In Summa Theologiae 3a, q48 Thomas Aquinas proposes five ways or models of atonement. These are, in order, the ways of merit, satisfaction, sacrifice, redemption and efficient causality. In line with the patristic and mediaeval tradition, Aquinas presents these five models very much in terms of what Hans Urs von Balthasar might call a theodramatic ‘action’ between God and humanity—a drama centred on the person of the incarnate Son who in some sense or other offers recompense to his Father for our sins. This theodramatic approach to soteriology dominates Catholic thought from Anselm to Balthasar and Protestant thought from Luther to Barth and beyond, but it takes little account of the latest thinking in historical Jesus studies or of current interpretations of Paul and other New Testament writers, and in this article I would like to suggest a way of rereading Summa Theologiae 3a, q48 in the light of what might be termed the Schweitzer/Sanders/Wright understanding of Jesus and Paul.

For Albert Schweitzer, Jesus was an eschatological prophet who saw himself as heralding the end of the age and who, when his preaching did not result in the anticipated apocalypse, effectively ‘broke himself on the wheel of history’ in order to bump human history over into the next phase. Paul picked up on this, and (according to Schweitzer) his ‘Christ-mysticism’ explored the various ways (being ‘in Christ’, dying and rising with Christ, mystical body, Holy Spirit) in which Christians become bound up with the Messiah whose death has inaugurated the eschatological kingdom.