Arguably, the deepest and most fundamental Christian affirmation is that Christ saves. In traditional terminology, another way to express the same affirmation is that Christ “atones” for the sins of human beings. Unlike the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, however, the early Church never formally defined a single orthodox account of exactly how Christ saves or what it is about his life, death, and resurrection that accomplishes that saving work. As a result, a variety of theories or models of atonement have proliferated throughout the centuries. Contemporary work in analytic philosophical theology typically builds on these models, reformulates them in contemporary language, and seeks to defend them from criticism.