Bloodless Atonement?

Does the Messiah have to die to pay for his people's sins? Is the cross of Jesus an atoning sacrifice? In recent decades a burgeoning number of theologians have answered the aforementioned questions in the negative. In fact some, like Rene Girard, have gone so far as to assert that seeing the cross as an atoning sacrifice undermines the very essence of the New Testament Gospels. While Girard and others following in a similar vein have offered provocative alterations to soteriology that no l...