Abstract
Many students of theology will have tackled the atonement, at some point, through the comparison of different approaches made famous in Aulén’s Christus Victor. They might, at some points, feel themselves to be on reasonably familiar ground in this book, especially in the second part, with chapters devoted to moral exemplarism, the ransom motif and Anselm’s deployment of the concept of satisfaction. Crisp’s facility for marking clear lines on an often blurry conceptual map is evident here, not least in a separate chapter on penal substitution, which he convincingly argues (against Aulén) is incompatible with an Anselmian account of the atonement.
Crisp is Professor of Analytic Theology at the University of St Andrew’s, analytic theology being a strand in contemporary academic theology that he has done much to identify and promote. It fosters a dialogue with analytic philosophy, as contrasted with continental philosophy, in terms of methods, concepts and fields of research. Crisp’s concern for conceptual clarity and secure lines of argument certainly aids accessibility: doctrines are set out through a sequence of numbered propositions, definitions of significant terms appear as indented text, and meticulous overviews and conclusions punctuate the text throughout. Poetry and paradox in theological discourse give place here to more prosaic parallels, such as the comparison between Christ and an internet router (pp. 217–21). Yet this remains a demanding read, dense with critical questions and carefully argued proposals, as Crisp interrogates not just theological traditions and contemporary scholarship but his own previous work in this area; he acknowledges in the Introduction that, in the process of writing the book, ‘I had to revise and rethink a number of key issues over the course of more than a decade’ (p. 3). That includes, for instance, the distance he puts between this account of the atonement and penal substitution, which he had sought to accommodate in earlier publications, in favour of an Anselmian view of satisfaction and of an understanding of Christ as our representative rather than substitute.
Crisp writes from a Reformed perspective, sometimes betraying anxiety that the positions to which his argument leads him might be thought unfaithful to its proper traditions. Perhaps the most startling example of this would be his defence of original sin as a form of pervasive and universal corruption that does not include the transmission of ‘original guilt’ for the sin of Adam. His creative exploration of ecclesiology in the penultimate chapter of the final, constructive part of the book as intrinsic to the doctrine of salvation might leave some residual tension with a presentation of justification that remains resolutely focused on the relation of the individual to God. Nonetheless, his insistence that the account of atonement offered here belongs within ‘the larger framework of God’s fundamental aim in creation and redemption of ensuring that God’s creatures … participate in the divine life’ (p. 228) also ensures that there is much material here to feed the theological thinking of anyone who affirms that first and final divine purpose.