The Atonement of Love

As an exceedingly earnest missionary in the early 1990s, I found myself transfixed by one prominent story about the Atonement. It had to do with the way that our individual sins affected Christ’s suffering. I knew then with perfect clarity that every time I committed a minor deviation from the White Bible (the then-current missionary handbook, a pocket-sized rule book binding missionaries across the church), I was pounding a nail into Christ’s battered flesh on the cross at Golgotha. With each tiny sin—staying 61 minutes at a dinner, say—I was directly responsible for a new portion of Christ’s terrible punishment. This image played a part in a scrupulousness that made me impossible to live with as a missionary. I tried to skip Preparation Day so that I could keep proselytizing; I never told (or laughed at) jokes; I memorized huge swaths of scripture. I could not escape the feeling that my mortal inadequacy brutalized the suffering Christ.

That searing image motivated me to magnificent productivity as a young missionary: no one worked harder than I did. And now I wonder. I find myself asking lately: is that actually how the Atonement works? Why, in the final account, did Christ suffer in the Garden and on the Hill? In what sense might I and my sins have been present with him in one or both of those places? As I navigate life’s middle places, I find that the answers to these questions that resonate with me now are different from those that resonated with the young Elder Brown. I’m not looking for permission to be religiously less committed; nor am I bothered by the possibility that external standards might in fact apply to me. I just keep staring at Atonement and wondering what all it contains.

Atonement is one of the most basic problems to vex Christians over the millennia. I think that because it is both so basic and so vast, Atonement leaves most of us befuddled. The cruel death of Jesus Christ is certainly one of the stranger twists in history and theology, and many believe that this vulnerability of a God stands at the center of the Christian revolution. No one but the Christians, it seems, was eager to worship a God so fragile, so weak, so vulnerable. Wikipedia, that electric menagerie of the stupid and the useful, counts approximately nine distinct theories of Atonement. More sophisticated treatments than Wikipedia may favor greater or lesser numbers of Atonement theories depending on their theological emphasis and whether they like their categories big or small. 

In our Restoration tradition, for example, the philosopher-attorney Blake Ostler has carefully summarized four Latter-day Saint theories of Atonement. Something as earth-shattering and paradigm-breaking as Atonement is going to generate much wonder, confusion, and wobbly words. Some ancient authors saw Christ as a “ransom” paid to liberate us from captivity to Satan. Other thinkers saw Christ’s death as meeting the mandates of something like a law that we humans had broken, a vicarious punishment. Others saw Atonement as a graciously persuasive act, with Christ demonstrating a willingness to give of himself that we should emulate. The late English professor and peacemaking activist, Gene England, promoted within Latter-day Saint thought this “moral suasion” model of Atonement ultimately attributed to the medieval theologian Peter Abelard. There are many possible paths to the reconciliation of God and humanity; these theories of Atonement point out several of those paths.

My best guess is that we Latter-day Saints favor substitutionary or penal understandings of Atonement. That’s the one I heard most often in the late twentieth century, more often than not tied up in a theory that sounded more Star Wars than Scripture, in which every molecule in the universe actively demanded that justice be served. I don’t hear that theory—the anti-Communist Cleon Skousen’s strange adaptation of Orson Pratt’s panpsychism—much anymore, but I still remember that image of atoms clamoring for blood at a galactic tribunal. Stripped of Skousen’s filigree, though, penal substitution mostly maintains that we mortals have a just and overwhelming punishment awaiting us because we have broken a law. But our hopelessness is remedied by an unusual feature of this law: a willing substitute can bear the penalty in our place. That’s what makes a savior. On this account, Christ acted something like the distraught father who confesses to a crime in order to take his son’s place on the gallows.

