Some questions are so important that we should always have a good answer ready, put in terms that people today can understand. For Catholics, these include why Jesus had to die, and how He could bear our iniquities and die for our sins. We should have well-considered answers ready for anyone who asks.
I’m not a professional theologian. I see myself more as someone looking for a useful mental model. When you find one that is both elegant and true, you get far more out of it than you put in. When I looked into these questions about Jesus’s death on the cross, I expected to find a definitive answer. In my experience, the Church usually has one, though it is often phrased in a way that no longer speaks clearly or convincingly to an intelligent person today, at least not without in-depth study. What I found instead was, essentially, that we don’t quite know. The Church has never dogmatically defined a single theory of atonement. We have several theories, each with its strengths and weaknesses, and to some extent we use all of them, drawing on whichever one fits the situation. Perhaps that is the best we can do when trying to put into words something beyond human understanding. It may also be that when we quote Saint Paul, Saint Peter, or Saint James, we are unknowingly repeating fragments of what Jesus Himself said on these subjects. In that sense, we may already know the right answers, just not the path that leads to them.
As a software professional meeting a customer who needs to streamline how things are done, you actually benefit from not understanding their business at first. As you dig deeper, your job is to capture what you learn in an elegant mental model expressed in code, and to do it with fresh eyes. Let’s try approaching this theological field as outsiders, too.
As for the Lord Jesus, one common view is that we heaped our sins on Him, the way people in ancient times heaped them on sacrificial animals, and that He went willingly to His death out of love for us, carrying those sins like a sacrificial lamb. This is highly symbolic language, and it’s hard to internalize when you don’t know which parts to take literally and which symbolically. Even seen from outside the Church, such an explanation makes some sense: the Old Testament describes similar sacrifices commanded by God, at least when read in a certain way.
There may be religious communities where, once you decide to believe, you have to accept whatever you are told. To me, being a Christian means the exact opposite, so I have to ask:
Can somebody suffer for my sins, physically or otherwise? Certainly. I can think of many such cases throughout history, both personal and collective. But can someone else bear my personal sins? Does reality allow sins to be transferred from one person to another? Hardly, unless “transferring” them means bearing their consequences without being guilty of them. I don’t intend to argue through definitions and syllogisms here. What I have in mind is something parents do quite often: they bear their children’s sins and suffer considerably so that the children don’t have to. Parents suffer in their children’s place, which is a kind of substitution. Think of a child who breaks something very expensive at home, or does something far more serious that you then have to deal with. And it isn’t only about the sins your children commit. As a parent, you suffer even more from the sinful mess you inherited from previous generations, which you try to put right, at least partly, so that it affects your kids less.
Jesus addresses God as “Abba,” an intimate Aramaic word for “father,” often rendered as “dad.” It’s not hard to imagine that God did for us in Jesus what we do for our children, only on another level.
I have to admit that when I imagine this, it moves my heart and calls me to action, because I can connect with it and empathize with God. Yet it doesn’t quite feel as mysterious and miraculous as one would expect of a truly religious experience.
And indeed, this is not all the tradition has to offer. In the Old Testament, blood is not just a symbol of death; it carries life. The Book of Leviticus says so explicitly: the life of a creature is in its blood, and God has given it to Israel for the altar, to make atonement (Lev 17:11). When blood was poured out or sprinkled on the altar, the point was not primarily the killing of an animal. It was life being returned to God, and through it, communion with Him being restored.
Take the holy day of Yom Kippur (Lev 16), for example. It involved two goats. The high priest laid the sins of the people on one of them, the scapegoat, which was driven into the wilderness, carrying the sins away. The other goat was sacrificed as a sin offering, and its blood was taken into the Holy of Holies and sprinkled on the mercy seat, the cover of the Ark of the Covenant, where God was present. The point was not punishment. The blood purified the sanctuary, so that God could go on dwelling among His people (Lev 16:16). The image I described earlier, of sins heaped on a victim, corresponds mostly to the first goat. Yet the tradition sees Jesus in the second one as well. The Letter to the Hebrews builds directly on this: Christ entered the true sanctuary not with the blood of goats but with His own, once and for all, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness (Heb 9:12, 9:22).
