Forthcoming in Hinder Them Not: Centering Marginalized Voices in Analytic Theology, Oxford University Press (Michelle Panchuk & Michael Rea, eds.). Penultimate Draft; Please do not cite without permission. 1 Conceptualizing the Atonement 1 Kathryn Pogin How cruel and wicked it seems that anyone should demand the blood of an innocent person as the price for anything, or that it should in any way please him that an innocent man should be slain--still less that God should consider the death of His Son so agreeable that by it he should be reconciled to the whole world! 2 If belief in the redemptive nature of the life and death of Christ is to be intellectually defensible, Christian philosophers must have an account of it that is not only philosophically coherent, but also morally unobjectionable. In the philosophical literature, there is a significant body of work dedicated to making theoretical sense of the atonement (e.g., whether the debt of sin owed to God may be satisfied by another), but thus far, contemporary philosophers of religion have given little treatment to the atonement by way of social epistemology or feminist philosophy, despite extensive attention to the issue within feminist theology. In order to bring these conversations together, here, I explore some of the epistemological and gendered implications of traditional approaches to the atonement— namely, the normalization of submission to violence and the idealization of suffering. In the first section of what follows, I describe three major categories of atonement theories in the philosophical tradition. The second section surveys some of the feminist criticisms of the atonement tradition that have been put forward in the theological literature, as well as the theological context which motivates those criticisms. In the third section, I examine the implications of feminist theology in this vein for particular theories of the atonement. In the fourth section, I argue that conceiving of redemption as arising out of sacrificial submission to violence—the suffering servant who willingly, though undeservedly, self-sacrifices for the sake of another—has corrupted the shared hermeneutical 1 Thanks to Michael Rea, Jason Stanley, Jennifer Lackey, Baron Reed, Amber Carlson, Meghan Page, Faith Glavey Pawl, Michelle Panchuk, Michael DePaul, participants in an Analytic Theology Workshop at Southern Methodist University, and participants in a Baylor Georgetown Notre Dame Philosophy of Religion Conference for discussion and/or comments on earlier versions of this paper. 2 Peter Abelard, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans