Atonement And Incarnation

In this book Vernon White sets out to address the crisis of credibility that increasingly has affected traditional claims made for the Atonement, and attempts to explain how the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ can have a universal saving significance. The present work stands as something of a sequel to the author's earlier book The Fall of a Sparrow, which attempted to show how God might be conceived as being universally and specially active in the world. In this study, White concentrates on the saving nature of that activity, and the coherence which he feels emerges if this is grounded in the particularity of the Christ-event. In defending the constitutive nature of Christ's role in the salvation of the world, without relying on Anselmian or penal substitutionary models of atonement, White proposes an atonement model which could rehabilitate such a belief without offending moral and conceptual sensibilities. A supporting chapter is provided outlining the kind of christology required to sustain this model, while the final chapters of the book discuss the ethical implications of the position adopted.

"How much can we really know about what happened in Palestine nineteen centuries ago, by way of making it a basis for our faith? Occasionally that question has broken out in quite extreme forms, suggesting the answer that Jesus may never have existed at all as an historical person. But now, apart from such absurd freaks of scholarship, we are confronted in a new way with the question whether we can know enough about Jesus to enable us to build a Christology upon Him. It is by challenging us with that question--not by giving us an assured result--that Form Criticism has become a momentous factor in creating the situation which exists for Christological thought to-day. It will make a great difference to the problem of Christology whether we accept or reject the claims of this new historical radicalism."--Chapter 1, page 27

In response to popular demand, Fr. Patrick Reardon presents the first of three volumes exploring redemption and salvation through the lens of Scripture, patristics, and liturgics, as well as through history, philosophy, language, literature, and psychology. He brings all these perspectives together to show how the whole of Christ's work--from Incarnation to Ascension--accomplishes the "at-one-ment" of God with man.

This companion volume to T. F. Torrance's Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ presents the material on the work of Christ, centered in the atonement, given originally in his lectures delivered to his students in Christian Dogmatics on Christology at New College, Edinburgh, from 1952-1978.