“atonement, which I just don’t get”
That’s probably a good thing.
Andrew Xian Nyhärt, _The God Who Never Flinched: Reclaiming the Cross as Covenant, Not Appeasement_ (2025), 202pp., on 59
amazon.com/God-Who-Never-Flinched-Appeasement/dp/B0FGP39D8H/
Across nearly every era of Christian history, brilliant minds have wrestled with the mystery of the cross.
Each generation reached for the categories it knew best– legal, political, philosophical, or anthropological– and from these materials constructed what we now call atonement theories.
These models have sought to explain how the cross works: what it accomplishes, what problem it solves, what exchange takes place in the economy of salvation.
Yet nearly all of them, for all their sophistication and influence, share a devastating blind spot:
they do not speak of covenant.
…these theories… reflect the cultural assumptions of their times more than the covenantal patterns of the Bible.
Stephen, people can go back and forth without end on the historical ledger of Christianity’s good and bad effects. The very sharp question, for me, is the one you raised in post 22: if the Christian claims are true, why is the fruit so often obscured among Christians themselves? As a Christian I do not want to dodge that. There are familiar replies one can reach for, but I would rather not reach for one here. If Christ is true, then the ways Christians have obscured him are not a side issue. They are part of the burden Christians have to face.
Tjalling said
Stephen, people can go back and forth without end on the historical ledger of Christianity’s good and bad effects. The very sharp question, for me, is the one you raised in post 22: if the Christian claims are true, why is the fruit so often obscured among Christians themselves? As a Christian I do not want to dodge that. There are familiar replies one can reach for, but I would rather not reach for one here. If Christ is true, then the ways Christians have obscured him are not a side issue. They are part of the burden Christians have to face.
Ideally this would be one of those disputes best conducted amongst believers themselves but as an interested outsider it is a bit surprising how seldom this kind of internal discussion takes place. Leaving it up to the outsider robs the critique of most of its force.
Stephen said
Ideally this would be one of those disputes best conducted amongst believers themselves but as an interested outsider it is a bit surprising how seldom this kind of internal discussion takes place. Leaving it up to the outsider robs the critique of most of its force.
I think that is fair.
Part of why it happens so seldom, I suspect, is that the question is genuinely uncomfortable from the inside. It seems easy for church life to become listening, agreeing, and going home, while what Christ cares about in Matthew 25 remains less central than it should be: feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, visiting the prisoner, caring for the least of these. These are not marginal illustrations.
I also wonder whether grace is sometimes received as reassurance without being allowed to become discipleship. If Christians have to be reminded of this mostly from the outside, something has already gone wrong. I do say that as one of the things that troubles me most from within it.
It is true though that sometimes the dispassionate outsider may notice things about ourselves that we have obscured or rationalized away. My own view, having been once fully inside the community and now fully outside the community, is that most believers want to both eat their cake and have it. What I mean by that is they are unwilling to confront the radical demands made by the gospels. If their message is in any way close to what Jesus actually taught then he demands the believer make a choice. Most believers want to be Christians but also fully successful members of their society and fully share the values of their culture. Jesus said that was impossible.
Yes Stephen, I agree that “Follow me” is not a harmless slogan. I would only add that it is hard for me to imagine that being near Jesus was only burden or demand. It must also have been good to be with him, in the ordinary sense in which a day with fresh fish and wine can simply be very good 
Robert, I agree. I did not mean to suggest otherwise. I was speaking about a tendency I recognize in ordinary church life, including forms I know.
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