David Coffey: Reshaping Traditional Theology

Theological Origins

David Coffey ¹ was among the first group of students to study in the newly established ecclesiastical Faculty of Theology of Sydney at St Patrick’s College Manly in the 1950s. Australian students seeking to gain degrees in theology had hitherto been sent abroad, to Rome typically, or on rare occasions to a Catholic university elsewhere in Europe. Having completed baccalaureate and licentiate degrees, Coffey was awarded a doctorate in 1960 for his thesis ‘The Concept of Truth in the Gospel of St John.’ His thought was further shaped in important respects by post-doctoral studies in Germany. But a study of his contribution to contemporary theology can usefully begin with a brief history of the origins of theological studies in Australia. A comparison with Thomas Hayden, the first professor of theology at Manly early in the 20th century, is particularly instructive.

For much of the 19th century, theological inquiry in Australia was confined to a handful of students for the priesthood gathered around the local bishop. Bede Polding, an English Benedictine monk and the first bishop of Sydney, initiated an enterprise of this kind soon after his arrival in 1834. Similar arrangements followed over the next decade in the dioceses of Melbourne, Hobart and Adelaide. With small numbers and limited resources, these aspiring theological colleges had all closed by the late 1860s. Even so, the proposal for a central ecclesiastical college for the Australian Province failed to gain episcopal support at the Provincial Council of 1869. ² By then the dream of a Benedictine monastic establishment in Sydney had long since vanished, and Irish bishops throughout the country were generally content to look to Ireland for a ready supply of priests.

Everything changed rapidly when Patrick Francis Moran, well connected in Rome and hitherto bishop of Ossory, took up his appointment as Archbishop of Sydney in 1884. ³ Within a year Moran determined to build a large seminary on a grant of land on the hill above Manly near the North Head of Sydney Harbour. Within five years, St Patrick’s College, a grandiose sandstone building, described at the time as ‘Gothic Perpendicular with a slightly Spanish flavour,’ was ready to welcome students from around Australia and New Zealand. The basis for a modest ongoing engagement in theology was finally achieved.

Thomas Hayden, a young Irish priest, arrived in Sydney late in 1889, fresh from theological studies in Rome. A protégé of Cardinal Moran, he had come just in time for the College’s first academic year. For the next 25 years Hayden was the primary teacher of Dogmatic Theology and Scripture in the only well-established Catholic seminary in Australia and New Zealand. In his teaching post, in Kevin Livingston’s words, Hayden ‘occupied a unique position on a barren theological landscape.’ ⁴ He was by all accounts a brilliant and revered lecturer, thoroughly grounded in Neo-Thomist philosophy and theology, a scholarly thinker who read widely in contemporary biblical and theological writings—Protestant as well as Catholic—and a scholar with a love of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Yet he published no more than a handful of articles in his academic career, all in the Australasian Catholic Record (ACR), a journal founded at the College by Cardinal Moran in 1895. ⁵ Hayden’s misfortune was to be caught up in the Catholic modernist crisis that erupted early in the 20th century.

As the controversy swirled around modernism—not least the use of the historical-critical method in biblical interpretation—Hayden published a moderately daring article on the authorship and historicity of the fourth gospel. ⁶ While not challenging the traditional view in either respect, he was prepared to speculate about the distinctive character of the gospel. The author, he suggested, had lived many years in Ephesus and had come to reinterpret the message and significance of Jesus in terms of Hellenistic thought and culture in contrast with the Semitic ways of thinking found in the Synoptic gospels. A year later he re-entered the minefield of biblical interpretation with a paper on the early chapters of Genesis. ⁷ Drawing on the French Dominican scholar M–J. Lagrange, he argued that we should distinguish between substance and literary garb in interpreting ancient texts of this kind. ⁸ Thus the substance of these chapters is seen to consist in religious beliefs concerning the creation of the world and the fall of human beings into sinfulness. This teaching is presented neither as science nor history, but clothed as imaginative stories based largely on Babylonian myths. His primary conclusion was that ‘there is little doubt that the early chapters of Genesis are far less historical than we have at one time thought them.’ ⁹ But he ended on a note of caution with the remark that, for now, we wait on a decision by the Church and further scholarly guidance.

That decision came just a year later in the anti-modernist decree of the Holy Office (‘Lamentabili’) followed by Pope Pius X’s encyclical letter (‘Pascendi’) in 1907. ¹⁰ For Hayden, as for Lagrange and many scholars throughout the Catholic world, everything changed at that point. Rome had spoken, the case was closed. In a ringing endorsement of Pius X’s intervention he promptly signalled his submission in a paper invoking the memory of Pius IX and ‘The Syllabus of Errors’ of 1864. ¹¹ Hayden’s scholarly speculations had come under suspicion among some clergy on the local scene and there is reason to believe that he had been reprimanded by Rome for his liberal views. ¹² In that light, his endorsement of the papal condemnation served to distance himself from any lingering suspicion of modernism.

