Jesuit On St. Paul And Atonement

St. Paul's theology gathers up past, present and future— God, God made Man, Christ glorified—and gathers us up equally into the comprehensive truth. It is, in a special sense, theology applied and extended to man. Nowhere else will you find less formalism or more vitality in religion. Hardly has he proposed a belief before he passes on to show the relation of that belief to ourselves.

So his consideration of the Incarnation or the atonement merges almost at once into an application and extension of that Incarnation and atonement to the Church and the individual.

Yet when, as against all this, we consider how many sided is this mystery of the atonement, and how limited the capacity of the mind which can only attend to one aspect, one reasoned theory or set of values at any given time, then how very incompletely at best may we expect to comprehend that supreme fact in itself and its overwhelming import for us!

Link (here) to the essay entitled, THE EXTENSION OF THE ATONEMENT IN ST. PAUL. BY Fr. Leo E. Bellanti, S.J.