Christ as Infinite and Finite: Rowan Williams’ Christ the Heart of Creation

Christ the Heart of Creation. By Rowan Williams. London: Bloomsbury Continuum. 2018. xvi + 279 pp.

What is Christology about? The answer to this seemingly simple question is unfurled in all its depth and range by this exemplary work by Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury and until recently Honorary Professor of Contemporary Christian Thought and Master at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Students of Rowan Williams’ publishing career will know that the voice, audience, and conceptual complexity of a given text varies a good bit in Williams’ work. Tokens of Trust does not offer the same genre or tone or historical analysis as On Christian Theology, or On Augustine, his recent work on St Augustine. Christ the Heart of Creation belongs to the scholarly side of the house, without doubt. This is a dense book; we can watch on almost every page this remarkable theologian striving with an unwieldy mass of Christological reflection, ordering and cataloguing and translating it into his own idiom, pressing down on the whole to reduce it to conceptual clarity and dogmatic rigor. Consider, for example, this specimen of dense translation of the work of Austin Farrer, the Anglican theologian and metaphysician, who will serve as principal witness for the prosecution:

We can see that “revelatory” action, including whatever events allow us a closer conscious share in infinite agency (in the love of the Trinity, to use conventional theological phrasing) will be, not an interruption of the finite sequence, but a particular configuration of finite agency such that it communicates more than its own immanent content. And this recognition of duality in our apprehension of finite agency that we identify as “revealing” something of God not otherwise available to natural perception, holds the key to a range of theological puzzles. (p. 5)

Language like this tells us that there will be simply no short-cuts here.

Although this book had its origin in the Hulsean Lectures, few of the concessions granted, as a rule, to a listening audience are visible here. Its success as a book, certainly, rests on the high degree to which the discrete lectures, and their diverse settings, have been merged into a single treatment and argument. Yet some vestiges of the lecture style remain: the relentlessly demanding nature of scholastic Christology is given a brief apology and a reassuring nod that we will get through this thicket together. And the second half of a long section on Dietrich Bonhoeffer still breathes the air of the International Bonhoeffer Congress that saw its birth. But these conversational reprieves are few. From the opening to the closing pages, a momentum of rigorous, technical, and conceptual argument is sustained, even heightened by book’s end.

The doctrinal analysis begins with a remarkable reading of the New Testament witness to Jesus, followed by a close reading of Williams’ field of specialty, Patristics. Here, Cyrillians take center stage, including Maximus, the Leontii (a wonderful Latinism for the two Leontiuses at work in Late Antiquity), and John of Damascus. Individual treatments of Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, late medieval developments in Occam and Biel, and the magisterial Reformers, as well as side-long glances at Karl Barth and disputed questions in Barth-Studies, end in a double flourish with a thoughtful and revealing analysis of Bonhoeffer’s Christology and Ethics, and an Appendix devoted to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Soren Kierkegaard. In a chapter labeled “Conclusion” but presenting, in truth, a fresh chapter, Williams ushers in a crystalline précis of the argument as a whole, followed by a methodological treatise on Erich Przywara’s legendarily demanding text, Analogia Entis.

Despite the appearance of a list, Christ the Heart of Creation is decidedly not an historical survey. Largely absent from this work are the crisp historical analyses that animated Anglican Identities, say, or Arius: Heresy and Tradition. Rather, Williams holds a plumb line against each witness, and through careful analysis and summary of each, determines whether to tie these historical theologians closer to his project or repel them. We spot his aim in a quiet aside in the discussion of Bonhoeffer’s 1933 Berlin lectures. There he writes that Bonhoeffer’s Christology lectures were “more than a ground-clearing exercise; the very fact of identifying—as Bonhoeffer does—a fresh starting point carries doctrinal implications” (p. 184). Historical analysis, that is, does not simply illustrate a theological development, nor pay tribute to its chief proponents; rather the interpretation of the past uncovers a “fresh starting point” and inaugurates it through standard-bearers who advance the cause. In this sense, we might describe Christ the Heart of Creation as “analytic history,” a bold cutting into the past with a sharp conceptual tool, and in this way, establishing the proper realm in which Christology should rule. It does not share the same sweeping grandeur of the 19th-century Idealist historiographies; but it does not shy away from a “master narrative”—and that is its very great strength. Like Farrer and John Webster, memorialized in the book’s dedication, Williams dares to survey the whole, correct it where it has strayed, and exhibit its luminous structure, properly ordered and conceived. We are in the grip of an Idea here, and by the end of the book, Christology has taken on a new shape and a new domain.

The reason for the book’s boldness and its exacting rigor lies close at hand: Christ the Heart of Creation strives to answer our original query, What is Christology about? Now, at first glance, this may seem an odd question. Wouldn’t the plain answer simply be: Christology is about the One Subject, Jesus Christ? Or perhaps, for those more Ecclesially minded, would Christology not simply intend the Person of Christ, the One defined at the synod gathered at Chalcedon? For most modern theologians, Christology is by form and content an exercise in exploring the singular reality of Jesus Christ.

Complex threads have drawn Christology into this prominent and isolated terrain. The pronounced focus during the 16th-century Reformations upon Christ as source of the sinner’s justification has made Christology a confession tied to the religious quest of the penitent. In those lands touched by the Reformations, the rise of historical studies among the humanists of early northern European has given Christology a new birth as portrait of the earthly or “historical” Jesus. In this way, Christology was thought to comprise something of a “bifocal” vision: “the Christ of faith,” as the Church’s teaching was now called, and the “Jesus of history,” an amalgam of historians’ judgments about ancient texts and cultures. So pronounced became this division among even Church theologians that as Ecclesially minded a theologian as the Dominican, Edward Schillebeeckx, could write two massive volumes given the separate titles, Jesus and Christ. Modern epistemologies in the West only heightened the pull of Christology away from its anchorage in the web of the Church’s teaching. Christology in the post-Kantian world was less a doctrine than an epistemology, the sole form of knowledge granted the believer under the austerities of the Critical regime. Most 19th- and 20th-century European theologies were Christologies in one of these modernist senses, and it was though that narrow gate that all doctrine necessarily passed in order to count as credible teaching, or expressions of faith, scalded but saved from Feuerbach-like projection.

Rowan Williams will have none of this. Ab ovo, Christology will be shown to be a dogma generative of a larger schema, the relation of Creator to creature. Now, this in itself is a bold move. Christ the Heart of Creation insists that Christology is a doctrine fashioned from two elements: the Creator–creature distinction and the Mystery of the Holy Trinity. Christology, that is, is about the larger schemas that relate creature to Creator and unfold the Triune Life of Father, Son, and Spirit. As can be readily imagined, much of the furniture of modernist Christologies, and some ancient ones, too, will be radically re-worked in such a book. There is not much of a “life of Jesus” here. There is a bracing and revealing section on New Testament teachings about Christ—more of that below—but surprisingly little about what we might expect catechumens to learn about Jesus: his wonder-working, his preaching and use of parables, his action against the Temple, his Passion predictions, indeed his Passion, his burial, his Rising. That is because Christology is not principally about Jesus, though of course it concerns him; it is rather about creaturehood as exemplified in this one particular creature, as he lives a life for others. The pronounced note of the Doctrine of Revelation in most modern European Christologies also falls silent here—for the most part. There is, to be sure, a firm conviction that to adhere to Christ is to learn by heart what creation is all about: everything is interpreted in light of this Key. But the anxiety exhibited by Protestant dialecticians over the grounds of Christian knowledge is notably soothed here. Williams holds that the knowledge of creaturehood will come by the various forms that all human and humane knowledge display—sociological, psychological, historical, imaginistic, and personal. Of course, this will involve Jesus of Nazareth, for he too was a creature, and he too belonged to a rich welter of texts and practice and material conditions that shape an individual life, and make it conform or lie proud against the surface of its day.

In place of these more familiar Christological motifs strides the Dogma of the Trinity, most especially the Eternal Generation of the Son. Christology, in its God-ward direction, concerns “Filiation,” the Proper Property of the Eternal Son, and in a larger sense, the Eternal Act by which the Son is begotten of the Father. The creature Jesus will enact, as his own finite life, the Filiation of the Eternal Son—more about this, too—and in just this way, will show himself the obedient One who gives himself to be the life of the world. For Williams, Christology really takes wing when it stretches its full length to touch the Totus Christus, the whole Christ with his members, his body, the Church. This Augustinian note allows Williams to demonstrate that an “individual bit of the universe” (p. xii) has become Lord and King, and in serving him, we “inhabit a world” (p. xi) that gives meaning to the whole and quickens us to give ourselves away in love of the stranger and the dispossessed. Thomas Aquinas is shown to follow this pattern, as is John Calvin, in a surprising “Catholic reading” of the Reformer. Martin Luther, again surprisingly, comes in for stern rebuke, especially in the forays in Luther and later Lutheranism into the genus majestaticum. Christ the Heart of Creation is most definitely a metaphysical work, but it is also a deeply ethical treatise. To speak about Christ in the end is to speak to him, and to learn from him how to receive life in openness and surrender, and to yield it up again, for the flourishing of the world.

The framework for this analysis belongs to Austin Farrer—though to be sure, in Williams’ own distinctive reading. Rowan Williams turns to two of Farrer’s larger works to set the stage: Farrer’s early essay, Finite and Infinite, and his later lecture series, the Bampton Lectures, published as The Glass of Vision. Quietly inserted into these large schematics is an unpublished essay, now transcribed as Very God and Very Man, a brief treatise Williams warmly recommends as proper roadmap into the tangled landscape of Christology. But Finite and Infinite holds pride of place. Here, the salient conceptual categories are finitude and infinity, and we should not mistake the governing power they wield. There are many ways, certainly, to speak of God and the world—these terms themselves are one pair—but a distinct form is given to this singular relatio when it is cast as finite and Infinite. Some of my fellow Barthians may quickly assume that I am here echoing the great methodological bell tolling through the Church Dogmatics: no alien, hellenizing philosophy in the central courtyard of dogmatics! But I do not actually think that is the central dogmatic or methodological point to observe here. Rather, I think the central question concerns relation, the category as old as Aristotle for joining subject and predicate, or subject and subject. We should not imagine, that is, that the paired concepts of finitude and infinity are neutral in their description of substantial relation. Rather, they characterize the relatio between the two in a distinct manner, as one of necessary asymmetry and radical unlikeness. These are the watch-words of Nicholas of Cusa’s celebrated non aliud, a minority voice warmly applauded by Williams in his Preface. Indeed, Williams coins a phrase he too knows is cumbersome: the non-dual, non-identical relation, to capture the silvery elusiveness of the non aliud. The Infinite and finite cannot be characterized as two, as if we could tote them up, nor can they be simply one, as a crude Spinozism would have it. Rather they enjoy this utterly unique relatio of being not the same, yet not opposed. In truth, it is stronger yet: the relation of Infinite and finite is not properly distinct or contrasted or ranged in some form, one against the other. The incommensurability of this school of theology is that strong. We simply speak the negative properties—not this, not that—and in this way gesture toward that which cannot be said but can only show itself. (The gnomic end of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is a natural appendix to Christ the Heart of Creation.)

As both Farrer and Williams know well, Divine Infinity has gone through long theological development, from the Cappadocians forward. As a Divine Name, Infinity has come to be considered a “positive predicate,” an attribute that cannot be assimilated to unending sequences or spiritual enormity. It names the Divine Essence, and as Thomas Aquinas notes—a source not lost on Farrer—it simply designates the radical distinction between Creator and creature. Infinity cannot “come alongside” of finitude as simply a common measure: were infinity to be simply the uncircumscribed extension of what we already met in the finite, the infinite would swallow up the finite, as a single digit in the unbounded run of natural numbers. No, the Infinite, as a Divine Perfection, must designate a Reality that is incommensurable with the finite and cannot therefore operate in the same dimension and under the same causal powers as the finite. Now, this does not dictate remoteness; on the contrary! The relation of the Infinite to the finite permits an intimacy denied those forces simply working in an exterior or causal fashion. (The early Barth is often misunderstood on just this point: his Totaliter Aliter may be in Heaven, but is not remote but rather demandingly present to the creature.) But incommensurability means that the realities involved in the God-world relation cannot operate on the same plane or be present as distinct or competing elements in a single world. No, non-competition, especially as set out by Kathryn Tanner in her several distinguished theological works, sets the hallmark for Williams’ account of God and creature. The Infinite simply gives rise to the creature: creatio ex nihilo is the name for how God works in the world. Should we wish to see a sign of God’s mighty hand in the world, we point to the creature. This finite being is just what we mean by God’s working, by Divine effects or acts in the world. Such a framework has many strengths, but it carries one burden as well: it dictates that the central problematic of Christology will be the meeting of two that cannot meet.

So subtle, and so radical, is this asymmetrical relation that a reader may be forgiven the thought that not much new has been said here. Of course, Christians of all stripes, indeed monotheists as a whole, will demand that God not be a creature, nor anything close to a creature, not even a supreme one. God is Mystery, theists say, and we do not look among the objects of this world for such a Reality as is God. But this fundamental recognition of the distinction between Creator and creature, however radical, does not reach the depth of Williams’ or Farrer’s conviction. That is because the application of this unique relation to Christian doctrine is to channel Divine Act into the one form it can take in the world, namely to give rise to a creature. God works from the inside, not externally, it is often said. True certainly; but for Williams and Farrer this means that the visible signs or effects of God’s working in Israel’s Scriptures—the Theophanies, the prophetic words and symbols, the killing and making alive, the mighty Red Sea crossing—all these belong to the world Farrer calls, in the Bampton Lectures, the realm of imagination. He does not mean by this a crude denial of reality; by no means! Rather, Farrer held that the consciousness of human creatures was fashioned in such a way as to depict in wholly creaturely, but extended—‘supernatural’—forms the Reality of the Infinite God. To see the Infinite at work is to see a finite creature, this time in inwardness.

The New Testament records of Divine Working must receive a parallel treatment. Christ himself must be fully and simply a creature, for this is how God, the Infinite, acts. Now, this axiom will receive a good bit of qualification and refinement; Farrer in particular will defend in his sermons and shorter addresses a kind of direct Divine agency ad extra that Williams cannot countenance. And both Farrer and Williams seek a way within this structure to affirm Chalcedon, and indeed the Athanasian creedal phrase, Very God and Very Man. But it is important to see that Christ the Heart of Creation does not take up Christ’s miracles, his Transfiguration, or his Divine Nature acting, as the Tome of Leo famously puts this, according to its manner, out of indifference or the press of other tasks. Rather, this characterization of the earthly Christ follows from a very clear and decided principle. The life of Christ must be told in a radically foreshortened manner, because the Infinite and finite simply do not operate together, cannot operate together, in this creaturely sphere in that symmetrical or worldly fashion.

Let me give as instances a few places where Williams speaks of the Infinite acting in the life of Jesus. In speaking of Thomas Aquinas’ Christology, Williams writes,

The content of “being Jesus of Nazareth” is grounded in and determined by the esse that is “being the eternal Word.” Even though the historical esse that is Jesus’ human identity of course includes things that do not and cannot belong to the esse of the Word as such, the conclusion has to be that nothing can be said of Jesus of Nazareth that is not in a strict sense spoken “about” the Word of God, considered as the final ground or condition of the historical identity of Jesus. (pp. 30–31)

A second summary statement on Thomas’ insights into Christology,

We are trying to speak intelligibly about what God does—that is, about infinite action, not another instance of the kind of agency we regularly encounter within the interactive universe. It is essential to be clear that the presence of the divine Word in and as the active historical presence of Jesus of Nazareth is not the intrusion into the world of a rival isomorphic personal agency alongside or instead of a particular finite agency. Belief in the Incarnation is the belief that the specific concrete and historical agent that is Jesus of Nazareth simply is the act of God the Word in a unique sense, quite distinct from the way in which divine agency is universally the ultimate activator of any and every finite substance . . . While it is true that for all practical purposes in our conceptuality the existence of Jesus “counts” as a real form of subsistence in the world, it is not one element in a partnership between two such subsistents, since it is what/who it is solely in virtue of its being “supposited” by the Word. (p. 36)

These are central texts for Williams’ Christology because it is in Thomas—this particular reading of Thomas—that Farrer’s convictions about Infinite and finite act are most fully exemplified. Note the admirable way Williams grasps the nettle here: just how on this view is the Incarnation to be distinguished from the perfectly general Divine act of holding the world in being? Running through the whole is the firm conviction that the Infinite God cannot be an Agent like others in this world of ours. The sign of His working, we recall, is simply creation itself. And Jesus of Nazareth subsists in our world, sustained by God as are all creatures. So it seems, by dint of conceptual strictures, that Jesus of Nazareth can be only an expression, one more expression, of the Infinite God’s creative working. In passing, we have some nods here to “grammatical” or linguistic ordering of predicates: nothing is said about Jesus that is not ultimately said of the Word. Indeed, Williams’ attraction to certain elements of Wittgenstein’s late work makes a grammatical analysis of Christology deeply attractive. But Williams is far too much of a metaphysician here to rely simply on linguistic or even epistemic schemas, however warranted by philosophical schools. He still seeks the proper discrimen by which the being of Christ is distinguished from the being of all that is. For this work, Williams relies on the notions of esse, existence or the act of being, of supposit, a complex term with a history all its own, and of grounding, or determination.

Note the austere rules that are placed on this task. Jesus of Nazareth must be homoousious with us; “human” must be predicated univocally of Christ and of ourselves. For Williams, this Creedal affirmation demands that Jesus be fully and wholly a human life, a creature seeking to be obedient and faithful to his Creator. So it must be, Williams argues, that one human life can become a distinctive instance of a Divine effect: “Jesus” just is the result when God determines to reconcile and heal the world of creatures. Jesus must do as God the Word does. He must exhibit perfect receptiveness to the Divine working, a dependence that can only be captured in familial terms: Sonship or Child of God. Therefore, only one act of being can subsist in Jesus Christ, the Word, because there can be only one Infinite Agent, acting to bring into being a creature who acts as Son. (Williams here sides decisively with the standard reading of Thomas on these matters, setting aside a newer and unsettling proposal about an esse secundarium, briefly endorsed in one of Thomas’ late works.) The Divine supposit will assume a full human life—though not a human “person” or “hypostasis.” What assumptio carnis means in this schema is that a single human life enacts the Divine Act of Filiation: as the Eternal Son is eternally generated by the Father, wholly dependent and receptive of the Father’s loving act, so Jesus of Nazareth in the Spirit is the effect of Generation in the creaturely sphere, obedient and receptive and reconciling. This is decidedly not the first of Aloys Grillmeier’s governing categories in Christology—not a “making” (homo factus est) but an “assuming” (assumptio carnis), a Divine taking of creaturely flesh as its own possession. So, the distinctive quality of Jesus’ life must not be something “in” him, as if a part of him were Divine and the rest human. Rather the whole human existence of the man Jesus must be what God intends when the sinful world is to healed, forgiven, and drawn back to its Source. This, I think, is what “grounding” amounts to in Williams’ Christology. He does not appear to be using it in the current philosophical idiom—as a dependence relation without causality—but rather as a term that captures a sense of origin. Jesus has his being in the Word of God, such that everything that is said about him can be seen as a form of “being sent.”

We see this notion at work in Williams’ Biblical exegesis. After a catena of references to the Pauline corpus, Williams concludes,

the apparent weakness or implausibility of a proclamation that has as its centre an executed criminal is used as a kind of demonstration of divine power: since this proclamation has no obvious human force or successfulness to commend it, it must be God alone who makes it credible. And the apparent passivity of Jesus as victim of human violence is turned around so that it appears as the supreme manifestation of divine initiative: God “gives” Jesus to be a victim, but Jesus equally and freely gives himself, accepting his death as a vocation in obedience to God so that his own willed and chosen powerlessness may be transparent to God’s act and power. The point is that the identity of Jesus as human sufferer and the further identity of that suffering with the divine action are never eclipsed in the language of Christian Scripture . . . Jesus’ human narrative identity, including his death, is understood as divine action—not a witness to or promise of divine action but that action itself; it is as human passivity, freely accepted, that his death becomes divine agency. (pp. 51–52, 55)

Here, the focus in Gospel and Epistle portraits of Jesus is on his frailty, his suffering path to Golgotha, his utter human nakedness before injustice and cruelty. This, Williams quite rightly observes, is never breached or covered over in the New Testament witness to Christ. What is remarkable, Williams holds, is that this human decision for God and for His Kingdom is viewed not as witness only or as prophetic exemplum, but rather as God’s action itself. This too is neither ignored nor obscured. Here, the Pauline language that was once described as his “Christ mysticism” comes to the fore. Believers are “in” Christ, they are members of His body, they prepare to meet Him as Judge, they become the Temple where, in His Spirit, He dwells. In a fine gesture toward recent African Christologies, Williams proposes that we think of this theme as one of an Ancestor and His kin. All this is carefully drawn from undisputed Pauline texts and broad Gospel narratives. It is an attempt, in Biblical idiom, to show Farrer’s metaphysical commitments enacted. The Divine acts of judging, gathering, healing, and reconciling are being effected in the world by a singular human life: God acts, and Christ becomes.

Let me finally cite a few places where Williams treats of the Chalcedonian definition directly:

The point is that we cannot imagine God directly acting in the world as one agent among others, so that any claim for the presence of divine actions must be a claim about activity that is strictly “coincident” with an uninterrupted finite action, whose effects are such that it cannot adequately be spoken of exclusively in terms of finite action. The post-chalcedonian model of the composite hypostatis of the eternal Word offers a structure which allows us to say that God is literally and personally acting within the world but does so only in the sense that this particular finite agent acts in such unbroken alignment with the Word’s way of being God (in contemplative dependence, unrestricted response, unbroken and unconditional filial love and self-giving) that the effect of this action is completely continuous with the effect of divine action in Israel’s history and ultimately with the divine liberty in the act of creation itself. (p. 221)

Or, in some of the post-Chalcedonian refinements of the terminology in the Definition:

The idea that Jesus instantiates a composite nature, a kind of life that is both divine and human, is a category error, implying that the two “contributing” natures are mutually dependent in constituting a third; that what it is to be divine and what it is to be human condition one another as elements in a single logical landscape. And this would mean that the divine nature was under a sort of necessity of combining with the human in order to produce the composite, that the divine would not be the divine unless it were interdependent with the human. (p. 99)

And finally, in a lapidary summary:

It is in this sense that we can rightly speak of Jesus as the heart of creation, the one on whom all the patterns of finite existence converge to find their meaning. While the relation between Jesus and the eternal divine Word—the “hypostatic union,” which is an uninterrupted continuity of distinct, self-identifying, active life between the Word and Jesus—is unique, it can only be understood in connection to a general conception, a metaphysical model, of how the finite and the infinite relate to one another. (p. xiii)

Williams is willing to be cautiously critical of Chalcedon, citing its “ambiguities” and shifting senses of key terms, and its disturbing openness to a kind of “Syrian” dualism between Divine and human natures. For this reason, Williams says, Chalcedon “defines an agenda rather than a solution to the problems that have generated it” (p. 88). The palm in Christological development is awarded to the post-Chalcedonian theologians of Constantinople II and III, with special favor shown to Maximus the Confessor. All this places Williams in a subtle dogmatic relation to the Creedal teaching of the Church. He does not stand as remote from Chalcedon as do Anglican Divines such as C.E. Raven or, even less, Maurice Wiles, nor is he willing to adopt the distancing shown by the recent work of Christopher Beeley, whom Williams discusses at some length. Rather, Williams appears to second a historiography we find also in Lewis Ayres, in which the theological work during the Justinian era settles, refines, and clarifies the language of Chalcedon, such that Cyril is now shown to be unshadowed victor. All this means that the Definition issued at Chalcedon is not going to directly govern dogmatic Christology, but rather a particular reception of it, redolent of late antique, Greek thought, will determine how Christology is to be shaped.

All this matters because as the citations show, certain language, prominent in Chalcedon, is strikingly absent from Williams’ Christology. This is not a Christology about natures, Divine or human, and it does not spend its capital on the celebrated four adverbs used in the Definition: without confusion or change; without separation or division. Christology is not about these things. It is rather about a relation of Infinite and finite that Williams portrays as “coincidence” or “uninterrupted continuity” or “unbroken alignment.” All this reverts to the central category, esse, interpreted now with heavy emphasis on the act in “act of being” or existing. The vision we are offered here is one of mutual acting or agency: the finite Jesus acts as a creature, and this agency is coordinated with, aligned to the Divine Agency: as on earth, so in Heaven. Note how in the Biblical exegesis, Williams focuses his attention upon the actions of the Divine and human agents. The vulnerability and dispossession of Jesus is willed by him; it is his own life-act. In just this way he “echoes” or “re-presents” the Eternal Filiation of the Son, who receives everything from the Father, without losing perfect Agency and Self-possession. Or again, note the way the hypostatic union is characterized: “distinct, self-identifying, active life between the Word and Jesus.” The saving act of God gives rise to a suffering human life that is nevertheless the source of life, healing, direction, and judgment. Jesus acting as King or Ancestor just is God acting, for the sake of the world. We are to draw upon this elusive notion of “non-dual, non identical” co-working in order to speak of the mystery of the Infinite God acting in the world in this finite manner.

Now, it seems to me that there are two areas where Christians might express concern with this remarkable and complex vision. One has to do with the Divine working in the world; the other has to do with Divine and human natures. Both are traditional elements in the Church’s Christology; both raise objections to the austerities Williams imposes upon the central dogma. Let me begin with the more general, the Divine working ad extra.

I think we have to be willing to ask whether (the Williams’ inflected) Farrer is right in his conviction that the Infinite can act only as the finite. Williams glosses this position as a form of category error: If we imagine God acting in the world, under the conditions of finitude, we reduce the Almighty and Infinite Lord to a creature, constraining Him to the objective realm of creaturely working; and just this confuses the Infinite with the finite. This is often said with a kind of oracular air; Friedrich Schleiermacher made a leitmotiv from it to govern the entire Glaubenslehre. And prima facie we can see its plausibility. It seems that everything that works in an extended space, under material dimension, and within a temporal realm, will become an object within it: it will become “dimensive,” so to say, or “extended” and “temporal.” Just this, we may think, stands behind the complex argument of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories in Kant’s first Critique. And there is indeed the air of the noumenal-phenomenal distinction that hovers over the whole of Farrer’s Bampton Lectures. But I think a reader of Holy Scripture is emboldened to ask whether all this follows from all that. The Christian canon, from Genesis to Revelation, testifies to a God who acts in the world through various forms of Presence: an out-stretched and mighty arm, a pillar of cloud, a voice like many waters, telling of the Divine Name, a roaring fire in the Sanctum of the Temple, the whole goodness of God, passing by Moses, held safe in the rock, the Divine Spirit inhabiting and leaving the Temple, wandering with the people in their exile, the slaying and making alive, the raising up of prophets and heralds who will hear the Word in their ears and in their bones, and the intimacy of conversation, as with a friend, in the sacred Tent of Meeting. These are the so-called Theophanies in the Old Testament, and it is not self-evident that they must be regarded as so many metaphors, as Thomists would be inclined to say, nor as the use by God of a creaturely medium to express the Divine, transcendent will, as an Augustinian might put this. It seems to me that Luther, a remarkable exegete, made fine use of an Occamist notion, when in his Eucharistic controversies, he spoke of the many forms of Divine Presence, some named and some unnamed, as yet undisclosed. We need not follow Luther in all his ways to see that what he offers Christology is a conviction that God can be present within the world without becoming the world, without losing His Nature as Immortal, Eternal, and Immaterial. Some of these modes, to be sure, will be inward—they will conform more readily to Farrer’s strictures about the theological imagination. But others are manifestly visible and objective; just this, we may think, is what Christians mean by miracle or Scripture’s mighty wonders. Christology above all needs conceptual room for God to act within the world as God, not creature, and Scripture seems unembarrassed in its affirmation that such things can and must be. This does not lead, I believe, to an unwanted consequent—that God and creatures compete or “add together” as comparable substances or agents. I think rather it means that God can intervene in His own world, can descend into it, can act and transform and renovate it, all the while remaining God. I would suggest that this is a “proper primitive”: like every axiom, it can receive no further explanation or grounding, but rather underlies the whole. Such are identity conditions, persistent conditions, and many of the primal elements of ethical theory. Our conceptuality builds from primitives, and I propose that we consider God’s action within the world, one such.

This matters to Christology, because the principle element that we do not hear much about in Williams’ work is nature: the Divine and human natures that are said, in the Chalcedonian Definition, to be in the One Son and Lord, Jesus Christ. Indeed Luther’s treatment of Christ’s human nature, and its deification by Divine Attributes, comes in for some of the sternest language in the entire volume. And we can see why. It is just this exuberant application of the notion of Divine Presence to the human nature of Christ that violates every instinct of a Farrer-formed conscience. It is not simply the Divine Agency, for that after all is central to Williams’ vision of Christ’s Person. It is rather the “inward” language of Chalcedon that finds little room in Williams’ Christology. Chalcedon speaks of One Person in two natures: just this makes Presence vital. The concept of nature allows the theologian to speak of a constituting, continuous state of affairs that just is the presence of an object to its environment. Now, I don’t think Williams has a programmatic gravamen with nature tout court, or with presence; he does not seem to work under the sway of a post-structuralist allergy to presence or metaphysical ontology. But it is significant, I think, that Williams refers to the Divine Nature only under the category of freedom: the Divine Nature is Liberty, Sovereignty, Unboundedness. It is just this note that lends the odd air of duality to some of Williams’ most dense summaries: it seems as if we speak of two, the Word and Jesus, when everything in this conceptuality bears down upon the idea of unity, One Divine act that just is the creature. But the striking use of Divine Son and human son, or of Eternal Word and Jesus, makes the reader wonder just what is meant by “coincidence” or “unbroken alignment”: Is this the non-duality, non-identity that we are to prize? We hear similar praise of Freedom among the Divine Attributes in John Zizioulas, where even necessity is barred from entrance into a proper Doctrine of God. But in Williams it appears that Nature must be brought under the rule of Agency exclusively: Divine Nature is a kind of act, the act of the Purely Unconstrained. And of course, Divine Sovereignty is to be praised in any proper Christian theology! But God’s Nature is not exhausted in the Attribute of Freedom. Just this is what makes the notion of Incarnation rich and vital in Christian conceptuality.

The Presence of the Divine Nature in the Person of Christ leads to an affirmation of what the later tradition called the “composite nature” of the Incarnate Word. And not just Chalcedon! Cyril and Cyrillians, Thomas and Calvin, Scotus all speak of the Divine Nature and human nature joined in a Personal, Hypostatic Union. That is why the concise summary of the hypostatic union in Williams’ Christology reveals the inner workings of the whole. It must be governed, we recall, by Agency, and by the larger relatio of Infinite to finite. Just this makes Williams distinctly uneasy with the Patristic language about the earthly Christ exhibiting His Deity in miracles and mighty signs, His humanity in his hunger and deep suffering. The Tome of Leo comes in for rebuke, as it appears there as if nature is now carrying off the trophy of agency. Moreover, the Divine Nature that does these wonders resides in the Person of Jesus Christ. Just this troubles the calm waters of a proper Infinite-finite relation. But Christian theology needs the language and confession of nature and inherence—just as Farrer needed the concept “substance” in his metaphysics—because it is the stable, singular unity of these two natures that just is the One Person of Jesus Christ. To be sure, “nature” itself is one of the classic words in the philosophical library: it denotes many things and connotes many more. It can stand in for “definition” or “essence” or “principle,” or qualia or property, or even “thing,” as when we speak of nature as the external world; or it can represent a mode of being, a broader connotation Williams can warm to, as it appears to stand far closer to agency than any of the other semantic fields. The central point, however, is that nature is what Christ consists in. He in His own unexcelled Unity is the Divine and human natures as a single Person and Subject. This is the force of the Word being made flesh: facere is every bit as central to Christology as is assumere. Now, Michael Gorman, one of Williams’ chief interpreters of Thomistic Christology, insists that “nature” cannot be reified; it would be a mistake, he argues, to say that Thomas considers nature a “thing.” Williams follows Gorman’s reading closely, most certainly in the rejection of any reified language—though parting ways over the matter of modus. It is this Thomistic reliance upon “principle of action” that makes Williams begin his work with Thomas as the clearest representative of the Farrer idiom of the Infinite. But the Summa has a full discussion of the inward Presence of Deity in the Person of Christ, as well as a careful endorsement of the classic expression of the Communicatio Idiomatum, “this man is God.” Of course, Williams is not aiming to be a Thomas interpreter here, and there is no reason he need treat the fullness of Thomas’ extensive corpus on Christology. The point here, rather, is that the reluctance to speak about natures, especially as they constitute the reality of Christ, has made the “composite” who just is the Incarnate Word difficult to articulate.

In truth, these two worries can be brought together as one: the stricture on Divine intervention in the world has severely constrained the Presence of the Divine Nature in the earthly Christ. Scripture not only speaks of Jesus’ action as God’s; it testifies also to the Fullness of the Deity dwelling bodily in Christ. There is, we might say, a “dimensive” Presence of the Divine Nature in the Incarnate One. Even as the Risen and Glorified Body of Christ is present under the dimensions of the gifts of the altar, so the Divine Nature indwells the corporeal existence of the man Jesus. This is His Deity. The “category error” that Williams spots in the notion of “composite nature” is certainly an error, if by that notion we mean a mixture (pace the Cappadocians!) or product of two natures into a novel third. But it is not an error, indeed it is a vital truth of Christology, if we mean by that term a single, sacred Person who exists in two natures: He, this very One, is composite. This conviction prompted scholastic theologians to try out “models of composition”: part-whole, whole-whole, substance-accident, soul-body, all earth-bound and frail attempts to think through how the Deity and humanity of Christ are joined in His Person. Christians are not wrong, I say, to point to Jesus and say, “God is there.” Indeed, it is the deepest, fullest example of Divine local Presence that any Christian could adduce. That this vision, too, is non-competitive, and consistent with a extra-Calvinisticum, is, I think, a proposition capable of strong defense. But it does cut against the current of Williams’ theology.

To these worries I think Williams might say: you have not considered the gravity of the Infinite. And that may well be so. But I think the notion of Infinity must subserve the Chalcedonian Definition, and I think it must do so in a fashion that vindicates the Church’s confession of Deity and humanity in the One Lord, Jesus Christ.

Neither of these worries, however, can touch the achievement of Christ the Heart of Creation. It is a complex, delicate, demanding, and wonderfully creative Christology. It places Christology within Trinity, a classic position long overdue for revival, and ties the Mystery of Christ directly to the life of discipleship and costly grace. This is what Christology is about, Williams says, and I am grateful for this sweeping vision of the finite Jesus who just is the act of the Infinite, Eternal Word.