Ligita Ryliškytė, in Why the Cross, develops an account of the atonement ‘in response to the exigencies of a secular age’ (p. 440), taking up a line of thought developed in Augustine and Thomas and transposed by Bernard Lonergan. After an account of secular culture (chapter 1), and the method of transposition (chapter 2), Ryliškytė explores Augustine's theology of the atonement (chapters 3 and 4), Thomas’ (chapters 5 and 6) and Lonergan's (chapters 7 and 8), followed by her (thoroughly Lonerganian) account of a historically minded systematic theology of the cross (chapter 9) and her constructive account/summary of the atonement (chapter 10). We might take the following passage from the concluding chapter as a summary of her perspective:
What pleased the Father was not Christ's suffering. It was Christ's love. Nor does God ask us to suffer but to love; yet true love in a fallen world is cruciform. Suffering is intrinsic to accepting and offering forgiveness and to genuine solidarity with the victims of sin. As illumined by St. Thomas, in the presence of sin, charity begets repentance and forgiveness. As Augustine had it, the just society is the penitential society. As Lonergan explained, by living out of friendship with God, such a society is healed of social decline through intellectual, moral and religious conversion. (p. 441)
Ryliškytė's work is a model of scholarship – well researched and meticulous. And it develops a line of thought ripe for careful study: the relationship between the doctrine of the atonement and the logic of friendship (John 15:13), doing so by delving into some of the great theologians of the doctrine, while bringing Lonergan prominently into the discussion. This alone merits her book careful attention.
That said, I had significant difficulties with her argument. First, I found that her ‘transposition’ of Augustine and Thomas left their work unrecognisable. Particularly with regard to Augustine, I found Ryliškytė engaging, but her summary, echoed throughout the book, of (restorative) justice over power simply fails as an account of Augustine's integration of justice and power in De Trinitate. In other words, I found Ryliškytė's approach to be less Augustinian than inspired by a narrow line of thought in Augustine which is not reflective of his overall view of Christ's saving work, resulting in a nearly Pelagian view of God's justice which ‘works by way of inspiring human repentance, persuading in God's love, and transforming human free rationality’ (p. 137). I found the same to be true of her account of Thomas, whose work she understands primarily ‘in the context of penance and friendship’ (p. 238). Ryliškytė, as I understand her, gives an account of Thomas which perhaps has more in common with John McLeod Campbell: ‘Christ's passion and death is vicarious satisfaction, not retributive punishment, since it is a voluntary… expression of sorrow for sin, rather than an involuntary infliction of penalty’ (p. 242).
Lonergan, according to Ryliškytė, transposes this version of Augustine and Thomas, arguing that ‘the Son of God became human, suffered, died, and was risen to communicate God's friendship to God's enemies in due order. Becoming a friend of God in Christ means accepting the gift of reconciliation and the offer of friendship and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, extending this friendship to others’ (p. 317). What we seem to have is an incredibly robust and sophisticated form of exemplarism rooted in the vicarious repentance of Jesus Christ (p. 319). The causality in question is a ‘historical causality’, which is ‘conceived as the shifting of odds of emergent probability through the diffusion of forgiveness and supernatural friendship’ (p. 403). This is a doctrine of the atonement focused on ‘transformation of evil into good’ (see e.g. p. 291), ‘inaugurat[ing] a new historical order by returning good for evil, as attained by an authentic subject’ (p. 293).
I find this account fundamentally lacking, though I am thoroughly inclined to develop the atonement in relationship to a theological account of God's friendship with us. The problem with Ryliškytė's approach, as I see it, is that she takes as her starting point a particular understanding of secularity as decisive for contemporary dogmatic reflection and develops Christian doctrine within that constraint. Such an approach, I think, results in an atrophied appropriation of Augustine and Thomas, but, far more importantly, it simply doesn't do justice to the range of the biblical witness to the necessity of Jesus’ crucifixion. Does it take crucifixion to enable solidarity, sorrow and vicarious repentance? Does it take death? Ryliškytė's argument would be little changed were it to revolve around an empathetic account of the incarnation alone.
As it stands, the book offers one of the most developed accounts of exemplarism I have found, resourced by Lonergan's distinctive theological approach. But exemplarism has always thrived within a far more comprehensive account of the atoning work of Jesus (as in the work of Augustine, Abelard and Thomas) and has failed when offered as a sufficient account of the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection. We do in fact need a rich account of the cross as the triune God's work of friendship – but I do not believe the path charted by Lonergan and Ryliškytė to be the way forward.
