Barry D. Smith, The Meaning of Jesus’ Death: Reviewing the New Testament’s Interpretations (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017).
Barry D. Smith is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Crandall University in New Brunswick, Canada. In this title, he draws upon his previous publications related to the salvation-historical meaning of the suffering and death of Jesus as well as various lecture materials from courses he has taught. The book is an attempt to make sense of the perennially controversial topic of the atonement. In so doing, Smith works his way through the four theories of the doctrine of the atonement that have emerged in the history of Christian theology: moral influence, governmental, satisfaction and Christus victor theories. In fact, he covers how Christ is in the order of Melchizedek (1), the suffering and death of Christ (2), the righteousness of God (3), expressions of the soteriological benefit of Jesus’ death (4), Jesus’ death as deliverance (5), and a summative chapter on the various atonement theories (6).
The conclusion that Smith reaches is confirmatory of a penal-substitutionary version of the satisfaction and the Christus-Victor theories of atonement, each of which should be viewed as two parts of a more inclusive theory of atonement present in the New Testament. This version, says Smith, is implicit in the exegetical reflections of the Patristic. Smith works from the premise that, for a theory of the atonement to be successful, no biblical data may be omitted or distorted, and the generalized concepts used to comprehend the biblical data must be seen as implicit in the data. In sum, this title is an analysis of the meaning of Jesus’ death in the New Testament which examines how to best conceive of the theory of the atonement based upon the biblical data.
Bradford McCall
Claremont School of Theology