In his recent How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels , N.T. Wright argues that many forms of atonement theology detach the cross from its proper context in the gospels - that is, the context of God’s coming kingdom. He finds that many “devour works” that deal with the life and death of Jesus ignore the fact that in Jesus “Israel’s God really did become king of the world” (241).

Putting the cross back with the kingdom gives “a fresh and helpful framework for understanding the vexed questions that surround the substitutionary atonement.” He insists that “Jesus understood his own death i terms of several strands of biblical witness, supremely Isaiah 40-55 and within that the great passage on vicarious substitution, the Fourth Servant Song (52:13-53:12).” For the four evangelists, he argues, Jesus “is dying a penal death in place of the guilty, of guilty Israel, of guilty humankind. Through his death, the evangelists are telling their readers there will come the jubilee event, the great redemption, freedom from debts of every kind, which he had earlier announced and which is the central characteristic of the kingdom” (243).

But Jesus’ substitutionary death cannot be “de-judaized” or “dehistoricized” without giving rise to caricatures. It makes sense as the work of the God of Israel, who becomes human and endures a human death in order to establish His universal kingship.