When a technical person like me hears this kind of symbolic reasoning, the first reaction is to feel overwhelmed by all the unfounded assumptions and unclear logic. The second is to reject it outright, because none of it sounds legitimate.
I completely understand that reaction. Yet when you read the Old Testament page by page, the same passages about blood and sacrifice look entirely different. You see a God who chose a group of quite unexceptional people in the Bronze Age and tried to lift them out of their wicked way of life, out of a misery inherited from previous generations. He tried to civilize them, for lack of a better word. Although they experienced God far more directly than we ever can, they swung between two extremes, sometimes within months. Either they feared Him, suspecting that He only pretended to be good and was in fact evil, luring them to destruction. Or, when they could see clearly that He was as good and merciful as He claimed, they promptly neglected Him and tried to take matters into their own hands and manipulate reality through occult practices and magic.
In a world where animals, and in some cultures firstborn children, were sacrificed to nonexistent gods, the true God established rules for proper worship. Yes, that worship was based on animal sacrifice and blood, but its purposes were clear. First, to acknowledge Him as the only God: these were the burnt offerings. Then, to give thanks for the livelihood He provided: the grain offerings, along with peace offerings for other occasions of thanksgiving. Then, to cleanse the people from sin and ritual impurity: the sin offerings. And finally, to make amends for sacrilege against holy things, for wronging a neighbor, or for a false oath: the guilt offerings, which also required compensating whoever had been wronged.
Sin offerings were only a small part of the whole. That doesn’t make them less important, but primacy clearly belonged to the burnt offerings. The word often used in this context is atonement, and in English you can hear “at-one-ment” in it: bringing your will into harmony with God’s. That is what God wants first of all: that you acknowledge Him and strive to make your will one with His.
Nowhere could I find anything harsh that God imposes on His people that has to be read as punishment for its own sake, or as satisfaction for His offended pride. Everything He does is meant to steer His people in the right direction. He uses far harsher means than Jesus does, but He is also dealing with a far more primitive people. Seen from this angle, the analogy I used earlier, of a parent trying to raise their children out of their misery, holds up entirely. When I read the Old Testament, my heart is moved in the same way as when I read the New. In both, it is His mercy that moves me. And honestly, what the Israelites did during the Exodus was sometimes so appalling that I would be afraid to turn the page if I didn’t know how the story ends.
Today, I believe, the better mental model is that of a parent: one willing to suffer to save their children from a misery they brought on themselves, going to any lengths for them, even death, to prepare a path out of that misery that they can walk together, hand in hand. It is love in its most extreme form, and in God’s case, a true sacrifice for our sins, one we re-present in every mess. It is all the more stunning coming from the One whom many people still imagine as a detached higher being, for whom we are mere specks of dust.
Fortunately, most of us can relate to that kind of parenting today. Two thousand years ago, however, analogies drawn from sacrificial blood may have been a much better way to depict the same reality. Ritual sacrifice was something almost everyone knew firsthand, so people could readily draw analogies from it and see the hidden connections. We shouldn’t condemn people for using different models in different ages, nor is there any reason to feel superior to them on that basis. But a symbolic analogy is not the same as the reality it describes.
The Church teaches that Christ’s death was a true sacrifice: He did indeed give His life for our sins. But if we lead with the imagery of altars and blood when a modern person asks why Jesus had to die, we may hand them a faith that has lost its power to move hearts and call people to action. It would be a faith that is hard to apply to everyday decisions, modeled on ritual practices that are long dead and forgotten.
And so I propose that we live by the analogy of the parent and let the language of blood deepen it, rather than living by the ritual and hoping that everyday love will follow. It won’t. God the Father is first of all a Father, and God the Son is first of all a Son.