The Sunday Pages | 005

What happened on the cross?

The Sunday Pages is a weekly newsletter for paid subscribers that rounds up five interesting links for the week, recommends a book with highlights of about a dozen meaningful quotes from the book, and includes occasional updates on personal projects.

If the cross is the central event of Christianity, it’s probably important to know what it did. What happened on the cross? What did Jesus actually do there? Obviously, this is the realm of atonement theories.

A lot of people were brought up with a penal substitutionary-only model of atonement. A lot of people have decided to reject that model, some of them in favor of something more like Christus Victor. It was reading the longer and more academic version of this book that helped me understand that choosing between those models is a false dichotomy. It helped bring the cross and the kingdom together in a way that I had never heard before. So I got excited that this book exists and is a smaller, simpler lay-level version of the more academic book. This is my go-to book on the atonement now.

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