Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition.

Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition. By Hans Boersma. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004. 288 pages. Cloth. $29.99.

This is a bold book that reclaims the redemptive significance of human and divine violence. The author's argument develops by means of an engagement with the dominant atonement motifs in the Christian tradition--moral influence, penal, and Christus Victor--carefully suggesting how each illuminates the nature of redemptive violence. Along the way, the author pursues an intra-Calvinist debate on the nature of election, provides a trenchant analysis of Rene Girard, and proffers a critique of the theological movement known as Radical Orthodoxy over the character of justice in public.

Boersma argues that violence can be good. He points to Augustine and the development of the just war tradition, the violence of God in the Old Testament (advancing the stunning claim that the ban, whereby men, women, children, trees, and pets were to be slaughtered was in fact an instance of God's "preferential option for the poor"), and argues that Jesus himself was violent. As for those who would question the goodness of the violence on display at these points in the Christian tradition, Boersma wonders if such voices are not finally instances of cultural accommodation or subjectivism, if they are really concerned with justice. At times he asserts that to distance God from violence is to distance oneself from the Christian tradition; that the effort to create such a distance can only be Marcionite or neo-Gnostic.

Undergirding Boersma's argument is the claim that violence is intrinsic to the "creational structures," including human nature, in this time between fall and resurrection. Even God is powerless to correct evil nonviolently; indeed, to refrain from violence would be to ensure that the devil, evil, and the worst violence would conquer. Apparently, Christ's victory on the cross remains in doubt, ensured only by the ongoing history of good violence.

Not that Boersma's endorsement of violence lacks limitation. He confesses that we are called by Paul to an unconditional hospitality that renounces violence, and so even as he insists that we cannot abide by the resurrection mandate and must get our hands dirty, he also insists that the call to unconditional hospitality remain the eschatological horizon that influences us to be more restrained in our violence. We are to use only as much violence as is needed to protect God's eschatological justice and hospitality.

Readers will notice immediately, for good or ill, the Niebuhrian character of this work. Astute readers will recognize as well that, the prominence of the language of hospitality notwithstanding, this book is not an exhortation to the practice of hospitality. This is the case not simply because the meaning of hospitality remains frustratingly ambiguous. Not only is there a difference between conditional and unconditional hospitality, but unconditional hospitality is associated with at least four different and not entirely compatible realities: the divine eschaton, pacifism, contemporary therapeutic culture, and the naked public square. On the contrary, this is a sustained argument against too much hospitality. The argument is not to trust, to dare, to risk hospitality in faith. On the contrary, it is a call for caution, for restraint, for suspicion, for security.

Boersma wonders if those who would question the justice of divine violence are mere cultural accommodationists. This same question might be put to him. Is this not a vision that is particularly well suited to a culture of fear--whose first response to the stranger is suspicion and who believes it has a duty to do whatever it takes for the good end of defeating evil and terror? In this regard, Boersma appeals to the Latin American liberationists and to the contemporary movement for restorative justice, noting how their concerns comport with the Bible and Christian tradition. Yet, there is too little of their spirit in this work. They are about risking hospitality, welcoming the stranger, the offended, and the offender in precisely those situations (this fallen world) where Boersma repeatedly warns us that violence is the order of the day, always tempering our hospitality.

Daniel M. Bell, Jr.

Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary 

Columbia, South Carolina