THE ATONEMENT SERIES: PART 1
[Click here for the companion YouTube video]
QUESTION: Sinful nature and sinful actions result in a broken relationship with God. Christ’s atoning work allows for this broken relationship to be healed. How do you personally think that Christ’s atoning work did this? For a Christian, what is the relative importance of the how of the Atonement as compared to the what of the Atonement?
C.S. Lewis (Clive Staples, 1898–1963) is best known for his The Chronicles of Narnia books but was also a highly impactful Christian apologist. His most popular apologetic works include The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity, but he also published many others. Lewis is not considered by many as an academic theologian but did have some original theological ideas such as his theory of atonement as presented in Mere Christianity. The following reading about the atoning work of Christ is from Mere Christianity, where he distinguishes belief in the Atonement itself as compared to theories of the Atonement.
READING: We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative. This man we are talking about [Jesus] either was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic, or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God. God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form. And now, what was the purpose of it all? What did he come to do? Well, to teach, of course; but as soon as you look into the New Testament or any other Christian writing you will find they are constantly talking about something different—about His death and His coming to life again. It is obvious that Christians think the chief point of the story lies there. They think the main thing He came to earth to do was to suffer and be killed.
Now before I became a Christian, I was under the impression that the first thing Christians had to believe was one particular theory as to what the point of this dying was. According to that theory God wanted to punish men for having deserted and joined the Great Rebel, but Christ volunteered to be punished instead, and so God let us off. Now I Eddington. What they do when they want to explain the atom, or something of that sort, is to give you a description out of which you can make a mental picture. But then they warn you that this picture is not what the scientists actually believe. What the scientists believe is a mathematical formula. The pictures are there only to help you to understand the formula. They are not really true in the way the formula is; they do not give you the real thing but only something more or less like it. They are only meant to help, and if they do not help you can drop them. The thing itself cannot be pictured, it can only be expressed mathematically. We are in the same boat here. We believe that the death of Christ is just that point in history at which something absolutely unimaginable from outside shows through into our own world. And if we cannot picture even the atoms of which our own world is built, of course we are not going to be able to picture this. Indeed, if we found that we could fully understand it, that very fact would show it was not what it professes to be—the inconceivable, the uncreated, the thing from beyond nature, striking down into nature like lightning. You may ask what good it will be to us if we do not understand it. But that is easily answered. A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.
We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself. [C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 2, Ch. 4]
Leave a Reply