Author: Anne van Gend Publisher: SCM Press 2024Reviewer: Rev Dr Jenny Dawson

The beginning to the penultimate chapter of Anne van Gend’s book - a quote from CS Lewis’ The Last Battle – gives a taste for the whole book. “Aslan”, said Lucy through her tears. “Could you – will you - do something for these poor Dwarfs?”  This leads into Aslan’s response, about those who would choose cunning instead of belief.  The author invites us to consider again and again that the sheer goodness and beauty of our hope is what Jesus has done, rather than being stuck with a particular way in which we might understand what Jesus has done.  She offers a gift to the church by unpacking four different traditional ways of telling the foundational story of Christ’s atonement, surveying them in a scholarly but gentle way.

This book definitely fills a need in the Christian community in the manner with which it deals with the kinds of beliefs that many people have taken on, perhaps through what they sing or have been told, rather than thinking through with care, in a way that makes sense in our contemporary world. 

The author is familiar with children’s and young adult literature so the book shines with references to the writings of CS Lewis, Tolkien, JK Rowling, Garth Nix, Cassandra Clare and others, as well as careful examination of Scripture. Mystery is at the heart of her thinking. As she says, “Atonement is a good example of a mystery that has suffered from being ‘shrunk’ into words” so that the love which is so well expressed through stories, poetry, music and art is reduced to a logical, even legal process.

At the centre of it all is the question: What stories are we telling ourselves, living by and telling the world about our faith?   The Ven. Dr Anne van Gend is Ministry Educator for the Anglican Diocese of Dunedin, and her response in this book comes out of not only wide reading and scholarship but encounters with ordinary people who long to have something to share with others.