Below is a response to the “conversation” or thread at BSA titled Atonement or Forgiveness, How About Neither? that began on October 9, 2025. The post begins with an interesting position by Charles Bledsoe, and comments by Michael Waddel and others are interesting.
One of Schaun Wheeler’s responses is below.
I like this, but I wonder if there’s a viable reconciliation of the classic atonement model and the view you’ve set out here.
Across a lot of traditions, there’s a shared intuition that the universe has a kind of underlying flow or order. When you live in harmony with it, things go well; when you fight against it, you suffer. It’s not punishment, it’s just how reality works. It’s the same as the difference with swimming with the current of strong river vs. swimming against the current: the river isn’t punishing you; you’re just doing something hard and potentially dangerous. Taoists call it the Tao; in Hinduism it’s dharma; in in Buddhism it’s dependent origination — the idea that everything arises through interlinked causes and conditions, so harmony means acting in tune with that causal flow rather than pushing against it.
The same idea crops up in the Hebrew wisdom tradition — the idea in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes that there’s an order built into creation, and that living in line with it (justice, humility, compassion) leads to shalom. When Jesus starts talking about being “not of this world” (*kosmos* – not to etymologial-fallacy our way through this, but the term originally meant “order” or “arrangement”), I think he’s tapping into that same intuition. When Jesus contrasts himself with “the world,” he’s contrasting the divine order with the human order that’s fallen out of alignment with it. If the order most people live by is out of step with God’s order, then Jesus is representing the “true” kosmos.
From that perspective, atonement isn’t about God being angry and needing to be appeased. It’s more like we’ve all gotten ourselves caught in the undertow, and the natural consequence is that we’ll drown unless someone pulls us out. If God really is love, then it’s in God’s nature to reach into the current and bring us back into harmony. So both atonement and forgiveness can be seen as an act of rescuing us from the destructive consequences of our own misalignment. Forgiveness is the actual act of God’s volition, and atonement is the principle that the universe isn’t going to fish us out of that undertow itself – it requires an act from someone else who is capable of navigating the current.
And if God is love in an absolute sense, then that offer of rescue — of forgiveness via atonement — is made freely to everyone. The only “judgment” involved is whether we accept the hand that’s reaching out. That’s how Robert Farrar Capon conceptualizes grace: that in the end, the only question God asks is whether we’ll let ourselves be saved. The boat is there for everyone. The only way to be lost is to refuse to get in. Every other aspect of religious observance (repentance, obedience, etc.) isn’t so much payment for the ride – a method to appease God – as it is a show of gratitude for having already been pulled from the current.
So it’s possible to think of atonement as necessary, not because God’s angry, but because reality itself has an order, and love acts to restore us to it. And it’s freely given to everyone, because love can’t do otherwise.
Now, all of this possibly requires us to assume that there is an order that even God must conform to. I haven’t catalogued it explicitly, but it feels like that’s a somewhat foreign concept in most Christian traditions – the assumption in those traditions, I think, is that God and the Order are the same thing. But for any tradition or person willing to separate the two, I think it’s possible to reconcile the concepts of both atonement and forgiveness with the idea of a perfectly-loving God.