Some years later Hayden wrote of Lagrange that ‘Liberal views on the historicity of the early chapters of Genesis . . . found favour with the learned Dominican and got him into trouble. He humbly submitted to the authority of the Church.’ ¹³ In writing this, he would have reflected almost certainly on his own expression of ‘liberal views’ just before the crisis erupted. Hayden did not experience trouble of the kind Lagrange and many others endured in those years. Yet in choosing silence, he too became a victim of the Church’s anti-modernist fervour and the dead hand it imposed on theological scholarship for decades to come. ¹⁴

Hayden’s mantle passed eventually to his student Cornelius Roberts who had completed theological studies in Rome before taking up an appointment at Manly in the 1920s. Roberts was a learned scholar, well versed in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, and author of a steady flow of theological papers in the ACR over the next 20 years. But his work appears as if written in a time warp set by an entrenched spirit of anti-modernism and the bitter sectarianism of the time. His successor from the mid-1940s was Thomas Muldoon. He too had been sent to Rome to study theology and had returned fully formed in the Roman mould that, along with a strong Irish influence, marked the Australian Catholic Church.

The significant development in the following decade was the establishment of the Sydney Faculty of Theology, instituted formally in 1954, under the Roman Congregation for Seminaries and Universities. The hope was that this would put Catholic priests on an educational par with Protestant clergy who had been able to take Bachelor and Doctorate degrees in Divinity under the Board of Theological Studies at the University of Sydney from 1937. ¹⁵ The original vision of the Faculty was for a great centre of theological learning under the Southern Cross, attracting students from across Australia, New Zealand and the whole of Oceania. For the most part it remained a small enclave within the seminary until it metamorphosed into the Catholic Institute of Sydney, which became in turn a member of the Sydney College of Divinity in 1984.

Muldoon was appointed Dean of the Faculty in 1954 before becoming an auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Sydney in 1960 and an advocate for conservative standpoints at the Second Vatican Council a few years later. With the establishment of the Faculty he embarked on re-working his cycle of lectures on dogmatic theology. Five large volumes, written in expansive Latin, were eventually published in Rome between 1958 and 1965, a huge undertaking. But the substance of what he had to say and the framework of cut-and-dried scholastic argument in which it was set echoed the textbooks of his Roman masters of the 1930s. By chance, the final volume appeared just as the Council was coming to a close. By that time the Muldoon lectures belonged to a past age. While Rome and its outposts around the world had marked time, French and German theologians such as Maurice de la Taille, Yves Congar and Karl Rahner had begun to open up new paths in thinking about Christian teaching and its sources. These pioneers occasionally fell under suspicion in Rome, but their moment came in January 1959 when Pope John XXIII announced his intention to convene a General Council.

When David Coffey began his studies in the mid-1950s, theology at Manly followed traditional Roman lines, but intimations of change were in the air as the decade moved on. Then in the mid-1960s he spent two years as a post-doctoral student at the University of Munich where his theological outlook was shaped profoundly by Karl Rahner. ¹⁶ He returned to the Manly Faculty in 1967, served as Dean from 1970, then as President from 1976 to 1981. During that time he played a major role in the negotiations that led to the Faculty being subsumed within the Catholic Institute of Sydney (CIS) and the subsequent incorporation of CIS into the Sydney College of Divinity (SCD) in 1984. ¹⁷

Coffey’s academic career was capped in 1995 with his appointment to the Presidential Chair in Catholic Systematic Theology (subsequently renamed the William J. Kelly SJ Chair in Catholic Theology) at Marquette University, Milwaukee. Following retirement in 2006, he returned to Sydney where he continues to be actively engaged in theological research. Coffey’s writings, books and scholarly articles now constitute an original and impressive system of theology constructed around the twin poles of Spirit Christology and the Trinity. Furthermore, his thought has become the focus of positive critical attention in Europe and the United States.

Grace, Spirit Christology and the Trinity

Looking back in 2010, Coffey commented that ‘like many another theologian . . . I have gone about my work not with any deliberate intention of creating a system, but to address pastoral needs or simply respond to invitations issued.’ ¹⁸ This apparently piecemeal approach was nonetheless tempered by the conviction that the fundamental doctrines of Christianity are not isolated elements but parts of a unified whole. While there was no way of knowing at the time, his early teaching and research set him on the path towards a new synthesis of the central doctrines of Christian theology. The key to this development lies in a renewed understanding of the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of Christ and consequently in Christian life and creation as a whole. The genealogy of Coffey’s theology and a guide to its eventual scope and structure can be found, I will argue, in his very first book Grace: The Gift of the Holy Spirit. This grew out of his lectures on grace in the years after his return to Manly from Munich. The work was published in 1979 and re-appeared in an updated edition in 2011. ¹⁹ I will take it as the primary focus of this paper, for its serves to introduce the themes that have come to characterize his theology as a whole.

