Infinity Dwindled to Infancy: A Catholic and Evangelical Christology by Edward Oakes (review)

609 BOOK REVIEWS Infinity Dwindled to Infancy: A Catholic and Evangelical Christology. By EDWARD OAKES. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011. Pp. 471. $29.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-8028-6555-7. Father Edward Oakes left the battlefield of the Church Militant all too soon, yet we can be grateful that he bestowed so many gifts upon her before departing. While he is perhaps best known as a translator and interpreter of his beloved Hans Urs von Balthasar—his retranslation of Balthasar’s The Theology of Karl Barth is a masterpiece—he also proved himself adept at theological speculation in numerous articles and essays. In his final years, Oakes dedicated himself to the themes of Christology and of divine grace, the first of which yielded the book under review and the latter an incomplete work that will soon be published. Yet, for all of these accomplishments, or rather because of them, we cannot be faulted for wanting to have a bit more. Infinity Dwindled to Infancy is evidence of this tension. It is in many ways a major contribution to the field of Christology, even though its form is that of a textbook. As a textbook it fulfills a need for a solid masters-level introductory text. When reading it, however, one cannot help but think of it as a first edition awaiting expansion and enrichment. I say this not in any way as a criticism—the opposite in fact. Oakes’s deep and wild erudition is a joy to behold but occasionally could lead to idiosyncrasies that, discovered by the text’s use, further editions would have tamed, without, it is hoped, domestication. We will never know, of course, and must be content with what we have; and that will be enough. Oakes enters the many-roomed mansion of Christology through the doors of the poets. The paradoxical title, taken from the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, foreshadows the approach: in Christ God has become “not just something else, [but] something conceptually opposite to the infinite and unchanging deity. More crucially, God has become a member of the very race that should be worshipping that changeless God” (2). This is a paradox that requires poetic form to express. Philosophers and theologians are needed as well, but they by temperament and task “kick against the goads” of paradox in a quest for conceptual coherence, the unraveling of opposition. This is proper in Christology, of course, since faith seeks whatever understanding is available to it, but given the peculiar nature of this mystery, it is poets above all who set the agenda. To make his point, Oakes begins with a survey of poetic attempts to re-present the Christic paradox. For example, the martyred Jesuit Robert 610 BOOK REVIEWS Southwell opens his Christmas poem, “New Prince, New Pomp,” by describing the incarnate God as “a silly tender babe.” John Betjeman asks, did “the Maker of the stars and sea become a Child on earth for me?” The anonymous poem “The Divine Paradox” sums up the problem and the gift this way: A God and yet a man? A maid and yet a mother? Wit wonders that wit can Conceive this or the other. A God, and can he die? A dead man, can he live? What wit can well reply? What reason reason give? God, truth itself, does teach it; Man’s wit seeks too far under By reason’s power to reach it. Believe and leave to wonder. Yet the paradoxes that this poet is content to leave unexplained and, perhaps, unexplainable, Christology aspires to understand at the heart of the Christian mystery. It is in wrestling with these paradoxes that the theologian is led to confront the particular problems of soteriology, psychology, history, and philosophy. But, if done properly, the enterprise of Christology will treat the inbuilt paradoxes of what God has done in Jesus Christ not as tensions to be relieved by conceptual acuity but as the subject matter from which Christology arises. Before ending his opening chapter, Oakes explains why he has subtitled his book “A Catholic and Evangelical Christology.” First, it signals that his task is fully informed by faith; it makes no...