This approach to Atonement may sound strange to a late-modern ear—all this talk about punishment and sin and violated cosmic order doesn’t sound the same as it once did. We late-moderns are often deeply unsympathetic to the underlying worlds in which this theory made deep and satisfying sense. And I’m not arguing that we should abandon it. The penal substitution model still has much to recommend it. There is a sense in which right is in fact right and our distance from rightness needs to be healed. No matter how much we late-modern folk squirm about external standards, in our hearts I think most of us still sense that we could be better than we are. And we feel painful shame and longing when we acknowledge the moral distance between who we are and who we might be. Penal substitution takes these facts square on and proposes a solution.

We should acknowledge, too, the emotional heft of the penal substitution theory. The image of Christ taking lashes for us is a sacred and moving one. My heart breaks at the thought of a soul-deep love that could motivate Christ to sacrifice health and happiness for me. I’m not as ready as many another modern believer to abandon the penal understanding of Atonement, and I’ll never be ready to accuse those who believe it of heartlessness. It is not cruel to yearn for a world of order and meaning that may call us to be better than we would otherwise be. We don’t have to imagine that God is cruel to believe that God may need to transform us, and that transformation may be difficult, even painful, for all involved. The theology is deep here, deeper than any easy answers.

But still, I wonder. What if this idea of penal substitution doesn’t capture the vastness of Christ’s sacrifice? What if our vision has been blurred by conflicting modern concepts of bureaucratic uniformity, personal identity, and individualism? What if there is another form and aspect of relation at play in Atonement? The longer I’ve spent wrestling with these topics, the more convinced I am that we as Latter-day Saints have access to a more profound sense of identity-in-community than we have generally confessed. And that more basic principle may hold the key to a broader understanding of Atonement as the transformative identity of humans and Gods. 

Latter-day Saint theologians have made important progress in this century toward a Restoration theology of Atonement. Blake Ostler sketched out a mixed theory of Atonement he called Compassionate in the middle aughts. The feminist philosopher and Kierkegaard scholar Deidre Green argued that Ostler was still too indebted to penal models. Green focused especially on the hypothetical risk that, for Ostler, repentance transferred suffering to Christ and might thereby induce believers—especially women who may be more prone to self-sacrifice—to refuse to repent in the interests of saving Christ the pain of their repented sin. (My younger self would probably have agreed with them.) Green’s criticism led Ostler to a cleaner and more persuasive elaboration of his Compassion theory of Atonement. Admitting inevitable differences, Ostler’s account overlapped some with an account by the engineer-blogger Jacob Morgan, who saw the light of Christ as an “infusion” which transformed and saved believers. I am grateful for these recent accounts focused on the experience of compassion and the brass tacks of shared life among mortal and divine souls. They are helpful antecedents to what I see as an Atonement of Love.

As I see it, Atonement is intimately tied to the miracle of Incarnation, what the Book of Mormon calls Christ’s condescension. Christ, being divine, became human. He condescended to join us in mortality. Incarnation and condescension aren’t identical terms, but they’re quite close: Atonement is about humans becoming divine, while Incarnation is about the divine becoming human. The two meet in Christ.

Note that Incarnation already marks Christ as mortal, with critical ramifications. Joining us in mortality means that Christ becomes vulnerable to mortality’s indignities, including illness and death. Why did Jesus have to die? That part seems simple: because he was human. Being born means having to die. That’s what mortal means. But by the time Christ gave up the ghost as an adult, that work was already done. He’d been mortal for decades by then.

I have just begged a critical question: In saying that Christ died because he was human, I didn’t ask why he became human in the first place. My best guess is that he became human because Divinity has to enter the world somehow. Otherwise we are left godless, just bits of matter that pass through some imagined awareness and then disappear back into the entropic mist that will one day culminate in the heat death of the universe. Without the entry of Divinity into the world, we are just stardust that thinks it can think and pretends it can matter. But how does the chasm between the thinly material world of people and the glorious realm of Divinity get bridged? That’s what Atonement is concerned with. The problem of Incarnation is fundamentally a question about whether divine transcendence (perhaps as spiritually fine matter; perhaps as more than that) can enter our coarse and fallen world. That seems straightforward enough, even traditional, as an answer. And it strikes me as probably true. Christ is the affirmative answer to the question: can God be present with us in this world? That divine presence, that Immanuel, is Christ’s human life.

