Waxing Theological

It's been a busy couple months for my family and I - I had hoped to write some more posts exploring the models of atonement, but between traveling to New York to visit family and then taking time at Covenant Point to participate with our local church camp, things got away from me.  My goal is to make some time in the next several weeks now to continue this exploration more fully! In the first entry we started by exploring what atonement is, and then went in-depth with the most common model that we see in both Catholic and Protestant churches: Satisfaction/Penal Atonement.  We see how the Satisfaction model stacks up, both its pros and its cons, and we see that it is still the most commonly-known and used model of atonement in our culture today.  But if this model isn't... pardon the pun... satisfactory, then what other models have been proposed, and how do they look, instead? As we noted earlier, Anselm kicked much of this debate off because he was unhappy with t...

A friend of mine recently posted a video that's pretty interesting - thought I'd share it to give context before getting deeper into this exploration.  It comes from www.fallingplates.com - it's an interesting evangelism website and the video itself uses some pretty compelling visuals and metaphors to explore the relationship we are invited into with Christ and the way in which Christ brings us back into relationship with God:     As I said - my friend shared this with me and she asked my thoughts.  Naturally, my seminary brain kicked in.  I said it's a good video, but commented on its use of penal atonement theology in talking about the crucifixion.  In my conversation with this friend, I realized that this is one of those things we talk about in seminary, but don't really talk about much in the "outside" world, so I decided that rather than try to handle this in a small post on Facebook, I'd do a larger exploration of "atonement t...