Abstract
This ambitious and spirited book presents Thomist Christology as a universal panacea for a cluster of what its author takes to be debilitating weaknesses in recent Christology (mainly twentieth century, but with occasional glances back to the nineteenth: Hegel, Schleiermacher and theological kenoticists such as Thomasius). White identifies a number of such defects, but perhaps most pervasive, in his diagnosis, and the one to which Thomist Christology offers the most obvious remedy, is Nestorianism. The key chapter is the very first, on the hypostatic union. As White presents Aquinas’s Christology, Nestorianism is indeed Aquinas’s primary target. In the twelfth century, Peter Lombard’s Sentences presented three current Christological views: one according to which the second person of the Trinity ‘assumed a man’; one according to which the second person of the Trinity took on human nature as ‘clothing’; and one according to which the second person of the Trinity came to ‘subsist in human nature’. As Aquinas saw it, the first two are Nestorian and to be rejected. And White finds a subtler form of Nestorianism in another view that Aquinas criticizes: that of his immediate predecessor, Alexander of Hales, that grace is a ‘necessary precondition’ for the hypostatic union (p. 88). White glosses: ‘The human nature of Christ receives grace such that it might operate in conjunction with the Word … [T]he difference between Christ’s union and our own appears merely to be one of degree’ (p. 89). According to Aquinas, contrariwise, Christ’s human nature is related to the divine person rather like a part is related to a whole, and is thus enabled to become a ‘conjoined instrument’ of that person for the purpose of human activity. No ontological or psychological independence for the human nature here!
For White, Rahner is the latter-day Alexander, seeing Jesus as the highest instance of human union with God in self-giving surrender. And White is surely right to think that Rahner’s later Christology has trouble giving account of the metaphysical commitments apparently required by Chalcedon. Subsequent chapters deal with the analogia entis (necessary for the incarnation), Christ’s earthly beatific vision (necessary for his mission), and key theological components of Christ’s mission (obedience, death, resurrection) – in each case with appropriate modern theological views corrected or rejected in the light of a vigorous Thomistic approach.
The overall impression is of a rather scatter-gun tactic. Some of the blows surely strike home – not only against Rahner, but also a searing attack on Barth’s rejection of the analogia entis, for example – even as others go wide of the mark. White fails to appreciate, for example, that kenotic Christology was and is in part an attempt to respond to logical problems raised by the incarnation, or even, apparently, to see the severity of the logical problems that might thereby be solved. And White’s tendency to speak of Thomist Christology and Chalcedonian Christology as though the two are simply synonyms is a little frustrating: there are many ways other than Aquinas’s of spelling out conciliar Christology.