What happened with the Atonement of Christ has proved to be a controversial topic over the past two thousand years. The situation is, for many or most Christians, that while Christ’s incarnation, death and resurrection is known to be the central fact; a satisfactory and satisfying explanation of the Atonement is something each person may have-to sort-out for himself.

Here is a framework.

1. Establish God’s ultimate aim and hope for Man – What does God want Man to become?

2. Christians know that Jesus Christ’s incarnation, death and resurrection was – in some way – essential to the fulfilment of that hope.

3. So, the explanation of what exactly Christ’s Atonement was, and how it worked; must be provided with reference to God’s ultimate aim for Man, and Christ’s essential contribution to the achievement of that aim.

I think it can be seen that the standard explanations of the Atonement do not fulfil the above requirements – mostly because they argue backwards to try and infer God’s aim and hope from the Atonement – whereas God’s aim and hope for Man must be built-into the explanation from the beginning.

I do not have an altogether satisfactory explanation to offer, but what I am looking for is one that starts from a plausible and comprehensible answer to point 1. an answer which treats God as our wholly-loving Father.

God’s aim would seem to be to raise-up His children to become like Himself. The Mormon answer is a good one, and far better than anything which came before. But I would want to add the clarification that God wants us to become like Himself, because his greatest wish to to expand the scope of (what might be termed) inter-personal love. So we are being educated through existence such that, by our choices, we may be raised-up closer and closer to the fully-divine level of God the Father and his Son.

I think this is probably something which is a matter of such importance that many people would require a personal revelation to know what God wants for us, and why. In other words, we need to intuit God’s own feelings for us, and this includes God’s own deepest needs. These needs are for a larger society of ‘peers’ (fully divine persons) than Mother in Heaven and Jesus Christ – in a nutshell, God wants a bigger family.

This is where many people will become edgy. For much of Christian history, it has been regarded as an insult to God to say He has needs – indeed the conceptualization of God has been so abstract that such a way of talking about Him sounds silly, dumb and childish. But I would regard that as an error, and that ‘dumb and childish’ explanations are exactly what we want (this seems to be Christ’s teaching, anyway) so they should not be rejected as silly!

Current Mormon explanations imply that God wants to make us fully divine primarily in order to have us create and rule more worlds; but that dodges the question of why creating and ruling more worlds is a good thing. If we assume that God wants a bigger family, because then there is more love, this explains why he wants his children to create and rule more worlds.

Anyway, I have not here explained the Atonement, in the way I hope it could eventually be explained. I have only made the first step. It’s a beginning, no more.