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Reviewed by:
  • Christ the Key
  • Christopher Holmes
Kathryn Tanner . Christ the Key. Current Issues in Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xii + 309. Paper, £16.99. ISBN 978-0-5217-3277-2.

Kathryn Tanner writes seriously theological, informed, and dense books on Christian doctrine. Christ the Key is no exception. Indeed, it is a creative and ecumenically minded re-inhabitation of the doctrines of human nature, grace, Trinity, and Holy Spirit. In keeping with the title, her thesis is that Christ is the key to the whole of Christian doctrine. What makes Tanner’s contribution matchless in contemporary North American theology is her willingness to revisit classical christological themes with a view to how those themes recast traditional Catholic/Protestant as well as East/West divides. Championing a non-competitive account of both concerns, she offers a truly evangelical and catholic account of Christ that has deep roots in the Fathers.

Her account of human nature (chapter 1) is a case in point. Acknowledging the Creator/creature distinction, she argues that the creation, in particular human nature as created in God’s image, is not self-contained. It is proper to creatureliness that humans participate in the image of God. God’s power manifest in Christ gives human beings the power to be “human versions of the divine image itself” (40). The human being is thus utterly dependent on her environment; she is implicated in it, for she is made for grace. However, human beings, unlike Christ, are not—because of sin—plastic to their environment or to their true nature. Accordingly, grace does not simply add to what is present. Grace, rather, remakes humans in accord with the one who is not only the pattern of the image of God but also the one who causes human beings to exhibit in what they do in their true nature.

When it comes to grace (chapters 2 and 3), Tanner understands nature to be the primary reference point. To be sure, this is a decidedly “Catholic” move. And yet “grace completes nature not by building on what nature is positively but by remedying what it lacks” (61). Advancing her concerns from chapter 1, she proposes that human nature is not a container of divinity. Because of sin, God’s power and grace is inaccessible to us. Thus the “hypostatic union ... is the precondition for humanity’s attachment in will and [End Page 141] deed to the divine in Christ” (71). Tanner uses the language of justification and sanctification to draw out the character of this attachment as effected in the hypostatic union. Attachment to Christ is justification; sanctification is the benefit of that attachment. Furthermore, in reconsidering the often-contested nature–grace relationship, Tanner argues for “a grace-centred account of the creature” (116). That is, she starts with “God’s gracious intent to give us God’s own life as our own end” (116). Desire for God is of God; nature does not supply that desire. Although grace is alien to us, it does not alter our nature, but rather makes us receptive to it.

Tanner’s account of Trinitarian life sponsors a rich account of the unity of the immanent and economic Trinity in a way that does not erase the priority of the former. The persons of the Trinity are among us in such a way that we are enabled to image them, which is the chief effect of the incarnation. Human life is now life in Christ. Human life is made over into the form of the Word to the end that the Word’s life might recur in ours. In like manner, the Son and Spirit go forth from the Father only to “return and re-ascend with us” (161). In the economy of grace, human nature is simply caught up into the Trinitarian relations, immanently conceived, and allowed to share in them. Indeed, Tanner argues that it is through the Spirit that we share directly in the Spirit of the Son’s body. The Spirit realizes the form of the Son in us, which is the very mission of the Son—to give us his own Spirit—and so we can speak truthfully of...

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