The response Jack Spong made to a question that was put to him on atonement:

[Name withheld], via the Internet writes:

In your answer of May 10, 2006, you wrote, “I see Christianity at its heart as deeply humanistic. The core doctrines of the Christian faith suggest that God is revealed through a human life…so I see secular humanism as the residual remains of Christianity once the supernatural elements have been removed.” In the next paragraph, you say you do not think “the supernatural understanding of God is essential to Christianity.”

In your answer of May 3, 2006, you reject “the interpretation of Jesus’ death as a sacrifice required by God to overcome the sins of the world” as making God “barbaric” and “Jesus the victim of a sadistic deity.” This “deeply violates the essential note of the Gospel, which is that God is love calling us to love” and is not “found in the pious but destructive phrase, ‘Jesus died for my sins.'”

My question is: If Jesus did not die on the cross to atone for humanity’s sins, why did he have to die to bring us the message that “God is love, calling us to love”?

Dear [friend],

First, let me say that you have rightly summarized my thinking, for which I am grateful.

Second, this understanding does challenge the traditional understanding of the cross as the place where the price of our redemption was paid and leaves many people with a gaping vacuum at the center of their understanding of Christianity. You have articulated that well.

I believe what you need to do is to free yourself of the theistic God who lives above the sky and who guides human history to accomplish the divine will. That mentality forces us to find purpose in everything. Locked into this view of God, the early Christians sought to find purpose in the cross. That is how we got substitutionary theories of the atonement and began to view the cross through the lens of the sacrificial Day of Atonement that the Jews called Yom Kippur. In the liturgy of Yom Kippur a perfect Lamb of God was slain. Its blood spread on the mercy seat of the Holy of Holies that was thought of as God’s place of occupation. Therefore, to come to God, people had to come through the blood of the lamb. Then a second animal was brought out and the priest began to confess the sins of the people. As the priest confessed, the sins of the people were thought to leave the people and land on the back and head of this animal. Then burdened with the sins of the people, this animal was driven into the wilderness. The sin bearer (called ‘the scape goat’) thus carried the sins of the people away. Both the sacrificial lamb and the sin-bearing goat became symbols by which Jesus was understood. In our liturgies today, we still say “O Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”

If that understanding is removed from the cross, as I believe it must be, then questions like ‘What is the meaning of the cross?’ and ‘Why did Jesus die?’ become perennial questions. Take purpose out of them and what is left is a picture of a free man – whole, complete, with his life being taken cruelly from him. In the portrait painted in the gospels of the cross, the dying Jesus speaks a word of forgiveness to the soldiers who drive the nails. He speaks a word of encouragement to the thief who is portrayed as penitent. He speaks a word of comfort to his mother in her bereavement. Whether these are historical memories or not is not important to me and I do not think any of them literally happened. They are, however, expressions of the corporate memory of Jesus. Here was a life being put to death unjustly but instead of clinging to his fleeting existence, he is still giving life away. That is a picture of a new level of human consciousness. The cross reveals for me the infinite love of God calling the world and me to a new humanity, calling us beyond survival toward the deepest secrets of transcendence. That is what the cross means to me and it moves me deeply.

I hope this helps you.

John Shelby Spong