If you read the FCM Informer, you should have received a copy of Christ’s Atonement of Blood, by Chris Good, in your mailbox recently. Good wrote this paper fifteen years ago, but FCM recently published it in booklet form because “the atonement issue has re-emerged as an even more important watershed in current Anabaptist thought.”
My critique of Sacrifice or Penalty? in the January/February issue exemplifies this re-emerging concern. And, while I lacked both space and clarity to give an adequate response, Good handles the topic with smooth familiarity. The booklet is scholarly, but not lengthy and should be manageable for anyone if read slowly.
“Other doctrines are immediately textured in correlation to one’s view of what happened on the cross,” Good begins. In the most literal sense, this is the crux of Christianity. Good divides his paper into five chapters, beginning with definitions of sin and atonement, then describing and analyzing various atonement theories, and finally looking at Anabaptist perspectives of the atonement and theology in general.
Good offers neither a simplistic catch-all answer nor a wishy-washy hesitant one. Rather, he recognizes the strengths and weaknesses of various theories while firmly holding to those facts that must be true. I believe that is where we must all land eventually. Should we try to make sense of the atonement and other doctrines? Absolutely. But we must hold our pet theological theories loosely and the words of Scripture unequivocally.
There is a bigger concern here that merely clarifying our positon on the atonement does not solve. This discussion exposes a broader weakness in Anabaptist thought, which Good addresses briefly in the last chapter. It is this: Anabaptists have “a penchant for our uniqueness, which often swerves close and sometimes crosses the line into heresy.” We recognize the errors of Calvinist penal substitution, but in our sweeping rejection of Calvinism we sometimes throw out a bit too much. Often we confidently position ourselves off the beaten path of Christian orthodoxy in an effort to emphasize our separation. We prioritize practical Christian living, but look askance at the theology undergirding what we do.
My primary concern is that this pamphlet is merely introductory. Several times Good acknowledges that much remains unsaid. Yes, introduction is necessary to stir us to thought, but we must go beyond that. We need Anabaptist thinkers and writers and, yes, theologians willing to lay out not just what we should do, but what we should believe. And that brings us again to the beginning where we must “embrace and proclaim the evangelical atonement gospel.”