Citation: Rutledge, Jonathan C. 2022. Narrative and Atonement: The Ministry of Reconciliation in the Work of James H. Cone. Religions 13: 985. https://doi.org/10.3390/ rel13100985 Academic Editor: Joshua C. Thurow Received: 11 August 2022 Accepted: 17 October 2022 Published: 19 October 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). religions Article Narrative and Atonement: The Ministry of Reconciliation in the Work of James H. Cone Jonathan C. Rutledge Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA; jonathan_rutledge@fas.harvard.edu Abstract: Contemporary analytic theological discussions of atonement do not attend extensively to questions of how narrative might relate to the atoning work of Christ. Liberation theologians, on the other hand, utilize narrative in their scholarly method regularly and often employ it when discussing atonement or reconciliation. This essay argues that analytic theologians should consider the notion of narrative (and narrative identity) as a mechanism of atonement in the broad sense of the term introduced when William Tyndale coined ‘atonement’ to translate 2 Corinthians 5. I then offer some psychological grounds for thinking that reframing one’s self-narrative in terms of a transcendent narrative is often conducive to human flourishing, and I consider the work of James H. Cone as an instance of such transcendent narrative reframing at work. Keywords: atonement; suffering; narrative; identity; James Cone; liberation theology; analytic theology; defeat of evil; cognitive science of religion 1. Introduction Due to a preoccupation with model building, analytic theological discussions of atonement tend to home in on questions of the mechanisms of atonement. 1 And while the mechanisms posited range widely—e.g., penal substitution, vicarious penitence, Christus Victor, moral exemplarism 2 —relatively little attention has been given to how incorporat- ing the narratives of scripture into one’s own self-narrative can serve as a mechanism of atonement. 3 This dearth of attention to narrative in analytic theological accounts of atonement may seem surprising given that, as (Finley and Seachris 2021) have pointed out, narrative has been prevalent throughout much of contemporary theology—e.g., black theology, feminist theology, womanist theology, queer theology, and, of course, narrative theology (See Finley and Seachris (2021)). Nevertheless, there is a regrettable lack of substantial engagement with such theologians from within the analytic tradition, a lack that this paper hopes partially to address. 4 To that end, I offer a framework within which we can better understand how narrative might be woven into a mechanism of atonement. In particular, I argue that if we allow ‘atonement’ to be used in a broad enough sense—specifically, a sense fitting well with the word’s historical origin—then much contemporary work in the aforementioned types of liberation theology can be seen to be atonement work in this narrative sense. I begin in Section 1 by spelling out a bit of what I mean by a narrative identity. My reason for emphasizing identity, as opposed to narrative in general, is just the intuition that union with God involves union between persons, and who I am, narratively speaking, determines in part my ability to love and be loved by God (i.e., a form of union). 5 In other words, I expect that the stories we tell and believe about ourselves and our relationship to the divine make a relevant difference to our ability to be united to God and to thrive in that union. As a result, if it is possible to change those self-narratives—i.e., to reframe our Religions 2022, 13, 985. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13100985 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions