Deification Through the Cross

The topic of deification/divinization/theosis has been "hot" for well over 15 years by this point, with new books appearing almost every year. I have documented and discussed many of them on here in the past decade. Late this year we shall have another book by a prominent and important scholar, an author whom I have interviewed on here before, whose voice as a Melkite priest within the contemporary academy is a rare and important one: Khaled Anatolios, Deification through the Cross: An Eastern Christian Theology of Salvation (Eerdmans, November 2020), 500pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

It is commonly claimed that Western Christianity teaches salvation as deliverance from sin through Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross, while Eastern Christianity teaches salvation as deliverance from death—and as deification—through Christ’s incarnation. But is it really true that there is no normative, unified doctrine of salvation to be found in Scripture and tradition?

Theologian Khaled Anatolios, deeply grounded in both East and West, here expounds a soteriology that speaks deeply to all Christians. He argues that both Western and Eastern perspectives are needed, and especially that Eastern theology and liturgy, contrary to Western misperceptions, hold cross, resurrection, and glorification together in an exemplary way. Anatolios uses the phrase “doxological contrition” to suggest that the truth of salvation is found both in Jesus’s perfect glorification of God and in his representative repentance for humanity’s sinful rejection of its original calling to participate in the life of the Holy Trinity.

Deification through the Cross is a salutary rebuttal of the postmodern fragmentation that assumes no single, normative soteriology can apply globally. Anatolios systematically expounds an integrated soteriology, which he then puts into dialogue with various perspectives, including liberation theology, Girardian theory, and penal substitution. All who seek to understand and teach “the joy of our salvation” will find indispensable help in this magisterial retrieval of an often-misunderstood doctrine.

Theories of Atonement

Few things are more tiresome than listening to fourth-rate Orthodox apologetics with their endlessly recycled caricatures of Anselm as some kind of comic-opera thug introducing his horrid theory of "atonement," which theory has then ostensibly tainted the whole of Western Christianity. It's been more than 20 years since I read Anslem, but I found nothing of this caricature in his works. Nor, for that matter, is he cited even once in the 1992 universal Catechism of the Catholic Church. But why let facts stand in the way of a good whodunnit?

Still, one should, I hope, be at least a little less blithe in slandering the great archbishop of Canterbury and making sweeping generalizations about Western theological development after reading a book set for release early this new year: Junius Johnson, Patristic and Medieval Atonement Theory: A Guide to Research (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 222pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

The notion of atonement, a process by which humans are made right before God, is central to the logic of Christian theology. In spite of this, major thinkers in the Christian traditions have held vastly different understandings of both the way atonement works and what it means. These differing accounts have become intellectual traditions which continue to influence both academic theology and spiritual practice today. In spite of the strong dependence of much contemporary thought on early ideas, linguistic and cultural barriers often preclude serious study of the original materials.Patristic and Medieval Atonement Theory takes a close look at the doctrines that depend on and influence views of atonement in order to make clear what place atonement occupies within the larger system of Christian theology. Junius Johnson also considers key concepts and tensions within the doctrine of atonement itself, which may be emphasized or glossed over to create the shape of particular doctrines. Johnson's guide briefly discusses major figures in the development of Christian doctrines of atonement to the end of the Middle Ages. Johnson then turns to the major primary and secondary sources and provides an orientation to the rich literature existing on this topic.

The attention given to the anatomy of the concepts involved, the introduction to the ideas of major thinkers, and the survey of available literature makes this an essential guide for students and scholars of Christian theology of any period, as well as those who research the Middle Ages but are not specialists in theology.

Atonement

One not infrequently comes across self-appointed spokesmen for Orthodoxy who, having fed all the world's poor and solved all its other problems, have time to invent risible caricatures of Anselm of Canterbury. Almost invariably those referring to him (or, rather, sneering at him) and his theory of atonement have never read him--indeed, would not know enough Latin to read one sentence of the Proslogion or Cur Deus Homo in the original. Nevertheless they cheerfully assert without any evidence that Anselm's theory, and it alone, is the operative one in Western soteriology, and thus a source of irreconcilable difference with the East. This is all tedious nonsense of course, made more absurd by its studied ignorance of the vast influence of many other figures--to say nothing of the fact that the Catechism of the Catholic Church pays no attention whatsoever to Anselm.

Along comes a recent book to offer a fresh look at theories of atonement variously understood:

Adam Kotsko, Politics of Redemption: The Social Logic of Salvation (Continuum, 2010), 224pp.

About this book, the publisher tells us:

Recent decades have witnessed an explosion of new perspectives on “atonement theory,” the traditional name for reflections on the meaning of Christ’s work. These new theologies view Christ as a political figure and mobilize social theory to understand the contemporary context and Christ’s meaning for that context. Politics of Redemption demonstrates that pre-modern theologians also understood Christ’s role in a fundamentally social way. The argument proceeds by analysing the most important and original contributors to the tradition of atonement theory (Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, Anselm, and Abelard).

The investigation reveals that they all work within a shared social-relational logic based on the solidarity of all human beings and the irreducible relatedness of humanity and the rest of creation. Having brought this social-relational logic to the surface, the work concludes by sketching out a fresh atonement theory as a way of showing that our understanding of Christ’s work and of its relevance for our life together is enriched by foregrounding the question of how creation, and particularly the human social sphere, is structured.

Kotsko includes in his book chapters on such crucially important Eastern Fathers as St. Irenaeus of Lyons, about whom not a few other important books have been written in the last two decades, and St. Gregory of Nyssa, on whom we have similarly seena greatly renewed interest in the last number of years by such scholars as Brian Daleyand others.