The spur for this pioneering study was Karl Barth’s critique of the guiding principle of the ‘Romanist doctrine of grace’ as ‘the negation of the unity of grace as God’s grace to human beings . . . the negation of the unity of grace as his grace in Jesus Christ. It is the division of grace by which it is first of all his, but then—and this is where the emphasis falls—effected and empowered by his grace, it is also our grace.’ ²⁰ While noting an element of animus in Barth’s critique, Coffey acknowledged both charges: that Catholic (neo-scholastic) teaching, with its profusion of types of grace, was fragmented, and that it tended to focus on grace as a human possession at the risk of not acknowledging God’s grace adequately as original and sovereign. But he was aware, as Barth was not, that Rahner and others were already opening new paths in the traditional Catholic teaching. Coffey’s aim was to address the Barthian criticisms by developing a unified account of grace in conjunction with the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. In re-thinking Catholic teaching in a developing spirit of ecumenism, he also hoped to provide an account that ‘would be agreeable not only to Catholics but to Protestants and Orthodox as well.’ ²¹ This approach has remained characteristic of his theology.

In Christian teaching God reveals himself in the creation of the natural world, in the unfolding history of Israel, in the manifestation of goodness in different religions, in movements that seek truth and justice, and in the hearts of all people of goodwill. But God has communicated himself most completely in the person and work of Christ. Thus, the key to Christian theology, in Coffey’s thinking, lies in Christology, for believers are led most fully to an awareness of God and his saving action in the world through Christ. In the order of theological doctrine (ordo doctrinae), the Trinity, the inner being and mystery of God, is supreme. But in the order of inquiry (ordo inventionis) Christology is central, for Christ is the ultimate self-communication of God in the world. This consideration points to the empirical method of inquiry Coffey employs in his thinking about grace and in subsequent writings. Its essence is that theological thinking must always move from the world to God, from the world of human experience as manifesting the presence of God. But one must note that ‘the world’ envisaged here is constituted fundamentally by the New Testament witness that ‘God has revealed his innermost being and mystery to us in Jesus Christ in an eschatological and definitive manner.’ ²²

Coffey’s employment of this theological starting point for the development of doctrine and practice reflects the spirit of ‘ressourcement’ that played a significant role in debates at the Second Vatican Council. Furthermore, by this time most Catholic scholars had embraced the once widely condemned historical-critical method in biblical hermeneutics. In searching in this way for a satisfactory principle of synthesis for the theology of grace, Coffey turned to look again at the New Testament witness to, and subsequent patristic reflection on, the long-settled theology of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Happily, he provides a succinct summary of the principle at which he arrived in the Introduction to the updated edition of the work:

The paradigm of all grace is Jesus Christ. In him took place the Incarnation of the divine Son, Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. The union of divinity and humanity in him must be understood as the elevation of the sacred humanity to divine Sonship, so that it is precisely in his humanity that Jesus is the Son of God.

This elevation was brought about through the bestowal, by the Father, of the Holy Spirit as Spirit of Sonship, on Jesus,in the act which at the same time created his humanity, sanctified it and united it in person with the pre-existent divine Son.This was a theme already known in part by the Eastern Fathers: for them it was the anointing of Jesus, by the Father, with the ointment of the Holy Spirit, an anointing that was identical with the Incarnation. The divine Sonship forged in his humanity is no threat to his eternal Sonship, to which it stands in the relationship of first effect and last disposition. ²³

What is the significance of this principle of synthesis for the doctrine of grace and the theology of the Trinity and the Incarnation? From earliest times, the grace of believers has been treated as a participation in the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Sonship by which they become sons and daughters in the Son. Now, in the theology of the Incarnation, the primary grace of Jesus Christ is the ‘grace of union’ in virtue of which he is the Son of God. But in the traditional account of the Incarnation, ratified at the mid-fifth century Council of Chalcedon, nothing is said of the Holy Spirit. Thus, the Spirit is not accorded a distinctive role in this supreme gift of grace. The pattern of God’s sovereign grace is consequently divided between the Father’s Gift of the Son as the principal grace of Christ and the Gift of the Holy Spirit as the principal grace of those who share in his Sonship. It might seem, as Coffey comments, that Christ would have ‘nothing more in common with us beyond a shared humanity.’ ²⁴

The achievement of the synthesis is to resolve the division in grace while safeguarding the uniqueness of the Incarnation. For in the account, the gift of the Holy Spirit sanctifies and unites the humanity of Jesus with God the Son in the first moment of his existence. Thus, in Coffey’s words, ‘the Incarnation can be seen as sanctification, indeed the paradigm of it, in that it is the most radical and complete possible instance of it.’ ²⁵ All others share in grace in an accessory or secondary way. Furthermore, the principle of synthesis makes clear that grace is primarily and fundamentally the uncreated gift of the Spirit present in the life and work of Jesus and in the lives of believers (and others of goodwill).

The principle for the synthesis of grace provides a succinct expression of Coffey’s Spirit Christology. A Christology of this kind is obviously different from the traditional theology of the Incarnation—Logos or Word Christology as it is sometimes called—which is focussed on God the Son. What then are the grounds for according a specific role to the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son, and why was it that this approach was overlooked at Chalcedon and forgotten for centuries to come?

