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Category - atonement

  • 29 Mar 2013
    Good Friday: Is Christianity life-giving or death dealing?

    Christians need to re-envision the meaning of the Cross in history and in our culture, such that we are equipped to go and do the Gospel that shapes us in a confused, broken, unjust and often violent world, says Simon Barrow. This will help us see that it is not true that the only ‘weapons’ at the Church's disposal are not the coercive ones wielded by our opponents. Rather, God’s cross points to the resources of suffering love that only the God of life can offer, because they are ‘beyond our means’ humanly, but not beyond divine gifting.

  • 29 Mar 2013
    Burying enmity: the language of the Cross

    Much has been written about the meaning of the cross, a subject on which Christians hold varying views, says Savitri Hensman. In Christ’s sacrifice, the true horror is exposed and the hope of a different way of life revealed. This can be difficult to comprehend, but it cannot be ignored or sidelined.

  • 1 Dec 2011
    Salvation in Christianity and Islam

    What are the different accounts of salvation given in Christian and Muslim thinking? What is involved in forgiveness? What do Christians mean when they speak of atonement through Christ?

  • 28 Oct 2011
    Cross is about love not crusades, says world churches' chief

    The cross "is not for crusades but a sign of God’s love embracing everybody", the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches says.

  • 23 Apr 2011
    What sense does it make to say 'Christ died for us'?

    How, we may ask on Good Friday, can wholeness, deliverance and healing possibly flow from a state execution resulting in the unjust violent death of a good person - one in whom his friends and followers felt they had met divine love at its most tangible and engaging? Simon Barrow explores the troubling mystery at the core of Christian belief, and looks at ways theology can address it intellectually, humanly and practically.

  • 4 Apr 2010
    Christians at cross purposes

    Conflicting views of the meaning of the crucifixion have led to strikingly different patterns of behaviour among Christian believers, says Jonathan Bartley. Damaging understandings of atonement have tragic consequences for healthy Christian witness and performance.

  • 2 Apr 2010
    Good Friday: travelling towards hope

    The seventh and final installment in a series of 2010 Lent and Holy Week blogs from Willard Roth focusing on places of particular spiritual intensity and interest across Britain and Ireland.

  • 12 Apr 2009
    The cross is anti-sacrificial

    The Cross of Christ is God's identification with the victim, says Giles Fraser. It abolishes the order of sin and death by abolishing sacrifice, not sanctifying it.

  • 10 Apr 2009
    Crucifixion and Abu Ghraib

    The crucifixion reminds us that God is well acquainted with places like Abu Ghraib, says Jennifer Halteman Schrock. May the suffering that Christ endured while on trial as a “terrorist” fill us with compassion.

  • 27 Jun 2008
    Common sense, mercy and sacrifice

    Much religion is dripping in sacrificial language, says Keith Walton. The appeasement of the gods is a common theme in many traditions. But in the biblical tradition, love that does justice becomes the core of a new perspective, based on a different understanding of who God is.