This radio talk by Anglican priest Jeffrey John attracted the usual accusations of liberal heresy before it was even actually broadcast, but upon reading the transcript I don’t see anything particularly unorthodox. Granted John takes issue with the theory of penal substitution, but he’s hardly the first to do so, and the universal church hasn’t established it as the definitive way of understanding the Atonement.

John says:

The cross, then, is not about Jesus reconciling an angry God to us; it’s almost the opposite. It’s about a totally loving God, incarnate in Christ, reconciling us to him. On the cross Jesus dies for our sins; the price of our sin is paid; but it is not paid to God but by God. As St paul says, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Because he is Love, God does what Love does: He unites himself with the beloved. He enters his own creation and goes to the bottom line for us. Not sending a substitute to vent his punishment on, but going himself to the bitter end, sharing in the worst of suffering and grief that life can throw at us, and finally sharing our death, so that he can bring us through death to life in him.

Whether or not this is a fully adequate account of the Atonement, it seems to me that this is an entirely orthodox perspective. I’ve written before that a theory of atonement is secondary to the central Christian affirmation: that God became incarnate in Jesus in order to save us from sin and death. The various theories of atonement are ways of understanding how that works, but they aren’t the thing itself.