The Third Article of Faith in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reads:
“We believe that through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel.”
It is a simple sentence. Yet the meaning we attach to “the Atonement”—and the lens through which we interpret it—quietly shapes everything that follows. For many, the Atonement sounds like a mechanism or a spiritual transaction: something Jesus Christ accomplished that we now access in moments of failure or pain. We speak of it as something to “apply” or “lean on,” as if it were a tool to be wielded. The language itself can make it feel abstract, even mystical, detached from the texture of daily life. But if our understanding of the Atonement remains at this level—distant from human experience—it risks losing its power. Perhaps the problem is not the doctrine itself, but the frame through which we view it.
From Legalistic to Medicinal
Most traditional explanations of the Atonement are legal in nature. They attempt to explain how justice is satisfied:
- Ransom theory imagines a debt owed to evil risking a universe where even God must negotiate with the devil.
- Satisfaction theory shifts the debt to God—where divine honor demands repayment.
- Penal substitution elevates justice itself into something like a super-law, one that even God cannot bypass.
Each, in its own way, assumes that something external to God must be satisfied before forgiveness can be granted. This raises a difficult question:
What, exactly, would prevent God from simply forgiving?
And perhaps more troublingly:
What if our need for punishment tells us more about ourselves than it does about God?
Human beings possess a deep instinct for retribution. We call it justice, but often it is refined retaliation, given moral language. Literature captures this instinct with haunting clarity. In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo presents the guillotine as more than an instrument of execution—it becomes a symbol of humanity’s appetite for vengeance, as if it whispers:
“I avenge.”
The guillotine does not merely punish; it satisfies something darker in us—a desire to see harm answered with harm. It is not just a historical artifact. It is a mirror, reflecting the uncomfortable possibility that what we often call “divine justice” may, at times, be a projection of our own instincts. If so, it would be a tragic irony: that a doctrine meant to reveal God’s healing nature has instead been interpreted through the logic of vengeance.
Atonement as Healing, Not Payment
What if the Atonement is better understood not as legal, but as medicinal? Not as a system for balancing accounts, but as a process of healing what has been broken. From this perspective, the Atonement does not erase consequence—it reveals it. It illuminates the real weight of our actions: the ways we wound one another, fracture trust, and estrange ourselves from the relationships that give life meaning. It calls us to remember—not abstractly, but relationally—the suffering our choices create. And in that remembrance, something begins to shift. As Terryl Givens observes:
“Atonement does not necessarily describe something Christ did, but something he hopes to achieve… not just a description of his heroic sacrifice, but the product of that sacrifice.”
The Atonement, then, is not merely an event to be received; it is a reality to be realized.
An Ancient Story, Revisited
The story of Jacob and Esau illustrates this vividly. From the beginning, the brothers are locked in tension, struggling even before birth. Division is part of their story. One day, Esau returns from a failed hunt—exhausted, hungry, vulnerable. This should have been a moment for care. Instead, Jacob sees his brother’s weakness as opportunity: he trades a sacred birthright for a bowl of stew. Hunger becomes currency. Relationship becomes transaction. Traditionally, we read this as a moral failure on Esau’s part. But perhaps the deeper truth is this:
A fracture has occurred. Trust has been broken. Relationship has been reduced to advantage.
The story leaves us with a question it never explicitly answers:
“What now? What is the path forward when something has been broken that cannot simply be undone?”
Do we seek repayment? Punishment? Balance? Or is there another way?
Atonement Enters Here
This is where the Atonement becomes real—not as abstract theory, but as a lived response. Once harm has been done, the instinct toward retribution feels justified. Someone should pay. The internal “guillotine” stirs within us. But Jesus Christ steps into that instinct—not to endorse it, but to transform it. His life, teachings, and sacrifice consistently move in another direction:
- Refusing retaliation
- Extending forgiveness
- Absorbing harm without passing it on
He does not deny justice—he redefines it. Justice, in this sense, is no longer about punishment. It is about restoration.