These questions, bearing on the theology of the Incarnation and the Trinity, take one to the heart of Coffey’s book on grace and bear on much of his later work in theology. The inquiry is concerned for the most part with the exploration of two different models of relations within the Trinity and the way in which each gives rise to a distinct theology of the Incarnation and grace. One is the well-known procession or ‘out-going’ model, which is associated with Logos Christology. The other, which he calls the return (or bestowal) model, is associated with Spirit Christology. In espousing Spirit Christology, Coffey does not suggest that one must choose between these two ways of thinking about the inner relations of Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the Trinity. Rather, he presents them as standing together in a relationship in which, in complementary ways, each throws light on the Trinity, the Incarnation and the gift of grace.

After centuries of reflection and considerable debate and dispute, the Church settled in the fifth century on the procession or ‘out-going’ model of relations among the three persons in one divine nature. In the familiar formula, the Son proceeds from the Father, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as co-principals ²⁶ (as specified in the West) or from the Father through the Son (as maintained in the East). Characterized in terms of knowledge and love, the Son is generated by an act of self-knowledge on the part of the Father, and the Holy Spirit is breathed forth in an act of love on the part of the Father and the Son. There is an intrinsic order in these two moments, but they comprise the single operation of God.

This model of the inner being of the Trinity is based on an understanding of the Incarnation and grace as distinct salvific extensions into the world of the processional relations within God: first in the union of God the Son with humanity, secondly in the union of the Holy Spirit with human beings in grace. This constitutes a descending Christology in which there is a primary emphasis on the belief that God the Son—the pre-existent divine being, the self-expression of God as Word—came down from above to assume human form as Jesus Christ. This theology gradually took hold in the early centuries as the Church reflected on the affirmation in the Gospel of John: ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ (John 1:14). There is no difficulty in recognizing the harmony between Logos Christology and the procession model of the Trinity, for the latter is extrapolated from the former. Given profound expression by Augustine and further developed by Thomas Aquinas, this has been the dominant focus of Christology for 1500 years.

The great turning point in Coffey’s theology was to suppose that there must be another way of thinking about relations within the Trinity that would provide the basis for assigning a specific role to the Holy Spirit in the Incarnation. The model he arrived at is as follows: ‘the Father bestows his love on the Son generated by him, and the Son in return bestows his love on the Father, this mutual love being the Holy Spirit.’ ²⁷ In contrast with the linear processional account, this is circular in form, for the Holy Spirit, as the mutual love of the Father and the Son, is the bond between them. (Clearly, the mutual love of the Father and the Son, which is the Holy Spirit, is to be distinguished from the common love of God as expressed for instance in the saying ‘God is love.’) Originally Coffey called it the bestowal model in keeping with the terms in which the relations within the Trinity are expressed. Later he re-named it the return model, precisely to draw attention to the primary contrast between it and the linear procession model: ‘For while in the procession model the Son and Holy Spirit come out from the Father, in this one they return to him, or better, the Son, having come out from the Father, returns to him in the power of the Holy Spirit.’ ²⁸

As with the procession model, the return model is based on an extrapolation from an understanding of the Incarnation and grace as prolongations of relations in the inner being of the Trinity. But in contrast with Logos Christology, this approach takes the form of an ascending Christology in which the union of divinity and humanity is to be understood as the elevation of the humanity of Jesus Christ to divine Sonship. ²⁹ How is this elevation of Jesus related to the return model of the Trinity? In Coffey’s words, as quoted earlier, the elevation ‘was brought about through the bestowal, by the Father, of the Holy Spirit as Spirit of Sonship, on Jesus, in the act which at the same time created his humanity, sanctified it and united it in person with the pre-existent divine Son.’ ³⁰ Specifically in this theology, Father, Son and Holy Spirit exercise distinct roles in the Incarnation (and subsequently in the life and work of Christ culminating in his death and resurrection). In each case, their roles as manifested in the world are seen to reflect the relations of the inner being of the Trinity as portrayed in the return model. This in brief is Coffey’s account of Spirit Christology and its associated bestowal or return model of the Trinity. ³¹

If the return model were thought to be a novelty, it could only be because it was overlooked for many centuries. As Coffey shows, the conception of the Holy Spirit as the mutual love of the Father and the Son is found in Augustine’s thought and again in Thomas Aquinas’s early theology. ³² In short, the return model of the Trinity has long been present in both eastern and western theology, but its presence became obscured and the memory of its original connection with Spirit Christology in the writings of the Eastern Fathers was lost.

As Logos Christology finds its inspiration in the Gospel of John, Spirit Christology looks especially to the Synoptic Gospels in their bearing on the Holy Spirit and the divine Sonship of Jesus of Nazareth. In considering a range of scriptural passages, Coffey focuses especially on the theology of the anointing of Jesus as recorded in Luke 1: 26–38. His overall conclusion is that, in seminal form, the New Testament contains the thesis that ‘the Father anointed the man Jesus with the Holy Spirit in an act which at the same time created him, sanctified him and united him in person to the divine Son.’ ³³ This affirmation, he argues, excludes any possible element of adoptionism, for ‘the humanity of Jesus is declared not to have existed prior to the anointing.’ ³⁴ In other words, the anointing of Jesus with the Holy Spirit is held to be identical with the incarnation of the Son of God.

