Remembering Holy Victims: Travis E. Ables

In his recent book, The Body of the Cross, our guest Travis E. Ables invites Christians to reconsider the atonement. He goes back to the early days of the church to learn new ways to think about how God is reconciled to the world.

The Body of the Cross is a study of holy victims in Western Christian history and how the uses of their bodies in Christian thought led to the idea of the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice. In tracing the story of this embodied development,

The Body of the Cross gives special attention to popular spirituality, religious dissent, and the writing of women throughout Christian history. It examines the symbol of the cross as it functions in key moments throughout this history, including the parting of the ways of Judaism and Christianity, the gnostic debates, martyr traditions, and medieval affective devotion and heresy.

Finally, in a Reformation era haunted by divine wrath, these themes concentrated on the unique concept that Jesus Christ died on the cross to absorb divine punishment for sin: a holy body and a rejected body in one.