A New Way to Fulfill the Law
Seen through this lens, “obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel” takes on a new meaning. Obedience is not about qualifying for salvation; it is about participating in the conditions that make reconciliation possible:
- To tell the truth
- To see others as ends, not means
- To repair what we have broken
- To forgive, even when it costs us
These are not arbitrary commands. They are practices of healing. The Atonement shows us the consequences of our actions, but also offers a path forward that does not rely on perpetuating harm. It invites repentance—not only of individual sins, but of the patterns we use to solve problems: retaliation, domination, transactional thinking.
Participants, Not Just Recipients
If this is true, then we are not merely recipients of the Atonement. We are participants. By covenant, by practice, by daily choice, we either continue the cycles that fracture human life or step into the pattern that heals it. The Atonement is not something we “use.” It is something we live.
Reframing the Article of Faith
Returning to the Third Article of Faith:
“Through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience…”
We can read this differently: through the pattern revealed in Christ, humanity may be healed. That healing becomes real as we align our lives with the principles that make reconciliation possible. The shift is subtle—but transformative. The Atonement is no longer a transaction to be believed in. It is a way of being that leads to human flourishing—not merely about individual salvation, but about how broken relationships, and ultimately humanity itself, can be made whole.
Discussion:
- How can we reimagine “The Atonement” as something other than fixing a legal problem?
- On this Good Friday, how does viewing Christ’s sacrifice through a legalistic lens—focusing on punishment or debt—risk obscuring the “good” of Good Friday for you personally?
Wheat & Tares 
I want to nominate Todd S as the author/editor of an elders quorum/Relief Society lesson manual for use starting next January. It is not necessary that I pass judgment on the rightness or wrongness of this thought (or any other thought he has shared with us here at W&T), but that the thought can be the starting point for a meaningful conversation. We desperately need meaningful conversations (and the reflection and learning that accompany meaningful conversations) in our church gatherings.
(I also appreciate other posters and commenters for your contributions to meaningful conversations, but this is the first one that made me think of an EQ/RS manual)
Well done. This is a vision consistent with the teachings of Jesus. It is far from the teachings of Paul.
Todd S: your writings are a balm to my soul. Thank you for your insights and taking the time to share.
Todd S: your writings are a balm to my soul. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights.
ji – I’m not sure I’d want that task, but I agree about the need for meaningful conversations. And if we allow it—even invite it—those conversations usually begin with a challenge to our current way of thinking. Maybe even a little bit of “crazy.”
When the New Testament is read in its historical context—without flattening every character and story into a prooftext—Jesus comes across as radical, even heretical. At the very least, he gets the conversation going. I’m deeply drawn to his life and teachings, but I’m not sure we fully grasp just how radical they are—or whether we even believe what he’s saying is possible.
As for “the Atonement,” my perspective has shifted because I no longer define justice as retributive. Once justice is no longer about retribution, the common LDS framing of penal substitution starts to feel both incoherent and unnecessary. Instead, I see Jesus’ life as a revelation of God (whatever that may mean to each person), and that life includes his death—not as an intervention to satisfy justice, but as an interruption that challenges and reframes human understanding.
One final observation: I like the thumbs up / thumbs down feature on this blog. But I’m always a bit puzzled by a thumbs down without any explanation. If we really want meaningful conversation, a thumbs down should come with an argument.
Love this post! I know I probably have been an annoying guy on a lot of your other posts, but ultimately, I’m trying to see if what you’re posting meets a criteria I have in my mind that I’ll summarize as the “peril test”.
That essentially is this (and this is a summary of my comments from other posts): can this thought process account for actions that have humanly irreversible consequences? The metaphor I’ve used in the past is of jumping off a cliff (or pushing someone else off a cliff). This is an action that, once taken, cannot be humanly reversed. Even if you were ignorant of the consequences, or you regret your actions, etc etc etc, you cannot stop gravity. You have to be saved from the consequences of your actions… Or the inevitable consequences will be perilous. I think many human actions are perilous beyond ones that end up in permanent disfigurement or death, but I’ll just use the cliff example as our starkest example of the class.
