Atonement (novel) Atonement (novel) Atonement is a 2001 British metafiction novel written by Ian McEwan concerning the understanding of and responding to the need for personal atonement. Set in three time periods, 1935 England, Second World War England and France, and present-day England, it covers an upper-class girl's half-innocent mistake that ruins lives, her adulthood in the shadow of that mistake, and a reflection on the nature of writing. Widely regarded as one of McEwan's best works, it was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize for fiction. In 2010, "TIME" magazine named "Atonement" in its list of the 100 greatest English-language novels
Substitutionary atonement lambs to pay for one's sins. The word "atonement" encompasses Christ’s work of redemption on behalf of his people. The center of Christ’s work, to which the whole New Testament expounded, was Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross. Christ’s death is the very heart of the Christian faith. A distinction is often made between substitutionary atonement (Christ suffers for us), and penal substitution (Christ punished instead of us), which is a subset or particular type of substitutionary atonement. Both affirm the substitutionary and vicarious nature of the atonement (that Christ did His work in place of something required of us),