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Mark W Elliott, Jesus der Christus im Glauben der einen Kirche: Christologie – Kirchen des Ostens – Ökumenische Dialoge. Edited by Theresia Hainthaler, Dirk Ansorge, and Ansgar Wucherpfennig, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 71, Issue 1, April 2020, Pages 349–356, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flaa042
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In a short introduction by Theresia Hainthaler on her mentor and collaborator the late Aloys Grillmeier, to whom these essays are dedicated, it is emphasized that the great Patristiker wanted to show the continuity of patristic Christology with that of the apostolic witness. (‘Seine Stütze ist die Heilige Schrift, kaum jedoch philosophische Spekulation.’) There is a short account of how the young Grillmeier’s 200-page essay (‘Die Theologie und sprechliche Vorbereitung’) in the 1951 Das Konzil von Chalkedon volume became the English Christ in Christian Tradition (a venture facilitated by F. L.Cross of Oxford). She then traces the story of its German translation and subsequent editions; and the rather complex translation and edition history is concisely and helpfully set out. The fact that the only English version available is from 1975 remains a puzzle.
In her substantive chapter, drawn from her research into the North African theologians, Hainthaler offers a useful sketch of the landscape and alights on interesting points d’appui: Fulgentius was the first to write a treatise on the human knowledge of Christ; indeed the African theologians’ strength was to offer simple statements about the communication of idioms that people could understand. Thus Paul’s two forms of Christ as per Philippians 2 (and Gal. 5:15) did good service for Vigilius. Sometimes this came at the cost of imprecision and self-contradiction in the case of Fulgentius, who argued that the soul of Christ had full knowledge of God since it was bound with the Word. Peter Lombard cited Fulgentius’s De fide ad Petrum as a work by Augustine. Not only does Hainthaler do a fine job of retrieving otherwise unknown and unfashionable figures, spotting gaps and filling them, there is a generosity of an ecumenical spirit in her work, harnessing scholars from a variety of traditions. As Grillmeier would have advocated, there is always room to give the benefit of the doubt to the Oriental churches. The idea of the ‘Son of Man’ as adopted is a biblical one, even if not a New Testament view. It might be significant that the Symbola Toletana does not mention the council of 553, and yet ‘unus de trinitate passus est’ somehow became acceptable in Western Christology.
