Christ the Heart of Creation by Rowan Williams (review)

Dense and occasionally opaque, this challenging book by the prolific former Archbishop of Canterbury is rich in insight and learning, and is surely worth the read. Offering a sustained meditation on Jesus Christ, Williams's theological acumen is on full display. The book might fairly be termed a celebration: of Christ, of the traditional Christology that is incarnational and that insists on full divinity and full humanity while seeing the two in their proper accord. As presented by Williams, this Christ does stand at the heart of the faith, and holds together and informs all that Christians believe (about God, creation, God's grace, Church) and practice.

Williams is methodical in the unfolding of this Christology. It is, and crucially so, a single-subject Christology. "Single subject" speaks to unity. The second nature is united to the first in the person of the Word or Son of God. "Single subject" also speaks to identity. It is the second divine person who becomes incarnate. As divine, the Word is absolutely free, unconditioned in agency, the fully effective agent who in full intelligence and love is not limited in causing in and through what God creates. And the Word who is one God with the Father and the Holy Spirit, same in divinity, is a distinct divine person, standing in intimate relation to the Father. The Son eternally receives from the Father, and in eternally proper relation to the Father eternally offers to the Father. In becoming incarnate, the personal property of the second person is inscribed in the humanity taken up, instantiated, by the Word. And so Jesus, the Word incarnate, is in correct relation to the Father and in his human actions—nicely summarized in terms of love—gives to the Father appropriately, unconditionally. Other humans are made in the image of God, but have fallen from God, distorted the image, by sin. As the Word who is incarnate, Jesus can meet the problem of their sin, can reconcile others to God; and as related to Jesus by their faith and love, and in imitation of the Word, and of the Word as incarnate, they will live in correct relation to God, giving to God what is God's, and offering themselves, as did Jesus, for others. In sum, this Christology is of immense significance for a theological anthropology, and for an account of ethics and the true flourishing of humans as humans (made by God, for God, and able to live out of themselves by Christ).

The unfolding of this Christology is at once metaphysical and grammatical. Williams is constantly alert to the difference between God and creation, between what can be said of God and what said of the creature. There is a logic of divinity and a logic of createdness, the one not to be confused with the other. The creature and God cannot be two things alongside each other, as if falling into the same category, as if they are subject to the same conditions. Rather, they bespeak different planes of existence, different operations. Hence, what holds of creatures does not hold of God; creaturely limitations, restriction, are to be denied of God (and so there is an appropriate apophaticism in the discourse about God). God is transcendent. Yet, creation and God do stand in relation, and Williams rightly plays this up as well. The creature receives all that it has from God: its nature and being, and even its acting. Creatureliness speaks to dependence. God moves creatures to their act. But this is not at the expense of the intrinsic capacity of a creature. Rather, God as agent respects the nature of the creature, applying the creature to act in accordance with its God-given nature. When it comes to creatures endowed with will, they are so applied to act that they too act; they will and they do in accordance with their own willing—as made possible, actualized, by God. Creaturely particularity and causality...