But we still haven’t gotten to the question of Christ’s suffering as we Latter-day Saints understand it. Why did the passionate misery of Gethsemane have to happen if the entry of Christ into earth life was already a reconciliation of the Divine and the human? Why couldn’t Christ have died as a newborn, touching his toes to earth just long enough to transform the world but not long enough to suffer? Why couldn’t Christ have died in his sleep?

Here I believe we witness the sacred extension of Incarnation to Atonement, encompassing not just mortality as the susceptibility to death but identity with us across the range of our human experience. Not only did Christ need to become flesh—in some sense, he needed to become us. What if, in other words, the suffering in Gethsemane was Christ opening himself to all of us at a metaphysical and ontological level? And not just to all of us in the sense of every human who ever lives (every one of us), but all of us in the sense of the full extremity of each one of us (every part of us). In those depths stand much pain, selfishness, sin, grief, and tragedy. We know that, instinctively. We are difficult to love. Indeed, it is painful. And yet Christ did just that, and in that encounter between perfect love and twisted mortality, I believe, comes the intense pain of the Garden of Gethsemane. In this respect I find that I generally agree with Ostler and Green that what is luminously true in Atonement is this fact of identity and union. I suspect that I am more skeptical of late modern ideas about selfhood than they are, but on this basic principle, I think we agree in a fundamentally Latter-day Saint way.

In this understanding of Atonement, it remains true that Christ took upon himself our sins, our churlish buffoonery, our impatience, stupidity, cupidity, and cruelty. That’s all true. But maybe he didn’t do it just to meet the demands of a cosmic criminal justice system. I’m sure that whatever law might be operative was in fact satisfied with Christ’s sacrifice. But I don’t think that’s the whole story. Maybe, at a fundamental level, Christ took upon himself our sins because that’s what it means to love us. We are, unavoidably, painful to love. We are the infants who shriek through the night no matter how tenderly the parents try to soothe. We are the children who kick and steal and curse. We are the partners who betray, belittle, and violate. We are the narcissistic exhibitionists who can hear no voice but their own. And there God stands, through Jesus, loving us anyway. Loving every hard and painful bit of us. No matter how much it hurts God to do so. This is not the vacuous love that is indifferent to the shape of our lives as some pop psychologists might have it. God’s love will transform us: that is, after all, the end game for the Atonement. That transformation will be painful, and it is the best thing that could ever happen to us.

I respect the ideaworld underlying the penal model of Atonement, even if specific instances of it may miss the point. We really won’t be godly if our whole lives are spent choosing against God. If we’ve never tried in life, it’s strange in the extreme to imagine that we will be wholly godly right after life draws to a close. But the penal model of Atonement is just that, a model. It’s not the same to walk across a map of Paris in your basement as it is to wander along the River Seine. Nor is it the same to imagine a terribly just God (or Eternal Law) extracting punishment as it is to experience Atonement itself.

When we actually experience Atonement, we realize, I think, why it was that Christ had to suffer. Because the pure love of a mortal being is inextricable from suffering. To put it too simply, it hurts to love us. This is not meant to demean us humans, but rather to glorify us. However painful we are to love, Christ and our heavenly parents love us anyway. In their love, we have life.

In this realization comes another view on that haunting tableau with which we began. I was a missionary convinced that I was a Roman soldier, spear stabbing into Christ’s side, every time I missed five minutes of study time or smiled at a woman my age. It’s not that I, inveterate sinner that I was and am, was actively killing Christ. I never have and never will send a spike through his wrist. When we sin, we are causing our own suffering. And Christ in his infinite love that fully infiltrates our identity has agreed that he will always love us no matter how painful it might be. The worse we are as people, the more noxious it is to love us, true. But Christ won’t stop loving us, no matter what. The heavenly parents don’t love us as the easy path; they don’t love us for some benefit to themselves, some flames of parental pride they must stoke with the kindling of our broken lives. Their love for us is a grace beyond any such calculations of risk and benefit. Theirs is an Atonement of Love, of being in relation, of identity.

