Fr. Jonathan critiques both liberal Protestant and Eastern Orthodox models of the atonement, which share some interesting similarities. With reference to their criticism of the Western "satisfaction" view of the atonement, he writes:
This picture of salvation may not be one that many people find appealing. Surely, we think, there must be a less bloody, less barbaric way. But hidden beneath the folds of such a noble and enlightened thought is a self-justification project. We rail against the implications of the doctrine of satisfaction because we rail against the very idea that God has a right to be intolerant of our sin. Indeed, we would much prefer to think about Christ as the great moral example or as the victor over death and the devil than as the priest who places His own sacrifice of Himself between God’s judgment and our souls on a daily basis. Of course, there is just enough truth in the lie to be dangerous. Christ is our great moral example and He is the victor over death and the devil. But He is none of those things if He is not first and foremost the one who sacrifices Himself to save us “miserable offenders.” And we hate that, because if it is true, then we have no business doing anything other than dropping dead and allowing Christ to pour new life into us. If it is true, then He really is the savior, and we, in fact, are not.
Indeed. As Fr. Aidan Kavanaugh put it so eloquently with reference to the Eucharist:
However elegant the knowledge of the dining room may be, it begins in the soil, in the barnyard, and in the slaughterhouse—amidst strangled cries, congealing blood, and spitting fat in the pan. Table manners depend upon something’s having been grabbed by the throat. A knowledge ignorant of these dark and murderous ‘gestures charged with soul’ is sterile rather than elegant, science rather than wisdom, artifice rather than art. It is love without passion, the Church without a cross, a house with a dining room but no kitchen, a feast of frozen dinners, a heartless life. The pious (religious and secular) would have us dine on abstractions; but we are, in fact, carnivores — a bloody bunch. Sacrifice may have many facets, but it always has a victim.