As an undergraduate, I was surprised to find that many of my Christian contemporaries could not spell the word ‘atonement’. Morgan’s reminder that Tyndale’s neologism means ‘at-one-ment’ is thus a salutary preface to this continuation of The New Testament and the Theology of Trust (2022), in which she argues that atonement should not be seen as a legal transaction performed for all time by the death of Christ but as the making whole of that which has been impaired by wrongdoing or suffering. This reconciliation has been made possible by the example of perfect trust in God which Jesus vouchsafed to us by his ministry of healing and forgiveness, in the knowledge that this would lead him to the Cross. Pistis or trust (more commonly rendered as ‘faith’) is the antidote to the fear and doubt that prevent us from acknowledging our own sins, showing mercy to those of others or accepting both the mortification and the awakening that are implied in receiving mercy. Having examined the role of pistis as a remedy for both suffering and wrongdoing in the ancient Israel and the New Testament, Morgan collates the recent findings of trauma studies on the obstacles to trust that arise when a person has suffered injury, injustice, or indignity, or has not grown up in a world where needs are honoured, frailties spared, or love returned. She argues that mutual trust is shown by recent studies of the natural world to be a condition for the flourishing of non-human animals and even of plants, whom we must assume to be embraced by the love of God, their Creator, and by his design for reconciliation.

In her chapter on ‘the Trust and Trustworthiness of Jesus Christ’, she maintains that, as a paradigm of absolute trust in God, the life of Jesus is presented to us all at once as a model for imitation and as a source. In answer to the question ‘Did Jesus have to die?’ she replies that, as a scandal which is also an act of grace, it ‘makes possible what might otherwise have been too big a step to take’ (p. 143). If he is a representative of humanity, it is not because he dies as our surrogate but because we can now learn, in Paul’s words, to ‘die in Christ’. As in her recent monograph, Being ‘In Christ’ in the Letters of Paul (2020), she does not construe this as a mystical or physical absorption, but as a voluntary exposure of ourselves to the risk of rejection and destruction that he accepted by his association with outcasts and his denunciation of counterfeit righteousness. Since his faith was complete in his obedience unto death (Philippians 2.8), the resurrection appearances were necessitated only by the failure of his disciples to ‘grasp what happened in the crucifixion’ (p. 153); and although the New Testament frequently speaks of the Cross in the language of sacrifice, ransom, or covenant, we ought not to insist on the judicial or sacerdotal sense of terms that ‘bear multiple possible meanings’ (p. 48). Although the name of Bultmann does not appear in the bibliography, Morgan evidently shares his conviction that the Cross must be stripped of its mythological appurtenances before it can be a symbol for our times.

In many ways, she improves on Bultmann in scholarship and argumentative cogency, and in contrast to Bultmann’s existentialism, she addresses the inescapable ills of life rather than distempers of the élite that King Agrippa would have ascribed to too much reading (Acts 26.24). Nevertheless, I would like to offer here three observations in favour of a more traditional understanding of faith and its objects. Firstly, her equation of faith with trust seems to me self-evident in its moderate form but barely tenable in the absolute form that excludes the notion of faith as belief. That God is to be trusted has been the staple of Christian homiletic and pastoral guidance from the beginning, but it is, to say the least, uncommon for adults, or even in children who have speech, to place trust in anyone without holding beliefs about them. It is possible – who can say? – that babies trust their parents without harbouring even an inchoate belief that they are their parents, but they are not held up as exemplars of faith in the scriptures, even at Matthew 21.16. On the contrary, we are admonished that anyone who would come to God must believe that he is and that he rewards those who diligently seek him (Hebrews 11.6); if the demons have pistis and tremble, as James 2.19 avers, there is at least one variety of pistis that is not trust.

Secondly, it seems to me that sound exegesis will not support Morgan’s retraction of her position in The Theology of Trust that the resurrection is as much an object of pistis as the work of Christ on the Cross. She is no doubt correct to argue that the Cross is the culmination of perfect confidence in the will of God, and it may seem to us that this faith would be less perfect if it were sustained by the assurance of resurrection; yet Paul says clearly enough that the resurrection proved Jesus to be the Son of God (Romans 1.3), that if it he is not risen faith and hope are vain (1 Corinthians 15.12–19), and that those who are justified by the resurrection are those who dare to believe, with Abraham, that God can bring life out of death (Romans 4.18–25). All three of Jesus’ prophecies of his death in the synoptic gospels include a prophecy of his resurrection, and it is this, according to Mark, that his disciples cannot understand (Mark 9.10). There is nothing in the gospels to suggest that submission to evil without the hope of vindication was at the heart of Jesus’ preaching; nor does it seem to the author of Hebrews 11.19 that the sacrifice of Isaac was any less an act of faith because Abrham knew that God could raise the dead.

Thirdly, while I do not underestimate the regenerative power of trust between human beings, I wonder what an author who dissuades us from putting our faith in the resurrection of Jesus can mean by trust in God. Christians have of course trusted God to send rain in answer to prayer, to protect their children from temptation, to prevent their parents from dying, to stand with the weak against the oppressor – and they have been so uniformly disappointed that a whole school has grown up that proclaims that the only true victory is to be numbered, like Christ, with the poor and the weak, the abject and the forsaken. It cannot be denied that Christians of New Testament times were far more prone that modern theologians to live as though they believed this; but again it must be emphasized that they renounced the apparent goods in the present world for the sake of more durable blessings (not to mention more hideous torments for their oppressors) in a world that was still to come. This does not mean that their service was venal: they earnestly desired to be free of sin in a world that mirrored the perfection of its Creator. If we preach neither a gospel of prosperity nor the gospel of reparation, I must confess that I do not know what we are trusting God to do.