Autumn 2018
THE ATONEMENT has long been a contested area in Christian doctrine – if only because the Church has never decreed any single teaching on exactly HOW Christ’s work of salvation is to be understood. But the way we understand it has important implications for the way we think of God and for how that affects our spirituality, our emotions and our personal behaviour. In this issue Andrew Campbell and Rob Clements present a dialogue exploring recent ideas of ‘nonviolent atonement’ which, while it seeks to correct ideas of a vengeful God, may risk accepting a world indifferent to injustice. Still confronting atonement issues, mindful of 1918 and the first Armistice Day, Peter Rutherford follows with a reflection on the ‘false picture of God’ which chaplains such as Woodbine Willie (Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy) found had alienated soldiers from Christian faith, and which he passionately denounced in his poetry.
