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Lewis Ayres, God Visible: Patristic Christology Reconsidered. By Brian E. Daley, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 70, Issue 2, October 2019, Pages 854–857, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flz079
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Extract
In 2017 Brian Daley’s long-awaited edition and translation of Leontius of Byzantium appeared (see JTS, ns 69 [2018], pp. 852–4). Coming out only a few months later, this book—originally his D’Arcy lectures at Oxford in 2002—offers what will probably be his summative statement about the heart of patristic Christology. The book commences with a discussion of the manner in which Chalcedon should not be the central reference point for discussion of patristic Christology. Aloys Grillmeier haunts this discussion; Daley acknowledges his own personal debts to Grillmeier as mentor, and yet sees his focus on models of Christ’s constitution as problematic. Daley’s alternative is to emphasize ‘that it is crucially important for us, in our post-scholastic and heavily secularized culture, to look at the development of the classical Christology of the early Church apart from the lens of the Chalcedonian definition’ (p. 24). Scholasticism is thus the enemy below; even if it rarely surfaces, the threat of its presence shapes much that happens in the book. Daley’s alternative is a certain kind of ressourcement (not surprising, given articles he has written on the movement). He argues that underlying all speculation on Christ’s constitution lies a particular vision of God’s intervention in history, focusing on the person of Christ as the culmination of God’s action in history, as the immediate transforming presence of the Word in the creation. Daley draws out this vision from within a deep commitment to its necessity for today’s Church, and with real passion. And yet the structure and method of the book also raise significant questions.
