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Richard John Neuhaus. Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross. New York: Basic-Perseus, 2000. xv + 272 pp. $24.00 (cloth), ISBN 046504932X.
In the preface to this book, Neuhaus makes the comment, "If what Christians say about Good Friday is true, then it is, quite simply, the truth about everything" (xi). This remark proves to be programmatic for this wonderful volume of meditations. Readers who look to them in the hope to find a refuge from the physicality and particularity of their everyday world are sure to be disappointed: Neuhaus offers a sustained critique of the Gnostic impulse, "the belief that we are not really part of the creation, that we are not really creatures" (120). This book plants us with both feet on the ground, arguing that all ground is sacred ground-ground claimed by the one whose hill of crucifixion is the real world, the axis mundi (6). These meditations ask us to linger at the foot of the cross and from there to claim the Christian gospel as the truth-the only truth-that addresses our culture in its deepest religious and moral dilemmas. If the cross is as central as Neuhaus claims it is, theological discussions about the nature of the atonement are by no means abstract academic vanities. The way in which we think about the atonement has an impact on the way in which we view our place in the world.
So, what is Neuhaus's understanding of the atonement? The first chapter of the book, "Coming to Our Senses," might also have been entitled, "Cur deus homo" (why God became man). Here Neuhaus addresses Anselm's age-old question about the necessity of the incarnation and the crucifixion. Neuhaus argues that God could not possibly simply overlook our wrongdoing without declaring that people are not significant and that their moral choices are irrelevant. "Reconciliation must do justice to what went wrong" (9). In the face of contemporary accusations that Anselmian-type models of the atonement are repulsive and foster abuse because they depict an angry Father demanding the death of his son, Neuhaus unapologetically asserts: "Justice cries out to be satisfied; something must be done. From the blood of Abel, to the prison camps of Siberia, to...