Book Review: On the Tree of the Cross: Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Doctrine of Atonement

On the Tree of the Cross: Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Doctrine of Atonement

Edited by Matthew Baker, Seraphim Danckaert and Nicholas Marinides
ISBN: 1942699093
Price: £23.02 (Amazon UK)

As an admirer of the works of Fr Georges Florovsky and the study of patristics in general, I have been eager to pick up a copy of this text for a while, a recent trip abroad gave me the opportunity to both buy and read this text through, and it was well worth the wait. It contains several great essays by prolific modern thinkers in Orthodoxy and Eastern Catholicism, spanning the centuries of the Early Church and Florovsky’s analysis of their thought.

As an essay collection, the book is split into different sections by different authors based on papers presented at a patristic symposium in honour of Florovsky held at  Princeton Theological Seminary and Princeton University in 2011. These papers each cover a specific thinker’s view on the topic of atonement, along with links between the specific text or line of thought covered and how this view was understood in the work of Florovsky. A large of the text is dedicated to the specific debate between the western substitute view of atonement and the Orthodox ontological view, however this guiding line is demonstrated throughout to be somewhat polemical and not true of patristic thought. The book ends with a collection of Florovsky’s essays, some previously unpublished, on the subject.

As mentioned at the start, I am an admirer of Florovsky’s work and so seeing many current thinkers cover and discuss his work in the text was an enjoyable treat and a reminder of the splendid work being done by Orthodox thinkers in continuing Florovsky’s own patristic studies and the incorporation of the Neo-Patristic synthesis into modern theological questions. I especially enjoyed the sections by John Behr and Khaled Anatolios on Sts Irenaeus and Athanasius, knowing how both are seminal thinkers on these saints it was good to have their views on the matter of salvation analysed at this level. The book also demonstrates the great strives made in patristic study. Overall, the text is a great piece of work, compiling the work of some of the best modern Orthodox thinkers on a difficult and often misjudged area of study, using their patristic knowledge to contextualise the question of Atonement and tackle the various approaches made.

With regards to drawbacks of this book, the only major one which comes to mind is that it often raises more questions than it answers. This is not a flaw in the writing but a general problem which I find with books based on conferences of collections of papers. An example of this comes from its principle point of discussion on the Ontological vs Substitutory view of Christ’s Crucifixion. Due to the essays being from various writers and from various perspectives it gives different answers to the same questions, leaving many readers with no definitive Orthodox view on these matters.

Overall, I would certainly recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand the thoughts of the fathers on the matters of redemption and atonement or with an interest in the ideas and legacy of Georges Florovsky. The book is a great overview of the topic, utilising some of the major Orthodox thinkers and academic writers of this generation to tackle the question with both academic vigour and appreciation of the theological depth of the topic.