"Why the cross? What was fitting or “just” about God’s choice to save us in this way? Is there a value to the twilight that precedes the dawn?

These are the questions that animated my research and intellectual struggle while writing Why the Cross? Divine Friendship and the Power of Justice. In a nutshell, the book reconsiders the very notion of the justice of the cross. How is the justice of the cross just? By drawing on Bernard J. F. Lonergan’s development of the Augustinian-Thomist tradition, I argue that the justice of the cross concerns the rightness of order, not transaction or retribution, as some post-Anselmian accounts of atonement suggest. Correspondingly, the justice of the cross regards the fittingness, not the necessity, of the divine solution to the problem of evil. It was fitting that a problem of a disordered love was answered, not by coercion or by divine intervention without human involvement, but by a re-ordering of human love through a gift of friendship with and in Christ. This is not to deny that the cross remains a paradoxical symbol, as is the twilight. For there is a radical difference between the darkness of suffering as inflicted and of suffering as willingly accepted out of love, just as Christ did."