Abstract
Participation and Atonement is the latest iteration of Oliver Crisp's project to clarify, and defend, a moderate Reformed account of atonement. He describes it as ‘a companion volume and sequel to … The Word Enfleshed’ (p. 3), though his account of the atonement has changed and developed between the two books.
Participation and Atonement is clearly structured, the prose lucid, and the argument plainly set out (pace the numbering of points in chapter 6 on penal substitution). As its title indicates, Crisp seeks to defend the following claims: (1) those who are members of redeemed humanity are justified by an act of sheer divine grace from eternity decisively achieved in time by Christ's death on the cross, (2) the Spirit unites the redeemed to Christ, and through Christ to the divine nature, (3) and in so doing incorporates the redeemed into the mystical body of Christ, (4) as part of God's fundamental aim in creation and redemption of ensuring that God's creatures, especially human creatures, participate in the divine life (p. 228). Crisp therefore seeks to integrate the atonement in the context of God's divine purposes from eternity to eternity, expressing God's election of humanity from before the foundation of the world and leading to theosis, which Crisp tantalizingly (but potentially problematically) describes as ‘like a mathematical asymptote in that the human members of redeemed humanity draw ever closer to God in this process, yet without ever becoming God or losing themselves in God’ (p. 238).
The book is structured in three parts. The first part is largely methodological ground-clearing, to better help address Crisp's central question: what is the mechanism by means of which Christ's work reconciles fallen human beings to God? (p. 3). In the second part, Crisp reviews various standard accounts of the atonement: moral exemplarism (chapter 3), ransom—which he regards as a motif rather than a complete doctrine (chapter 4), satisfaction (chapter 5), and penal substitution (chapter 6). Part of his strategy here is to distinguish satisfaction and penal substitution, as a prelude to presenting his revised theory of the atonement. Whereas his previous ‘realist union account … was a species of penal substitution’, Crisp contends that his revised account, which he dubs the ‘representational union account’, is not (p. 148). Crisp now argues that Christ's reconciling work is not a version of penal substitution or satisfaction, though it is akin to both. On Crisp's representational union account of the atonement, ‘Christ is accountable but not responsible for human sin, and he performs an act of vicarious penance on behalf of fallen humanity’ (p. 7). Christ's atonement is a ‘vicarious, reparative, and penitential act of soteriological representation whereby a “part” of humanity, Christ, may stand in for the whole of fallen humanity and act on behalf of the whole’ (p. 148; see also pp. 178, 188–90). This is possible because whereas all human beings are protologically represented in Adam, they are eschatologically represented in Christ (p. 198).
In the third part of the book, Crisp seeks to develop his account of the atonement (chapters 7 and 8), to connect it to the incorporation of the redeemed into the mystical body of Christ (chapter 9) before offering a concluding chapter entitled ‘Soteriological Synthesis’.
Crisp's book is largely successful as a work of clarification, though there are points at which it is possible to ask whether he and others whose work he discusses are drawing distinctions without a difference (most obviously about whether satisfaction, penal substitution, and Crisp's representational union account really are as distinct as he claims).
Crisp's interaction with Eleonore Stump's Atonement (Oxford University Press, 2018) is especially rich (pp. 111–16). However, because Participation and Atonement is a work of analytical theology and applies that approach on every page, it is unlikely to persuade those who think that more insights are yielded by approaching the atonement through a series of necessarily incomplete, and overlapping, metaphors than to look for a single mechanism or master account. Because the book is a formal argument, it will probably leave unmoved those whose objections to satisfaction and penal theories of the atonement are rooted in emotional or intuitive aversions to ideas of punishment, violence, wrath and the picture of God implied in such theories. The book also assumes that immortality is something human beings have lost because of their sin, and Crisp does not explore how his and other accounts of atonement might be framed if human beings face annihilation rather than an eternity of conscious punishment. Crisp's focus seems, however, to be on offering a Reformed account of the atonement which is intelligible by, and potentially attractive to, Catholic and Orthodox Christians (see, e.g., pp. 108–109, 154–55, 202). He seeks to be ‘dogmatically minimist’, in the attempt ‘to isolate a doctrine that has ecumenical promise’ (p. 171).
Participation and Atonement is a useful, and important, introduction to an influential way of thinking about the atonement, presenting Reformed accounts in their best light, and seeking to integrate them within a broader soteriology from which they have sometimes been unhelpfully detached.