Atonement

The doctrine that Christ has saved human beings from their sins, with all that that salvation entails, is the distinctive doctrine of Christianity. Over the course of many centuries of reflection on the doctrine, highly diverse understandings have been proposed, many of which have also raised strong positive or negative emotions in those who have reflected on them. In this book, in the context of this history of interpretation, Eleonore Stump considers this theological doctrine with philosophical care. The central question of the book is the nature of the atonement. That is, what is it that is accomplished by the passion and death of Christ (or the life, passion, and death, of Christ)? Whatever exactly it is, it is supposed to include a solution to the problem of the post-Fall human condition, with its guilt and shame. This volume canvasses major interpretations of the doctrine of the atonement that attempt to explain this solution, and it argues that all of them have serious shortcomings. In their place, Stump employs an extension of a Thomistic account of love and forgiveness to argue for a relatively novel interpretation of the doctrine, which she calls ‘the Marian interpretation.’ Stump argues that this Marian interpretation makes better sense of the doctrine of the atonement than other interpretations do, including Anselm’s well-known theory. In the process of constructing the Marian interpretation, she also discusses love, union, guilt, shame, forgiveness, retribution, punishment, shared attention, mind-reading, empathy, and various other issues in moral psychology and ethics.