Abstract
Conference papers do not always make a good book, but this is an exception, a rich collection of reflections on Christology whose origin was the July 2018 conference at Pusey House, Oxford, ‘Totus Christus: Knowing and Loving the Son of Man’. Skilfully edited, the range of papers is impressively ecumenical; although the Anglicans dominated, perhaps inevitably, in Oxford they are more often the hosts than the guests at ecumenical scholarly gatherings. What draws the papers together is a common concern for Christian orthodoxy in its widest sense. These are scholars for whom the Trinity and the Incarnation are less a matter for critical speculation than for nourishment and growth. The majority stand in the Chalcedonian tradition but it is good to have a contribution on the Eucharistic anaphoras of the Syrian Church from Polycarpus Augin Aydin – a demonstration, if one were needed, that the family likeness of true orthodoxy is available even beyond the divisions of Chalcedon. There are many gems in this collection, but this reviewer was particularly drawn by Carol Harrison’s meditative exploration of sound and silence as a key to Augustine’s Christ-centred reading of Scripture, and also Paul Dominiak’s exploration of Augustinian sensibility in Hooker’s Christology. A reawakening to the riches of Hooker’s thought is long overdue in Anglicanism, and this is met not only by Dominiak’s contribution but also by David Curry’s supplementary essay on how Chalcedonian orthodoxy provided the formative principles of Anglican sacramental theology. For anyone tempted to dismiss nineteenth-century German scholarship as hopelessly reductionist, Johannes Zachhuber’s paper demonstrates that there is another side to German idealism which might worthily contribute its insights to the theme of Totus Christus.
There were two other papers that stood out for me, because they covered territory that I had not explored before. The first, by Lydia Schumacher, considered how early Franciscan thinkers paved the way for an understanding of Christ as the centre of creation, in a way quite different from that assumed in Aquinas’s Summa and which may have important things to say about how we humans relate to the animal world and the rest of creation. The second was a masterful and beautifully written analysis by Oliver O’Donovan of a little-known text on Christian ethics by Hans Urs von Balthasar. This sets out in nine propositions why Christian ethics should not assume or depend on either natural law or conscience as its basis, but should see ethics as a direct response to Christ’s concrete achievement and call, a call that is finally validated by the resurrection. With a final brilliant summing up by Rowan Williams, this is a heartening articulation of orthodox Christology which takes the reader back to familiar biblical and liturgical texts with a renewed hope and vision.