I’m getting ready for “The Cross in the New Testament,” a course I’ve been teaching once or twice a year since coming to Fuller. One question we wrestle with has to do with atonement models.
How do we understand how the death of Jesus works as a saving event? 
The way we answer that question has rather significant implications. It lies at the root of the universal versus limited atonement debate (did Jesus die for everyone or just for those who will eventually put their faith in him)? It impacts how we share the gospel–did Jesus take the punishment you deserved when he died on the cross? And, of course, the extent of salvation–is there a hell, and if so, does it have a population?
In addition to all this, the way we talk about how Jesus’ death works will either foster or curtail our ability to connect it back to Jesus’ ministry and our own lives. What does the ministry of Jesus have to do with his death? (What’s the connection between kingdom and cross?) And, what does this death and life have to do with the lives we are called to live? Is there a coherent narrative that runs from life through death and resurrection and even into the life of the Christian community?
The most common take on Jesus’ death in contemporary evangelicalism is probably penal substitution: Jesus took our penalty for us and thus frees us from condemnation.
Once we start probing this, however, there are two significant problems. One is exegetical and the other is theological/pastoral.
The exegetical problem is that a strong “penal substitution” reading both depends upon and creates interpretations of biblical passages that do not actually work.
Take, for example, the ransom saying in Mark 10: The son of man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
When we approach this with a strong penal substitution framework, we read it as an indication that Jesus dies in our stead, to remove the penalty incurred by our guilt.
But this is not what the word “ransom” typically means.
While a penalty refers to what is paid to someone who is guilty, the word “ransom” trades on a different metaphor, a metaphor of captivity. The difference between penal substitution and ransom is that the former envisions the person as a guilty, condemned prisoner needing to pay the court; the latter envisions a person as taken hostage. Are hostages guilty criminals needing to pay a penalty to secure their freedom? No, the guilty party is the one who has ensnared them and is requiring a ransom for the hostage’s freedom.
Even the allusion to Isa 53 that may be generated by Mark 10 does not necessarily mean that Mark is envisioning Jesus’ death in terms of penal substitution.
There are passages that point toward something like penal substitution. This is just an example that the Bible doesn’t always say what we think it does, and that our assumption can deeply color our reading.
So where do I go with my understanding of atonement?
I am working with a category I’ve been referring to as “cosmic restoration.”
The goal I’m trying to achieve with this is to create a category that is both specific enough to communicate something significant and yet broad enough to encompass the full breadth of the saving work of Christ in both cross and resurrection.
There are powers to be defeated. There is guilt to be expiated. There is a humanity that needs to be reconciled to God. There is a creation groaning in the pains of childbirth. And there are people who are living within the systemic failure of the world in individual and corporate alienation from one another, from God, and from the created order.
Any viable model of atonement will have to encompass all of this. And, once it does, we might find some of our old questions reframed. More on that soon.
The gospel of the crucified Messiah is not merely “forgiven sinner,” but “new creation.”
The beginning of the first Advent was not the announcement to Mary, or to Joseph, by the angel. It was the work of the Holy Spirit. 
