Elizabeth A. JOHNSON. Creation and the Cross: The Mercy of God for a Planet in Peril. Maryknoll and New York: Orbis Books, 2018. pp. 238.  $28.00 hb. ISBN 9781626982666 (print), LCCN 2017048275 (ebook). Reviewed by Jill RAITT, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211.

This review is not a summary of Creation and the Cross. An excellent summary is available in the National Catholic Reporter, and is available on-line: https://www.ncronline.org/news/environment/deep-incarnation-liberates-all-creation. Instead, I want to share with you what this book has meant to me. It has challenged me as no other that Elizabeth Johnson has written. From all her previous books, I simply agreed or delighted to learn, to enrich, my theological understanding. But I must admit that Creation and the Cross revealed to me how much of conventional soteriology (the theology of how we are saved) I have simply accepted without thinking it through. I have long understood that the immediate cause of Christ’s death on the cross was due to politics. The people greeted Jesus as a king, hoping, as had Jesus’ followers, that he was the promised Messiah, a second King David, who would lead the army of Israel to expel the Roman overlords. Pilate feared such an uprising and the consequent loss of Rome’s confidence in him; hence his derisive plaque: Jesus Nazarenus, Rex Judaeorum. The Sadducees of the Sanhedrin were also politically afraid to lose their precarious role as mid-level authorities between Rome and the people of Israel. (Chapter 3) That all creation is somehow redeemed with us was also not a problem for me, although it is beautifully, fully, and convincingly the theme of Chapter 5 as is our consequent necessity to protect and cherish all that God makes and loves.

But I have struggled with the soteriology. Heretofore, I must admit, I had not tried to develop a coherent soteriology. I have chafed at the notion that the agony in the garden was Jesus struggling to accept the will of God that he suffer the punishment due to sinners from Adam to ourselves in order to restore God’s honor, insulted by sin. Nor could I accept Anselm’s theory. When explaining the setting for Cur deus homo I’ve said, “In Anselm’s world, if a peasant kicked another peasant in the shins, it was easily settled in the village—the offender gives the offended a chicken. If a peasant kicked a king in the shins, that peasant died a painful death.” In like manner, taught Anselm, sin dishonors God. But the sinner, a mere creature, is not God’s equal and so cannot make reparation to restore God’s honor. So the Second Person of the Trinity became incarnate. His mission was to satisfy the demand that the honor of God be restored. As a human being, he paid a debt owed by humans; as God, he was able to honor God as an equal. So, though sinless, he accepted to bear human sins and to offer himself as a sacrifice to establish, in his blood, a new covenant with God, now fully reconciled with humanity. In other words, God is portrayed as requiring a quid pro quo. This understanding of how salvation was achieved has come to be called, Anselm’s satisfaction theory (Chapter 1).

Anselm’s argument was so impressive that it has lasted, with some distortions, until today. Students are won over by its rationality as Anselm strove to prove revelation to be reasonable: faith seeking understanding. But that is what should have sounded an alarm. God is beyond what our reason can grasp. So how do we think of the quandary of sin?

The foundation of Johnson’s answer is the reiteration in both Testaments that God is a God of mercy and compassion (Chapter 2). Her argument also includes an abundance of biblical metaphors intended to help hearers and now readers to understand the meaning of Christ’s life, passion, death, and resurrection. Among other passages, Johnson emphasizes Second Isaiah’s message of comfort and deliverance and then, of course, the Gospels (Chapters 2-4). In chapter 4, Johnson marvels at the way the early church used metaphors to emphasize the saving mercy of God in Christ. In this long chapter (44 pages) She examines the many New Testament metaphors under the categories of military and diplomatic, financial and legal, cultic and sacrificial, familial, and metaphors of new creation. A last section examines the early Christian use of the the suffering servant passages in Second Isaiah to understand Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection.

Jesus’ mission was and is to spread faith in the love and mercy of God made flesh. As Johnson argues, Jesus never said, “Your sins are forgiven, now go do penance.” Rather he said, “Take up your bed and walk,” and “Go and sin no more.” And indeed, over and over Paul, John, Acts of the Apostles, say that faith in the resurrection of Jesus is our redemption.

In an online conversation with Elizabeth Johnson, she told me that her inspiration was first, the mercy of God as dominant and second, the basic idea that “no one had to die in order for God to be merciful. What kind of God would this be?” The result is a book that retires Anselm’s satisfaction theory of the cross and proposes “an accompaniment theory, ie, God with us in the depth of our pain and suffering and death.” It is “a theology of divine presence as redemptive.”

Johnson borrows this much from Anselm’s book; she casts it as a dialogue between herself and her student, Clara. It’s a format that allows for a few colloquialisms and informalities not found in other Johnson books.

Although I will continue to work on soteriology, I embrace the arguments in Creation and the Cross, and I agree with Richard Rohr who wrote on the book’s jacket: “Here I am happy to say that she [Johnson] unpacks what my own Franciscan school (Francis, Bonaventure, Duns Scotus) believed about the atonement and the salvific meaning of the death of Jesus. It was not a juridical transaction but a cosmic revelation.”