Christ the Heart of Creation

unity in active communication – in the conformity of the vehicle to the content of what is being shared by God.

The community is what it is in virtue of the inexhaustible act of God summoning, judging and sustaining it – just as the life of Jesus is not simply ‘the same thing as’ the life of the Word, since it is what it is because of the inexhaustible action that pervades and structures it.

there is an analogy between the way in which the Word unites with Jesus in a union without confusion or separation (to borrow the language of Chalcedon) and the way in which Jesus unites with the believing community.

just as the recognizability of the Word in history is bound to the humanity of Jesus, so the recognizability of Jesus in the world is bound to the visible community insofar as it is constituted by turning and returning to the foundational and sustaining act of Christ.

the answer to the questions, ‘Who is now causing and defining the relation of these lives with the Father? Who is acting and speaking in those relations so as to give them their distinctive character?’ is ‘Jesus Christ’.

the only way in which the exchange of properties can make sense is if the unbroken and unqualified agency of God acts upon the humanity to create actual new possibilities for it, while itself permitting a qualified use of human predicates to be ascribed to the Word in its action to bring this about.

it is the affirmation of unequivocal divinity for the Logos that mandates the affirmation of unequivocal humanity for Jesus.

a theology of ‘the whole Christ’, totus Christus, which allows for a sophisticated account of how we both combine and distinguish between speaking of the Word in its eternal selfhood, the Word incarnate in Jesus and the Word considered as the actively unifying principle of the believing community’s life.

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.