Ligita Ryliškytė, Why the Cross? Divine Friendship and the Power of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). 491pp. ISBN 9781009202763.
Reviewed by Dr Rod Benson
Published in the CUP series Current Issues in Theology, this book addresses the question, “What does it mean for the cross of Christ to save?” This book offers a fresh take on atonement theory from the perspective of philosophical theology.
The author, a Lithuanian Catholic theologian and Sister of the Eucharistic Jesus, draws on the thought of influential Catholic scholar Bernard Lonergan and the Augustinian-Thomist tradition, and grounds her conclusions in recent theories of secular culture.
She reflects on the “prolonged historical suffering” of the Lithuanian people, including the 1991 Russian invasion and its aftermath and pays homage to, among others, the Australian Lonergan scholar, Professor Neil Ormerod.
Ryliškytė contrasts justice as “rightness of order” with post-Anselmian accounts of atonement which emphasise transaction or retribution. Key to her approach is her examination of the “fittingness” rather than “necessity” of the divine solution to the problem of evil.
Chapters 1-2 lay a foundation for constructing an adequate theological response to secular culture. The next two chapters analyse Augustine’s thought on the justice of the cross.
Chapters 5 and 6 examine Thomas Aquinas’s post-Anselmian reframe of Augustine’s approach, casting the achievement of the cross largely as charity/friendship rather than supererogation. For Thomas, the justice of the cross is essentially reconciling and restorative, and the will of the one seeking reconciliation forms a bridge between charity and justice.
Chapters 7-10 discuss Lonergan’s transposition of Augustine and Aquinas in his “Law of the Cross.” Ryliškytė examines the basis of this key concept and proposes three explanatory principles which together “demonstrate that the Law of the Cross concerns the transformation of evil into good not as an abstract principle but as an ontologically grounded, personally transformative, historically mediated, and eschatologically oriented dynamism” (13).
In chapter 10, Ryliškytė introduces the notion of “emergence” which, she argues, counters the problem of ontological reductionism by delivering, through the event of the cross, a new historical telos characterised by a diffusion of forgiveness and friendship. This gracious upwelling of virtues makes real the possibility of justice as good order.
For those of us not trained in twentieth-century philosophical theology, Lonergan can be hard to follow. His fundamental conceptual work benefits from theologians such as Ryliškytė (and Ormerod) who are able to employ and extend the possibilities of his conceptual world in impressive and constructive ways.
Until picking up this book, I had not associated Bernard Lonergan’s writing with theories of the atonement. Whatever we think of his whole project, or the Law of the Cross, Ryliškytė has demonstrated here that his thought may fruitfully be developed to illuminate the profound mystery of the cross.
I don’t feel qualified to engage further with the author’s polemic on the meaning of the cross, except to suggest that she could benefit from reflection on Baptist scholar Paul Fiddes’s work on atonement and perichoresis in relation to justice, charity and friendship.
Image source: publisher.
iDigress 