Article April 11, 2011 Issue

Atonement—cherishing our oneness with God

By Shirley Paulson

How can anyone ever expect to be good enough to deserve the depth of God’s affection for us? Some wrongs people commit seem too full of evil to be forgiven. In fact, any wrong at all is unjust before God, who is Love and always loves. Yet, without total freedom from evil-doing, how can anyone ever truly be saved from the effects of bad behavior? Even murmuring, doubting, and withholding grace may be unthinkable before a God who is always good. 

Jesus’ supreme act of sacrifice on the cross is the answer to these questions for those who believe in him. For the past two millennia, Christians have believed it but have had difficulty explaining it. They have devised numerous “doctrines of atonement,” but the Christian church as a whole has never agreed on the “right” explanation. One of the troubling unresolved issues in some of the classic doctrines of atonement is how Jesus’ crucifixion absolves someone of his or her own mistakes. Especially when someone who claims to “believe in Jesus” goes right on terrorizing others, it is difficult to imagine how Jesus’ suffering make everything OK! In fact, despite all these doctrinal explanations, it still remains a long leap of faith for many to consider how Jesus’ dying has anything to do with our own mistakes.

Mary Baker Eddy’s emphasis on the meaning of sin provides a platform for consistent reasoning on the subject. “All sin is of the flesh,” she explained in Science and Health (p. 311). The relevance of this point is that the evil we do or think in the “flesh” is everything that opposes the Spirit. St. Paul agrees: “What the flesh desires,” he says, “is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want” (Gal. 5:17, New Revised Standard Version). If sin—or all forms of selfish living—is of the flesh, we come to realize there must be repentance in order to live with the Spirit. Paul’s happiness about Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection was the power of those experiences to inspire us to “crucify” anything in ourselves that would enslave us. When repentance is so strong that we never want to return to evil, and that we cherish the privilege of being with God, then we understand the healing doctrine of atonement.