Nicholas E. Lombardo. The Father’s Will: Christ’s Crucifixion and the Goodness of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 270 pages. Hardcover. £65. ISBN – 978-0-19-968858 In The Father’s Will, Nicholas Lombardo provides an apologetic angle on the crucifixion, seeking to prove the consistency of God’s justice in light of the apparent injustice of Christ’s crucifixion. In the process he provides a moral framework for judging different theories of redemption and in the end, suggests a rehabilitation of the devil’s ransom theory as the best way to understand the drama of redemption.
In the Part 1, “Philosophical Prolegomena,” Lombardo lays the groundwork for the study. After producing a framework for the moral evaluation of human action based on intent (ch. 1), he provides a framework for absolute moral judgments that arises from the intuitive human inclination toward the good (ch. 2). He then introduces double effect reasoning as a tool to distinguish between morally ambiguous actions by focusing on intent and the net good achieved (ch. 3) before proposing an ethics of self-sacrifice that provides a moral framework to rightly differentiate heroic self-sacrifice from suicide (ch. 4). Finally, he applies all that has been learned from chapters 1-4 to assert the absolute nature of moral evil and impossibility of God’s acting in a morally evil manner (ch. 5), thus ruling out “any theological narrative in which God wills the actual crucifying of Christ, or Christ intends his own death” (92).
In Part 2, “The New Testament Evidence,” Lombardo examines the New Testament witness regarding the relationship between God’s will and Christ’s crucifixion. He first uses historical-critical tools to examine how Christ’s death relates to his intentions (ch. 6). Then Lombardo explores how the New Testament witness situates the crucifixion in God’s plan of salvation (ch. 7). He determines that the New Testament clearly portrays the crucifixion as occurring according to God’s will and plan while placing the moral and actual responsibility for the crucifixion on the shoulders of those people directly responsible for the act.
In Part 3, “Theological Evaluation,” Lombardo chooses three specific theories of redemption to examine: Anselm’s satisfaction theory in which Christ’s death makes satisfaction for the sins of humanity (ch. 8), Abelard’s response to Anselm in which the crucifixion reveals God’s love and the arouses Christian charity (ch. 9), and the patristic account of the devil’s ransom theory (ch. 10). Based on his work in chapters 1-7, Lombardo develops two evaluative questions: “Do the interpretations avoid implying that God wills moral evil, and do they align with the results of our historical and exegetical investigations?” (12). In the end, while affirming the potential benefits they provide to Christian theology, Lombardo concludes that of the three, only the (properly understood) devil’s ransom theory adequately answers both questions. Anselm’s theory fails because in it God wills moral evil, and Abelard’s approach falls short because it does not make sense of the salvific necessity of the crucifixion.
Although there is much to commend in this well-written, interdisciplinary study, I would like to highlight two important contributions of the book here. First of all, Lombardo shows clearly that any account of redemption that pits the Father against the Son in a manner that divides the Trinity or depicts a version of divine child abuse, stands against the theological tradition of the Christian church. Along those lines, Lombardo helpfully shows the way Anselm and Abelard sought to maintain the unity of the Trinity and the justice of the Father in their theories of redemption. Secondly, as the wonderful culmination of his interdisciplinary, constructive work (ch. 10), Lombardo reclaims the devil’s ransom theory as a plausible metaphor for the drama of redemption. This recovery of the church’s preferred redemption theory for its first 1,000 years discusses the ways that it has been misinterpreted before carefully re-articulating the theory according to a variety of church fathers. Lombardo reconstructs the theory:
“Through sin, humanity becomes subject to evil, suffering, and death. In order to restore humanity, God becomes man, so that he can draw out the power of evil in all its various manifestations and take it upon himself. Then, after absorbing the full force of evil in his crucifixion, Christ overcomes death by his resurrection and makes it possible for us to share in his victory by being joined to his Person through the sacraments” (229).
For me, chapter ten alone is worth picking up this book. One minor critique is the lack of attention Lombardo pays to stream of Christian theology that perceives sin as nearly destroying the human ability to perceive and interpret their natural inclinations toward good. Perhaps he will address that in future works.
The Bottom Line: Lombardo convincingly argues for the unity of the Trinity and the morality of the divine will in the crucifixion while raising a ridiculed metaphor of redemption back to respectability and thus beautifully inviting the church to re-appropriate its most ancient theory of redemption, the devil’s ransom theory. Review by Forest Buckner (fb42@st-andrews.ac.uk) University of St. Andrews
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