So in this post, I especially appreciated the framing:
Yes, indeed.
I also agree with you that repayment and retribution do not hit the mark.
If a person pushes another person off a cliff, paying them money does not fix the damage. Paying their family money does not bring their loved one back. Having the state decree that the pusher should also be pushed off the cliff doesn’t bring the first person back. We might out of grief and rage believe that if we could only stick it to the other guy, then we would feel better, but it does not heal the wound.
I like what you propose:
And yet…(You had to know this was coming, right?) We actually cannot always repair what was broken, even if we sincerely would like to. We cannot reverse time or undo the effects of gravity.
And all this assumes that someone sincerely would like to repair what was broken.
I think the legal model and all these other models are trying to address the reality that not everyone regrets their perilous choices. From a practical perspective, a guy who continues luring others to cliffs to push them over needs something to prevent him from doing that (such as jail time.) I agree that jail or other punishments doesn’t heal the situation or even necessarily cause a change of heart in the perpetrator, but regardless of whether the perpetrator has a changed heart, the rest of the community has a vested interested in reducing the chance that he will push anyone else off a cliff.
I really like these discussions because they get to the heart of the gospel. I like andew’s post and I am going to say the same thing, kind of in my own words. This is complex and not how we usually talk about stuff. So my goal in saying this in my own words is to give it a slightly different perspective.
I was always bothered by the retribution and penal aspect of the atonement. It just didn’t seem to do any good. At all! Take Andrew’s idea of pushing someone off a cliff. So, I’ll be the pusher off-er for our example. How does telling God I am sorry and I believe in Jesus help me to understand the consequences to the pushee? Maybe the poor pushee died, or maybe he ended up needing both mangled legs amputated and spent his life in a wheel chair being waited on by the rest of his family. And what about his unbearable pain upon hitting the bottom? How do I ever really comprehend the pain I purposely caused?
With the standard view of atonement, I don’t. Oh, but that poor pushee understands. And his loved ones that have to care for him the rest of his life, the understand the consequences. But that penal substitution theory does not help them either. They are stuck for life with the consequences of my actions. Even if they forgive me, they are still stuck with the painful consequences of my actions. Totally unfair to the pushee and his family.
I tell Jesus that I am sorry and I shouldn’t have done it and I am off Scott free because Jesus forgives me, but that family is still suffering. Sounds like Mercy robbing justice to me.
The victim of my sin has the consequences for life, even if he forgives. The ability to walk will not come back and that phantom pain is with him for life. While the sinner who caused it accepts Jesus as his Savior and skips away pain free. Mercy for the sinner robbing justice for the sinned against. Not justice for God because God was not hurt. He might have been offended at the selfish behavior I engaged in when I pushed the poor guy off the cliff. But he was not harmed and no real debt is owed to him. The real debt is owed to the poor guy who got pushed. But the standard view of the atonement forgets him as if he does not exist. Oh, it tells him he has to forgive or he is worse than the guy who pushed him. Excuse me? He is STILL hurting because of my behavior and yet he is having to forgive? Nope. Just nope. What about everything he lost by having been pushed? The standard view of atonement does not even care about his loss and the huge debt the push-er owes him. It is reduced to between the sinner and God, when God was not pushed off a cliff.
Back to the story of Jacob and Esau. Jacob pushed Esau off a cliff in a moment when Esau was weak. Esau forgives, but his loss is never made up to him. At least not in the story.
I think the story is leaving out a lot. Our standard view of the atonement leaves out the victim of the sin. It almost forgets about the main point Jesus tried to teach us.
