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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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.
English philosophy has tended to empiricism, which readily inverts into idealism. German philosophy has tended to idealism which is a kind of empiricism of reason. Scottish and French philosophy, by attending to action, perception and the body, have tended to realism.
Thus Alexander Hamilton and Maine de Biran somewhat converge, as noted by Ravaisson. Some later Scots like Ferrier knew about the French. Much earlier Malebranche is heavily present in Hume. The Auld Alliance in philosophy.
But Ravaisson rightly suggests that the English and often the Scots have misread Bacon: the latter hoped for truth in active engagement with matter ‘which is the contemplation of the works of God’. A contemplative pragmatism which becomes mystical in Hartlib and Comenius.
At his most radical de Lubac identified grace with spirit as such. If one does not do so, then pure nature is reinstated. Yet Balthasar tended to see this identification as a ‘Romantic’ confusion. I don’t think so.
A lot of Balthasar’s misgivings about Schelling and Romanticism were somewhat misplaced: a strong linking of creation and revelation, monotheism as implying a certain monism and even ‘pantheism’ are both loyal to the best Patristic teaching.
What Balthasar failed to take account of was what researchers like Antoine Faivre have now discovered: the grounding of Romanticism in a pre-Romantic Christian esotericism deeply informed by Patristics and seeking to restore the Greek philosophy -Christian revelation link in
Liberalism is not the only form of optimism. There can be an alternative communitarian optimism, or realistic hope. We are now in danger of forgetting that, in terms of a merely ‘realist’ reaction against liberalism. The ideals of Capitalist liberalism were not very ideal anyway.
Realism can be as unbalanced as idealism. Yes, all kinds of nations compete for basic material resources, but nations themselves only exist in part as gathered round ideas. Where these ideas become deluded, material goals, ideologically magnified result in crazy actions as with
Hitler and Putin. This the difference between more just and more unjust regimes continues to matter today and it is not just a matter of reversion to ‘realist’ or ‘normal’ competition between powers. The powers themselves remain in part divided over ideology: Russia and China are
Everywhere in the US, but especially in the South, there’s this prevailing soporific hush: as if nothing was likely to happen and yet something overwhelming might happen at any instant.
The prevailing hush
There’s nothing quite like this, either in Europe or in Latin America, which both feel more alert, sparky and urgent. The slumber at the end of history?
I largely agree with John Harris. Christianity is totally incompatible with nationalism as a central determining value and with overtones of racism. Excess immigration is a problem but must be questioned for the right reasons: especially wage depression and social viability.
Similarly traditional marriage and the family should be encouraged but without any suggestions of intolerance or suppression of different lifestyles and relative lack of support for single people. Tone is often everything.
It should also be noted that some both critical and modifying voices will be speaking at the conference. As said before, the Nat Cons appear to be sharply divided on matters of economic liberalism.