This book represents a lucid and thoughtful account of the main “atonement paradigms” and their representative theologians. William Witt and Joel Scandrett, both of Trinity School for Ministry (Ambridge, PA), have developed a useful teaching resource that is informed by the best modern scholarship on the one hand, and is clearly and accessibly presented on the other. While the work is clearly rooted in Anglican evangelicalism, its approach would find wide acceptance across Protestant and evangelical constituencies. One of the strengths of the work is its recognition that the New Testament uses a range of metaphors to illuminate the work of Christ, which somehow needs to be held together to provide a comprehensive and responsible account of the nature of atonement. The eight “paradigms” considered in this volume include Atonement as Incarnation (Athanasius and Irenaeus), Atonement as Satisfaction (Anselm of Canterbury), Atonement as Penal Substitution (John Calvin and Charles Hodge), and Atonement as Reconciliation (Karl Barth). The work concludes with a hybrid chapter dealing with recent evangelical debates on “penal substitutionary atonement,” with a helpful final reflection on the shape of a theologically responsible account of atonement. The volume includes a good bibliography, which is likely to be useful to those developing courses on this topic.

Inevitably, a relatively short work of this nature cannot do full justice to the topic under discussion. Some critical comments, however, are in order, as it is important to note topics that are not adequately engaged, so that those using this book for teaching purposes can find ways of supplementing its analysis. It would surely have been helpful to open the discussion with a survey of the leading soteriological metaphors of the New Testament (such as adoption, redemption, justification, and sacrifice), noting their cultural roots and how these illuminate and inform subsequent Christian reflection on the atonement, while at the same time raising interpretative issues concerning the transfer or transposition of these metaphorically embedded notions from one historical context to another. This also would have allowed some initial reflections on the theological issues arising from developing theologies based upon such metaphors. Such questions are rightly raised at later points in the work; yet an initial overview of these questions might have been helpful pedagogically, in preparing readers for some of the issues that need to be engaged. The metaphor of “mapping” could have been developed further; the term seems to be used here in the limited sense of “surveying,” rather than in the richer form associated with the philosopher Mary Midgley, which sees this epistemic metaphor as allowing the multiple perspectives of a complex reality to be affirmed and correlated.

From a historical perspective, it would have been helpful to have a more thorough engagement with the question of how the social context of theologians shaped their thinking on both the significance and modes of atonement. To what extent, for example, does a writer's historical context shape his (all the leading representatives of atonement paradigms surveyed here are male, by the way) understanding of why atonement needs to be rationalized as theoretically coherent, rather than simply proclaimed as a soteriological gift? The work does not address concerns about theological “overtheorizing,” particularly evident in theodicies (think of J. K. A. Smith's worries about “epistemic Pelagianism”), which is also a danger in more rationalist accounts of the atonement. Recent reflections on how a theology of the atonement might address certain feminist and pacifist critiques are not engaged.

Witt and Scandrett are clearly writing for an Anglican evangelical readership and have developed an approach that would work well for this anticipated audience. Yet this focus inevitably leads to a certain degree of selective attention that neglects recent Catholic and Orthodox discussions. It would, for example, be helpful to have noted Vladimir Lossky's concerns about Anselm of Canterbury's approach to the atonement, which would have opened up a useful discussion of whether Christ's benefits can be separated from Christ's person. Such anxieties about more “transactionalist” approaches to the atonement are clearly noted in this work; its format, however, prevented them from being discussed more thoroughly. Bernard Lonergan's discussion of the “Intelligibility of the Redemption” would also have been a useful foil in highlighting the dangers of excessively rationalist approaches to the atonement; perhaps a reference to William P. Loewe's Lex Crucis: Soteriology and the Stages of Meaning (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016) might have been helpful for this purpose.

These observations, however, do not detract from the value of this clear and engaging account of some representative accounts of atonement within the Christian tradition. While the book omits some discussions that might be helpful for the purposes of teaching, its analysis can easily be supplemented with additional resources in a classroom context.