Below is an abstract of a new essay, the full text of which you can download at this link.
Abstract
This essay examines and challenges an influential agenda that relativizes theories of atonement toward irrelevance. The agenda originates in John Bowker’s simile likening atonement theories to lymphocytes: like white blood cells that take their shape from whatever antigen they encounter, atonement theories are “solutions looking for a problem,” each molded to fit the particular spiritual crisis its culture identifies most acutely. Seen through this lens, the great historic models—Ransom, Christus Victor, Theosis, Anselmic Satisfaction, Penal Substitution, Lutheran Vicarious Satisfaction, Moral Influence, and Governmental—become not rival accounts of a timeless truth but a succession of differently shaped antibodies, each indexed to its age and destined to lose relevance as that age passes. The implication is corrosive: if every theory is merely problem-shaped and society-originated, then there is no timeless human problem and no timeless divine solution, and atonement itself eventually vanishes into insignificance.
The essay first distinguishes the lymphocyte image from ordinary contextualization, which expresses a fixed, pre-existing message in the language of a culture without altering its content. The lymphocyte image makes the stronger claim that the perceived problem actively forms the solution, generating plurality, contingency, and a deflationary suspicion of every model.
The essay then turns to Alan Mann’s Atonement for a Sinless Society as a case study. Mann argues that modern people no longer relate to “sin” but instead suffer chronic shame arising from an incoherent self, a gap between the ideal self one narrates and the actual self one lives. His remedy, here named “Narrated Self-Coherence,” offers Jesus’ coherent self-narration, supremely in the Eucharist, as a story into which the divided self can be re-authored. The essay contends that Mann half-acknowledges his own theory to be one more lymphocyte: he adopts Bowker’s diagnostic logic and applies it to displace penal substitution yet never confesses that his own model is equally provisional and bound for obsolescence. Worse, in resisting metanarratives, Mann inadvertently constructs a super-metanarrative that narrates the rise and fall of all atonement theories, his own included. His theory is also shown to be subjective (locating the problem intra nos), narrowly defined, and unable even to claim universal help.
Against this bleak prospect, the essay proposes a more hopeful alternative grounded in Lutheran theology. First, rather than abandoning the word “sin,” it urges learning the language of original sin as confessed in the Augsburg Confession, since God’s Word itself has the living power to teach what sin is. Second, it commends Christ’s universal, objective vicarious satisfaction, which addresses sin as a real offense extra nos and lifts from sinners the burden of self-salvation. Third, it argues that Lutheran vicarious satisfaction does not solve only one problem but grounds a manifold atonement: drawing on Dierks, Peters, Pieper, and Kilcrease—and on Luther’s Large Catechism— it shows how Christ’s satisfaction of the Law’s guilt reverses the verdict that gave the tyrants of sin, death, and the devil their grip, thereby harmonizing vicarious satisfaction with Christus Victor in a single, enduring work.
