Jesus: Essays in Christology by Thomas Weinandy (review)

641 BOOK REVIEWS Jesus: Essays in Christology. By THOMAS WEINANDY. Ave Maria, Fla.: Sapientia Press, 2014. Pp. 440. $37.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-1-9325-8965-8. This book contains a nearly comprehensive collection of the Christological essays written by the Franciscan scholar Fr. Thomas Weinandy over the past twenty-four years. The book is divided into four parts. The first, “Christology and the Bible,” considers the relationship of modern exegesis to dogmatic theology. The second, “Historical and Systematic Christology,” examines core principles in patristic, medieval, and modern Christology. The third, “Christology and Contemporary Issues,” ponders diverse modern controversies . The final section, “Christology and the Christian Life,” contains the text of ten sermons, each having to do in some way with doctrinal and Christological themes enunciated in the book. The topics treated in this work are vast in scope, and frequently as intellectually challenging as they are important. Consequently, this is a significant collection of essays from a modern theologian who has not shied away from serious and interesting theological topics. There are clear themes running throughout the book which reflect not only the editorial organization of the volume, but also of the overarching unity of the thought of the author. It is not possible to treat all the various essays and arguments in a review of this scope. I will consider, then, some of the most important elements from each section of the book, focusing in particular on the middle two sections. In part 1, Weinandy focuses in particular on the notion of modern theological exegesis of the New Testament, with two of his three essays examining the treatment of the New Testament by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in his three volume work Jesus of Nazareth. In the first essay the author seeks to identify criteria for a theological appropriation of modern historical exegesis. Following Ratzinger, Weinandy notes that the concept of biblical unity is ultimately a theological one, and that Christ himself forms the bond between the two testaments. Therefore his mystery itself provides the ultimate criterion of unity for the modern project of biblical hermeneutics (4-7). Modern exegetical methods are to be welcomed, but in the end are constructive theologically only when they are taken up into a perspective of faith that perceives the centrality of Christ’s relation to the Father as a 642 BOOK REVIEWS revelation of the Trinitarian mystery, and as the soteriological recapitulation of fallen humanity’s relationship with God. Part 2 takes up core patristic and Thomistic Christological principles. Here the arrangement of the essays is concerned with telling a story of development and interpretive continuity. The first essay argues that theological seeds of the Council of Chalcedon are found already in the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, particularly in his attribution of both divine and human properties to the one subject who is Christ: “What the communication of idioms does linguistically . . . is conjoin the two Christological truths of Jesus Christ’s divinity and humanity so as to express the ontological oneness of who Jesus is as the Son or the Word of God existing as man” (71). The second, third, and fourth essays consider the plenary reality of the humanity of Christ in the theologies of Athanasius and Cyril, so as to demonstrate that each clearly affirms a human spiritual soul in Christ, and is not Apollinarian. Thus each affirms in Christ a human essence of body and soul, even if he did not employ the terminology of two “natures,” and the theological influences that gained ascendency at the Council of Ephesus should not be opposed artificially to the formulations of Chalcedon: “Cyril did not employ the mia physis formula to espouse one nature in the sense of one quiddity, but rather he primarily used it to emphasize that Christ is one being or reality—one entity” (99). Again, the communication of idioms is of central importance: “All human attributes, attributes that imply a union of body and soul, such as suffering, ignorance, fear, and the like, must be predicated of the Son” (80). This Athanasian principle (to which Cyril clearly subscribes) was originally developed in an argumentative soteriological context : if God the Son is not truly human, then we...