The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology

The Incarnate Lord by Thomas Joseph White OP

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Strap in. This may be a long, bumpy ride.

By way of background, I picked up this book after my Aquinas group moved into the Summa Theologica, Part III, which concerns the Incarnation. Through St. Thomas Aquinas's exposition of the Incarnation, I've developed a deeper appreciation for the nuance and beauty of the Incarnation, but, not surprisingly, various questions continue to perplex me.

This is a lengthy, finely analyzed work that discusses Thomistic Christology in light of contemporary and historical issues. The writing is generally accessible, but the concepts and argument can be dense. I am not sure that I could have gotten as much out of the book as I did without the Thomistic background (and the help of other members of my group in working my way through some parts of the book.)

Following the structure of the book, and highlighting the points that caught my attention. I don't want to imply that my summary gets anywhere close to discussing the nuance and subtlety of White's analysis. I'm just giving an overview for myself when I want to dive back into particular topics.

INTRODUCTION: Biblical Ontology.

The Bible will not permit Christians to walk away from the Incarnation. As White says the New Testament is “concerned above all and before all with the ontological identity of Christ.” (p. 7.) Thus, to study the New Testament “realistically at all is to study the being and person of Christ.” (p. 8.) The New Testament, of course, affirms that Christ is both man and God. “The word became flesh and dwelt among us.” (Jn 1:1, 3, 14.) The man Jesus had a pre-existent identity that was anticipated in the Old Testament. (p. 11.) Christ is identified as the Lord and can perform actions reserved to God alone, such as forgiving sin. (p. 15.) The communication of idioms begins in the New Testament whereby events that pertain to the man Jesus are ascribed to God, e.g., “they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” (p. 19;1 Cor. 2:7-8, See also Phil. 2:6-11.)

The issue of the relationship between Jesus as man and Jesus as God is baked into the cake.

PROLEGOMENON: Thomistic Christology

Chalcedonianism affirms that Christ is one person, the Son of God, who subsists in two natures as God and man. (p.32.) Naturally, this is a difficult position that easily leads to contradictions, which have been exploited by various theologians, such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Immanuel Kant, and Karl Barth, to question the Chalcedonian formula. (p. 32.) White notes the claim that we live in a post-metaphysical world and asks if we are required to rethink the Incarnation in the light of Immanuel Kant. (p. 34.) White discusses Schleiermacher as the source of a methodology in modern German Christology that evolved within liberal Protestantism, including von Harnack. (p. 35.) Schleiermacher reinterpreted Chalcedonian metaphysics in terms of the “original experience of God in Christianity as first instantiated in the life of Jesus (in his God-consciousness) and as transmitted to his disciples, who in turn codified this experience in doctrinal terms.” (p. 37.) The proper methodology is to get behind the doctrine and the transmission to the “pre-doctrinal primitive truth.” (p. 37.)

This seems to involve a fair amount of mind-reading. White points out that for Schleiermacher, the locus of the divine-human connection is no longer found in the nature or the person, i.e., ontologically existing things, but in “the world of human consciousness” of Christ. (p. 42.) Schleiermacher “transfers the locus of divine-human unity from the realm of the substantial to that of the accidental.” (p. 43.)

White compares and contrasts Karl Barth to Schleiermacher. In Barth, particularly through the interpretation of his disciples, White argues that doctrine is eschewed in favor of the proposition that we understand God only through the life of Christ. (p. 48.) hence, the cross reveals that the Son is eternally obedient to the Father and that God in his very deity obeys and suffers. (p. 48.) The “very deity of God can be subject to death and the regaining of eternal life. (p. 48-49.) White observes that while Barth rejects the liberal Protestant conception of our human religious consciousness as the locus of the divine human encounter, “yet he also seeks to place the site of the hypostatic union in an odd location: the transcendent identify of God is revealed in a voluntary act of the human Christ (the free and willing submission of Christ to God.”) (p. 48; See also p. 369 (“Rather as we have seen with Barth, the personal Sonship of Christ is revealed through his human obedience.”).)

We cannot help but think that we are a long way from Chalcedon.

