“A Better Atonement should be required reading for all western Christians. Brief, clean in its line of argument, and engaging in its style of presentation, it carefully and faithfully takes on one of the — if not the — central questions in Christian conversation today.” -Phyllis Tickle, author of Emergence Christianity

For a long time, I’ve felt uncomfortable with the conventional ways that many Christians understand the atonement — that is, why Jesus died on the cross. Or, more accurately, what was accomplished when Jesus died on the cross. The most common understanding of the atonement stems from the early church doctrine of “original sin,” which I take to be a wholly unbiblical doctrine. In other words, our common view of the atonement is a solution in search of a problem — the tail wagging the dog.