Review

Salvation's Network

Reclaiming the Atonement:
An Orthodox Theology of Redemption;
Volume I: The Incarnation
by Patrick Henry Reardon
Ancient Faith Publishing, 2015
(323 pages, $18.95, paperback)

reviewed by S. M. Hutchens

The seminary list of "theories of the Atonement" customarily begins with the "ransom paid to the devil" common in the patristic era, in which man's sin was understood to have brought him under the power of Satan, to whom Christ in his death paid the ransom required for a captive, and over whom he triumphed in his resurrection, drawing on, as C. S. Lewis called it in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, "deeper magic from before the dawn of time" (that is, the law as a function of grace rather than its antithesis), when the White Witch claimed Edmund as her just victim and Aslan released him by dying in his place, the innocent for the guilty.

Often the final theory considered is the "Abelardian" one of "moral influence"—that Christ died to provide a compelling illustration of charitable and morally improving labor—generally treated as the worst alternative among the orthodox-minded because of its incompleteness and its attraction to religious liberals who reject the metaphysical underpinnings of the more traditional theories (for example, the barbarism of the idea that God would require blood sacrifice for the remission of sins). Along the way, one will encounter synthetic treatments such as presented by Gustav Aulén in Christus Victor (1931), which represents as the classical view that Christ overcame the powers of evil and death that held men in captivity, and rose in victory over them. In this Aulén discovers a central stream that may be considered definitive and trims other theories, both of the objective (Anselmian) and subjective (Abelardian) kind, of their eccentricities.

The most significant of the atonement theories presented is that of St. Anselm of Canterbury (†1109) in Cur Deus Homo? (Why the God-Man?)—sometimes called the "commercial" theory—in which man's sin is treated as an affront to the honor of a holy God, creating an infinite debt to him (not the devil) that finite and sinful man is unable to pay. The redeeming answer to this is the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son of God, who only, as both God and man, could serve as the mediating and reconciling agent. St. Anselm's theory is of particular importance in Roman Catholic ecclesiology and soteriology, for the concept of an infinite treasury of merit earned by Christ on the cross and graciously transferrable to man helps lay the ground for its administration through the ministries of the Church and its priesthood in a system vigorously rejected by Protestantism.

The Goal of God's Activity

Fr. Reardon has produced a work on the Atonement that is precisely not an attempt at a more satisfactory theory, or to lay down a royal road among existing theories, but an exposition of the reconciliation of sinful man to God in its largest sense, as a function of the life of God in the Son and Spirit, the At-one-ment of God and sinful man regained, perfected, and magnified in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son, in which every contingency of creation, including that of sin, is wholly anticipated and contained in the Trinitarian life. As such, what we have been given here is not simply a doctrine of Atonement such as we have become used to, but a Christology, and thus also necessarily a Trinitarian theology, an account not simply of the reason God became man, but of the life of God as it relates comprehensively to the life of man: "The word atonement signifies the goal, the telos or skopos of all God's activity in this world: man's participation in the divine life" (17).

In this light, theories of the Atonement that treat the work of Christ principally as a divine reaction to the emergency of sin or to any claim the devil might make lose much of their definitive force: everything necessary for the rescue of man, or for his life if rescue is unneeded, has been preemptively provided for as part of the life of God, in whom the Incarnation of the Son as the paschal Lamb was the form taken in the anticipated history of God's eternal and inexorable concern that man, whom he loves, might despite every contingency partake in the divine life in unity with his Son. It is this life in which sin and death are comprehended, absorbed, and nullified, and in light of which the devil cannot be thought of as a kind of dark-side challenger to light-side God, an Ahriman who, because of the sin and death of man he has brought about, can summon the Almighty to a reckoning. Rather, he is put in his place as a fallen archangel utterly out of his own reckoning, with a miserable history of being employed and "dealt with" by his Enemy.

Fr. Reardon has accomplished the expository task he has set himself, not in the form of a rigidly systematic exposition, but more in the creation of a network of exegetical observations. They are suspended topically in chapters with headings such as, "Life in the Church," "Anselm, the Fathers, and Holy Scripture," "Incarnation and Deification," "The Transfiguration," and "The Last Things," with appendices on "The Destiny of Israel" and "Salvation History and Life in the Church." What the reader unfamiliar with Orthodox theology will find, however, is more a concentration on connections than headings, so that the categories of theology tend to float lightly on an interconnective narrative of the character of the life of God as it contains the life of man, here shown as the eternal basis of the Atonement.

Richness & Simplicity

It is likely that the reader accustomed to this volume of thought being compressed into highly articulated theological systems will be struck by the richness—perhaps even with a kind of Johannine depth in simplicity (the book is not difficult to read)—of synthesis supported by a magisterial acumen, particularly exegetical, founded on years of study, contemplation, and pastoral exercise.

I find it difficult to recommend too highly this book my friend and teacher has written. If it were possible, I would make it the foundation of the seminary theology curriculum, the first book on the subject the students would read, and be expected to read carefully, after studying the Bible—quite fitting if indeed "atonement signifies the goal, the telos or skopos of all God's activity in this world," based on man's participation in the divine life.

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