As a Thomist, White disputes this approach. The Incarnation was a concrete reality, which we cannot access as a historical matter. We access it through grace which means through doctrine. Historical study will not determine doctrine, but it can clarify what is reasonable to believe concerning the historical mode that the doctrine was revealed. (p. 58.) For White, the recovery of a metaphysics of being is an integral part of a renewed Chalcedonian Christology. (p. 62.) White notes the different modes of existence “in act.” In one, the existence is ontological, e.g., a person exists in act from embryo to death. In another mode – secondary act – a thing exists by an operation, such as conscious knowledge. (p. 63.) The Incarnation represents the former; our union with God takes place in the second mode, though human operations, by the working of grace we come to know and love God. (p. 63.) The Incarnation is therefore not accidental; it takes place substantially in the subsistent person of the Word and not in the accidental operation of the man Jesus. (p. 64.)

This distinguishes Aquinas from Barth and Schleiermacher by placing the Incarnation in the ontological and not the operational. White also notes that the operations of the man Jesus are only natural analogies that of God (p. 66.).) Thus, “the goodness of Christ as God is not identical with his goodness as man. “ (p. 66.) “All of this suggests that if human beings can believe in the incarnation (by grace), then they are also capable of natural analogical thinking about the transcendent God,” which means that Christians make implicit use of natural theology. (p. 66.)

PART ONE: THE MYSTERY OF THE INCARNATION

1. The Ontology Of The Hypostatic Union.

The poles this chapter run between Nestorianism and Chalcedonianism.

Aquinas posits a unique “Grace of Union” that united the human nature of Christ with the person of the logos. In contrast, in its pure form, Nestorianism posits two persons in Christ – a human and divine person coordinated by grace. (p. 77, 79.) Nestorianism may also include forms where the union of natures is not substantial, but accidental, where Christ is “two subsistent entities joined or united by a kind of operational union, a moral synergy.” (p. 80.)

White finds that there is a Nestorian “tendency” in modern theology, particularly that of Karl Rahner. (p. 76.) White argues that Rahner locates the ontological unity of God and man in the same place where Nestorianism typically locates it: “uniquely in the spiritual operations of the man Jesus, particularly as they are conformed by divine indwelling to the mystery of God in himself.” (p. 76.) The key is therefore the difference between the “grace of union” unique to Christ and the grace that unites us to Christ.

I will confess that when I read Aquinas's discussion of the “grace of union,” I blew past its significance. The Grace of Union is the unique grace that joined Christ's human nature to the person of the Logos in the hypostatic union. The Grace of Union is unique to the incarnation; it is not a habitual grace of the kind that pertains to all saints who persevere in sanctification. Habitual grace is created; the Grace of Union is uncreated and infinite because the human nature is united immediately to the infinite Logos. (p. 87.) The difference between our union and the hypostatic union are differences of kind and degree. (p. 89.)

White provides a deep critique of Karl Rahner's Christology. What I think it boils down to is that modern theology has a tendency to deny the uniqueness of the Incarnation. (p. 92.) Thus, Christ's human nature is coordinated to the Logos almost voluntarily, accidentally, and by way of the same habitual graces that coordinate saints with God. (p. 92.) While this creates a greater space for Christ and reduces the instrumentalization of Christ as man, it does make one wonder what makes Jesus unique? (p. 92.) Aquinas starts from the grace of union; Rahner finds the human nature united to God in the beatific vision and the act of self-surrender, which made Christ the most perfect historical expression of God among us. (p. 100.)

White explores other modern theologians who locate the Incarnation in accidental operations of self-surrender or understanding.

White then discusses Aquinas's ontological metaphysics. The hypostatic union begins in the person of the Logos and from the Logos the habitual grace flowed into the intellect and will of Christ. White then discusses the ideas of subsistent existence. He also dispenses with the idea that moral autonomy is inconsistent with the human nature being an instrument of the Logos. (p. 120.)

I thought White made a good point about the difference between ontology and operation when he points out that Jesus did not stop being the hypostatic person when was, e.g., sleeping. (p. 122.)