Thar main point Jesus was trying to make was “love one another.” Jacob and Esau loved each other enough that when they saw what they had become, really saw, they changed. Jacob bowed before Esau and Esau ran to him to hug him. Love won.
The family of that guy pushed off the cliff loved him enough to care for him. And if I as the sinner truly repent, then I am going to spend the rest of my life caring for others. Maybe I can’t care for the exact guy I pushed off a cliff, but there are plenty of people who need love. And if I fail to show love to whoever needs it, then I guess Jesus is going to look at me and tell me that I still don’t understand about love.
Pushing the guy off the cliff is a failure to love. Repentance is learning how to love. Repentance is healing the wounds caused by lack of love.
This is why reincarnation could be a possibility. Could this be the real issue of resurrection and atonement? Could it be Jesus made it possible to have another chance to make restitution or whatever, and another and another until we achieve oneness with Love? I have no idea, but embracing ambiguity has been so wonderful for me. “Timshel” I get to chose.
Andrew—first of all, I think I speak for a lot of people here: your comments are anticipated, and not in the least annoying.
To Ji’s point, meaningful conversation is needed. I’d go a step further—meaningful conversation is how we uncover blind spots, which makes it essential. Your persistent question about the “peril test”—which I haven’t responded to very well—has exposed something I missed. And something Anna has pointed out often: conversations about “the Atonement” tend to center on freeing the sinner, while either minimizing the irreversible harm done to the victim, or subtly asking the victim to release the perpetrator before anything has actually been healed.
The “peril test” asks a simple but devastating question: how do we account for human actions that have irreversible consequences? That’s not a casual question. It demands real consideration. And honestly, it reveals how inadequate many of our Atonement frameworks are. We’ve leaned heavily on economic metaphors—debt, payment, balance—but those frameworks reduce everything to transactions. They make the issue about “stuff,” not about the human beings involved. And as you pointed out, payment doesn’t erase what was done. It doesn’t restore what was taken. I don’t think “payment” is irrelevant. But it’s not the core problem—and it’s certainly not the full solution.
Maybe we’re asking the wrong question. Maybe the issue isn’t about undoing the past, but about what happens when the past—if not healed—begins to shape and repeat itself in the future.
Because if something real has been broken—truly broken—how can it ever be whole again? The honest answer is: not by undoing it.
There are fractures in human life that cannot be reversed. A life taken. Trust shattered. Innocence lost. A story permanently altered. Any theology that takes reality seriously has to admit that some things do not “go back.” So if “atonement” means becoming at-one again, it cannot mean erasure. It cannot mean restoration to what was. It has to mean something else.
This is where the “peril problem” becomes real. What do we do with actions that cannot be undone? Not the kinds of mistakes you can apologize for and move past, but the kind that restructure a life. The kind that don’t just hurt—they redefine the world for the person who has to keep living in it.
I’ve seen this up close. Over the past two years, I’ve watched my sister-in-law’s life unravel after her husband’s infidelity and eventual abandonment. After 17 years of marriage—whatever it really was beneath the surface—he dropped a kind of emotional nuclear bomb: he cheated, and then claimed he never loved her. In one moment, it stripped away her sense of worth, her trust in him and in herself, her belief in marriage, her dignity. It destabilized everything. And I’ve also watched what followed—the grief, the sorrow, and how it slowly hardened into rage. A desire to destroy. And honestly, I get it. I’m sure I would feel the same. This is where the question stops being theoretical. Because this kind of damage doesn’t just go away.
Viktor Frankl, in *Man’s Search for Meaning*, doesn’t solve this by minimizing evil. He doesn’t explain it away or wrap it in clean answers. He looks directly at brutality, at degradation, at the collapse of fairness—and still identifies something in the human spirit that refuses to be fully conquered. Not control. Not justice. Not reversal. But some kind of power to hold what has happened without being completely destroyed by it. Whatever that is—I want some of it.
