Letters: what’s wrong with adoption?

The sins of the world

Sir: Matthew Parris (‘Cross purposes’, 22 April) claims that Paul invented the Church’s teaching about redemption on the cross and that Christ was silent on the topic. This is simply not true. An obvious example is found in the gospel of Mark, chapter 10, verse 45: ‘For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.’ But it is Jesus’s words of institution at the Last Supper which provide the most clear explanation of what his death would achieve: ‘This is my body which is given for you… This cup is my blood of the new covenant poured out for you.’ Jesus could not have been clearer that his death was going to be a sacrifice for sins which he would make on behalf of his disciples. 

Archbishop Cranmer’s inimitable prayer of consecration in the Book of Common Prayer puts Jesus’s understanding of his death like this: ‘who made there (by his one oblation of himself once offered) a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.’ This brilliantly untangles the ‘terrible muddle’ of the atonement of which Matthew Parris complains.

The Revd Richard Coombs

Rector of Cheltenham

Found in translation

Sir: Matthew Parris describes finding Christian teaching on the atonement a ‘muddle’. I appreciate his honesty – but there is an irony in his dismissal of atonement as part of a ‘private language that’s almost impossible for non-believers to understand’. Five hundred years ago when William Tyndale sought to translate the Bible into the English of the common people, there simply was no equivalent to the Greek and Hebrew words. To simplify and get the essence across he coined the term ‘at-one-ment.’ Whatever else the cross of Jesus does, it makes it possible for a restless world of fractious people to be ‘at-one’ with Almighty God.