ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the range of evangelical approaches to the sacrificial death of Christ. It argues that while evangelicals have in the main adopted a substitutionary interpretation of Christ's atoning death, there has often been considerable variety in their understanding of it at various points. Sometimes they have stressed the penal nature of the death of Christ, but that has often come under challenge from those who have wished to stress other facets of the atonement. From their very beginning, evangelicals wherever they have been found, have been preoccupied with the cross of Jesus Christ, that is, his atoning death and sacrifice on Good Friday, and his resurrection from the dead on Easter Sunday. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, despite much change elsewhere, evangelicals resolutely maintained their focus on the cross. The chapter concludes by exploring some of the ways in which substitutionary atonement has become a flashpoint within contemporary evangelicalism.
