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Henry Wansbrough, Christ as Creator: Origins of a New Testament Doctrine. By Sean M. McDonough., The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 62, Issue 1, April 2011, Pages 306–307, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flr048
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Extract
This fascinating study of the doctrine of Christ as Schöpfungsmittler (roughly ‘mediator of creation’) has been, says the author, in gestation for a decade. It builds, of course, on earlier works, but imparts a whole new dimension to the question of how Jesus came to be seen as God. How did this Galilean teacher come to be understood in terms of the divine agency by which God created the universe? This conception has often been considered from the point of view of the identification of Jesus with the Old Testament concept of divine Wisdom. McDonough, however, shows that Christ is not normally identified with Wisdom; rather, he has divine Wisdom. This is only ‘one of the tributaries of the river of Christology’ (p. 84); others are equally or more important, such as Spirit, Word, and image, all of which are traced back to the language of creation throughout the Bible. The first of them, the Spirit-filled Messiah, may well have been important in Jesus’ own perception of himself (p. 74). By all these images the rich Old Testament conception of the Messiah as the agency of God, bringing to perfection God’s creative action, reaches a new wealth of vision. McDonough insists repeatedly on two aspects, that its matrix was the concept of Messiah rather than that of Wisdom, and that it is no later interpretation, but is built directly on the experience of the mighty deeds of Jesus during his lifetime, and on the experience of the mighty works of the Spirit of Jesus in the earliest Christian community. The wise words of Jesus present him powerfully as a Wisdom teacher, renewing and completing creation, for McDonough shows how creation and its fullness in redemption have a moral aspect too. Such a view of the mighty deeds and works was no subsequent, superimposed interpretation, but must have been inherent in the understanding and description of them from the very earliest accounts.
