Word: sinned
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...books on Orthodoxy: "It's like a fire fighter who goes into a building and comes back out covered with wounds and scars but carrying in his arms a baby he was able to grab from the crib. The victory is that he did snatch eternal life out of sin and death. And that's what Orthodox Christians focus...
...Testament lines calling Christ's death a ransom, but he could not believe that the devil was owed anything. So he restructured the cosmic debt. It was, he posed, humanity that owed God the Father a ransom of "satisfaction" (to use Anselm's feudal terminology) for the insult of sin. The problem was that the debt was unpayable: not only did we lack the means, since everything we had of value was God's to begin with, but also we lacked the standing, like a lowly serf helpless to erase an injury to a great lord. Eternal damnation seemed unavoidable...
Anselm's formulation, often called substitutionary atonement, has been restated in countless ways over the centuries. The church eventually extended its concept of the sin for which Jesus died beyond Adam's disobedience to everybody's transgressions. The 16th century reformer John Calvin replaced Anselm's feudal king with a severe judge furious at a deservedly cursed creation. Hala Saad, a contemporary churchgoer in Texas, recites a milder modern version: "All I had to do was sign up for God's debt-cancellation plan--for Jesus to take my place...
Arguments still rage as to which group of humans (everyone? Christians? the elect?) the sacrifice benefits and about whether our sins somehow retroactively exacerbate the agony of Christ's sacrifice. But no other postbiblical formulation has so elegantly intertwined the Father, the Son, wayward creation and intimations of sin and grace. None has so bound believer to Saviour in the intimacy of pain (and eventual Easter glory) and fulfilled Paul's great work of turning the Cross, an image of ultimate horror, into the paramount Western icon of love...
...great 19th century proponent, declared that atonement's new location was not in "remote fields of being" but in humanity, as "a moral effect, wrought in the mind of the race." Jesus' death became less central, because it was no longer the price for lifting the burden of sin; instead, Bushnell's successors took to preaching the Saviour's life, exhorting their congregations to strive toward reconciliation with the Father by emulating the Son's healings, his scourging of the money changers or his precepts of love and tolerance...