It is possible to use a word so often that it ceases to have meaning. I heard a song once that used the word "shadow" so often that it degraded from an audible symbol for the space on the ground absent of light to a nonsense jumble of its constituent parts.
Atonement has a similar problem, I think. We misuse it, I think, or rather use it to refer to something other than what the original word intended. When we say "Atonement," what we typically refer to is the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Those three things are like pillars supporting a bridge, and the actual events described or implied by the words translated as Atonement indicate what happens when we individually cross that bridge.
"Reconciliation" is another word used as a translation for the same word for Atonement in the New Testament. All the words translated as Atonement imply a return to God, coming home, reunion, sitting down at the dinner table, the prodigal son and his loving father forgiving and forgetting the past and rejoining each other to perpetuate their interrupted relationship.
The word Atonement was contrived by William Tyndale as he was translating the Bible into English from its original languages. He could find no equivalent in our language, and so he took the phrase "at one," and tacked "ment" on the end to indicate an event or completion of becoming "at one." Paying a price for transgression is also referred to in popular parlance as "atonement," an economic phrase loaded with the assumption of guilt, rather than just a debt of money. And so it is appropriate to refer to the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ as an Atonement. But there is more to it than that.
In the fuller sense of the original word, Atonement is what we are able to do, or what is able to be granted to us, as a result of what Jesus did. Think of the fruits of His life, the things we may enjoy one day, and even here and now:
Two people holding a grudge against each other reconcile, extending forgiveness, brought together, at one;
A man and a woman, two disparate entities with separate ways of thinking, being, and wanting, brought together for eternity, at one;
Mercy and justice are brought together so that the demands of both are satisfied, harmonized as Eliza R. Snow put it, at one;
The spirit and body are reunited in the resurrection, permanently at one;
We are brought back into the presence of God our Father, reunited after sad separation, never to part again, at one;
Families, even broken and scattered ones, can be healed, members forgive and are forgiven, and sealed together in permanent relationships, parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren, at one.
All these things are At-One-ment, in the fuller sense of the word, closer to its original meaning. All these things are permanent, too. The teeth of entropy and chains of death are broken by Him. Our way of speaking glosses over this too often, trivializing the momentous blessings made available, reducing them to a get-out-of-jail-free card. We are recipients of so much more than that, and I cannot help feeling like restating what I said before: we are figuratively trapped at the bottom of an inescapable pit, and all we have to offer in the end are pleas for assistance and a sincere, loving "thank you" to our Rescuer.
