the atonement

The Atonement
by J. Gresham Machen


Machen (1881-1937) was Professor of New Testament, first at Princeton Theological Seminary, and afterwards at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia. Excerpts from Christianity and Liberalism (1923).

According to Christian belief, Jesus is our Savior, not by virtue of what He said, not even by virtue of what He was, but by what He did. He is our Savior, not because He has inspired us to live the same kind of life that He lived, but because He took upon Himself the dreadful guilt of our sins and bore it instead of us on the cross. Such is the Christian conception of the Cross of Christ.

This Bible doctrine is not intricate or subtle. On the contrary, though it involves mysteries, it is itself so simple that a child can understand it. "We deserved eternal death, but the Lord Jesus, because He loved us, died instead of us on the cross" — surely there is nothing so very intricate about that. It is not the Bible doctrine of the atonement which is difficult to understand — what are really incomprehensible are the elaborate modern efforts to get rid of the Bible doctrine in the interests of human pride.

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