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Book Review: The Word of the Cross: Salvation as Revelation in the Fourth Gospel

THE STATED GOAL of this doctoral dissertation is to demonstrate that "there is a Johannine theology of salvation which fully recognizes the salvific meaning of Jesus' death, but does not do so in terms of expiation, sacrifice, and vicarious satisfaction." As such the work serves the rather specialized task of modifying the widespread Roman Catholic rejection of Bultmann's interpretation of John. On the one hand, Bultmann is wrong to maintain that the death of Jesus has no objective salvific meaning; on the other, John's view of Jesus' death is not that of other New Testament writers or of later normative Christian theology. Forestell accepts the Bultmannian understanding of salvation as faith in the revelation God gives in his Son, amplifying it to include Jesus' death as the focus of the revelation; the gospel is simply "the Word of the cross," and has, he maintains, a special theological importance for modern man. This goal is exhaustively and convincingly achieved. At the same time, however, the work has a wider usefulness. By investigating one Johannine theme it sheds light on much of the material in the Gospel and therefore, by means of Shorter Reviews and Notices Interpretation