ATONEMENT

The doctrine of the atonement, the doctrine that God has resolved the problem of human evil by means of the suffering and death of Christ, is the central doctrine of Christianity; and yet not much attention has been paid to it by contemporary philosophers of religion. Perhaps one of the reasons for this comparative neglect is that many philosophers know this doctrine only in the version which tends to be promulgated by unreflective believers who are more to be admired for devotion than for philosophical expertise. This popular account of the atonement is often assumed to be just the theory of the atonement held by such Christian thinkers as Aquinas (or some other notable philosophical theologian), but careful consideration shows that Aquinas’s theory (and no doubt also that of other thoughtful and sophisticated theologians in the history of the Christian tradition) differs significantly from the popular account with which many philosophers are familiar.