Abstract
This volume, by Adam Johnson, Assistant Professor of Theology at Biola University, is a recent contribution to T & T Clark’s accessible series on difficult themes, “A Guide for the Perplexed.” Johnson’s book lives up to this mandate for he writes clearly and broadly on one of the most vexing themes in Christian theology: the doctrine of the atonement.
The atonement is at once the most ubiquitous and the most misunderstood of Christian doctrines. It is regularly preached, but seldom fully appropriated. Johnson provides a roadmap through the various historical representations, but he does so by eschewing the usual guide: Gustav Aulèn’s famous and oft-used study, Christus Victor. Instead of the wooden and exclusive models, Johnson capably alerts us to the dynamic and multiple layers of interpretation of Christ’s death and resurrection according to theologians throughout the centuries. Following Thomas Aquinas, Johnson argues that “we ought to witness to the fittingness of the atonement: to demonstrate how the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ brings together a wide array of benefits for the sake of the reconciliation of all things to God” (5). With this overarching goal in mind, Johnson leads us to an understanding of how the “multidimensional work” (6) of the atonement offers salvation in a variety of ways consistent with the character of God who is revealed in Jesus Christ.
Such analysis is not confined to the biblical narrative, but instead looks to the manner in which “biblical scholars throughout the history of the Church” (12) have come to understand the saving work of Christ as narrated through the Bible. Such excavation of sources throughout history will enable Johnson and his readers to “glean the treasure” (20), which is the rich and multivalent imagery of God’s saving work through Christ. Such treasure, it is hoped, will awaken the modern church to underrepresented accounts of Jesus’ atonement.
In his excavation and recovery, Johnson explores the parameters of images of Jesus’ atonement through the question of orthodoxy (chapter 2). Chapter 3 explores the triune shape of the doctrine of the atonement, while chapter 4 considers the atonement in light of the divine attributes. Chapter 5 looks at the creaturely benefits that are accrued through the atonement, and specifically at the inclusive diversity of its benefactors. Chapter 6 renarrates the atonement through the Triduum—Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday—and finds in the temporal unfolding of God’s revelation a rich and consistent account of Christ’s saving work. Chapter 7, the conclusion, offers both a wrap-up of the book and a brief invitation to the book’s implications for further related issues, including its implications for biblical and cultural hermeneutics.
While this book offers a sound introduction to the doctrine of the atonement, and is particularly useful in upsetting the wooden approach to this doctrine in favor of a more dynamic view, it tends to jettison its proposed aim of offering a rich exposition of the atonement in its handing of critiques of the atonement, particularly of “satisfaction theory.” The book gives short shrift to feminist and womanist critiques of the doctrine of the atonement, claiming (too breezily in my view) that feminist theologians have not taken seriously enough the doctrine of the Trinity in their criticisms. In Johnson’s estimation, feminist critics verge on “tritheistic interpretation of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as distinct entities” (69). Yet, Johnson’s subsequent defense of monotheistic trinitarianism strikes me as rather Docetic as he fails to consider what feminist critics have underscored in the biblical text: the material, human suffering of Jesus of Nazareth, whose cry of dereliction on the cross pronounces the depths of alienation, which other creatures echo throughout history in this fallen world. That God can accomplish something out of creaturely suffering is entirely possible and consistent with feminist and other liberationist theologies; that such creaturely suffering is necessary is an entirely different question. It is, to my mind, this difference, which makes all the difference, that Johnson has failed to appreciate as he defends Jesus’ suffering and God’s wrath as necessarily ingredient within God’s saving work.