BOOK PICK: ‘Atonement’
ATONEMENT
SOUNDINGS IN BIBLICAL, TRINITARIAN, AND SPIRITUAL THEOLOGY
Margaret M. Turek
Ignatius Press, 2022
266 pages, $19.95
To order: ignatius.com or (800) 651-1531
Requested why Jesus suffered, the typical Catholic may say: to atone for our sins. If pressed, he’d seemingly clarify Jesus “made up” for our sins by way of justice.
The higher catechized may paraphrase Anselm of Canterbury: Sin is an infinite offense in opposition to God as a result of God is infinite. Man can’t restore what he destroyed, as a result of he’s each broken and never infinite. So we wanted a God-man as Second Adam to repair what the primary ruined.
However why the cross? If something Jesus did has infinite worth, couldn’t atonement have occurred much less horrifically? Sure, however the Father so willed it to emphasise the gravity of sin.
What sort of picture of the Father may some draw?
Margaret Turek, who teaches at St. Patrick’s Seminary and College in California, proposes a difficult and intriguing rethinking of the doctrine of atonement, recast by way of the calls for of divine love. Removed from diluting the seriousness of atonement, this work of speculative theology, constructing on the considered 4 up to date theologians (John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Norbert Hoffmann), arguably deepens its significance. It does so by connecting atonement with each Trinitarian theology and theological anthropology.
“… a merely juridical understanding of the relation of forgiveness and satisfaction can’t do justice to the profoundly interpersonal high quality of the method by which sin is eradicated. … [O]ur examine has delivered to mild that what’s at stake within the Christian doctrine of atonement is nothing lower than the Christian idea of God. To see into the center of the cross occasion is to understand it as a dramatic epiphany, formed in response to sin, of the thriller of the everlasting Trinity. It’s to understand that forgiveness and atonement are rooted within the Trinity like fatherhood and sonship, lively and receptive technology” (232-33).
Sin leaves actual harm that have to be repaired: It can’t simply be wished away or ignored. If God is “offended” on the sinner, it’s as a result of the sinner is made in God’s picture and likeness, and God can’t comply with what mars or destroys that picture and likeness. God’s anger is simply the other facet of the coin of his love, as a result of the Father intends to create “sons within the Son” and can’t acquiesce in what negates that sonship. When, in response to God’s initiative of conversion, the sinner “turns” again, sin causes him to expertise a way of abandonment, as if God was not current. Willingly following the Father regardless of that forsakenness imitates Christ and his sense of abandonment on Calvary. Christ atoned by taking up sin, together with the sinners’ sense of abandonment, but remaining trustworthy to the Father. The Father permits himself to be hidden with out ever not supporting his Son.
This course of is rooted within the lifetime of the Trinity itself: The Father by no means clings so tightly to his divinity that he doesn’t pour it out utterly within the eternally begotten Son. The Son doesn’t grasp that divinity so tightly as to not return it to the Father, in order that the Spirit proceeds from them each. In that sense, the “giving and receiving” within the Trinity itself each supplies a mannequin for the Incarnation and for what man’s adoption in Christ ought to entail. It’s all measured fully by divine love.
This transient evaluate can’t discover the density of Turek’s critical theological hypothesis about God’s loving ardour because it entails sinners, its biblical foundations, or implications for Trinitarian theology or spirituality. The ebook calls for cautious and attentive studying, however I’m satisfied it’s on to one thing necessary, by way of an understanding of atonement that seeks to be orthodox whereas, on the identical time, drawing out the completely critical implications of what it means to be liked by a God who’s Love.
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