Rowan Williams’s Christ: The Heart of Creation (2018) and Jordan Daniel Wood’s The Whole Mystery of Christ (2022) mark two recent and profound attempts to re-think the Creator-creature relation in light of the hypostatic union of Christ’s divine and human natures. As others have noted, both books are notable not just in terms of the quality of their respective contributions to contemporary Christian theology, but also because of the illuminating contrast that emerges from a consideration of their positions. This brief intervention considers these positions of Williams and Wood on the hypostatic union, albeit in a rather particular, targeted manner. My basic contention is that Wood’s absolute distinction of “hypostatic” and “natural” logics is problematized by any sufficiently rigorous account of divine simplicity. Since all parties (Williams, Wood, and indeed Maximus himself) have independent reasons for accepting this implication of divine simplicity, I argue that Williams’s “asymmetrical” account of the hypostatic union enjoys an accordant theoretical advantage over Wood’s in this specific respect.
In the four essays of this special issue of Religious Studies and Theology, readers will encounter both meanings of “Lonergan and” described by Crowe. On the one hand, all four of us have identified a scholarly dialogue partner for Lonergan and offered at least some comparative judgements. These include novelist and literary critic Toni Morrison (1931–2019), decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter (1928–), feminist philosopher Judith Butler (1956–) and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1959–). On the other hand, in accord with Crowe’s second meaning, each of us have attempted an “intelligent mediation” of some aspect of Lonergan’s thought to an issue of vital contemporary concern, such as legacies of racialized oppression in literature and moral ethics, colonial constructions of religion, and contested questions of intersectional identity. Finally, we have done this by striving, to the best of our abilities, to become fluent in the thought of our interlocutors, so that our collective understanding of each and all may emerge more engaged, more intelligent and hopefully more fully human.
The thought of Bernard Lonergan, S. J. has served as a wellspring for antiracist Catholic theology, even while antiracism per se was not Lonergan’s agenda. This essay advances the antiracist trajectory of Lonergan’s thought by incorporating into it Sylvia Wynter’s decolonial theory. Wynter calls for tectonic, epoch-making change, resulting in both social reorganization and a fully new self-understanding for humanity. Wynter’s work forces Lonergan’s account of self-transcendence into deeper relation with history and proposes a new standard for authenticity: self-conscious awareness of the nexus among race, colonialism, and Eurocentrism, and a historically grounded, power-attuned story of human flesh.
Anti- Epicurean Polemics in the New Testament Writings, by Stefan Szymik. Vol. 5 Lublin Theological Studies, edited by Adam Kubiś. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2023. Pp. 338. Cloth, US $150.00. ISBN: 978- 3- 525- 50022- 4.
This essay is at its core an attempt to learn from Toni Morrison’s “delight” in confronting problems of race in classical American literature in the book Playing in the Dark (1993). That attempt to learn from Morrison becomes a confrontation with the problem of traditions, race, and racism more generally. Christian theology and Christian tradition remain primarily in the background for most of the essay. They slowly come to the fore in dialogue with Bernard Lonergan, whom the essay deploys as part of its “learning” from Morrison. At its close, the essay makes a case for the need to confront problems in traditions from a higher point of view that is able to integrate insoluble concrete situations. It argues that Morrison’s delight is an instance of this higher point of view. Finally, the essay performs the possibility of arriving at this higher point of view through the close study of Morrison’s work, which implies the relevance of other voices as ways “in” for scholars perhaps unaccustomed to problems like race and racism.
