Abstract

Each human owes atonement to God for his own sins, and owes it to his fellow humans to help them to make atonement to God for their sins. Only an individual sinner can repent and make apology, but others can provide him with the means to make reparation. Jesus Christ, who, being God, owed nothing to God, provided his life and death as something that we can offer to God as our reparation for our own sins and those of our fellows. This model of atonement, tantamount to the ‘satisfaction’ model of Anselm and the to the biblical model of ‘sacrifice’, is the most satisfactory of the traditional theological models of the Atonement.