Christ the Heart of Creation

To act towards Jesus in this way continually presses on us the question of how we are to speak – about as well as to him.

non aliud – ‘not another thing’

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.

is indeed the Word that makes the humanity what it is, in the sense that it makes it to be the way it actively is (not in the sense that it makes it to be the sort of thing it is, a human individual in the abstract).

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.

The central claim Paul makes is not that divine action entails an evacuation of human freedom, but that the particular kind of human freedom that in some sense releases divine action to transform the created world is an act of full openness to divine purpose and divine love.

everything done by God is done inseparably by the Trinity; but what that action brings about is a state of affairs in which human nature is related to the Person of the Son – not to the divine nature in general.

when we speak theologically of the divine Word, we do not and cannot speak simply of this eternal subject; we speak of what the divine Word has actually done in this world and of how we have learned to identify the divine Word in action within human history.

It is the case that the life of Jesus makes certain things true about the activity of the Word in history; it is not the case that the life of Jesus makes certain things true about the way divine life is lived in the mode of filiation.