Abstract
Oliver Crisp and Fred Sanders (eds), Christology Ancient and Modern: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics, Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 2013; 224 pp.: 9780310514961, £14.99/$22.99 (pbk)
The first volume in a series of ‘explorations in constructive dogmatics’, Christology Ancient and Modern has come from the first annual Los Angeles Theology Conference (January 2013). Eleven contributors discuss not only the appropriate sources, criteria and methods of Christology but also, and even more, doctrinal questions – above all, issues thrown up by the union of divinity and humanity in Christ (e.g. his possessing both a human and a divine will). Some of the contributors are international figures in theology (e.g. George Hunsinger, Katherine Sonderegger and Alan Torrance). Nine of the contributors teach for universities or seminaries in the USA.
Sonderegger’s chapter is a moving meditation on Christ as the Way, the Truth and the Life. Peter Leithart shows how systematic theology could profitably retrieve features of the sanctuary Christology found in John’s Gospel. I would question the historical accuracy of a statement made by the editors: ‘The Nestorians believed that Christ comprises two numerically distinct persons in one body’ (p. 16). I also wonder about Crisp seeming to disallow the view that the divine Persons are ‘persons of a different sort’ (p. 35). To be sure, everything depends here on how one understands ‘sort’. Yet I think that the relational quality of personhood in God entails acknowledging that the three Persons, being ordered to one another in an asymmetrical way, are Persons in different ways.
The book saved its best wine for the end, Torrance’s plea to reclaim the continuing priesthood of Christ. Unlike Garry Wills in his recent Why Priests? A Failed Tradition (New York: Viking, 2013), Torrance does not agree that we would know Christ better by demolishing the letter to the Hebrews. He backs up his spirited exposition of the biblical and theological reasons for recognizing Christ’s priestly work by citing his own experience. When his wife fell sick and died of cancer, Torrance found the continuing priesthood of Christ to be more relevant than he could ever hope to articulate. As he held his dying wife in his arms, he knew ‘the risen, ascended Priest’ to be ‘present by the Spirit interceding on our behalf’. This ‘meant that we could repose in his presence and know that communion’ which is the beginning and the end of everything (p. 203).
It was gratifying to find the contributors here and there citing Sarah Coakley, Eleonore Stump and other contributors to a volume which I co-edited a decade ago, Incarnation: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the Son of God (2002). Like those who collaborated to produce the earlier volume, the group that Crisp and Sanders brought together also shared the conviction that acceptance of the biblical and traditional witness (coming above all from the Council of Chalcedon) supplies more than adequate material and questions to fuel vigorous theological exploration. Christology exemplifies splendidly the vitality of ‘faith seeking understanding’.