Christology: A Global Introduction/What Sort of Human Nature? Medieval Philosophy and the Systematics of Christology

Christology: A Global Introduction. By Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2003. 300 pp. $21.99 (paper).

What Sort of Human Nature? Medieval Philosophy and the Systematics of Christology. By Marilyn McCord Adams. Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 1999. 120 pp. $15.00 (paper).

As long as theology continues to be in a state of thorough flux-and that will be for a long time-there will be a need for books written in the whatare-they-saying-about genre. Kärkkäinen has already published surveys of pneumatology and ecclesiology. Here the theological subdivision he introduces is Christology, construed broadly enough to include discourse that bears in almost any way on Jesus. At times, in fact, it seems that Kärkkäinen s real subject matter is not Christology so much as the whole of Christian theology, viewed from a Christological (or Jesuological) vantage point. But that is perhaps to be expected. Otherwise, why speak of Christian theology?

The book gets better as it goes along. Part 1, "Christ in the Bible," is too short-and does not try-to do more than remind readers of what, presumably, they already know. Then comes "Christ in History," an equally compressed overview of disputes and developments from the rise of the Ebionites to the fall of the historical-Jesus questers. Part 3 considers ten twentieth-century Christologists, half of them Germans, not counting Tillich. The final part takes up "contextual Christologies," first in four thematic chapters (process, feminist, black, and postmodern), then in three pairs, each of which presents an overview of contemporary work done in a two-thirds-world context, followed by a more detailed examination of one author: Latin America (Jon Sobrino), Africa (Benezet Bujo), and Asia (Stanley Samartha).

This is explicitly and unabashedly a textbook, which it would not be just to criticize for failing to do what Kärkkäinen never intended. Inevitably he has written pages of précis in which sentences, perfectly accurate in themselves, are strung together without the connective logic they would have in their original settings. Inevitably his treatment of Christologists and contexts is selective. What was not inevitable is the thousand-year gap in the middle of page 80, between the third council of Constantinople and Martin Luther. Kärkkäinen seems to be following a somewhat old-fashioned Heilsgeschichte, which would have it that, even if not all was darkness between the fathers and the reformers, still nothing very interesting came to light.

But theologians in the Middle Ages were not just marking time. What they were up to, where Christology is concerned, can be glimpsed in Adams's little book, which ought to be better known. It does not completely fill the gap in Kärkkäinen's, but does complement it in illuminating ways. Kärkkäinen observes that dividing Christology into considerations of Christ's "person" and "work" is to some extent artificial. Adams shows that, far from being divided, the two topics have to be considered together if we are to understand the way the medieval authors she expounds handled the question that gives her book its title.

The council of Chalcedon declared that Christ's humanity lacked nothing compared with ours: he is "consubstantial" with us. Given that boundary condition, however, what else can we say, concretely, about the sort of human nature Christ had? Such a question, which is speculative or systematic rather than doctrinal or dogmatic, was answered differently by different theologians, depending on how they framed a "soteriological job-description" for God incarnate. Thus Adams argues, rightly I think, that the logic of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo, if not always the particular conclusions about Christ's human nature that he draws, informed the whole subsequent discussion. Peter Lombard, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus all gear their explications of who Christ was, qua man, with what he did "for us and for our salvation." What he knew and how he knew it, whether and in what sense he sinned, in what his freedom and his suffering consisted-these questions, which Chalcedon leaves open, cannot but arise for anyone who takes a stand, as Anselm did, on why the Incarnation happened at all.

Adams ends her survey on the far side of Kärkkäinen's gap, with Luther. What she emphasizes is not the continuity with Anselmian soteriology that Luther passed on to Calvin, but his relish of the "coincidence of opposites" that Chalcedon had implicitly ruled out. And though, like Kärkkäinen, she writes chiefly as a reporter on other Christologists, Adams's book ends with a brief but explicit hint of the shape her own systematic position might assume. Taking her bearings from Luther but following a route to the present different from any that Kärkkäinen traces, she suggests that Christ's humanity need not have been innocent, that God's main soteriological strategy was to sanctify horror-filled human lives by "metaphysical identification," and that this is accomplished by "taking human being in all of its uncleanness into hypostatic union with Godself" (p. 98). Where such a position belongs on the map that Kärkkäinen draws, if it belongs there at all, is difficult to say.