Book review by Mark Galli
Of the many positive things one can say about the analytic philosopher and devout Catholic Eleonore Stump, this one stands out: She is no coward. During her career, Stump has tried valiantly to address the perennial problem of God’s goodness and omnipotence in the face of evil. And now she has published a book, Atonement, in which she dares to offer a new theory of this pivotal doctrine.
Not unlike professional climber Alex Honnold, who scaled 3,000 feet without ropes up the daunting face of California’s El Capitan rock formation, Stump is a person of uncommon skills (intellectual in this case). But unlike Honnold, she is glad to have a few ropes—especially those tethered to Thomas Aquinas—to help her grapple with daunting topics like theodicy and atonement.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to summarize her new view as we might with other atonement theories. For example, the ransom theory argues that Jesus’ death ransoms us from the hold of Satan. The exemplary theory saves us because we are moved by Christ’s sacrificial death to take up a life of sacrificial love. Penal substitution is about Christ paying the just penalty for our sins so that we might be united with him. And so forth.
Stump’s theory could be summarized like this: God is love from beginning to end. This, of course, sounds trite, but in her hands it is anything but. Using Aquinas as a guide to the meaning of divine love, she argues that her atonement theory deals not only with our guilt but also our shame. Not only our suffering but also the suffering our sin has inflicted on others. Not only our past sin but also our current and future sin. Not only our alienation from God but our alienation from others.
Stump puts it this way: “God’s love [is] maximally expressive of God’s nature and central to the atonement, and it takes God’s forgiveness to be God’s love in operation towards human beings suffering from guilt. . . . There is no human being, however steeped in evil, with whom God does not desire union, which is the true good for that human being. In a sense, all of this book is an explanation of the love of God.”
The Agony of the Cross
You might be tempted to ask, “Well, what is so new here?” The answer, of course, comes in the richness of Stump’s many detailed observations, and for that, one can only commit to reading her book in its entirety. Still, here is one example that gave me fresh insight: her discussion of Jesus’ cry of dereliction—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—along with his desperate prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, pleading with God to be spared.
Here’s the problem: Many mere mortals have managed to face death with more courage and equanimity than Jesus did—Stephen, for example, just months later. Jesus knew he would rise from the dead, so why all the anguish?
After a lengthy argument about what is required for Jesus, as fully human and fully divine, to read the minds of other human beings (not a simple problem to unwind philosophically), she says this about his ordeal on the cross:
At one and the same time Christ mind-reads the mental states found in all the evil human acts human beings have ever committed. Every vile, shocking, disgusting, revulsive psychic state accompanying every human evil act will be at once, miraculously, in the human psyche of Christ . . . without yielding an evil configuration in either Christ’s intellect or will.
Such psychic agony “would greatly eclipse all other human psychological suffering. . . . Flooded with such horror, Christ might well lose entirely his ability to find the mind of God the Father.” For me, this drives home the suffering of Christ, a suffering so comprehensively horrible that it surpasses even the physical abuse of crucifixion.
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Source: Christianity Today
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