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‘Atonement’ as Justice in Western Law and Christian Thought

Cassandra Sharp


This year Ian McKewan’s best-selling 2002 novel Atonement was adapted for film starring Kiera Knightly and James McAvoy. The cinematic treatment confrontingly brings to life the story of Briony Tallis and her destructive role in the life of her older sister Cecilia and her lover, Robbie Turner. As both the storyteller and a major character in the narrative, Briony expresses deep remorse about her ruinous acts as a 13-year-old girl and says that her novel, to which she gave an ending very different from the reality, is her ‘atonement’. In this story, Briony, seeks atonement through fiction⎯by reuniting the two lovers whose lives had been wrenched apart⎯ in an imagined happy ending.

Atonement is of course central to a Christian understanding of the world with the claim that God achieves it, not through fiction, but through the reality of Jesus’ death. The film highlights the fact that the concept remains hard-wired into the human psyche regardless of religious belief. This article seeks to explore how the biblical concept of atonement may be detected within formal Western understandings of justice, and more specifically, theories of punishment.

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