Eugene England - A Non-Metaphysical Atonement

It is clear that long before Christ had actually performed the central acts of the Atonement—the suffering in Gethsemane, the death on the cross, the resurrection—men were able to be affected by those acts through the prophetic knowledge that God was willing to perform them in the future. What this means is that the mechanics of the mission itself did not occur in time as a necessary precursor to their effect on men, as some theories of the Atonement would require; Christ’s mission was not to straighten out some metaphysical warp in the universe that Adam’s taking of the fruit had created. The effects of the Atonement were not metaphysical but moral and spiritual: they reach men living at any time and place through each man’s knowledge of the spirit and events of the Atonement.

-Eugene England, "That They Might Not Suffer"