Atonement and Incarnation

Book excerpt: In this book Vernon White sets out to address the crisis of credibility that increasingly has affected traditional claims made for the Atonement, and attempts to explain how the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ can have a universal saving significance. The present work stands as something of a sequel to the author's earlier book The Fall of a Sparrow, which attempted to show how God might be conceived as being universally and specially active in the world. In this study, White concentrates on the saving nature of that activity, and the coherence which he feels emerges if this is grounded in the particularity of the Christ-event. In defending the constitutive nature of Christ's role in the salvation of the world, without relying on Anselmian or penal substitutionary models of atonement, White proposes an atonement model which could rehabilitate such a belief without offending moral and conceptual sensibilities. A supporting chapter is provided outlining the kind of christology required to sustain this model, while the final chapters of the book discuss the ethical implications of the position adopted.