What emerges in this way yields an ascending Christology in the New Testament to match the descending Christology of John’s Gospel. The ascending approach, with its focus on the anointing of Jesus by the Holy Spirit, became a significant theme in the writings of the Eastern Fathers. This line of development in Spirit Christology culminated, as Coffey shows, in the theology of Alexandria in the post-Athanasian era. ³⁵ By this time, in his summation, the anointing of Jesus with the Holy Spirit had been generalized into a theology of the Incarnation. But while Cyril approached the Incarnation from both sides—in effect, the viewpoints of descending and ascending Christology—he did not resolve their relationship fully. What was missing from Cyril’s theology was ‘the insight that for Jesus the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Sonship, i.e. the Spirit who unites the sacred humanity to the person of the divine Son.’ ³⁶ Moreover, the affirmation of Logos Christology had become dominant by this time and the declaration at Chalcedon sealed its place.

One factor in the eclipse of the role of the Holy Spirit in the Incarnation and the subsequent turn away from ascending Christology was the concern that a focus on the elevation of the humanity of Jesus might lead to adoptionism (the early third-century view that Jesus was adopted as Son of God in his baptism). A determined emphasis on the Logos—as in descending Christology—would clearly exclude that, albeit with an unrecognized tendency towards devaluing Christ’s humanity. A second and perhaps more important factor was the considerable resonance between the Church Fathers’ interpretation of the becoming flesh of the Johannine Logos and the rich concept of logos in Hellenistic culture and philosophy. In this context Logos Christology became the received account in conciliar decrees and Christian teaching. The complementary tradition of Spirit Christology, as sourced especially from the Synoptic Gospels, fell into neglect.

Spirit Christology and the Salvation of the World

Coffey’s theology, as indicated, rests on close attention to scriptural and patristic sources and the historical circumstances in which Christian belief developed in the early centuries and subsequently in Church teaching. With reference to Christology, there are two points to note. In the first place, he affirms the essential tenets of Logos Christology and the complex hermeneutic development that led to its formulation. On the other hand, he shows that its dominance has resulted in an incompleteness and imbalance in Trinitarian and Christological theology as reflected notably in the fragmented character of the traditional theology of grace. In redressing this, Coffey looks to an enlarged theology based on a comprehensive consideration of New Testament and patristic sources as opened up by exegetes and historians of early Christian thought in the past century. ³⁷ Again, his theology gives serious attention to theological traditions of Eastern Orthodoxy, to Scholastic theology, especially the thought of Thomas Aquinas, to doctrinal issues associated with the Reformation, and the challenges set by Kantian and modern philosophy generally.

Among contemporary sources Coffey’s theology has been shaped especially by the theology of Karl Rahner. ³⁸ Rahner’s conception of revelation as the self-communication of God in the world, most fully in the Incarnation, but also in grace and the beatific vision, is especially significant. ³⁹ This in turn presupposes the recognition that in the spiritual dimension of human existence there is an openness to God, a capacity for transcendence in virtue of which human beings can be taken into God’s being by his divine power. Rahner calls this the supernatural existential. He conceives it as a fundamental aspect of our existence rather than an element of human essence. Specifically, it is an orientation conferred gratuitously by God prior to all human freedom as a consequence of his universal salvific will. ⁴⁰ This openness to, or movement towards, God is realized in a unique and unsurpassable manner in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. In human beings generally it can be realized in a secondary way in the gift of grace and the beatific vision.

In endorsing this theme, Coffey interprets it in the context of his own account of the complementary relationship of ascending and descending Christology and his theology of grace. Thus, he observes that the transcendence Rahner attributes to human existence is fundamentally a human reality, no matter how exalted by grace it might be in its realization. Transcendence of this kind lies within human understanding. Such openness to the divine, however, ‘falls short of the transcendence of God that Jesus possessed by virtue of the incarnation, for this transcendence is not a human reality at all but is strictly proper to God.’ ⁴¹ In a word, divine transcendence lies entirely beyond the human order. Ascending Christology can lead to the fully graced human nature of Jesus, but not to the transcendence of the Incarnation itself. For this, what is needed is a descending Christology as formulated at the Council of Chalcedon in speaking of the ‘divine nature’ of Jesus Christ. But each Christology relates to, and calls for, the other. The ascending approach arises in reflection on the experience of Jesus as witnessed in the Gospels, which becomes in turn the necessary ground on which descending Christology arrives at the affirmation of the incarnation.

