality is, this is just one atonement theory of many.  The wide span of Christianity across the centuries and geography has used many different metaphors to describe why the death of Jesus was important.  And all of these are just that: theories and metaphors…rooted in culture and time.  Poetic interpretations of some cosmic spiritual event that we have no real language for otherwise.

While one person may find the concept of penal substitution to be deeply moving (Christ died…for ME?!), many others are finding it to be more and more problematic, so much so that folks are rejecting the faith entirely.  The logic of penal substitution doesn’t hold well…making God to feel more like a villain with an arbitrary sense of anger and hatred and a penchant for child abuse.  Penal substitution can feel more like a mythological Greek god story than something of real eternal significance.

One approach is to completely challenge or defy penal substitutionary atonement.  A common approach of deconstructionists is to utterly reject and speak out against the harm done by evangelicals who insist on this atonement theory.  This critique is valuable, especially for those of us who have developed a toxic amount of shame and guilt after a lifetime of being raised in it.

For anyone wrestling with their faith and a growing unease if not outright rejection of penal substitution, I encourage you to explore other atonement theories that have been handed down over the centuries.  This week’s comic is poking fun at both penal substitution and one of the earliest beliefs, ransom theory, where humanity was literally held for ransom by the devil like we were kidnap victims, and Jesus paid the price to set us free.

Maybe we could hold our atonement theories lightly.  Sometimes these metaphors are quite helpful for finding meaning in the Christ story, sometimes they don’t do much for us, and sometimes they can legitimately mess us up.  But each of them is just that: a theory.  A theory someone may put their entire faith in, but a theory nevertheless.

As you wrestle to make meaning of your life and the world, may you find humor and wonder in it all, and maybe we find an atonement theory that sets us free from the religious trauma many of us have felt from an insistence that penal substitution is the only way to approach God and the Christ mystery.