One strength of this relational theory of Atonement is that it’s true to our mortal experience. We have all at some point felt what it is to love another imperfect being. There is great beauty and power in such love, and there is sadness. Sometimes such terrible sadness. Even if the beloved is nearly perfect, there is still the exquisite and soul-searing reality that all beloveds will one day die. To love well is to experience pain. I have known the soul-deep terror of loving a person who is struck by terrible illness and then dies. That love, however painful, is nothing I would ever walk away from.

Among the most sacred memories of my late adolescence was the discovery of how many people had prayed and wept on my behalf as I made a string of bad decisions and cultivated a life estranged from God and sanctity. We know, if we are honest, that we have caused pain to those mortals who love us. And we know how sacred it is to be loved through our failings. If Christ truly loves us, then, why would he be free from that pain? In other words, why would Gethsemane not have been painful? No reason at all.

What I’m suggesting here is that the horrible pain in Gethsemane might have been the moment when Christ was allowed to love us all, perfectly. Until then, perhaps, he had not reached the necessary phase of his earthly development. For reasons I confess are not immediately apparent to me, his Incarnation had not yet become our incarnation. We were not yet fully his in the Atoning work of adoption. And as we became his, as our stubborn identities melted into Christ’s cosmos-ordering love, we became one with Christ and with our heavenly parents.

This Atonement of Love reinterprets many traditional texts. Take D&C 18—Christ “suffereth the pains of all men.” Or consider the deeply Christological texts in Isaiah—”he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” Or the account of 2 Nephi, “he suffereth the pains of all men, yea, the pains of every living creature, both men, women, and children, who belong to the family of Adam.” I’m aware that a bewildered if metaphysically potent scapegoat, bearing the sins of the community, may lurk just offstage in certain scriptural passages. What I’m arguing is that Christ gives us license to read these rituals and their textual echoes as pointing beyond themselves to larger truths about the nature of love.

Amulek’s influential references in Alma 34 to “an infinite and eternal sacrifice” which functions as an “infinite atonement” also resonates differently within an Atonement of Love. Amulek explains that you can’t kill a murderer’s brother to resolve the murderer’s guilt. Culpability and punishment don’t naturally, logically, or legally transfer from one person to another. Instead there will be an infinite end to sacrifice that “encircles [sinners] in the arms of safety.” Admitting that the Amulek text touches on multiple theories of Atonement simultaneously, I see in that infinite Atonement a kind of red thread of fate tying Christ and us together, forever.

This concept of a relational Atonement of Love has an array of implications. It provides different context for old stories in ways that are true to the old and open to the new. For example, acknowledging how painful it is to love mortals makes some sense of our teaching that God and the cosmos suffered terribly when Christ died. As he breathed his last, earthquakes raked the New World, and the temple’s veil in the Old World split in two, as if the temple were tearing its garment in grief. Our heavenly parents wept just as they did when they watched with Enoch over the full expanse of human history. As Enoch sees all of humanity, he and the “the God of heaven” stand together, their faces wet with sadness, witnessing the human penchant for wickedness and cruelty. A mystified Enoch asks God why God is crying. God replies, in essence, that it hurts to love us. But he loves us anyway. (While the scripture, true to its time, doesn’t mention her, in my mind’s eye, I have often seen the Heavenly Mother crying with Enoch and the Father in that stark and beautiful panorama of human history that prefigures the Garden of Gethsemane.)