In recent work, Coffey has sought to offer a precise account of the transcendence of which Rahner speaks in its conjunction with the divine transcendence of the incarnation. ⁴² Drawing on Aquinas and the 20th-century theologian Maurice de la Taille, he identifies it with the ‘created’ grace of union by which the sacred humanity is elevated to divine Sonship. This, as we have seen, comes about through the bestowal by the Father of the Holy Spirit on Jesus in the first moment of his existence. In philosophical terms, this created grace is the last disposition and first effect of the uncreated grace of union, ‘which is the divine Word himself in his full untrammelled transcendence.’ ⁴³ The created grace of union, uniquely proper to Jesus, expresses the ultimate limit of an ascending Christology. This, he concludes, is that to which exegetes rightly refer ‘when they speak of the divine Sonship of Jesus in the Gospels as a characteristic—the principal one—of his graced humanity.’ ⁴⁴

Another well-known Rahnerian notion is the Trinitarian thesis of the ‘axiomatic unity of the “economic” and “immanent” Trinity.’ Coffey accepts the axiom as reflecting ‘the necessary consistency of God in his inner being and his saving intervention in the world.’ ⁴⁵ But he reformulated it subsequently, as Declan O’Byrne explains, as a model of theological inquiry in three stages: (a) the study of the biblical witness to God as revealed in the mission of Jesus Christ and the sending of God’s Spirit into the world; (b) reflection on this witness yields an account of the ‘immanent’ Trinity since each of these events constitutes a prolongation of inner relations in God’s transcendent being; and (c) the all-important return to the ‘economic’ Trinity as the focus of God’s self-communication in the world. ⁴⁶

Rahner’s theology also provides a starting point for other aspects of Coffey’s theology, including his Christian anthropology, the theology of the death and resurrection of Jesus and of human death generally, and reflections on the presence of the Holy Spirit in the world as a whole. These are large topics, and I will attempt no more than to provide a brief account of the central elements. The core of the anthropology, as noted, is ‘the basic Christian concept of the human as finite transcendence grounded in, and ordered to, the infinite transcendence of God.’ ⁴⁷ For human beings, death is understood as the point that ‘crowns their personal history, and subsumes it in a single act which expresses and affirms the whole meaning and value of their life.’ ⁴⁸ It is the point at which the course of a person’s life assumes its definitive and transcendental form as a final option for or against self-fulfilment in God. Ultimately this option is the expression of the person’s response to the twofold commandment of Jesus, love of God and love of neighbour. But Rahner shows that the two commandments are linked intrinsically by the will of Jesus so that they constitute in essence a single commandment in which, in his words, the ‘explicit love of neighbour is the primary act of the love of God.’ ⁴⁹

Applying this understanding to the death of Jesus, Coffey proposes that ‘even though the divine Sonship was bestowed on Jesus at the beginning of his life, it needed his history and his death for him to realize fully in his humanity the reality of the Son of God.’ ⁵⁰ The grace of the Incarnation is thus profoundly historical in character—a consideration that emerges specifically in ascending Christology with its attention to the humanity of Christ as Son of God. In other words, the Incarnation unfolds in a history that follows the pattern of human life from birth to death. In conjunction with this, the resurrection of Jesus can be understood as ‘the full coming into being in the world, and therefore the full saving presence, of the Son of God, which took place precisely in the humanity, and therefore through the death, of Jesus of Nazareth.’ ⁵¹ In these terms, Coffey emphasizes the fundamental status of the Incarnation as the ground on which the resurrection comes to constitute the historical realization of the saving mystery.

In the full realization of his humanity in death, Christ was constituted as mediator between God and human beings with authority to send the Holy Spirit upon the Church and the world. In this way the death of Jesus is the ultimate expression of his love of God manifested in the love of neighbour. Drawing on abundant witness in the New Testament, Coffey concludes that ‘With Jesus, as with ordinary people, the primary act of his love of God (the Father) was his love of the neighbour, and the supreme act of his love of God, his death, was thereby also his supreme act of love of neighbour.’ ⁵² In his unique case, this supreme love of neighbour consisted in the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to the nascent Church and potentially all humankind.

In place of the once common theory of the sacrificial death of Jesus as vicarious satisfaction due to God for sin, Coffey interprets the sacrifice as an act of love directed to the Father and—as related to sin—an act of love directed to the neighbour for whose sins alone it was a sacrifice. ⁵³ This theology of the death of Jesus as an act of love can be linked with the return model of the Trinity. As Coffey explains, the sending of the Holy Spirit by Christ, taken as the primary act of Christ’s love of the Father, corresponds ‘to the bestowal of the Holy Spirit as love by the Son on the Father in the Trinity itself.’ ⁵⁴ Thus its purpose is to bring about the community of the Church, indeed, to draw all human beings into becoming sons and daughters with and through him, loving the Father with a love of which the primary act will be their love for each other in the medium of the same Holy Spirit.

Finally, there are related Trinitarian implications in Coffey’s endorsement of Rahner’s late conception of the ‘Spirit of Christ as entelechy.’ ⁵⁵ ‘Entelechy’ here has the sense of inner ‘directive principle,’ specifically the idea of the Spirit of Christ as sent by the Father to guide the world throughout salvation history. This is the Spirit of creation and revelation who in time effected the incarnation of Christ, inspired his life and mission to its completion, and thereafter moves creation towards Christ in its grace-filled return to God. Within this universal salvific framework, the Spirit of Christ as entelechy, sent by the Father, embraces the Pentecostal Spirit sent by Christ upon the Church.

