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But A Community Called Atonement is not just a bridge-building book. It is also an expand-your-vision book. To parody J. B. Phillips's famous title, this book could have been called Your Atonement Is Too Small.

Classic evangelical writers tended to use the word Atonement to refer to what Jesus accomplished in his death on the Cross. When most of these expositors wanted to talk about the bigger picture, they used a phrase like "the plan of salvation."

Unfortunately, when the word Atonement is used that narrowly, it's easy to miss the broad reach of God's atoning activity. God was in Christ reconciling you and me to himself. But that's not all. Paul also says that God was in Christ reconciling the entire kosmos to himself.

McKnight's gaze follows the way Paul focuses his wide-angle lens. McKnight reviews the various metaphors, pictures, and theories of Atonement implicit in Scripture and looks for the big picture. Taking themes expounded by the earliest church fathers—victory, ransom, recapitulation—he wraps them together into one package called "identification for incorporation."

It works like this: In Christ, God identified with the descendants of Adam to the point of experiencing an ignominious death. He was raised to new life so that he, the new Adam, might incorporate members of the fallen race into a new humanity. He became what we were so that we might become what he is. The creator God re-creates, in other words, but he does so in a way that does not leave the old creation to languish in sin and brokenness.

This broad-horizon approach to Atonement requires a corporate understanding of humanity and of the church. And that is the point of McKnight's title: A Community Called Atonement. It also requires a missional understanding. In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes that as a result of God's reconciling the world to himself, the members of his church are given a ministry of reconciliation. God's reconciling action and our shared ambassadorial role are bound tightly together in Paul's thought. God does not simply reconcile us to himself. He does so with the purpose of making us his agents of reconciliation.

McKnight's call to see Atonement in a bigger context is nothing less than a call to mission, a mission of participation in the reconciling work of God.

David Neff, editor in chief of Christianity Today

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

A Community Called Atonement is available from ChristianBook.com and other book retailers.

McKnight blogs at JesusCreed.org.

Other Christianity Today articles on the Atonement include:

Cross Purposes | Biggest Christian conference splits amid growing Atonement debate. (July 2, 2007)

Nothing But the Blood | More and more evangelicals believe Christ's atoning death is merely a grotesque creation of the medieval imagination. Really? (May 2006)

A Multifaceted Gospel | Why evangelicals shouldn't be threatened by new tellings of the Good News. By Al Hsu (Apr. 10, 2008)

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May 2008, Vol. 52, No. 5