In Construing the Cross, Frances Young is taking her great accomplishments in patristic theology and using a dizzying array of interdisciplinary resources to make them accessible to the everyday reader. In this text Young seeks to expand her reader's understanding of the atonement by moving the conversation about the cross from theory to theoria, to use the underlying Greek term, a word meaning something like a ‘seeing through’ (p. xiii). What must be ‘seen through’ are many of the attempts to ‘theorise’ the atonement. Instead Young gestures towards a theoria that draws from a variety of disciplines in order to emphasise the ‘paradoxical reality . . . that life is found through acceptance of death as the way of new birth’ (p. 123).

Young's approach might irritate those who seek from it an explication of the meaning of the cross in an analytic mode. She has a tendency to draw widely and perhaps haphazardly from a wide range of sources; in chapter 2 alone she quotes a TV programme from the 1970s, Rene Girard, the second-century Epistle of Barnabus, the book of Leviticus, Mary Douglas and Martha Nussbaum. In chapter 4 she somewhat unbelievably refers to the organisation of a Wikipedia page on the Tree of Life as evidencing the breadth of interest in the topic (p. 61). In chapter 5, she includes her own poetry on the topic of the cross. In this way, the origin of this book as a series of lectures (the Didsbury lectures, given in 2014) and not an analytic treatment of the atonement is evident.

This tack can especially be seen in chapter 3, where Young deals with the Tree of Life motif and where some of her larger insights about the cross are evident. The origin of the ‘tree of life’ motif is in Genesis 2:16–17, where Adam and Eve have eaten from the tree of knowledge and are cast out of the garden of Eden. Young notes that the use of the Greek xylon (wood), which appears in the Septuagint translation of Genesis, adds biblical credence to relating the tree in the garden to the ‘tree’ on which Christ was crucified (Gal 3:13). By making quick work of the disparity between the trees of Genesis 2:16–17 and 3:2–3, Young sides with the unity of the narrative (against a redacted addition) and then moves to introduce a patristic canonical reading that has both cosmic and eschatological dimensions. The original life that the tree promised, secured in Christ's death, becomes a symbol of the eschaton. She quotes from a paschal homily attributed to Hippolytus:

Young then discusses how the ‘tree of life’ exists across religious and cultural traditions, and that therefore this usage in the Genesis account might be connected to a broader tradition that associates trees with ‘life, renewal, rebirth, immortality, and unity in the cosmos’ (p. 65), and perhaps even with the nourishing ‘earth mother’ symbolism prevalent through many cultures.

Iconographically, the tree of life has two prominent medieval developments that Young also considers. The first is the Jesse tree, which illustrates the genealogy of Jesus according to the ‘branch’ language of Isaiah 11. The second is the lignum vitae crucifix type, associated with a treatise by Bonaventure written in 1270. Crucifixes developed according to this form sometimes superimpose a cross on the tree of life, or include fruits and branches suggestive of the fecundity of the death of Christ. Young's quick movement across such varied terrain can be unconvincing; much of her treatment of the lignum vitae crucifix, for instance, relies on a single recently published volume (pp. 66–70). However, such flexibility clearly illustrates her understanding of the cross as a multivalent symbol whose variety emphasises its universal applicability. By seeing the cross as the Tree of Life, the ‘axis of the universe’, and by affirming that this symbolism has a biblical basis and also universal usage, Young is making a broader theological claim. This tree, the cross of Christ, sustains the smallest and most vulnerable things, from the birds who roost in the branches of the Jesse tree to the members of the L'arche community who made the image that generated this particular chapter. (Young notes on p. 44 that a handmade tree of life image generated her thought.) By ‘seeing through’ the theories that are limited when considered alone, Young has located her own insight about the cross. This tree generates and sustains life as it provides shelter for those most vulnerable, and draws all of creation to it, that we might all flourish in its shade.