Can These Dry Bones Live?

Frances Young, who won high critical acclaim for her deeply committed book, Sacrifice and the Death of Christ, seeks to convey the excitement of the theological quest, the excitement of studying the Bible, the excitement of wrestling with what might seem outmoded and irrelevant ways of thinking and discovering that there is a chiming with experience. She offers a study of atonement as a demonstration of the possibilities. It stems from a deep preoccupation with suffering and its meaning, the outstretched arms of the crucified Christ, the image of the woman in travail. But this suffering and pain is the prelude to new birth, to vision and hope, to the feast of the kingdom. New birth and new creation, she sees, lie at the heart of the Christian message; and our own growth depends on the painful but rewarding labor of appropriating the Bible and our Christian heritage through critical reflection.