In Atonement and the Life of Faith, Adam J. Johnson combines the patristic account of Christ’s assumption of the human condition to heal humanity’s disordered will with an innovative approach to the role of the Holy Spirit to offer a healing-recapitulation-pneumatic approach to soteriology. This book is part of Baker Academic’s Soteriology and Doxology series, which is ‘designed for the theologian-in-formation’ (series preface). Each volume is organised by the fivefold movement of creed, scriptural range, comparative soteriology, constructive theology, and Christian life to form an example of theological reasoning that unites exegesis, theology, dogmatics, and doxology designed to elicit worship. This book is faithful to the editors’ objectives.

Johnson notes that his earlier work on the atonement (Atonement: A Guide for the Perplexed, 2015; The Reconciling Wisdom of God: Reframing the Doctrine of the Atonement, 2016) focused on the first two articles of the Apostles’ Creed. His goal for this book is to emphasize the third article and the role of the Holy Spirit, which ‘is fundamentally about worship, as we seek to conform our minds and thus our whole selves to the reality of Christ’s death and resurrection’ (p. xiv). Armed with this viewpoint, along with the doctrine of divine impassibility and the notion that God is fundamentally joyful, Johnson emphasises a healing-recapitulation account of atonement. He argues that because ‘Scripture has a “mind,” a pattern of thought that shapes and informs the text,’ in which our minds are conformed to God’s mind, we can read scripture guided by the ‘ruled reading of the church’ as understood in the Apostles’ Creed (p. 61).

One of Johnson’s strengths is breaking down topics into digestible parts. He explains each phrase of the Apostles’ Creed and aligns it with his healing atonement approach. Johnson then selects images from the Old Testament (e.g., covenant, law, Sabbath, creation, sacrifice and exodus) to describe the mind of scripture in relation to Christ, who is understood both as the recapitulation of the Old Testament and the one who suffers the fate of sin. With very little comparative discussion of different atonement models, Johnson very briefly reviews the main eras in the history of the doctrine of atonement in order to identify ‘major contributors and shifts in the history of the doctrine, to counteract some prevalent assumptions and equip the reader to profitably interact’ (p. 92).

After outlining the healing-recapitulation model of the atonement in this way, Johnson proceeds in the fourth chapter, ‘The Spirit of Atonement’ (co-written with Tessa Hayashida), to provide a constructive account of the role of the Holy Spirit. Their innovative approach equates the role of the Holy Spirit with the mode of God’s wrath against sin as borne in Christ, in line with what they argue is the traditional understanding that the ‘Spirit is the vehicle of both God’s blessings and curses’ (pp. 117–8). Insofar as divine wrath is understood as ‘the exercise of divine love toward sinful creatures’ and God’s method of judgement (p. 119), Johnson and Hayashida suggest that the role of the Spirit is ‘to be the love of God directed toward the sin-bearer; to be the love of God in its mode of wrath’ (p. 127), and thus that the ‘atonement is the one work of the one God: Father, incarnate Son, and Holy Spirit’ (p. 131). This approach, Johnson argues, preserves the unity between Father and Son on the cross while not neglecting the Spirit. However, while this approach certainly preserves the integrity of the father–son relationship, now it is the work of the Holy Spirit that seems divided from that of the other two persons. In light of this problem, Johnson questions whether imagining that the ‘Holy Spirit is wrath’ is proper and surprisingly responds by claiming it is ‘the best they have to offer’, aligning the Spirit’s role to the freedom to worship God in a ‘joyful, playful, and creative’ manner, which he asserts, is humble faith (pp. 131–2).

Finally, Johnson notes the practical application of forgiveness. The atonement provided forgiveness when God forgave humanity through Christ’s suffering and ‘nailing the debt record to the cross’ (pp. 146–7). Here, Johnson seems to abandon the healing approach, favouring a judicial one. Johnson prioritises justly and proportionately holding the sinner accountable for their sin, even as in forgiveness treating the sinner as if they had not sinned.

In this ambitious project, Johnson subtly integrates a multitude of theological concepts to present what he describes as a ‘fully Christian Eastern-Western synthesis’ (p. 12), holding them together through a spirit of joy and worship rather than through rigid systematisation. At the same time, he adopts and adapts parts of atonement models he prefers rather than providing a fully consistent healing model. Indeed, his commitment to ‘penal’ assumptions hinders his fully exploiting the possibilities of his thesis that the Holy Spirit as the wrath of God: ultimately, when describing God’s wrath, he simply switches roles (viz., from the Father to the Spirit) rather than constructing a thoroughgoing healing approach that challenges traditional assumptions regarding God’s atoning work. Additionally, Johnson’s characterisation of wrath as joyful, playful and creative calls for further clarification, as accurate assessment of this melding of seemingly contradictory qualities requires a more thorough comparative examination of different approaches to the atonement. Therefore, I would be cautious about assigning this book to ‘theologians-in-formation’ without facilitated discussion.