A perhaps underemphasized aspect of Christ's atonement

Usually, Christ’s sacrifice of the Cross is thought of as atonement for our sins before God. This leads to old theological question: Why can’t God simply forgive our sins, without the need for any atoning sacrifice? Aquinas’s answer is: God could, but it’s more fitting that the debt be paid. I want to explore a different answer.

Suppose that when you do a wrong to someone, you come to owe it to them to be punished. But now instead of thinking of God as the aggrieved party, think of all the times when we have done wrong to other human beings. Some of them have released or will release us from our debt through forgiveness. But, probably, not everyone. But what, now, if we think of Christ’s sacrifice as atomenent for our sins before the unforgiving. We don’t need to pay to other unforgiving humans the debt of being punished, because Christ has paid it on our behalf.

This neatly answers the question of why God’s can’t simply forgive us our sins: God can simply release us from our debt to God, but it is either impossible or at least significantly unfitting for God to simply release us from our debt to fellow human beings.

Here is a consequence of the story. If we fail to forgive our fellow human beings, that is yet another way in which we become shamefully co-responsible for Christ’s sufferings, since now Christ is atoning for these fellow human beings before us. We should then be ashamed of ourselves, especially given that Christ is also suffering for us.

The story isn’t complete. Christ’s atonement applies not just to my sins against my neighbor, but also to my sins against God alone and my sins against myself. But once we have seen that some atoning sacrifice is needed on our behalf, the idea of a total atoning sacrifice, capable of atoning for everyone’s debts to everyone, including to God, looks even more fitting.