Coffey goes beyond Rahner’s original insight in showing how this encompassing idea finds support in biblical witness, especially 1 Peter 1: 10–12. ⁵⁶ Furthermore, he shows how it fits within Trinitarian theology. For if the Spirit is to be the Spirit of Christ as entelechy, it is must be that the Father bestows the Spirit on the Son within the Trinity itself. Rahner could not satisfy this condition because his theology acknowledged only the processional model in which the Spirit proceeds from Father and Son as one principle. But that the Father bestows the Spirit on the Son is a central component of the return model. On this basis Coffey can argue that, in terms that embrace all creation, ‘it makes sense to say, as Rahner does, that the incarnate Son is precisely the immanent end of the Holy Spirit in the economy.’ ⁵⁷ For Coffey indeed, the idea of ‘the Spirit of Christ as Entelechy’ became the foundational thesis (ordo doctrinae) of his theology of the Trinity, Christology and grace. ⁵⁸

Death and Resurrection: A Question of Orthodoxy

Following his study of grace, Coffey returned to the theology of death and resurrection in a discussion of Edward Schillebeeckx’s views on the resurrection of Jesus in a recent book. ⁵⁹ The question was whether the exegetical data to which Schillebeeckx appealed and the theological interpretation he subsequently offered could be considered orthodox in the Catholic tradition.

Drawing on exegetes, Schillebeeckx allocated the New Testament accounts of the appearances of Jesus after his death to the familiar genre of ‘conversion stories’ in Jewish culture. One who was blind to the God of Israel comes to see the truth, does penance, and lives a changed life. On this pattern, the apostles had abandoned Jesus before his death, but subsequently, in an experience of forgiveness, came to see that he was truly the Christ, the living Lord. Commenting on the Gospel stories of the empty tomb, he again drew on exegetical authority in interpreting them as expressions of an already existing faith, not intended as historical narratives. Their import was that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the risen Christ, to be looked for among the living, not the dead. ⁶⁰

In theological terms, Schillebeeckx interpreted the resurrection as an event of grace in which God raised Jesus to life in the complete fullness of his humanity. This consists of a transformed mode of personal–corporeal existence, not the restoration of the corpse left behind, but a new creation in the definitive realization of the embodied life Jesus lived on earth. That Schillebeeckx considered this an objective event is especially clear in his insistence that the resurrection of Jesus logically and ontologically precedes any faith-motivated experience of the disciples. ⁶¹ Thus, the fulfilment of revelation and grace in Jesus became in turn a revelation and grace for others in the sending of the Spirit.

A theology of the resurrection on these lines fits readily with Coffey’s own theology of grace. Indeed, he offered his discussion as both complementing and corroborating Schillebeeckx’s interpretation. ⁶² The exegetical findings, which he endorses, are made to rest fundamentally with the relevant scholarly community. The magisterium’s role as authentic interpreter of Scripture relates rather to matters of faith in theological interpretation. On this basis Coffey concludes that Schillebeeckx’s theology of the resurrection, affirming that the whole humanity of Jesus was raised to new life by God’s power, conforms to orthodox Catholic teaching

Without changing his views significantly, Schillebeeckx sought to clarify them in later writings. ⁶³ Others too, exegetes and theologians, discussed the question of bodily resurrection in related but different ways in these years. A range of perspectives on the topic can be found in an insightful article by Bernard Prusak. ⁶⁴ Thus, Karl Rahner also proposed that the empty tomb be judged ‘as an expression of the conviction which had already spread for other reasons—the conviction that Jesus was alive.’ ⁶⁵ Again, he concluded that the appearance stories ‘be explained as secondary literary and dramatic embellishments of the original experience that “Jesus is alive,” rather than as descriptions of the experience itself in its original nature.’ ⁶⁶ Joseph Ratzinger stressed especially the indivisibility and unity of being human. In this context he concluded: ‘The real heart of faith in the resurrection does not consist at all in the idea of the restoration of the body, to which we have reduced it in our thinking; such is the case even though this is the pictorial image used throughout the Bible’; rather, resurrection means that a self ‘which now appears in a body that can be conceived in chemico-physical terms, can again appear definitively in the guise of a trans-physical reality.’ ⁶⁷

Prusak proposes overall that ‘a growing consensus understands bodily resurrection to mean that the personal identity established in an embodied history is raised up into a transphysical reality.’ ⁶⁸ Subsequently he speaks of a consensus across a spectrum of theologians that ‘Resurrection is not the raising up of a body but the raising up of a whole person into eternal life.’ ⁶⁹ Taking account of developments in contemporary physics, he also notes that the authors under consideration ‘all acknowledge the need for a new way of understanding matter and bodiliness.’ ⁷⁰