Within the Atonement of Love, Christ can judge us because he is us. Who better to judge us than the one who has merged his Divine identity with our mortal identity? Who has loved every nook and cranny of us, no matter how blighted or cruel or pathetic? I’ve long thought that the best way to understand the familiar and too-often-cruel maxim “Love the Sinner; Hate the Sin” is to perform a thought experiment: imagine that you are the sinner. In other words, think about how you would feel if you were the one who had committed the sin. Not some stranger, some spiteful enemy. You. How heavy would you want the punishment to be, and how would you feel about the fact of punishment? In general, we would want only the absolute minimum of punishment necessary to the task, and we would feel no hatred for the offender. You may still need to send a person to prison for certain crimes. But you should ache at the thought of it, mourn the fact of the pain and punishment, and seek to make the punishment as tolerable as possible. Because that’s what we would do for ourselves. That seems to me what Christ does in judgment. He joins with us in perfect communion and is able to imagine the world from our perspective, deeply and painfully in love with us. Judgment without communion is just alienation. Judgment in communion is precisely what this relational model of the Atonement of Love is. When we truly and rapturously love the sinner, we participate directly in Atonement. And when we hate the sinner, we reject the Atonement. In contempt for the sinner, we refuse Christ’s Way.

But we need not refuse love. Christ’s Way, Christ’s Love, is as universal as stardust, wind, and sunlight. There is liberty in this universal scope of atoning love. While I am no Universalist in the non-Mormon sense, the Atonement of Love sees beyond salvation to the actual saving beauty that animates it. When we fret about whether we’re saved, we turn the story of our lives inward, following the modernist script of isolated consumers pleasing and perfecting themselves. With the Atonement of Love, we turn the story of our lives outward. Christ says “I’ve got salvation figured out for you. I bathe you in my love. Now I need you to be vessels of my love and grace. So, you poor broken thing, go shed forth my love in the world.” The shift from pious narcissism to Christian agape is the path that the Atonement of Love makes possible.

I know that the Atonement is strange no matter how we conceive it. Especially in our late-modern age—both captivated by and deeply fearful of particularity—we wonder why any specific concrete mechanism might apply. We feel compelled to believe that our own particularity is praiseworthy, even essential. But we dare not attribute such particularity to the cosmos when it interacts with us. That strikes us as too close to constraint, an impingement on our agency. Why wouldn’t God just love us enough to save us instead of requiring that such love come through Christ’s expansively mortal life? If Atonement is all about Love, in other words, why isn’t the Love of God enough? What I’m suggesting is that God and cosmos can be particular too. I think it likely that the Atonement is how God loves us. We cannot package God’s love into a positive psychology trope or a snippet of poetic Romanticism. We must be open to the possibility that God’s love is specific, not just in its capacity to love each of us individually but in the possibility that the shape of that love is at least partly external to us (see, for example, 2 Nephi 2:11). We may need, in other words, to allow for God a majesty that we cannot hold in our hands. For me, that possibility is exhilarating, even as it is terrifying.

This is heady stuff. And anything big and beautiful can miss its mark when we put it to work in human lives. Christ loves us totally, in a way that brings our selves into his. We mortals seek to live that way too, and we see glimmers of it in the astonishing love of a parent for an afflicted child, a friendship that must surely date to the premortal existence, or a wonderfully healthy marriage. But we will also encounter distorted shadows of this pure love. We see this most clearly in an abuser who seeks domination in the name of unity, stamping out the partner’s self. Christ does not call the abused to seek identity with the abuser. God forbid. Patterns of abuse are not just evil in their own right, but they are also terrible because they distort the true order of love. We must keep our eyes open to those who suffer, always. And in rejecting the misuse of true principles, we must not also deprive ourselves as a community of flourishing, here and now and forever, through Christ’s Atoning love.

The atoning love of Christ calls us into painful and glorious communion. It binds us with the unconditional love of a parent willing to sacrifice all for a suffering child. Recognizing that we are painful to love and that Christ has gladly taken on himself that pain is the best and most potent liberty of all. 

Sam Brown is a physician scientist who also wonders about bigger questions. He's parenting three children at the cusp of adulthood and writes books from time to time.

Art by Jen Norton.

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