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Rating: 
Summary: The most important book on Christian theology ever
Review: Aulen's aim in this work is to explain the doctrine of the atonement as it was held for the first 1000 years of Christianity, and to explain how and why the church has deviated from it.
I am a lay theologian and I have read a lot of theological works, but this book stands out from the rest. I now feel that I didn't properly understand Christianity prior to reading this work.
Aulen doesn't interact much with scripture, and confines himself to a historical account of what various people in the church believed at different times. However his fundamental thesis is clear: that the Bible and the early church have a view of Christ's work that is majorly different to what is commonly received today in the Western Church.
Though Aulen was a Western theologian, Eastern Orthodox believers will also benefit from Aulen's clear and insightful exploration of the doctrine of the Greek Fathers. Aulen's account of the atonement is Orthodox, and far clearer than what I have seen expressed elsewhere in Orthodox writings.
Rating: 
Summary: A provocative and important analysis of the Atonement
Review: No Christian committed to the teaching of Scripture would deny that the doctrine of the atonement is the heart of the Christian gospel. The Scripture clearly teaches that Christ's death as an atonement for sin will result in the salvation of the world. But the dominant view of how the Church has understood how this works has changed dramatically over the last thousand years. Most modern Christians (not including those in the Orthodox Church) have a system of how and why this exchange took place which was not articulated until Anselm in the Scholastic period. This system in all it's most important intricacies is held by most as not only essential orthodox dogma but as the center of the Christian faith. This book brings the view of this system (and the view that later opposed it) under the microscope as no other work has done before. Aulen analyzes these views in light of the dominant teaching of the Church for the first millenium of Church history (known as the "Classic/Patristic/Greek" view). He also has some interesting insight into the strength of Martin Luther's atonement theology. My personal qualms with this work are that
1. he lays out the Patristic view as the teaching of the Bible but is not very convincing
2. Luther's views on Law and Wrath do not line up with Biblical teaching and are certainly not the pinical of Christian teaching on the atonement
3. he does not understand the history of the doctrine of the Reformed Church and therefore lumps it all together. BTW this is a problem with a lot of modern critics of teaching on the atonement (& justification) in the Western Church, including my favorite N.T. Wright. Though I have quarrels with some of Aulen's views, this book brings a most important issue into focus and does a great job of starting a conversation between differing wings of the Christian Church. Thank you Wipf & Stock for reprinting this invaluable work.
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