Nicene Theology offers an interesting reflection on the nature of dogma and faith today. After reading a book about various views of the Atonement:

Perhaps, then, to be faithful to Scripture and to the Christian witness we should refuse to appropriate any single model. Perhaps an honest appreciation for scandal, for variety and for paradox in the doctrine of the atonement, should replace our need for a theory or theories.

Certainly there are many helpful ways of talking about Christ's work, many helpful metaphors to employ. It is not simply theological variety that we ought to embrace, but the scandal of paradox and of offense as well.

The idea rings true. I'm guilty of that kind of systematizing -- same as anyone else, I suppose -- but I've always been vaguely dissatisfied with it. More and more, I fall back on the metaphor of a fractal, or references to the classic book Flatland, in which a two-dimensional world encounters three-dimensional shapes. It's a scary place to be in, embracing a multiverse of Atonement-concepts, but perhaps it's a good sort of scary.