Because life does this. People do this. Things break in ways that don’t go back. There are moments that divide life into “before” and “after,” and no amount of effort or goodness can stitch it back into what it was. And yet, some people keep going. Not untouched. Not unscarred. But still capable of meaning. Still capable—almost unbelievably—of love.
I think this is what that line in the Book of Mormon is reaching toward: “It is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.” Not as a qualifier. Not as a threshold we finally meet. But as an acknowledgment that even after everything we can do—after the effort, the repair attempts, the grief, the rage, the exhaustion—there are still things we cannot fix. And somehow, something meets us there.
It is a miracle—there’s no other word for it—that a human being whose life has been shattered can still move forward in any meaningful way. That every step isn’t hijacked by the past. That bitterness doesn’t become the only honest response. And yet, it often feels like it should.
Which is why the question isn’t abstract anymore. It’s not clean or theological. It’s desperate. It’s human: Is there any way to keep living with love when what has happened to me demands bitterness? Is there any way to carry this without it hollowing everything out?
If grace means anything at all, it has to mean something here—not in theory, not in systems, but in the quiet, brutal work of continuing to live when life has already taken more than it should have. And somehow—not because it makes sense, but because it happens—there are people who do. Which means maybe—just maybe—that kind of grace isn’t imaginary. It’s hard-won. Fragile. Real.
And maybe this is where Christ’s life and teaching point us—not toward a system that explains suffering, or a transaction that resolves it, but toward an interruption. An interruption to the patterns we know: retaliation, resentment, despair, self-destruction. The cycles that trauma naturally produces.
What if healing doesn’t come from applying those same patterns more perfectly, but from breaking them altogether? From introducing something new—new ways of seeing, new ways of holding pain, new ways of interpreting the past—so that what has happened is not erased, but it no longer has the final word. Not undone, but transformed in how it lives inside us.
So that trauma, while real and lasting, does not permanently close off the ability to see beauty, to trust again, or to love.
If that’s what grace is—then it’s not abstract at all. It’s the only thing that makes a future possible.
I want to bounce of Anna’s comment to respond to yours, Todd. There’s something that must be said for the victim as well as something that must be said for the perpetrator.
Your comment gets at the victim. How does the victim continue to live past their life being shattered? I will observe that in some cases, they literally cannot. If the push is fatal, there is no time or opportunity to have grace recover from that.
I think your answer is trying to make sense of things from a framework that is as naturalistic as possible. Where we are subject to the laws of physics and those laws will not be reversed. But again, the reason people look to deity is because they want something that goes beyond the natural. If we say this isn’t really possible, then we aren’t introducing *that much*.
OK, but your comment is so far about the victim. It says nothing about the perpetrator. It prescribes something for your sister-in-law to do after being betrayed.
What does Viktor Frankl say about the Nazis, rather than the survivors of concentration camps?
While I agree that there isn’t healing for a victim by punishing a perpetrator (pushing the pusher off the cliff doesn’t bring back the victim), there is still something to be said that if Atonement only addresses the victim (in a limited sense) and says nothing about the perpetrator, that’s another miss.
Certainly, just freeing the perpetrator seems amiss. But not addressing them at all also seems amiss.
I think part of the motivation for hell (which is a bit different than the atonement, but I think these are related?) is to assert that even if there might not be justice under natural laws in this life, that with the supernatural, one can hope for cosmic justice overall. But your model and comment can’t provide cosmic justice. It can only tell the victims how to continue living in an unjust world.
Andrew
You’re right to press on this. If what I’m describing only speaks to how a victim survives harm but has nothing to say about the one who caused it, then it leaves something essential unresolved.
I think part of the difficulty is that we’re often working with two very different visions of justice, and depending on which one we assume, “atonement” ends up doing very different work.
One model is retributive justice—the idea that every act creates a moral debt that must be paid through suffering or punishment. In this framework, justice means giving each person what they deserve, harm demands a proportional response, and punishment is an end in itself—it satisfies justice.
