In the Redeeming Christ by François-Xavier Durrwell (review)

Ave Maria Press, under their Christian Classics label, has made available the long out-of-print classic by the Alsatian biblical scholar and Redemptorist priest, François-Xavier Durrwell. This is a volume which has well deserved a wider reading, and offers much of the best fruits of the biblical and liturgical ressourcement of the mid-twentieth century.

In the preface, Durrwell remarks that despite the “flowering of theological…studies, there is one complaint we still hear; we have no theology of the spiritual life” (xv). In the Redeeming Christ answers this need, and it does so by reformulating the idea of such a theology. “[I]t is precisely in [the] life of God that man’s salvation lies,” and so “theology knows nothing about God which does not also concern the salvation of man” (xv). Theology of the spiritual life is, in this way, coextensive with the whole of theology since its goal is nothing other than conformity to the central subject and lodestar of all inquiry, namely the resurrected Christ. The spiritual life is life in the redeeming Christ.

Durrwell’s remarks on soteriology in the Part I set the trajectory of the book and account for its robustly ecclesial and sacramental character. They function, moreover, as a shorthand for all that follows (and so merit a brief summary). In the obedience of the Cross, he writes, Jesus immolates “not just the leanings of the flesh, but sinful flesh itself” (6). This is the moment of redemption, at which Jesus’ “existence is fixed forever.” As Durrwell summarizes: “The five wounds which he showed his disciples are not merely the receipt for our ransom inscribed upon his body, but the wounds of a death from which he will never recover. He did not rise to the life he had before, to this world, to this time; in this sense, he did not rise at all. He died once for all. The life of glory is a perpetuation of his death… The Lamb of God stands in glory and is surrounded by hymns of triumph, but he is still slain” (7).

Attentiveness to this ongoing character of Christ’s redemptive act undercuts any purely forensic account of salvation. The wounds remain as a witness not only to a debt paid (cf. Col 2:14) but primarily to the actuality of that new life in glory which retains nothing of “sinful flesh” (Rom 8:3). In a purely juridical account, “Once the price was paid, God would not need to raise Christ again” (9). The Resurrection would be of no importance. And yet, Paul insists that if Christ is not raised, we “are yet in [our] sins” (1 Cor 15:17). “Redemption,” Durrwell responds, “is not, then, simply a question of expiation by death, of payment of ransom, of buying us back. It was a personal sanctifying of Christ whereby he passed from life according to sin into the holiness of God; a drama played, from first to last, in the single person of Christ. And if it were entirely a drama personal to Christ, men have no share in the Redemption unless his drama becomes theirs.” Jesus’ entry to new life benefits no one but him alone, save that one should actually enter into Christ’s death and Resurrection (cf. Rom 6:5–8). The goal of the spiritual life is, therefore, that we “become the body of that Christ” (10).

Fittingly, Durrwell moves next to the sacraments (including the “sacrament” of Scripture) by which entry into that life is made possible (Part II) and then to a consideration of the virtues constitutive of that life (Parts III and IV). He concludes with a treatment of Mary (Part V), the paradigm of the spiritual life. Though sprung from his initial treatment of the Resurrection, the material of these chapters is not systematic in scope or feel. (He treats, for example, only the sacraments of Eucharist and Confession.) Rather, Durrwell wends through one topic and...