Christ the Heart of Creation

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.

Tarsicius van Bavel, in a lucid digest of Augustine’s teaching on this topic,54 cites Sermon 341 as a focal text: here Augustine says that ‘Christ’ has three meanings, referring to the eternal and pre-existent Word, to the incarnate figure of the redeemer and mediator, and to the ‘whole Christ’, head and body.

the analogy does not stop there: to be ‘in’ such an ancestor is to be able to claim that what he is doing you are doing.

the Franciscan view from Scotus onwards is that we must go further and ascribe a created esse to Jesus, such that there is a true sense in which he is a human agent, a genuinely active individual substance in respect of other active finite substances, though dependent on the independent existence of the Word.

what is impossible is that the three Persons should assume a single pre-existing human hypostasis – that is, a pre-existing principle of agency determining the particular historical identity of the individuated nature.22 Individuated nature is an abstract idea, and becomes concrete only when activated in the form of a self-continuous agent among ag

human words, even words of pain or doubt or rebellion, are adopted as his in order that they can be transformed; and in an analogous way the Word is the persona of Jesus, taking on, becoming ‘answerable’ for, the human words, acts and sufferings of Jesus.

the focus on Jesus as a continuous human subject, born, maturing, dying.

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 Paul speaks of being ‘in’ Christ, it is hard to avoid the implication that he sees Jesus as being as much the source of a single community of kinship as Adam or Abraham – the source of a new human kinship (as in Adam) and the source of a specific kinship among those who have received God’s promise (as in Abraham).