Book Review: The Body of the Cross: Holy Victims and the Invention of the Atonement

In this ambitious and illuminating study, Travis E. Ables examines the evolution of the idea of penal substitutionary atonement, which he points out is a relatively recent phenomenon, by way of a more general discussion of the development of atonement theology from the earliest centuries of the Christian movement to the 17th century (with the book’s Conclusion offering a reflection on substitutionary atonement as treated in The Fundamentals, foundational tracts for Christian fundamentalism, in the early 20th century, alongside imagery of the cross employed by African Americans opposed to lynching in Jim-Crow-era America). In the period of the early Christian martyrs, which would give rise to the development of the cult of the saints, what Ables terms the ‘logic of vicarity’ saw the violence of the cross sublimated into both saints and sinners. While holy victims were considered to have suffered within their own bodies, and thereby to have transferred excess merit to the whole Church, by the same token the sufferings imposed on heretics maintained the sanctity of the Church, and preserved it free from corruption. For Ables, throughout Western Christian history the cross ‘forms a boundary marker, a means of social differentiation, carrying with it the tension of inclusion and exclusion’ (p. 16); as he pithily puts it, ‘We need the reprobates to tell us who we are, as the elect’ (p. 4). What happens in the period of the Reformations, Ables continues, is that penal substitution merged the concepts of merit transfer and vicarious suffering in the crucified flesh of Christ. The book is divided into seven chapters, the first three dealing with the early centuries of Christianity, up to the period of Augustine. There is a leap forward in chapter four to the Central Middle Ages and the period of Anselm and Abelard and Heloise, while chapter five examines in turn the mysticism of Mechthild of Magdeburg and Franciscan spirituality surrounding the cross. The final two chapters take us into the period of the Reformations, the sixth chapter focusing predominantly on the theology of Luther and the magisterial Reformation, while chapter seven examines the Reformed tradition, transitioning from Martin Bucer and John Calvin to William Perkins and Puritanism. 1182278 ITQ0010.1177/00211400231182278Irish Theological QuarterlyBook Reviews book-review2023