Coffey did not contribute further to the debate in this period other than in an article on Christian anthropology. ⁷¹ Here he endorsed Greshake’s concept of ‘resurrection in death’ in conjunction, first, with Rahner’s account of the unity of spirit and matter, then with Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of matter evolving into spirit in such a way as to preserve the identity of the individual through death. Specifically Coffey argued that resurrection takes place in death itself, paradigmatically in the resurrection of Jesus, then, through his saving death, in the case of all who die in grace (as marked by love of neighbour). ⁷² With reference to Prusak’s survey of this period, Coffey has indicated that he sees his theology of the resurrection of Jesus as largely consonant with the views attributed there to Rahner, Ratzinger and Schillebeeckx. ⁷³ Clearly, within the consensus to which Prusak refers, these issues are subject to continuing debate among exegetes and theologians.

Coffey’s reflection on Schillebeeckx’s theology carries an echo of Thomas Hayden’s appeal early in the 20th century to the distinction between substance and literary garb in interpreting biblical writings. A well-founded theological interpretation, he points out, is not a simple alternative to an earlier way of expressing a belief. Rather, it is ‘a depthing of [the earlier understanding], in which substance is more clearly perceived because distinguished from formulation, and content better grasped because distinguished from framework.’ ⁷⁴ In these terms, one could say that the development of a clearer expression of the substance of a belief does not threaten faith but opens it to greater depth.

Coffey’s article on the resurrection aroused criticism in time among a number of Sydney clergy. Their judgement was that his account undermined the traditional belief that the physical remains of Jesus were raised in his resurrection. A group of petitioners appealed to the Holy See and the article, together with the book on grace, was referred to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith presided over by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Edward Clancy, Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney, received a document from the Congregation in October 1986 containing observations on which Coffey’s comment was sought. ⁷⁵ This was just a week before Pope John Paul II was due to arrive in Sydney, and stories of heretical dissent filled the media. ⁷⁶

The sense of crisis died down soon enough, but for Coffey, the Roman inquisition dragged on for another two years. During this time he submitted his responses to the Congregation and engaged in correspondence with Professor Vanhoye SJ, an eminent Scripture scholar at the Gregorian University, who had been appointed to assist in the case. Finally, Cardinal Clancy advised him that the Congregation would not be taking the charges any further. Soon afterwards, a statement signed by the Cardinal appeared in the Sydney Catholic Weekly, 28 September 1988, advising that he was satisfied Dr Coffey’s theology conformed to Catholic orthodoxy. Apart from the original list of observations on his work, no documentary evidence was forthcoming from beginning to end. Unlike his predecessor Thomas Hayden, David Coffey emerged undeterred by the long process of magisterial scrutiny. In the following decades his theological research on the central doctrines of Christianity has flourished with the publication of several books, Deus Trinitas in particular, and many articles. ⁷⁷

Coffey’s theology is daring in many respects yet fundamentally eirenic and constructive, for, while he argues for definite standpoints, he looks to find common ground and a synthesis where possible among different approaches. This is particularly clear, as I have sought to indicate, in the enhanced understanding that comes when the descending theology of Logos Christology is informed by its complement in the ascending theology of Spirit Christology. For another example—across time in this case—he gives due credit to the significance of scholastic thought in the history of theology while going beyond it to engage with the different challenges (and opportunities) that confront theology in the modern world. More generally, Coffey’s Spirit Christology supports an illuminating synthesis of all the main areas of systematic theology. Taking the Christology as starting point there follows ‘a theology of the Trinity, a pneumatology, an ecclesiology, a theology of grace, an eschatology, and even a theology of the world religions.’ ⁷⁸ On these lines, his theology reaches out to find common ground with other traditions, as in his interest in the Eastern Orthodox theology of the Trinity.

The ecumenical implications of Coffey’s theology are particularly evident in Steven Studebaker’s recent book on the Trinitarian vision of Jonathan Edwards and David Coffey. ⁷⁹ Studebaker is an American Evangelical theologian engaged in a comparative study of the thought of a contemporary Australian theologian with the leading American Calvinist philosopher-theologian in the 18th century. The hitherto unsuspected link between them is a common interest in Augustine’s mutual love model of the Trinity. This led to the discovery of a convergence in their theology. In reading Edwards in the light of Coffey, Studebaker goes on to argue for a reshaping of the traditional evangelical understanding of grace and redemption to bring it into closer association with Catholic teaching. He also draws particular attention to a theology of religions in Coffey’s thought, encompassing the salvation of unbelievers through the mediating presence of the Holy Spirit in the world.

The salvation of the unbeliever was, in fact, the topic of David Coffey’s first published theological paper in 1964. ⁸⁰ It remains a question of significant importance for him as an aspect of his far-reaching theology of the Holy Spirit. For over four decades the great project at the centre of his research has been Spirit Christology and the Trinity in their bearing on creation as a whole. His contribution to systematic theology, building especially on Karl Rahner’s investigations, constitutes a major reshaping of theology within the Catholic tradition, a transformation that reaches out to other religious traditions and the world.