476 - The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality, and the Christian

The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality, and the Christian Tradition

By Colin E. Gunton

Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans, 1989. 222 Pp. $21.20.

The doctrine of atonement receives little attention these days because its controlling concepts (substitutionary suffering, blood sacrifice, victory over Satan) appear to the modern, not to say post-modern, mind to be both immoral and fantastical. In this well-written and informative book, Colin Gunton defends the language of atonement as metaphorically useful in demonstrating that "the real evil of the real world is faced and healed ontologically in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ."

Gunton develops his argument by way of an analysis and reinterpretation of the three classical theories of atonement: the exemplarist, the Christus Victor, and the forensic, or Anselmic. The exemplarist approach, theologically associated with Abelard, and philosophically with Kant, typifies for Gunton the attempts of rationalism to reduce Jesus to a role model and redemption to what humanity can do for itself. Gustav Aulen employed the rubric "Christus Victor" to draw together interpretations of the cross as the triumph of God over evil. This approach correctly places emphasis upon the divine initiative, but in its earliest forms came freighted with accounts of devils and demons vanquished by various divine stratagems. Here, Gunton offers two

478 - The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality, and the Christian

important clarifications. He points out that the Christus Victor theory is not only about divine action, but includes the fact that the defeat of evil is a human task as well, since it was the human Jesus who carried it out. Furthermore, the demons vanquished by Christ are not mythological creatures to be set aside, but apt metaphors for both personal and extrapersonal aspects of sin.

Anselm's doctrine of atonement is called "forensic," because it explains the substitutionary sacrifice of the God-man as satisfying the requirements of justice. Only a divine being could pay the enormous debt of human sin; only a human being should do so. The trouble with Anselm's theory, according to Gunton, is that it is di-polar rather than trinitarian. It presents the atonement as a transaction between God, the Father, and the Son, whose humanity must suffer the penalty of sin on our behalf. Thus, Anselm's approach overlooks the suffering of God and views atonement as merely a removal of guilt rather than a renewal of life. Gunton argues that a trinitarian interpretation of atonement will not understand sacrifice as something that happens to the creature in the name of a vengeful, angry, or demanding deity, nor as only the "once for all" action of Christ on the cross. Atoning sacrifice is, rather, an eternal activity within the divine life in which the Father and the Son reciprocally give themselves to each other and to the world. Here, Gunton employs the thought of P. T. Forsyth and Edward Irving, but neglects the earlier work of F. D. Maurice, whose Doctrine of Sacrifice anticipated this whole discussion.

Finally, for Gunton, "substitutionary atonement" means more than Christ's taking upon himself our punishment. In a marvelous dialectical turn he argues that we, in a sense, are substitutes for Christ-in that the true humanity that belongs properly to Christ (according to the doctrine of enhypostasis), is by the self-giving of God now applied to us. In this way, Gunton moves from Anselm to Barth, from substitutionary punishment to substitutionary grace.

Gunton's argument is burdened by an ongoing discussion of metaphor, which I found not only superfluous, but sometimes even contradictory to his emphasis upon divine initiative and grace. For instance, when he claims that metaphors have "a revelatory quality [which] enables us to bring God to human language," or that metaphor is "one of the means by which God is enabled to come to human speech," the divine source of revelation is obscured. It has to be kept clear that, in respect to revelation, it is God who enables language, and not the other way around.

This issue notwithstanding, Gunton's book offers a clearly written and original contribution to the doctrine of atonement.

ALEXANDER J.McKELWAY

Davidson College
Davidson, North Carolina