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Is the atonement necessary or fitting?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2019

ANNE JEFFREY*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Baylor University, One Bear Place #97273, Waco, TX76798, USA

Abstract

In her impressive Atonement, Eleonore Stump claims that her novel Marian theory of the atonement meets a desideratum for a successful theory that Aquinas's theory does not, namely, showing that Christ's passion and death are essential to the solution to the problem of human sin. Here I suggest reasons to side with Aquinas, who says that Christ's suffering and death are not necessary, but merely a fitting way of solving the problem. If the fittingness of Christ's passion and death is a good enough justification for it, we lose a motivation for adopting the Marian theory over the Thomistic one.

Type
Book Symposium
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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References

Aquinas, T. (1265–1274) [1981] Summa Theologica, 5 vols, Fathers of the English Dominican Province (trs) (Westminster MD: Christian Classics).Google Scholar
Stump, E. (2018) Atonement (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar