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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Serie: Challenges in Contemporary Theology
- Sprache: Englisch
A fascinating collection of essays exploring a fresh contemporary approach to the person and doctrine of Jesus Christ
How should Christians think about the person of Jesus Christ today? In this volume, Sarah Coakley argues that this question has to be 'broken open' in new and unexpected ways: by an awareness of the deep spiritual demands of the christological task and its strikingly 'apophatic' dimensions; by a probing of the paradoxical ways in which Judaism and Christianity are drawn together in Christ, even by those issues which seem to 'break' them most decisively apart; and by an exploration of the mode of Christ's presence in the eucharist, with its intensification, 'breaking' and re-gathering of human desires. In this sequel to her celebrated earlier volume of essays, Powers and Submissions, Coakley returns to its unifying theme of divine power and contemplative submission, and weaves a new web of christological outcomes which remain replete with controversial implications for gender, spirituality and ethics.
The Broken Body will be of interest to those working in the fields of systematic theology, philosophy of religion, early Christian studies, Jewish/Christian relations, and feminist and gender theory.
"Fusing biblical and patristic theology, analytic philosophy, and spiritual tradition, Sarah Coakley has produced a fascinating, inspiring, and compelling account of Christ's identity, and its importance for questions of life."
—Professor Mark Wynn, University of Oxford
"Coakley argues that good Christology arises only from intellectual and spiritual postures learnt by encountering Christ openly. This volume subtly and powerfully facilitates such encounter, with God and, in him, with our neighbours, especially the Jewish people."
—Professor Judith Wolfe, University of St. Andrews
"Everything we have come to expect from Sarah Coakley is here in this extraordinary collection: wonderful clarity; startling and fruitful comparisons, within and beyond the theological canon; a brisk defiance of feminist conventions that in turn sharpens and deepens feminist analysis; a resistance to cheap theological certainties; and an abiding faithfulness, anchored in Christ, borne aloft by the Spirit. Christology is here shown to embrace abjection and jouissance, to advocate sacrifice that is itself the end of patriarchal violence, and to demand a eucharistic sharing that is incomplete without solidarity to the outcast and the poor, themselves the face of the living Christ. In these essays Coakley exemplifies the semiotic richness of priest and scholar, a breaking open of theological reserves that will transgress, startle, renew, instruct. This is sacrifice, re-made."
—Professor Katherine Sonderegger, Virginia Theological Seminary
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Preface
Acknowledgments
Prologue: The Broken Body
The Christological Question
How to
Speak
of Christ: The Positive and the Negative Poles
Christology and Judaism: What is at Stake?
Christ, the Eucharist and the Broken Body: Sacrifice and Its Moral Demands
Conclusions: Christology, ‘Apophasis’ and the Broken Body
PART 1: Seeking The Identity of Christ
1 On the Identity of the Risen Jesus: In Quest of the ‘Apophatic’ Christ
Introduction: The Problem of the ‘Identity’ of Jesus
Cautionary Tales from the Bultmann/Käsemann Debate: The Historical Approach to Jesus’s Identity
Christological Identity as ‘Hypostasis’: The Ontological Approach to Jesus’s Person
Recognizing the ‘Anonymous’ (Risen) Jesus
Conclusions
2 Does
Kenōsis
Rest on a Mistake? Three
Kenotic
Models in Patristic Exegesis
Introduction: Is
Kenōsis
Necessary?
Philippians 2 in Patristic Exegesis
Contemporary Philosophical Implications
Conclusions
3 ‘Mingling’ in Gregory of Nyssa’s Christology: A Reconsideration
Introduction: Re‐Thinking Gregory of Nyssa’s Christology of Union
Outline of the Thesis: The Misunderstanding of Gregory of Nyssa’s Christological Use of ‘Mixture’ Terms
‘Mixture’ Revisited: Nyssen’s Strategies for Describing the Indescribable in Christ
Conclusions: Christology, Soteriology and the Ascetic Task in Gregory of Nyssa
4 What Does Chalcedon Solve and What Does It Not? Some Reflections on the Status and Meaning of the Chalcedonian ‘Definition’
Introduction: What Can Chalcedon Solve?
Chalcedon as ‘Linguistic Regulation’
Incarnation Language as ‘Metaphorical’
Incarnation Language as ‘Literal’
Conclusions: Chalcedon as ‘Horos’
PART 2: Israel and Christ in Contestation?
5 ‘Broken’ Monotheism? Intra‐Divine Complexity and the Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity
Introduction
Systematic Background: Recent Christian Attempts to Alleviate ‘Supersessionism’
Why Three? The Phenomenon of Deep Prayer and Its Implications for Election
Are There Intimations of ‘Proto‐trinitarianism’ in Jewish Understandings of Prayer and Election?
Three Jewish Loci of ‘Triadic’ Prayer: God Praying to God in the Elect
Conclusions
6 On the ‘Fearfulness’ of Forgiveness: Jewish and Christian Perspectives
Introduction: The ‘Impossibility’ of Forgiveness
Psalm 130. 4 and Its Interpreters, I: Jewish Tradition
Psalm 130. 4 (129. 4 LXX) and Its Interpreters, II: Christian Tradition
Systematic Conclusions: On the Fearfulness of Forgiveness
7 On Clouds and Veils: Divine Presence and ‘Feminine’ Secrets in Revelation and Nature
Introduction and Statement of Theses
Cloud and Veil in Exodus and Its Rabbinic Interpretation
Paul and the Superseded Veil: The Christian Disjunction between Veil and Cloud
The ‘Femininized’ Veil: Erotic Intimacy with the Divine, or Gendered Subordination?
Nature’s ‘Veil’, ‘Noumenal’ Darkness and the Modern Scientist
8 In Defence of Sacrifice: Gender, Selfhood and the Binding of Isaac
Introduction: Where Three Roads Meet
The Post‐modern Problem of Sacrifice
Why Is Isaac a ‘Woman’? Rabbinical Exegesis and the Interruption of Patriarchal Violence
The Sacrifice of Sexuality and Gender: ‘Threeness’ Interrupts ‘Twoness’
Conclusions
PART 3: The Eucharist, Desire and Fragmentation
9
In Persona Christi
: Who, or Where, Is Christ at the Altar?
Introduction
I
‘Inter Insigniores’
(1976) and the Use of Thomas Aquinas’s Theme of
‘In Persona Christi’
II Disputing the Thomistic Reading: Dennis Ferrara and Sara Butler
III Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) on the Eucharist and Gender
IV The Woman at the Altar: The Cosmological Disturbance of the Incarnation
10 Sacrifice Re‐visited: Blood and Gender
Introduction: Review and Forecast
Sacrifice Contested: The Meaning(s) of ‘Sacrifice’
Jesus and Sacrifice
The Woman Sacrificer: Patriarchalism Disturbed
Conclusions
11 Gift Re‐told: Spirals of Grace
Introduction: Review and Forecast
Why Gift? The Evolution of a Post‐modern Theological Debate
Gift and Trinitarian ‘Desire’: Economics and Gender
Spirals of Grace: The Divine Economy and Christ in ‘the Poor’
Conclusion: The Eucharist as the ‘Breaking’ of Desire
12 Real Presence, Real Absence: The Eucharist and the ‘Apophatic’ Christ
Introduction: Review and Forecast
Medieval Diversity and the Thomistic ‘Theory’ of Transubstantiation
‘Resistant Markers’ in Thomas’s Account of Transubstantiation: In Pursuit of a ‘Discerning Apophaticism’
Transition to Contemporary Expositions of Transubstantiation
Marion’s ‘Gift’ and the Occlusion of Gender: Pickstock’s ‘Ecstasy’ and the Problem of Enfleshment
Conclusions: Flesh and Blood – The Eucharist, Desire and Affective Transformation
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 Rembrandt van Rjin (1635), ‘The Sacrifice of Abraham’. Rembrandt ...
Figure 8.2 Rembrandt van Rjin (1635), ‘The Sacrifice of Isaac’. Rembrandt / ...
Figure 8.3 Drawing of the
akedah
by a disturbed boy of 14 years, attending a...
Figure 8.4 Abraham and Isaac, Princeton University, 1978–1979, cast bronze. ...
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 Northwest German Master, ‘Eucharistic Man of Sorrows with the Al...
Figure 10.2 Giovanna Bellini, ‘Pietà Donà delle Rose’, c. 1505: Mary cradles...
Figure 10.3 Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, ‘Madonna and the Consecrated Wafe...
Guide
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Preface
Acknowledgments
Prologue: The Broken Body
Begin Reading
Index
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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Challenges in Contemporary Theology
Series Editors: Gareth Jones and Lewis AyresMing Hua Theological College, Hong Kong and University of Durham, UK
Challenges in Contemporary Theology is a series aimed at producing clear orientations in, and research on, areas of “challenge” in contemporary theology. These carefully co‐ordinated books engage traditional theological concerns with mainstreams in modern thought and culture that challenge those concerns. The “challenges” implied are to be understood in two senses: those presented by society to contemporary theology, and those posed by theology to society.
Published
These Three are One: The Practice of Trinitarian TheologyDavid S. Cunningham
After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of PhilosophyCatherine Pickstock
Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality and TheologyMark A. McIntosh
Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological InterpretationStephen E. Fowl
Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of ChristWilliam T. Cavanaugh
Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way into the Triune GodEugene F. Rogers, Jr
On Christian TheologyRowan Williams
The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and LiteraturePaul S. Fiddes
Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy, and GenderSarah Coakley
A Theology of EngagementIan S. Markham
Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and TheologyGerard Loughlin
Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian TheologyMatthew Levering
Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith PerspectiveDavid Burrell
Keeping God’s SilenceRachel Muers
Christ and CultureGraham Ward
Theology in the Public Square: Church, Academy and NationGavin D’Costa
Rewritten Theology: Aquinas After His ReadersMark D. Jordan
God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian EthicsSamuel Wells
The Trial of the Witnesses: The Rise and Decline of Postliberal TheologyPaul J. DeHart
Theology and FamiliesAdrian Thatcher
The Shape of TheologyDavid F. Ford
The Vietnam War and Theologies of MemoryJonathan Tran
In Adam’s Fall: A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original SinIan A. McFarland
Divine Illumination: The History and Future of Augustine’s Theory of KnowledgeLydia Schumacher
Towards a Jewish‐Muslim‐Christian TheologyDavid B. Burrell
Scriptural InterpretationDarren Sarisky
Rethinking Christian Identity: Doctrine and DiscipleshipMedi Ann Volpe
Aquinas and the Supreme Court: Race, Gender, and the Failure of Natural Law in Thomas’s Biblical CommentariesEugene F. Rogers, Jr
Visioning AugustineJohn C. Cavadini
The Broken Body: Israel, Christ and FragmentationSarah Coakley
THE BROKEN BODY
Israel, Christ and Fragmentation
Sarah Coakley
This edition first published 2024© 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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The right of Sarah Coakley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication DataNames: Coakley, Sarah, 1951– author.Title: The broken body : Israel, Christ and fragmentation / Sarah Coakley, Harvard University Department of Religion Cambridge, US.Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., [2024] | Includes index.Identifiers: LCCN 2024004262 (print) | LCCN 2024004263 (ebook) | ISBN 9781405189231 (paperback) | ISBN 9781118780824 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781118780800 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Jesus Christ–Person and offices. | Jesus Christ–History of doctrines.Classification: LCC BT198 .C538 2024 (print) | LCC BT198 (ebook) | DDC 232–dc23/eng/20240229LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024004262LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024004263
Cover Design: WileyCover Illustration: Noyon Missal, French, thirteenth century, MS Typ 120, fol 4 seq 7, illumination of Synagōgē and Ecclēsia, sacrificing the Lamb of God. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Reproduced with permission.
For Arthur, Theodore (Teddy) and Simon Claude, the next generation of seekers for Christ
Preface
This book is a successor to an earlier volume in the Challenges in Contemporary Theology series, which was entitled Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).1 I characterized that earlier book, at the time, as my first volume of Gesammelte Schriften, an accompaniment to an emerging project in systematic theology which was, and is, also ongoing.2 Unlike that earlier volume of essays, however (where the cluster of themes which united its content were only identified retroactively), this current book has been planned for a long time, and the chapters drawn together here were always intended to fit together into a cumulative argument about contemporary Christology and its purviews. The core theme of ‘brokenness’ (in all its ambiguity and richness), and its relation to various forms of ‘apophaticism’, in both speech and practice, is explored analytically in the Prologue that follows.
Over the years in which these essays were researched and written, I have accumulated a great number of debts to other scholars and colleagues, discussion partners in Jewish/Christian dialogue (both in Israel and elsewhere), and above all to my former students and research assistants at Harvard and Cambridge. In the last category I must first and foremost thank Philip McCosker, Mark Nussberger, Shai Held, Michon Matthiesen, Timothy Dalrymple, Cameron Partridge, Hjördis Becker‐Lindenthal, and (in the very last stages of editorial work), Amanda Bourne in Alexandria, VA. This book simply could not have taken the shape it has without their extraordinary practical, linguistic and theological assistance of every sort: gratias ago vobis.
But I am no less grateful to another ‘great cloud of witnesses’, some alas no longer living, whose influence and conversation is writ large throughout these pages. Amongst these I must mention especially, with deep appreciation (and in the case of the first names in this list, in piam memoriam): †Joseph Blenkinsopp, †Joseph (Jossi) Dan, †David Hartman, †Aaron Lazare, †Robert Murray, S.J., †Krister Stendahl, †John Webster; and Gary A. Anderson, Erik Aurelius, Elitzur Bar‐Asher, Anthony Baxter, John Behr, Markus Bockmuehl, John W. Bowker, Brian Britt, Sebastian Brock, Jack Caputo, Andrew Chester, Fr. Maximos (Nicholas) Constas, Richard Cross, Brian E. Daley, S.J., Stephen T. Davis, Paul DeHart, C. Stephen Evans, Michael Fishbane, David F. Ford, Yehuda (Jerome) Gellman, Alon Goshen‐Gottstein, Richard B. Hays, Moshe Halbertal, Charles Hefling, William Horbury, Peter Kang, Cleo McNelly Kearns, Ed Kessler, Arthur Kleinman, Martin Laird, O.S.A., Jon Levenson, Andrew Louth, Christoph Markschies, Giulio Maspero, Bruce McCormack, John Milbank, Jeremy Milgrom, R. W. L. Moberly, David Newheiser, David Novak, Gerald O’Collins, S.J., Kimberly C. Patton, Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Eugene Rogers, Christian Schlenker, Jon Schofer, Kate Sonderegger, Carol Steiker, Jesper Svartvik, Richard Swinburne, Kathryn Tanner, Keith Ward, Michael Welker, Merold Westphal, and Rowan Williams.
The second section of this book consists of four hermeneutical investigations of topics that supposedly divide Judaism and Christianity definitively. These essays were originally explored in very rich and deep conversations at the Shalom Hartman Institute, the Tantur Ecumenical Institute, and the Swedish Theological Institute, in Israel; and at conferences supported by the Templeton Foundation in Cambridge, and by the Research Centre of Interdisciplinarity and Theology in Heidelberg. I am greatly indebted to all these places of learning and of scholarly and inter‐religious conviviality, and to the remarkable people who lead them.
The last four chapters of this book were originally presented as ‘named’ lectures in two venues: as the Hensley Henson Lectures at Oxford; and later (in slightly revised form) as the John Albert Hall Lectures at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. I am most grateful to those who made my sojourns in those two places both memorable personally, and also suggestive of the need for further reflection and revision of my thinking, now at last undertaken.
I must also express my deep gratitude to the editors of this Challenges series, Gareth Jones and Lewis Ayres, whose patience with me has been nothing short of heroic; and to the many editors and sub‐editors at Wiley‐Blackwell over the years who have guided this project to completion, in particular: Rebecca Harkin, Juliet Booker, Clelia Petracca, Laura (Adsett) Matthews, Ed Robinson, Martin Tribe and Madhurima Thapa.
Without the support that my own erstwhile university institutions (Harvard, Cambridge) have provided over the last years, and, more particularly, the generous grants, sabbatical time, and financial backing which have been garnered from the Leverhulme and McDonald Foundations of late, probably even now this book would have not have come to completion. All these forms of generosity and trust remind us that gift and sacrifice are not opposites (as is also discussed in this volume), but coterminous and cooperative undertakings only fully comprehensible in the economy of grace.
Sarah Coakley
Alexandria, VA
Candlemas, 2024
Notes
1
This is now prospectively planned to be re‐published by Wiley‐Blackwell in a 2
nd
edition, with a new authorial essay on critical responses and debate included.
2
The first volume was published as
God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity'
(Cambridge: C.U.P., 2013), and the second volume,
Sin, Racism and Divine Darkness: An Essay ‘On Human Nature'
(Cambridge: C.U.P., 2025) is forthcoming.
Acknowledgments
With the exception of the ‘Prologue’ and Chapter 10 (‘Sacrifice Re‐visited: Blood and Gender’), all the essays in this volume have appeared in earlier settings, but have been included here with either light or more significant revisions. Where the copyright lies with the earlier publisher, I am grateful for permission to reproduce the material. The details of these earlier publications are as follows:
‘The Identity of the Risen Jesus: Finding Jesus Christ in the Poor’, in eds. Beverly Roberts Gaventa and Richard B. Hays, Seeking the Identity of Jesus: A Pilgrimage (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 301–319. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
‘Does Kenōsis Rest on a Mistake? Three Kenotic Models in Patristic Exegesis’, in ed C. Stephen Evans, Exploring Kenotic Christology: The Self‐Emptying God (Oxford: O.U.P., 2006), 246–264. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.
‘ “Mingling” in Gregory of Nyssa’s Christology: A Reconsideration’, in eds. Andreas Schuele and Günter Thomas, Who is Jesus Christ for Us Today? Pathways to Contemporary Christology (a Festschrift for Michael Welker) (Louisville KY: Westminster/John Knox, 2009), 72−84. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.
‘What Does Chalcedon Solve and What Does it Not? Some Reflections on the Status and Meaning of the Chalcedonian “Definition” ’, in eds. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, S.J. and Gerald O’Collins, S.J., The Incarnation: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the Son of God (Oxford: O.U.P., 2002), 143−163. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.
‘Re‐Thinking Jewish/Christian Divergence on the “Image of the Divine”: the Problem of Intra‐Divine Complexity and the Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity’, in eds. Michael Welker and William Schweiker, Images of the Divine and Cultural Orientations: Jewish, Christian and Islamic Voices (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2015), 133–149. Reproduced by kind permission of Michael Welker.
‘On the Fearfulness of Forgiveness: Psalm 130:4 and its Theological Implications’, in eds. Andreas Andreopoulos, Augustine Casiday and Carol Harrison, Meditations of the Heart: The Psalms in Early Christian Thought and Practice, a Festschrift for Andrew Louth (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 33−51. Reproduced with permission of the publisher.
‘On Clouds and Veils: Divine Presence and “Feminine” Secrets in Revelation and Nature’, in ed. John W. Bowker, Knowing the Unknowable: Science and Religions on God and the Universe (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 123−159. Reproduced with permission of the publisher.
‘In Defense of Sacrifice: Gender, Selfhood, and the Binding of Isaac’, in eds. Linda Martín Alcoff and John D. Caputo, Feminism, Sexuality and the Return of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 17−38. Reproduced with permission of the publisher.
‘ “In Persona Christi”: Who, or Where, is Christ at the Altar?’, in A Man of Many Parts: Essays in Honor of John Westerdale Bowker on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday, ed. Eugene E. Lemcio with an Introduction by Rowan Williams (Eugene OR: Pickwick Publications, 2015), 95–112. Reproduced by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.
‘The Woman at the Altar: Cosmological Disturbance or Gender Fluidity?’, The Anglican Theological Review 86 (2004), 75−93 (a small section of this article appears in Chapter 9: permission granted by the Executive Director and Managing Editor, The Anglican Theological Review).
‘Why Gift? Gift, Gender, and Trinitarian Relations in Milbank and Tanner’, Scottish Journal of Theology 16 (2008), 224−235. © 2008 Scottish Journal of Theology. Reprinted with permission.
‘Transubstantiation and its Contemporary Renditions: Returning Eucharistic Presence to the Body, Gender, and Affect’, in “Yes, Well …” Exploring the Past, Present and Future of the Church: Essays in Honor of John W. Coakley, ed. James Hart Brumm (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformed Church Press [Eerdmans], 2016), 61–81. Reformed Church Press, 475 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10115, USA. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission.
The quotation in the ‘Prologue’, n. 39, from Elizabeth Jennings’s poem ‘Easter’, is reproduced from her The Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2012), with kind permission of David Higham Associates Ltd.
The illustrations which appear in this book (on the front cover, and in Chapters 8 and 10), are reproduced with the gracious permission of the following libraries, publishers, and art institutions:
Front cover: Noyon Missal, French, thirteenth century, MS Typ 120, fol 4 seq 7, illumination of Synagōgē and Ecclēsia, sacrificing the Lamb of God. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Reproduced with permission.
Figure 8.1: Rembrandt van Rijn, ‘The Sacrifice of Abraham’, 1655, etching. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Reproduced with permission.
Figure 8.2: Rembrandt van Rijn, ‘The Sacrifice of Isaac’, 1635, oil painting. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Reproduced with permission. Photograph by Vladimir Terebenin, © The State Hermitage Museum.
Figure 8.3: ‘Drawing of the akedah by a disturbed boy of 14 years, attending a Child Guidance Clinic’. Reproduced from Erich Wellisch, Isaac and Oedipus: A Study in Biblical Psychology of the Sacrifice of Isaac, The Akedah (New York: Humanities Press, 1954), facing p. 97, by permission of the Taylor and Francis Group, Academic Books Permissions.
Figure 8.4: George Segal, ‘Abraham and Isaac: In Memory of May 4, 1970, Kent State University’, 1978–1979, cast bronze. The statue stands on the campus of Princeton University, Princeton, NJ: The John B. Putnam Memorial Collection, Princeton University, partial gift of the Mildred Andrews Fund. Photograph © Getty Images, reproduced with permission.
Figure 10.1: Unknown northwest German Master, ‘Eucharistic Man of Sorrows with the Allegorical Figure of Caritas’, c. 1470. Wallfar‐Richartz‐Museum & Fondation Corboud. Reproduced by permission. Photograph © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln, rba_c010594.
Figure 10.2: Giovanna Bellini, ‘Pietà Donà delle Rose’, c. 1505, Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice. Photograph © Getty Images, reproduced with permission.
Figure 10.3: Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, ‘Madonna and the Consecrated Wafer’, 1865, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In the public domain.
The publishers apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in the next edition or reprint of this book.
Prologue: The Broken Body
This book is concerned with how and where Christians encounter Jesus Christ and acknowledge his identity, in all its mystery and fulness. It also asks, secondly, how believers can, or should, then best express what they believe about him. And finally, and thirdly, it begins to probe how that expression is bound up with what they necessarily do to live out that belief and embrace its demands, not only through Christian sacramental and ecclesial practices, but also on the borderlands of the church, and especially in the historic and fraught relationship of Christianity to Judaism. For it is thus, I propose, that they come to ‘know’ Christ ‘more nearly’, both through habituation and continual surprise.
These three tasks constitute, as I see it, the fundamental concerns of any attempt at a ‘Christology’ – that is, any adequate expression of the contours of belief in Christ as the salvific God/Man. But beyond and beneath these initial concerns, and perhaps more challengingly, this book asks in various ways what initial human presumptions or attitudes have to be broken in order for any proper response to emerge to these core riddles of Christian faith in relating to Jesus Christ. That issue is my central concern in what follows immediately in this Prologue. The lines of thought about such ‘brokenness’ may, perforce, not be immediately familiar ones, and certainly they are ones which in some cases could court controversy and critique; and hence the need to explain them anticipatorily. But as I shall argue here, they are vital for any rich and discerning understanding of the christological task.
I should also immediately make it clear at the outset, moreover, that this is therefore a book of essays that should be read as prolegomena to any future Christology, rather than as a full and substantial Christology per se.1 That is, I am engaged in this book in preliminary explorations,2 which will shape what I finally wish to say about Christ as the fulsome revelatory divine presence in any ‘systematic’ theology worthy of the name. But these preliminary explorations are necessary steps, because none of them is completely obvious in the current theological terrain, and several of them may even seem surprising or contentious. Let me now explain.
The Christological Question
‘Who is Christ?’ This is a deceptively simple question, and it hides a multitude of possible theoretic ‘sins’ and differences of opinion only scarcely below the surface of immediate theological consciousness. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the most perspicacious commentators on this topic in the modern period, left only lecture notes on the problem (‘the christological question’, as he himself called it);3 but he was one of the few theologians in the twentieth century to have pinpointed with such insight its real richness and its accompanying difficulties. It is not for nothing that his analysis starts with the insistence that ‘silence’ should precede any attempt to answer this question – since Christ, he says, is essentially inexpressible, whilst at the same time supremely revelatory: thus, ‘The silence of the Church is silence before the Word’.4 A true Lutheran, however, Bonhoeffer goes on immediately to fulminate – contentiously, of course – against the suggestion that this silence might be the silence of what he calls the ‘mystics’; for he takes it that their ‘dumbness’ would be both solitary and self‐referential. Instead, he says, an essential paradox has to be grasped at the outset of the christological task: ‘To speak of Christ means to keep silent; to keep silent about Christ means to speak. When the Church speaks rightly out of a proper silence, then Christ is proclaimed’.5
Ironically, however, the ‘mystic’ in the Western tradition who most closely anticipated this paradoxical insight of the Lutheran Bonhoeffer about a ‘proper silence’ before Christ was the sixteenth century Carmelite friar, John of the Cross, only a slightly later contemporary of Luther himself. As John wrote in one of his most famous aphorisms: ‘The Father spoke one Word, which was his Son, and this Word he speaks always in eternal silence, and in silence it must be heard by the soul’.6
The essays that follow in this book cannot therefore be said to be straightforwardly ‘Bonhoefferian’, for – amongst other differences from him – they engage insistently with earlier traditions of ‘mystical theology’ (patristic and medieval) towards which Bonhoeffer harboured a certain suspicion, and which find a certain climax in John of the Cross himself. But what they do share with Bonhoeffer is an intense interest in analyzing what can, and cannot, be said in the task of Christology (out of a ‘proper silence’), and what therefore remains the necessary arena of divine revelatory mystery, indeed the unfinished business – at least from our human perspective – in any authentically Spirit‐filled response to the crucified and resurrected Jesus. And what goes along with this insight is an attempt to clarify first and afresh, as Bonhoeffer also did so presciently and in his own way, what must thereby be the relationship between certain primary elements in any modern christological armoury: the ‘Christ’ as biblically proclaimed in the New Testament; the ‘historical Jesus’ as earnestly probed behind the biblical texts by modern critical scholarship; and the patristic tradition of metaphysical speculation as to Christ’s ‘person’ and ‘natures’.
Understanding how these three different genres of reflection on Christ relate, or should relate, in our quest for Christ’s ‘identity’ is one of the most complex and subtle questions of contemporary Christology: it is, after all, a special conundrum created by the modern period in its forging of a newly intense appeal to the second element in this triad.7 I choose to tackle this issue head‐on in the opening chapter of this book. Immediately, and out of this initial reflection, an argument of my own starts to emerge about how any proper response to the identity and presence of the risen Christ is necessarily ‘apophatic’ in a particular sense, that is, ‘broken open’ to the unexpected and the mysterious in the Spirit’s brokerage of a form of displacement from our natural expectations and categories.8 We would – reasonably enough, or so it seems – like to catch and hold what we might know and recognize in Christ, to make it our own possession, even express it in purely propositional terms; and the modern ‘quest’ for Jesus as an object of critical historical investigation inevitably courted, from the start, this ambition to probe to a new level of certainty about what could be verified about his life, teaching and person, as if the mystery that inevitably surrounds God in Godself could somehow be dispelled or moderated in the case of his Son. For often we still presume that getting at the ‘historical’, or ‘human’, Jesus will be the proper means of taking hold of what we need to know in responding to a more elusive divine revelation.9
Worse: the ambition may even be extended to a felt need to justify, by historical and empirical means, the very metaphysical claims enshrined in later credal statements about the second Person of the Trinity. But this, I submit, is a vain and misplaced propulsion – a ‘category mistake’ – as is argued at some length in Chapter 1. Attempting to map the modern ‘historical Jesus’ directly onto the historic creeds in this way is fraught with confusion,10 not least because it also sometimes attempts to short‐circuit, and even displace, the issue of what it is to encounter the risen Jesus – without which the question of the ‘identity’ of Christ is idolatrously shrunk from the outset, and the historic creeds denuded of all their soteriological power.
It follows, as I go on to argue further in Chapter 1, that although the modern ‘historian’s Jesus’ inevitably and rightly retains enormous and enticing interest for all Christians who seek to deepen their understanding of the identity of Christ in his historical manifestation (even though this quest remains fraught with endless scholarly disagreements of interpretation), it cannot be either the justificatory starting point, nor the constraining and final criterion, for his divine reality: this is one of the most significant areas in which an apophatic ‘saying no’ has to occur in Christology. Yet, in a slightly different sense of ‘saying no’, this ‘historian’s Jesus’ can indeed have a crucial role, as I also argue in Chapter 1, in being deployed strategically against ideological, distorted or idolatrous renditions of that same Jesus. In other words, we must say ‘no’ to attempts to defuse or ignore his risen mystery, just as we also say ‘no’ to attempts to hijack his risen reality for falsely political, distorting, or even merely complacent ecclesiastical ends.
It is thus not coincidental that Bonhoeffer was the modern theologian so particularly concerned to locate the (to him, judiciously circumscribed11) importance of the ‘historian’s Jesus’, at the same time as he also cautioned against the dangers of an idolatrous rendition of the same project: his own political and social context, we can now see more clearly, was quite crucial here for his perspective and insight.12 Writing with his ‘back up against the wall’ (as another great christologian of the late modern period would later call it13), Bonhoeffer the Lutheran was teaching for a state‐church that was at this very time in danger of completely idolatrous corruption by Nazi ideology; and thus he was necessarily expressing his own theological, indeed specifically christological, resistance. His ‘saying no’ was therefore not merely an attention to an appropriate set of semantic rules for Christology, but a lived‐out practice of spiritual and political protest. And this was in relation to the very Christ whose Word was speaking to him afresh out of the primordial divine silence to which his teaching and preaching witnessed.
Thus, once the necessary simultaneity of dazzling revelation and dark hiddenness in our response to the risen Christ is better understood, we also begin to see that even to restrict our christological reflections to the three sources of reflection already mentioned (the ‘biblical Christ’, the ‘historian’s Jesus’, and the Christ of conciliar definitions) is itself too constrained an understanding of the christological undertaking and its necessary points of reference; we must attend also and always to the social context of our christological utterances,14 but also at the same time to the sometimes‐shattering pervasiveness of the presence of Christ in our midst, at least for those attuned to receive it: for ‘Christ plays in ten thousand places’, as Gerard Manley Hopkins once expressed this mystery poetically.15 I go on therefore towards the end of Chapter 1 to unfurl an appeal to the patristic tradition of ‘spiritual sensation’ to account for the epistemological conditions under which the Spirit can indeed ‘break open’ our hearts and minds to the pervasive and transforming reality of Christ’s risen presence in these ‘ten thousand places’: in Word, in sacrament, in the ‘body of Christ’ which is the church, but especially too in moral acts of mercy and compassion to the oppressed and the poor.
But what exactly, then, does this ‘breaking open’ to the full reality of Christ, as so far discussed, actually connote? Is there not a danger here of mere obfuscation on the one hand (the apophatic ‘darkness’ motif as merely blinding, élitist or confusing, as some might cynically interpret it), or, on the other, of the naïve valorization of multiple experiential agendas, under the false aegis of ‘mystical’ appeals to the presence of Christ? The answer, of course, is that both these spiritual dangers are always and ever on offer (we can never dispel them completely, and that is why spiritual discernment in this area is so important). But that does not mean that we cannot do sterling work in continuing to probe and clarify the epistemological, semantic, metaphysical, and moral questions which this christological arena holds up to us. And the rest of this Prologue will now be devoted to this task.
How to Speak of Christ: The Positive and the Negative Poles
So far was have discussed a ‘breaking open’ of consciousness to the risen Christ which is the creative starting point of any deep reflection on his personal identity, brokered in the Spirit. This is a theological point of essentially epistemological (and thus also wider ‘spiritual’) significance. But this lesson has immediate consequences, as already hinted, for a different, this time semantic, sense of ‘apophaticism’ as applied to all our faltering attempts to describe, define, or comprehend through any kind of linguistic expression, what Christ is ‘for us’. In Chapter 4 of this book I make an attempt to unravel this issue in specific reference to the so‐called ‘Chalcedonian Definition’, the document propounded by a decree of the church in the mid‐fifth century (451 CE) to provide a conciliar norm for any future christological ‘orthodoxy’. The immediate political fall‐out from this attempt is well‐known,16 and was profoundly messy and divisive ecclesiastically; but what is less agreed upon, even now, is quite what the ‘Definition’ was actually attempting to achieve in the first place, and what it therefore should connote now for the Christian faithful. The answer I supply in Chapter 4 is my own response to the question of the spiritual importance of understanding what can, and cannot, be grasped about the reality of Christ in such (rightly)‐attempted credal protections against heresy.
This task involves pinpointing another form of ‘saying no’, in the sense of linguistically protecting a unique mystery whilst also ‘breaking open’ consciousness to further horizons of christological possibility. The word ‘horizon’ (as opposed to ‘definition’), is in fact a less misleading translation of the original Greek term used for this text (horos). What it is attempting to do, therefore, as I argue in some detail in Chapter 4, is to indicate the boundaries of what can, and what cannot, be constrained or explained in any formal attempt such as this to protect the unique metaphysical mystery of the God/Man; and at the same time it gestures invitingly beyond the edges of what can be said into an encounter with the divine reality itself, displayed incarnationally in Christ. By the same token (utilizing a combination of the ‘positive’ and the ‘negative’ modes, linguistically understood), it also deliberately uses key technical terms (hypostasis, phusis) that are themselves, in a sense, intentionally ‘apophatic’ in their minimalism. One can, of course, attempt some basic indication, in explicating the meaning of the ‘Definition’, of what Christ’s ‘person’ (hypostasis) and ‘natures’ (phuseis) denote here, and even – provisionally – how they might be related; but at the time of the writing of the ‘Definition’ the deeper philosophical aspects of these questions were by no means fully plumbed, and the use of these key terms was therefore seemingly intended more as a wedge against various forms of error than as a full clarification. However, we should not mistake this ‘apophatic’ strategy (as some moderns influentially have done, under one form of an appeal to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy), as merely the creation of linguistic ‘rules’ in quest of a form of semantic hygiene, as if strong metaphysical assertions were not also being made quite emphatically.17 This latter presumption, I argue, presents a false disjunction; for we should neither mistake the Chalcedonian ‘Definition’ for a full propositional explication of the riches of Christ’s reality, nor yet for any withdrawal from a profound underlying metaphysical confidence about the irreducible uniqueness of the incarnation itself. Both these aspects of the christological task are fully compatible under a suitably ‘apophatic’ rendition.
When we then turn back to some of the pre‐Chalcedonian christologians with such lessons in mind, it may be a surprise to find that we can now read at least some of them more charitably than heretofore – less as false approximations to a later, ‘achieved’, conciliar truth, and more as subtle explorations of the relation between given biblical authority, tentative philosophical explication, and necessary divine mystery. I discuss these matters in Chapters 2 and 3 of this volume in relation to two central themes in the Christology of Gregory of Nyssa (c.335–c.395), expositions which I believe to have been gravely misunderstood and misjudged by many in the tradition – at least until recently.18
To be sure, Nyssen’s christological writings are ad hoc and unsystematic; we cannot claim that they represent a finished product, and the full coherence of what he proposes is often – at least at first blush – elusive and unresolved. But what emerges from a closer examination of his treatment of the two controversial christological themes that I examine here (‘Kenosis’ in ch. 2, and ‘Mingling’ in ch. 3), is a pattern of christological thinking which further amplifies our understanding of Christology as a ‘breaking open’ of ‘apophatic’ consciousness. We should not of course be surprised to find Gregory excelling in this genre, given his foundational contribution to the resolution of the later Arian controversy, and his particularly novel and perspicacious account of the paradoxical relation of trinitarian and ‘apophatic’ thinking therein.19 But perhaps what is less well understood is how this same sensibility is present also in his christological treatises. What we see here, I propose, is an implicit christological ‘method’ (worthy of further reflection and analysis), in which a richly ‘semiotic’20approach to a variety of relevant biblical texts, symbols and metaphors, which mutually bombard and co‐inform one another, is conjoined with an equally rich exploration of pagan philosophical materials of relevance which might supply analytic clarification of the matter in hand. In applying these insights doctrinally, however, the existing philosophical tropes are never allowed by Nyssen simply to control or dominate without some correction, but are brought into new alliance and counterpoint with the vying biblical materials, and in interaction with the undergirding spiritual practice of the theological investigator. Such is the locus, according to Gregory, of a suitably ‘apophatic’ rendition of christological revelation.21 In large part, I argue at the end of these chapters, Gregory thereby anticipates the insights of the slightly‐later ‘mystical’ theologian, Dionysius the Areopagite, for whom appropriate theological utterance is always a matter of ‘saying yes’, ‘saying no’, and then saying ‘no’ even to the ‘no’.22 For only thus does one advance on a three‐tiered journey into God which is not simply a matter of a discerningly ‘apophatic’ semantic theory (important as that is), but more fundamentally of an extended religious epistemology of personal transformation and insight. The ultimate goal is a participation in God, not simply the production of an exacting linguistic account of what can, and cannot, be said propositionally about God and the God/Man who is Christ.
Christology and Judaism: What is at Stake?
Up to now I have made no direct mention of the major christological complications raised by the indissoluble – but historically heinous and tragic – relation of Christianity to Judaism, although this theme has necessarily lurked in our earlier discussion of ‘the historical Jesus’ (Jesus the Jew). In one sense, of course, this christological ‘complication’ and its core attendant question is obvious: is Jesus the long‐expected Jewish ‘Messiah’, or is he not? And is any Christian doctrine of Christ therefore necessarily ‘supersessionist’, or is it not? Much depends here, as we shall see, on the very definition (and remaining ambiguity) of the term ‘supersessionism’.23 The second section of this volume is devoted to a set of complex hermeneutical explorations which aim to ‘break open’ this issue afresh – in a yet further sense of that metaphor of ‘breaking’ already explored; and it argues, cumulatively, through these several essays, that no Christology worthy of the name can duck or evade the matter of Christianity’s historic, and ongoing, relation to Israel. Whatever it is that Christians want to say of Christ must therefore be integrally connected to his, and Christianity’s, rootedness in Hebrew Scripture and tradition: the theme of ultimate eschatological re‐convergence between Judaism and Christianity, unforgettably bequeathed to us by the apostle Paul in Romans 9–11, thus remains as fresh as ever, and necessarily as yet unfinished.24
My method, in the four chapters that follow in Part II of this volume, is exploratory and preliminary in relation to this key topic, and by the same token it is also essentially exegetical: I do not attempt here to settle this issue in some more ambitious, analytic, or philosophical mode.25 And that is entirely advised. Taking four core themes that are normally associated with ‘breaking’ Judaism and Christianity apart (in a negative or exclusionary sense of Christian ‘supersessionism’), what is discovered in all four cases is actually an extraordinary hidden nexus of ongoing shared theological insight, arguably the harbinger of a deeper unity that is still being worked out through and between the two traditions. But this convergence is often manifested most vibrantly, as it turns out, in rather hidden, forgotten, or ‘mystical’ texts that characteristically disclose their wisdom only through deep and patient practices of spiritual reading and attention. This in itself may once again be significant, as we shall now see.
The first such exploration (Chapter 5) proposes the seemingly strange idea of an incipient Jewish proto‐‘trinitarianism’, to be discerned in a number of texts and traditions within Judaism itself; and it thus breaks open the possibility of a deep remaining congruence of Jewish and Christian ‘monotheisms’ from this surprising perspective. The proposal is that the christological nettle that is so problematic for Judaism in relation to Christianity cannot be grasped without placing it first within its rightfully trinitarian context: as in Chapter 1 (above), the Spirit’s relational position in the Godhead is crucial for understanding how monotheism is both fully retained yet ‘broken open’ to Messianic presence.26 And this involves a subtle exploration of a theme that Judaism and Christianity share in their deepest roots: that our profoundest relation to God explored in prayer and worship already requires a reflexive conversation between God‐and‐God, in which the pray‐er, participating in this exchange, is being drawn into an anticipatory longing for, and acknowledgement of, the presence of the Messiah. Moreover, it is not a coincidence here that Judaism itself fully anticipated this theme of reciprocal divine exchange in worship which became so fundamental for early Christianity’s understanding of the very recognition of Jesus as God’s Son.
Monotheism is not in any sense abrogated by these insights, I argue, but is merely complexified by the very practices of prayer (God speaks to God here), and the accompanying desire for the very presence of the longed‐for Messiah in this space of worship. However, even as this conjoined sensibility between Judaism and Christianity is aroused and acknowledged, it cannot dispel the problem of the distinctively Christian claim about Jesus’s already‐achieved Messianic status within Christianity itself. Christianity is inherently and necessarily ‘supersessionist’ in this one sense, I argue; but the key issue is how the Spirit interrupts any attempt at a settled claim to replace the Judaism on which it depends, and to which it is inexorably conjoined. Hence, once again we see that Christology must always be closely tied to pneumatology and to the deep prayer that acknowledges its own impetus within the Godhead:27 to seek the full reality of the Messiah, I propose, is always to acknowledge the ‘not‐yet’ as well as the ‘already’. As Paul van Buren once put it, with deliberate irony, ‘ The task of a Christian theology of Israel is to help the church hear and learn from Israel’s Yes and No, its denial of the church’s Jesus Christ for the sake of faithfulness to the church’s God and the Father of Jesus Christ’.28
My comparative treatment of Jewish and Christian theologies of ‘forgiveness’ in Chapter 6 goes on to parallel this set of insights. One should not have to choose between forgiveness as the sole prerogative of God (supposedly the ‘Jewish’ view), and forgiveness as demanded of all humans (supposedly the ‘Christian’ one) – as this disjunction is often represented in modern Jewish/Christian discussions.29 Rather, after a lengthy exegetical examination of some rich and relevant sources, one may see afresh that human forgiveness is only possible in leaning into God’s forgiveness: that is, one might say, the very meaning of the coming of the ‘Son of Man’ (who is ‘God’, from the Christian perspective), and who thus has the ‘power to forgive sins’ (Mark 2.10 and parallels), and who resides in his own open future of forgiveness into what Augustine later termed the totus Christus.30 From this perspective, the Christian church (as the very ‘body of Christ’) does indeed ever hold out the prospect of true and efficacious sacramental forgiveness, but always in an awareness of its own ecclesiastical frailty as yet still in need of being guided by the Spirit into full and perfect union with the divine/human Christ. Again, the story of forgiveness is not yet finished between Judaism and Christianity, any more than it is within the Christian church itself.
The third essay in this section then traces the unfolding of another classic locus of Christian supersessionism: the issue of the ‘veil of Moses’, and its presumed removal in the event of Christ (so Paul: 2 Cor 3. 7–18). But for Paul himself that did not of course mean the divine rejection of Judaism, but rather the promise of an ultimate eschatological convergence with Christianity (see again Romans 9–11). So re‐examining how ‘veiling’, and ‘cloud‐darkness’ (another closely‐related Mosaic and wilderness theme in Jewish revelation), work in relation to the later re‐engagement with these topics in Jewish and Christian theology is once more crucial here. Again, the deeper one probes into the history of Jewish and Christian reception of these particular themes, the more a surprising convergence appears: ‘veiling’ and ‘clouds’ are protective of a divine appearance that is ‘dazzling darkness’ to the human – revelation and unknowing together. These symbols do not therefore bespeak the much later modernist choice between revelatory erasure as pure nescience (in relation to the Kantian noumenal realm), over controlled scientific truth (in relation to the phenomenal realm), as comes to be presumed in the post‐Kantian turn of critical philosophy.
Finally, in Chapter 8, the biblical topos also used fleetingly by Paul to represent the final achievement of Christ’s salvation (the ‘sacrifice of Isaac’31) is creatively re‐appropriated along similar lines to these accompanying chapters. But in this chapter there is not a primary concentration, in a modernist vein, on Abraham’s psychic ordeal and test of obedience in Genesis 22 (as in the interpretations of Kant and Kierkegaard), but rather (as in the rich medieval rabbinical traditions on the akedah emerging from the European persecutions and pogroms) on the ordeal of Isaac himself. Here is the one, Isaac, in whom God ‘changes the game’, we might say, even for what we might expect of relations within Godself in the matter of sacrifice; and indeed – through the offices of an interventionist angel – once again pneumatologically ‘interrupts’ what might seem to be a re‐condoned arrangement of patriarchal religion, founded in ancestry, obedience and threatened violence.32 It would indeed be easy to come away from the lessons of Genesis 22, as many modern feminists have exposed, with precisely this latter, violent and patriarchal, interpretation of the story. But once again, a more subtle rendition of the text – which ‘plays between the lines’ in midrashic mode – allows an alternative rendition, one in which divine intervention not only undercuts violence and patriarchalism, but also questions the whole ecology of gender and patriarchalism on which such associations are built.
Indeed, various other surprising concomitant messages about gender are found ‘between the lines’ in these foregoing essays on Jewish/Christian biblical themes, especially when ‘mystical’ or esoteric texts are in play.33 And so by the end of the second section in this volume we begin to see that the ‘breaking’ of certain classic presumptions about the supersessionism of Christianity over Judaism also brings in its train certain intriguing ‘breakings open’ beyond patriarchal forms of both of these historic religions. What I termed above (in relation to Gregory of Nyssa’s early christological method) the ‘mutually‐bombarding’ exegetical approach to problematic theological questions, is here developed more systematically as a means of keeping open the role of the Spirit in its constant interruptive propulsion against any false, idolatrous, or precipitous identification of Christ and his church, and especially any false hegemony of Christianity over Judaism. For – to repeat – the story of the church is not yet finished; and the church remains manifestly frail and sinful, not least in its understanding of its ongoing relation to the history of Israel. If we cannot confront this challenge, then – I dare to suggest – we cannot respond to the risen Christ himself.
Christ, the Eucharist and the Broken Body: Sacrifice and Its Moral Demands
So far in this Prologue I have written about various forms of ‘breaking’, or ‘breaking open’, which allow a window onto the depth and breadth of Christ’s reality, founded on his own ‘breaking open’ of the gates of death in the resurrection. Without a confrontation with the particular transformations of resurrection life, I have urged, no attempt to give substance to Christ’s identity will have proper meaning in the first place. The last section of this volume, however, is devoted to a cluster of themes that arguably should have been enunciated much earlier: the preceding death of Christ himself; his foundational manifestation of salvific and sacrificial divine/human ‘brokenness’ here, and especially as his sacrifice relates to his own understanding of the traditions of Israel; his institution of the eucharist as an extension of his own ‘body’ for the future life of the church; the outflowing implications therefrom for any rich Christian theology of the eucharist and its moral efficacy; and the significant final lessons for where we are to find the full and encompassing ‘identity’ of Christ.
But in fact the delay in coming to these climactic themes in this book is advised. For without the preparatory explorations of the earlier two sections of the volume, it would not have been possible to lay out an argument for a very particular set of ‘breakings open’ as founded in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The third section of this volume (Chapters 9–12), then, moves to draw some of the lessons of the first two sections into an explicit consideration of the outcomes of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection as expressed in the ritual and theology of the Christian eucharist. It expounds and unfolds the eucharist’s own relation to Judaism and to Jewish sacrifice; and it explores in some depth (in Chapters 9 and 10, in particular) the further surprising ways in which issues of bodily gender again lap at the edges of these themes; it seems, then, that where due attention to the subtlety of divine interaction with the human occurs, and is pneumatologically received, certain shifts in supposedly‐fixed human views of gender invariably also occur. Moreover, the more fundamental anthropological category of ‘desire’ here also comes to the fore (as it has done already in Chapter 1, and in my earlier ‘systematic’ theology34), as the argument unfolds for a yet further ‘breaking open’ of human desire to the incorporative logic of divine desire in the liturgy of the eucharist. For God’s desire for us, always held out to us in the life and death and resurrection of his Son, necessarily challenges and ‘breaks’ our own sinful desires; and in the eucharist, supremely, it offers an efficacious reformulation of them by participation in his body and bloody. For, when rightly understood, his sacrifice – of which the eucharist is a re‐presentation and spiritual extension – is no ‘patriarchal’ sacrifice‐as‐violence, but precisely its (mysterious) toppling and condemnation, which itself breaks open and exposes patriarchy and abuse for what they are. Often, as is most horribly true, such abuse has been falsely mandated, and still is, by ‘religious practices’ – even by the use of the liturgy of the eucharist itself; but in the authentic searching of the Spirit, I argue here, such a demonic rendition is progressively exposed, brought to light, and condemned. Admittedly, the contemplative, eucharistic, reformulation of desire can also itself at times be deeply and authentically painful and challenging, as it confronts and convicts the exigences of sin in us; but this is at base a propulsion of divine grace, a manifestation of pure divine love and gentleness, even if at times it is misleadingly felt as judgement and alienation – more truly, in fact, it is a purification, a purgation. This is not the ‘shattering’ of violence and abuse, then, but as John of the Cross puts it, in his magisterial account of the ‘dark nights’, the ‘light and gentle’ touch of God.35 It follows that the Christic ‘broken body’ (again, when rightly and discerningly understood) is the only broken body that is simultaneously mystically uniting of its followers and at the same time mystically healing of their wounds.
These are major and debatable theological claims, to be sure, and they are worked out in the last section of this volume with due attention to a number of associated themes and challenges: the place of the priest at the altar as ‘in persona Christi’ (whether male or female: that divisive debate is once more re‐addressed), both summoning and deflecting human desires to their necessary divine purification in Christ (Chapter 9); the role of Christ’s own intentional sacrifice in relation to Jewish tradition, and of how this also now plays out in the church in gendered terms, both in summoning worldly views of gender and in transforming them (Chapter 10); the importance of Christ’s sacrifice precisely as sacramental ‘gift’, rather than as any ritualized manipulation, apotropaism, or mandated violence (Chapter 11); and the long‐disputed question of Christ’s eucharistic ‘presence’, and how it relates to sacramental and pneumatological efficacy in the contemporary lives of believers (Chapter 12). All along, the continuing theme of the Christian church’s necessary openness to the future, and to the ongoing Jewish tradition alongside it, provides an inescapably eschatological perspective on Christ’s identity, as his own eucharistic ‘fragments’ – we might say – remain as yet ‘ungathered’ on the mountains.36 And through these various discussions, as I have intimated, a final set of evocations of the symbol of ‘breaking’, or ‘breaking open’, arise thereby, and are added to the cumulative force of the thesis that has been developing throughout the book about the nature of Christology, its mode of expressions, its applications and goals, its mysteries and revelations, its moral and spiritual implications.
