I would cautiously say that I think this review is roughly right. Rowan is of course right to say infinite and finite are at incommensurate levels even in Christ. So there is no fusion. But just for this reason there can be paradoxical personal coincidence of infinite and finite.
The curious thing about Rowan’s book is that he so admirably exalts Aquinas for following the true Cyrilline trajectory that insists on the entirely divine character of Christ’s being and unity but underplays the communication of idioms that is part and parcel of this view.
Thus I think Jordan is right to indicate that he underplays the resulting paradoxical hypostatic unity that is the God-Manhood.
For me by contrast with Rowan Calvin does not correct Luther’s Christology, but makes the equal but opposite error from a Catholic perspective. The extra Calvinisticum and the reduction of the comm idiomatic to metaphor amounts clearly to near-Nestorianism.
It follows that what renders Rowan’s book quite hard to follow is the endorsement of Aquinas’ single esse Christology on the one hand and the Extra Calvinisticum on the other.This would seem to read the former as if it meant an ‘excess’ over the Incarnation in the infinite Logos.
But that indeed as Jordan indicates reverts to a rivalry or ‘Concursus’ view of the infinite/finite relation. For Aquinas that absolutely nothing is ‘added’ to the eternal Son means from all eternity he is absolutely at one with the humanity of Jesus.
Via a ‘decision’ coterminous with the eternal generation of the Son as such. Just as the decision of God to create is coterminous with this generation for Thomas.
Nothing in either Luther or Calvin is really like this because of their impoverished theological legacy.
Rowan’s inclusion of Bonhoeffer is also to me inconsistent with the more Catholic thrust of the book because B after Grotius insists on God’s standing alongside an entirely ‘independent’ finite world. But this *does* assume a kind of rival equality of that world with the infinite
Whereas the non-rival and asymmetrical view implies no free-standing of the finite and its existence only as analogical elevation and transfiguration by grace.
Radicalised by the Incarnation this means deification and transformation of the cosmos into the body of Christ through personal unity. Not at all a sort of divine Kenosisis towards an independent realm.
Exactly the lack of rivalry between infinite and finite grants the finite no real independent existence. By pretending to this at the Fall, our salvation can only consist in direct divine personification of our fallen finite nature.
Thus as at times Rowan himself strongly insists the union of God and Man is not in nature but in ‘style’ and ‘character’ now seen as the most concretely substantive thing at all. Perhaps Jordan makes hypostasise sound too much like a ‘bare’ thing.
The new thing with Christianity is the merging of solid thing with ethereal personality. The idea that personhood in theology is to do with personality is a mistake is itself a huge mistake.
Nevertheless Rowan, by endorsing Calvin, seems oddly to back away from the link of the ‘one style’ of the God-Man with the communication of natural idioms.
He also strangely seems not to see that the Bonhoeffer dialectical ( not analogical) view of the coincidence of outside the world with inside the world us linked to the Lutheran Monophysite ‘container’ view of the Creation he so explicitly refuses.
One could read all this as Rowan’s attempt to be seriously Anglican. But Calvin and Luther are simply not compatible with the Fathers and Aquinas. All the same later Protestant thinkers often backed off from them in more Catholic ways.
Thus Hooker is very strong on the communication of idioms and much nearer to Aquinas in his Christology than Calvin is.
Important to read alongside Rowan’s book also Aaron Riches’ book on Christology. He makes many similar points historically but then concludes in the 17thC with Berulle and then Chardon’s radical Mariology. Surely they are more authentically in the Byzantine line RW celebrates?
Finally and likely beyond Jordan and even Aquinas I think that just *because* nothing is added to the Logos by the Incarnation that from all eternity God is also the God-Man. It is blasphemous to suppose God might not have ‘decided’ this because he simply ‘is’ this ‘decision’.
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‘Marx, it should be emphasised, was consistently hostile to the idea of equality…human needs…were purely individual in character.’ (Michael Sonenscher) Marx’s utopia of no property was a ‘negative community of use’ outside any value consensus. Marx was a liberal.
Contrast Proudhon who rejected both the negativity of use and property independent of social role and obligation in favour of a distribution of property and an exchange of labour and good based on virtue and as of objective justice. Socialism or ‘anarchy’ not communism!
Sonenscher’s implicitly revisionist history of ideas goes some way to suggesting that communism is Protestant and socialism is Catholic or Anglican (there was a big influence of the religious socialist Buchez via Ludlow in England.)
The fate of the churches today is bound up with the future of high culture and what remains of folk culture. The reverse is equally true: high and folk culture will only survive in the West if Christianity survives. Religion cannot be expressed through commercial trash culture.
Too many bishops seem to think it can be. They suggest meeting people where they are — I suppose in their world of evermore debased pop music, banal quizzing, tattoo and nail parlours, online betting etc. But becoming religious would mean salvation from this world —as in the NT.
There is no viable option now for the CofE but to begin with the few: with those cleaving to high culture (choral trad etc) and to the older patterns of folk culture. The best of Gen Z are attracted to this. From there things can grow again.But a mass culture strategy is a mirage
It is a mistake to think that freedom as mediation means negative mediation as in Hegel, or to read Schelling with this assumption. In Schelling freedom necessarily involves mediation and the other, but a positive mediation. Although von Baader is clearer on all this.
This is complexly bound up with the way Von Baader rightly breaks with the LNC and so lets polar relations be truly paradoxical. By remaining too rationalist (LNC and sufficient reason) Schelling never quite achieves the coherence he implies.
But all the same since the emptiness of the first potency in S immediately implies the determinateness of the second and the the synthesis that is the third, none of this points to any sort of heterodox subordinationist Trinity!
Surely the European scientific-industrial revolution (for they were one) took off because the Christian reforming and eschatological spirit fused with the Hermetic will to spiritual-material creative and theurgic transformation. But this became demonic, bad magic, ironically
because it was captured by the opponents of good magic, of theurgy, the mechanistic disenchanters and ultimately by an atheistic rejection of the original eschatological lure and Baconian desire to exercise a corporeal charity.
Thus in our time what is being played out is the perversion of Christian eschatology and Hermetic alchemical hopes to the point of the threat of total terrestrial destruction.
The hypocrisy of China and Russia’s critique of the liberal democratic West is shown in their total espousal of the very worst of the West: capitalism, bureaucracy, technocracy.
Nevertheless both ‘civilisation states’ view their tussle with the West as ideological, while the West is still (in a compromised way) trying to defend constitutional mixed government, legal due process and the dignity of the person. For all the talk of realism and the multipolar
in actual reality we have a complex civilisational clash between different renderings of modernity and a clash of polar powers that is unlikely to settle into any sort of supposed traditional ‘balance’ — even of conflictual stalemate in the end.
Moses is strange: he has an Egyptian name and he is neither a priest nor a prophet. In fact he is manifestly a magus: magician and shaman. He works with his rod Yahweh’s vastly superior cosmic magic which outplays the Egyptians at their own game.
He also enters into the hidden divine reality wherein is revealed to him not just the basic moral law but equally (the separation of ‘ten commandments’ is not in the text of Exodus) a political and social constitution and rules for ritual and temple reflecting the celestial.
The whole thing is way, way nearer something like freemasonry than it is near the pilgrim fathers. One can suppose it all sounds a bit folksy-American but then wow! The staggeringly sumptuous and proto-baroque details of the temple: all golden knobs and almonds and pomegranates.