Book Review

This is an ambitious book, a thought-provoking book, a monitory book, but ultimately it is a book at odds with itself. The question that it asks is both poignant and topical (How could nominally good Christians in the twelfth or the eighteenth or the twentieth century sanction the use of retributive punishment while at the same time worshiping a God-man who died a victim of judicial murder?), but the answer that it attempts is methodologically ambiguous and historiographically inconsistent. It is nevertheless an answer that engages a deeply rooted problem in the Judeo-Christian legal and theological tradition, and if it is unsatisfying, it is as much because the answers given within the tradition are not susceptible to easy formulation as it is because Gorringe has not successfully assimilated them within his argument. It is therefore a book that deserves closer consideration, if only to understand why its question is so analytically intractable.	1
Gorringe's purpose is two-fold: on the one hand, to demonstrate the interdependence between theologies of the atonement and penal strategies within the historical tradition, particularly in England, and on the other, to argue for an alternative interpretation of the founding texts upon which these theologies have been constructed. His argument is divided into three parts: an exegetical discussion of the principal biblical sources for a theology of atonement, a historical survey of the development of these theologies from the eleventh to the nineteenth century, and a concluding argument for the contemporary reinterpretation of the biblical sources. He situates this attempt to reconcile historical development with theological truth within the context of sociological and anthropological analyses of punishment (David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society [Oxford, 1990]) and violence (René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. S. Bann and M. Metteer [London, 1987]), but his primary methodological concern is exegetical: What do the founding texts of the tradition really say, and how have they been misinterpreted over time? This in itself is an acceptable (not to say traditional) methodology, and there is no doubt that many of the answers that have been given in the past may in fact represent a "deformation of biblical faith" (82). My concern is not with Gorringe's revision of the texts but rather with his historiography. His intention is to demonstrate that within the tradition itself, there are conflicting interpretations of the meaning of Christ's death, and that some of these interpretations point not to retribution against sinners and criminals (the two at times conflated, at others distinguished by the theologians and lawyers) but rather to forgiveness and reincorporation into the community. He argues that it is possible to read Jesus' death not as divine sanction for inflicting suffering or death on those who have transgressed the laws of the community (who either as scapegoats or as penitents must atone for their wrongdoing to satisfy God's justice) but rather as a challenge to recognize the "needs and rights of victims" (256), here defined not as those who have suffered crime, but those who have perpetrated it. The answer is the "imagined community" (Benedict Anderson) of the church realized through a "praxis of costly forgiveness" (268). So far so good, at least insofar as the argument operates from a theological perspective. Where Gorringe encounters difficulties, however, is not in his arguments for contemporary reinterpretation of the gospels but rather in his historical survey of their effects, two of which provoke particular concern for this reviewer: the use of Anselm's theory of satisfaction as the prototype of retributive theology and the description of the effects of passion mysticism on late medieval and early modern understandings of corporal punishment.	2
Anselm of Canterbury is perhaps best known for his ontological proof of the existence of God, but theologically his most provocative work was his Cur Deus Homo?, an apology for the Incarnation addressed to certain "unbelievers" who contended that the death of Christ was not only absurd and improper, but moreover unnecessary, since God might have redeemed humanity by a simple act of divine forgiveness. According to Gorringe, Anselm's answer (that only the sacrifice of an innocent God-man could satisfy God's justice) was metaphorically dependent upon the structures and procedures of feudal law, according to which sin might be perceived as an "infringement of honour" (93), and satisfaction (satisfactio) would be considered necessary to restore the hierarchical order of society. Gorringe is not the first to observe Anselm's dependence on feudal imagery in his theological arguments (see Richard Southern, St. Anselm and His Biographer [Cambridge, 1963], 107-14), but he convincingly demonstrates that this imagery is at base legal as much as it is social. Where he oversteps his evidence is in his allusions to the transmission and reception of Anselm's theology. "Still, today, it commands the allegiance of many (99).... [Calvin] addresses Anselm's question (without, however, mentioning Anselm) (137).... [In Grotius' Defensio Fidei Catholicae de Satisfactione Christi] the Anselmian theme of order is reintroduced in an almost unrecognizable form (148).... Enter Anselm ... The death of Christ dominated the 'structures of affect' of Europe for five hundred years, and in so doing they pumped retributivism into the legal bloodstream (224)." This may be good theology, but it is bad history. Had Calvin and Grotius read Anselm? Why does Anselm "still" command allegiance? How appropriate are metaphors of the circulation of the blood for the description of processes of intellectual reception? These questions might or might not provoke concern if encountered in a history of doctrine (but see Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," History and Theory 8 [1969]: 3-53), but in an argument attempting the integration of theology with legal and social praxis, they are Socratic gadflies, insignificant in themselves, but pointedly irksome en masse.	3
