To limit atonement only to what
was accomplished when Jesus suffered and died leads to a reduction of the
significance of the incarnation to the crucifixion (see, e.g., Stibbs, who
identifies Jesus’s death as the purpose of the incarnation [Finished
Work, esp. 28]). This reduction also leads to a confusion of biblical
categories. The wide array of problems identified in Scripture that prevent
fellowship between God and humanity are, on such an account, all imagined as
being solved solely by means of Jesus’s suffering and death. Reconciliation,
redemption, propitiation, purification, and forgiveness, to name some of the
major biblical categories, basically become indistinguishable (if not in terms
of the problems they address, then in terms of the solutions given in Scripture
to those problems). If, instead of trying to lead everything onto the cross, we
allow that Jesus is in himself at the center of atonement (Jesus is the
solution to all the problems that separate God and humanity, not the death of
Jesus), then the entirety of the incarnation—Jesus’s birth, life, suffering,
death, resurrection, ascension, and return—can be seen to contribute in
particular ways to the atonement. Importantly, such an account would
allow for distinct biblical problems to be solved by distinct aspects of the
larger sweep of the incarnation. In the case of atoning sacrifice, rather than
forcing this to be fundamentally about suffering and death, which Leviticus
simply does not support (something that should matter if one wishes to avoid
theologies that are essentially Gnostic and/or Marcionite), one could identify
ways in which the logic of Jewish sacrifice and high-priestly ministry resolve
particular problems that hinder divine-human relations without assuming that
these solve all the problems. (David M. Moffitt, Rethinking the Atonement:
New Perspectives on Jesus’s Death, Resurrection, and Ascension [Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2022], 146-47 n. 28)
One needs, too, to take seriously
the possibility that the self-evidence of a reduction of all of Jesus’s
sacrificial and atoning work to the cross is both anachronistic and in danger
of leading to a kind of diminution of the importance of Jewish Scripture, and
practices for early Christian understandings of Jesus. This is still a long way
from Marcion, but there are nevertheless real theological concern that need to
be borne in mind if one wants to confess that the God who revealed the tabernacle,
priesthood, and sacrificial system to Moses is the same God who appointed Jesus
to the status of sacrifice and high priest according to the order of
Melchizedek but that the God meant something entirely different by the terms
“sacrifice” and “high priest” than what he revealed to his people in the Mosaic
law. (Ibid., 150 n. 35)