2. THE HUMAN NATURE AND THE GRACE OF CHRIST.

This chapter takes the reader into natura pura and the question of whether the desire for God is purely grace or exists naturally in the human soul. (p. 131.) This is a difficult chapter. White explains that a key take-away from the chapter is that it demonstrates a “profound correspondence” between philosophical concepts about human nature and theological concepts about Christ. (p. 171.) I think that White affirms via Aquinas that there remains in human nature in its wounded state after the Fall, and without grace, a natural appetite or inclination to God as to the highest good, which might still be ascertained through reason. (p. 161-162.) I think that White also affirms “pure nature” in that the alternative is that grace is required to make a complete man and that means that either human nature was created evil or that grace is no longer a free gift. (p. 167.) According to White, it follows that since Christ is the perfection of humanity is morally perfect, i.e., free from sin, then evil is not inherent to human nature. (p. 167.)


3. THE LIKENESS OF THE HUMAN AND DIVINE NATURES

This chapter deals with the issue of understanding how we are even able to talk about the divine nature as being related or relative to the human nature. This seems like a reasonable concern inasmuch as the divine nature would seem to be radically alien considered against created nature. The divine does not exist as part of the “furniture” of reality and is not contained in a genus.

White's explanation is that the divine nature cannot be “radically” alien because creation was created by God. This permits consideration of analogous ways of thinking about divine attributes.

4.WHY CHRISTOLOGY PRESUPPOSES NATURAL THEOLOGY

White argues that (a) the affirmation of supernatural revelation (given in grace) presupposes the existence of knowledge in the human persons that is not derived from revelation (so-called natural knowledge) and (b) there is a correlation between the workings of the human mind and the grace of revelation unless the human mind is a naturally capable under grace of recognizing such revelation a grace, i.e., outside the ordinary spectrum of truths obtained by human reasoning, and (c) recognizing revelation includes an innate capacity to reason, i.e., that there is a God and God communicates to humans, etc.
5.THE NECESSITY OF THE BEATIFIC VISION IN THE EARTHLY CHRIST.

One of the more surprising features I found in reading Aquinas was that the Angelic Doctor posited that Christ at all times in His life, even in the womb, had perfect knowledge – infused and beatific – about who He was and all information that He might need for His earthly mission.

White defends the Thomistic position against contemporary criticism on the ground that it is the beatific vision that serves to guarantee in a non-accidental way that Christ would carry out His mission.

The contemporary criticism of the Thomistic position has included that it involves a latent Monophysitism. This criticism seems a natural conundrum for the Chalcedonian position, namely, at any point where the divine and the human overlap, it would seem that the divine would crowd out the created human nature. Aquinas dealt with this by arguing that the human nature did not have access to the totality of the divine knowledge.

But that move leaves the opening for Thomas Weinandy to argue that this position is Nestorian since it seems to separate Christ into two persons. (p. 243.) In order to fend off this charge, White emphasizes the “nature/mode” distinction, whereby in the Incarnation the Logos has two modes of existence, human and divine. We know this to be the case since Christ's two wills are attested to in the Agony in the Garden. However, the Logos is singular and “the singularity and unity of the person of Christ can only be sufficiently manifested in his human actions if his divine and human wills cooperate concretely in all of his personal actions.” (p. 254.) White locates the concrete basis of this cooperation in the Beatific Vision by which the man Jesus has always known that He is the Son and what that Sonship entails. Infused knowledge is insufficient: “In the absence of the vision, by contrast, the infused knowledge of Christ would still be the medium by which the man Jesus would be conscious of his own divine will, but it would no longer participate in any evidential certitude of that will.” (p. 260.) The human and divine wills might “operate on parallel tracks” but they would not be part of a single person, which raises the specter of Nestorianism. (p. 260-261.)

PART TWO: THE MYSTERY OF THE REDEMPTION

1. OBEDIENCE.

This section begins an examination of more substantive topics. White's method is to discuss some contemporary thinker whose account seems to contradict that of Aquinas. White seems to fairly set forth the objection but counters the objection with Thomistic reasoning.