twentieth. Yet the word is in the Bible." (1) Farrer is referring to Romans 5:11 in the Authorized Version: "we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement." Here the word 'atonement' -literally, the state of being "at one" -translates the Greek katallagê, which means "reconciliation." The doctrine of the Atonement, then, is in its essentials the claim that the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ effects a reconciliation between God and human beings, who had been -and apart from Christ's gracious action would have remained -estranged on account of human sin. And that doctrine, far from being a twelfth century innovation, is a prominent theme of the Pauline epistles and a matter of theological consensus from the earliest days of Christian thought.