The need to pay closer attention to the mechanisms of transmission and reception is most acute in Gorringe's account of later medieval and early modern uses of the Passion. One of the great strengths of Gorringe's argument on the whole is his contention that theologies of the atonement were caught up in the ideology of criminal law, and that these theologies in turn impacted upon the development of criminal law and the treatment of criminals, most particularly in the execution of the Waltham Black Act between 1722 and 1823. Nevertheless, in assuming rather than demonstrating Anselm's dominance into and beyond the early modern period, Gorringe on the one hand fails to explain why Anselm's later contemporaries, themselves caught up in the structures of feudal law, did not on the whole immediately embrace his satisfaction theory and on the other ignores perhaps the single most important transformation in judicial practice for the representation and perception of the significance of Christ's execution in the later Middle Ages: the reinstitution in the twelfth century of judicial torture (Thomas Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society [Philadelphia, 1996], 145-64). Instead, Gorringe appeals to Johann Huizinga's classic description of a medieval "mind saturated with the concepts of Christ and the cross" (The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. F. Hopman [Harmondsworth, 1965], 184), and, in Norbert Elias's terms, to the "emergence of new structures of affect" (105), in order to explain the transformation in sensibilities that manifested itself in the late medieval devotion to Christ's wounds. This devotion itself emerged at a time when the use if not the spectacle of torture was becoming standard, especially in the treatment of suspected heretics. It is not enough to suggest that this passion mysticism was simply "the obverse of the brutality which characterised the period" (125). In theological terms, the argument was often cast according to the Latin rhetorical trope quanto magis (how much the more). If Christ, who was God, suffered such extremities of physical pain and humiliation, how much the more ought the same pain and indignity be inflicted upon "the Jew, the heretic, the criminal, the outcast?" (Bestul, 159). The legality of torture in this period had as much to do with the perceived purity of the socio-ecclesiastical body of the church as it did with the punishment of wrongdoers.	4
As noted above, this is an ambitious and thought-provoking book. A longer review might comment more upon Gorringe's efforts to integrate biblical exegesis with anthropological and sociological interpretations of Old Testament sacrifice and upon his rather more successful discussion of the paradoxical demands placed upon prison chaplains in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were expected "to preach repentance and obtain conversion" (160) from the more often than not poor criminals awaiting execution under the Black Act. Nevertheless, enough has been said to sketch the complexity of Gorringe's argument and to highlight its difficulties, one of which must be noted as uppermost: how should a (post) modern theologian address theological issues historically without implicitly or (as Gorringe occasionally does) explicitly blaming the proponents of now unacceptable positions for holding those same positions even as he demonstrates the extent to which these positions were implicated in the social, cultural, and legal institutions of the day? In asking "how a Christian theology of the atonement ought to bear on penal thinking" (7), is it possible to do so without suggesting that all previous construals of the crucifixion were wrong, indeed "deformations of biblical faith," rather than themselves attempts to reconcile the ambiguity of scripture with the powerful human impulses to seek expiation for wrongdoing and vengeance against wrongdoers? In his argument, Gorringe himself slips at times not only between the analytical categories of sin and crime, morality and law, but also between the interior demands of individual guilt for atonement and the exterior demands of society for retribution. Perhaps the story of the crucifixion functions so powerfully as myth, despite its grounding in the historical reality of Roman justice, precisely because the narratives on which all subsequent interpretations of that historical event inevitably rest, namely the gospels, were themselves historically contingent attempts to make sense of the apparent nonsense of Christ's death, while at the same time irrevocably bearers of cultural meaning insofar as they engaged their readers in contemplation of the "primeval reality" of human violence and suffering (11, citing Bronislaw Malinowski, "Myth in Primitive Psychology," in Myth, Science and Religion and Other Essays [Westport, Conn., 1971], 101). Theological truth may or may not be historically contingent, but human interpretations of that truth inescapably are, as are human attempts to come to terms with the simultaneous and perhaps inevitably complementary facts of human violence and suffering. Gorringe's question admits no easy answers precisely because violence and suffering continue to be inescapable, and yet Gorringe's critique of criminal law and theologies of the atonement suggests that they might be within his utopian "imagined community" of the church.	5
Rachel Fulton University of Chicago

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