This is where ideas like hell or cosmic punishment often come in. They answer the very real human cry: “If injustice isn’t made right here, will it be made right somewhere?” And I think that instinct is valid. When harm is irreversible—when someone is “pushed off a cliff,” so to speak—there is something in us that insists, “This cannot just disappear. It must be answered.”
But even here, there’s a limit. Punishing the perpetrator—no matter how severely—does not restore what was lost. It may satisfy a sense of moral accounting, but it doesn’t heal the rupture itself.
The other model is restorative justice, which asks a different question altogether. Not “What punishment is deserved?” but “What is needed to make things right again—if that’s still possible?”
In this framework, the focus is on healing the damage done to people and relationships. Justice is about repair, not just repayment, and the future matters as much as the past.
Now, in cases of extreme harm, we have to be honest: some things cannot be restored. If a life is taken, it is not returned. If trust is shattered, it is not easily rebuilt.
So restorative justice doesn’t pretend to rewind reality. Instead, it faces forward and asks: “Given that this has happened, what would it take for life to be livable again? For trust to have any chance of re-emerging?”
That includes something very important you named: separation of the perpetrator—not as a form of vengeance, but as protection for the vulnerable, acknowledgment of the seriousness of the harm, and a necessary condition for any healing to begin. That kind of boundary is justice. Not punitive for its own sake, but protective and reality based.
This is where your question really lands: what does atonement say about the one who caused the harm?
In a retributive frame, the answer is that they must suffer in proportion to what they’ve done. In a restorative frame, the answer is more demanding, not less: they must face what they’ve done, without illusion, without escape, and be transformed by that truth—if transformation is even possible.
That includes full accountability, the loss of access, trust, and standing, and potentially a lifelong confrontation with the consequences of their actions.
That’s not “just letting them go free.” In many ways, it’s harder than punishment, because it’s not transactional. It doesn’t “pay off” the debt—it requires a reordering of the self.
But even then, we have to admit something uncomfortable: nothing the perpetrator suffers or becomes can undo what they did.
This is where I would locate atonement differently than a purely retributive model. I don’t see atonement as a mechanism that reverses consequences or balances a cosmic ledger.
If someone is pushed off a cliff, no act—divine or otherwise—stops the fall after the fact. At most, you might say it asserts that death or loss does not have the final word. But even that doesn’t erase what was taken.
So, then what is it doing?
I think it’s addressing a different problem: how can human beings continue to live, love, and relate to one another in a world where irreversible harm is real?
Atonement, in that sense, is not about undoing the past. It’s about making a future possible.
For the victim, it offers a way to live that is not wholly defined by what was done to them. For the community, it offers a way to rebuild trust, however fragile. For the perpetrator, it offers a path—though not a guarantee—toward truth, accountability, and transformation.
I think where your critique really bites is here: if we give up on supernatural retribution, are we left with a world where injustice simply stands?
In one sense, yes. There are harms that are never “made right” in any symmetrical way. And I think that’s exactly the human problem that ideas like hell or cosmic justice are trying to solve—they refuse to accept that reality.
But I’m not convinced that even infinite punishment actually solves it. It answers the demand for justice as balance, but not justice as healing.
So, I don’t think atonement is primarily about punishing the perpetrator or even fully restoring the victim.
I think it’s about holding open the possibility that love is not completely extinguished by harm, that trust, though shattered, is not forever impossible, and that human beings are not reducible to the worst thing they’ve done—or had done to them.
And to be clear, that does not remove the need for boundaries, consequences, or separation. Those are part of what love requires in a broken world.
If I had to summarize it simply: retributive justice asks, “How do we make them pay?” Restorative justice asks, “How do we make a future possible?”
I think most traditional atonement models lean heavily on the first. I’m trying to explore whether the second is closer to what actually helps human beings live in the aftermath of real harm—without denying the seriousness of what was done.