Some recent Christologies appear strangely post-biblical, as if Lessing's ‘great ugly ditch’ had been transferred into the theology faculty, dividing systematicians and exegetes into utterly discrete silos of discourse. Any contemporary Chalcedon-consistent Christology must reconcile metaphysics and biblical narrative. Christ is both absolute (transcendent) and relative (immanent); Chalcedon's logic demands that the singular life of Jesus be accredited as the self-disclosure of infinitely transcendent reality, but nonetheless as a human life embedded within relative causal pathways. DeHart reconciles these impulses by recourse to semiosis, cutting through any post-biblical dissociation of historical facticity and the cultic reception of Christ's divinity. Although the prime targets are Christologies that constitute Christ as an interruption to the quotidian flow of creaturely causality, Unspeakable Cults is equally opposed to dogmatic reductions of facticity to irrelevance, and to any historicism that over-asserts the power of atomised facts to drive out metaphysics. Christologies are immunised against historical deconstruction only to the extent that they acknowledge their incapacity to exorcise themselves of history.
For DeHart, Christology flourishes within the space of ‘lagging epiphany’ (the ecclesial reception of Christ, derived from and determined by the incarnation itself). This reception does not repristinate the pre-determined fact of Christ but is the means by which that fact (qua Absolute Fact) reaches self-expression and actualisation. The incarnation is ‘inevitably stretched out into a temporal interpretative process through communal cultural activity’(p. 12), but the nexus of semiosis invoked by this ‘extended incarnation’ intersects with the ontological mission of redemption. On DeHart's account, cultural semiosis is analogous to prime matter, formed by the animating dynamics of the Spirit ‘without disturbing its purely immanent cultural dynamic’ (p. 163). Christology consequently demands a pneumatology that avoids the extremes of Bultmann (entanglement within history) and Barth (disengaged hovering over history, poised to interrupt): the integrity of Chalcedonian Christology hangs together with historical and cultural processes, guaranteed by strong pneumatology.
The starting point of DeHart's argument lies in an analysis of two modern attempts to negotiate a disconnection of the essence of Christianity from the historical person of Jesus, that of Ernst Troeltsch (Chapter 1) and D. F. Strauss (Chapter 2). For Troeltsch, authentic religiosity operates independently of ‘old belief’ in the divinization of the historical events of Christ's life: faith in divine redemption is decoupled from the historical existence and reality of Jesus (p. 28). For all the difficulties of Troeltsch's version of neo-Kantianism (regarded by the young Karl Barth as nothing but a Christological cul-de-sac), he helpfully identifies the importance of cultus as the means by which a neoprotestant Christology secures fidelity to historical faith. Strauss's dualism is intensified by decoupling not only the historical reality of Jesus from his appearance in cultic reception, also ultimate religious truth from historical facticity. For Strauss the ‘mythological’ interpretation of Christ cannot speak historically: the language of divinization is always catachresis, failing to deliver the meaning that it promises and falling short of historicity.
DeHart's semiotic strategy demands the ‘semantic integration of Jesus and his cult’ (p. 58): by holding Jesus and the worshipping community together in a single semiotically integrated process (‘a genuine community of meaning’, p. 57), the incarnational hypothesis gains plausibility as both history and metaphysics. Chapter 3 resources such a (re-)integration by interrogating the cultural scripts within which Jesus's identity was realised and accessible to his disciples. DeHart is liable to be misunderstood here as either staging an intervention into historical Jesus research or developing his thesis on the basis of particular historical-critical reconstructions. His point is somewhat more modest: to establish that there are historical pictures that render a semiotic reading of the enduring Christ-event plausible. Morton Smith's construal of Jesus as magician or itinerant wonder worker is juxtaposed with Jonathan Z. Smith's embedding of Jesus within two broad cultural impulses of ‘anthropologization’ and ‘eschatologization’. As magician, Jesus is not primarily a vehicle of divine facts or propagator of a new ethos, but the locus of theandric agency. This distinctive agency locates the demarcation of the magician's identity in the demarcation itself (as an intrinsically transgressive or subversive figure). Jesus is, then, a complex and syncretic cultural figure whose intense liminality inscribes an unspecifiability indicative of authentic transcendence, demanding the interpretative superimposition of cultic and mythological frames. Likewise for J.Z. Smith, the gospel genre is a ‘theatre’ in which the semiotic constitution of Jesus's full deity is played out according to the intensified scripts of anthropologization and eschatologization. As a result, Jesus only fully comes into view in his cultic reception.
Chapters 4–6 establish the framework of DeHart's constructive proposal, seeking an ‘orthodox Christology […] maximally compatible with historical consciousness’ (p. 95). Chapter 4 excavates the strong pneumatology (via ‘causal stratification’) in which God ‘as speaker’ creatively manipulates the medium of history. Chapter 5 rehearses Strauss's laceration of Schleiermacher's Christological lacunae, noting that the affirmation of the ‘local presence’ of God in Christ need not supervene upon a disruption to the causal tapestry of reality. The apex is Chapter 6's religionsgeschitchliche reading of Aquinas, who conjoins an account of authentic immanent causality with God's (qualified) omnicausality: divine power can constitute things as such—including the events of history—not only as facts but, ipso facto, signs. The events of Jesus's personal history are consequently ‘extensions of the eternal Son's personal identity’ (p. 149). DeHart finds in Aquinas's tripartite account of God's presence to creation (qua creator, in the saints, in Christ) a curious proximity to the Spinozistic framework underpinning Scheleiermacher. The resulting picture is a Christ who is radically transcendent because more radically immanent: an inverted extra calvinisticum in which the life of Christ is possessed not only of a surplus of divinity but an irreducible excess of human meanings, received and exchanged in the ecclesial community.
DeHart's reading pushes Aquinas in decidedly non-Thomassian directions, as becomes clear in the final two chapters, which address the consequences of Christology undertaken in ‘lagging epiphany’. Chapter 8 probes faith's incapacity to accredit or discredit the supernatural causality of Christ's miracles. The systematician (like the exegete) is liable to historical prejudice for reasons that are structurally integral to the mystery of the incarnation: precisely because Jesus's transcendence is found in an excess of immanence, it does not present itself for empirical scrutiny. With Rousselot, DeHart affirms miracle as both entirely historical fact and as an aperture opening into a transcendent realm. This radically qualifies the utility of apologetic invocation of miracle (though perhaps not their functioning as motives of credibility, within the orbit of faith). Chapter 9 takes up the Hegelian theme of Christ's ‘monstrosity’ (the unspeakable, conceptually repellent, composition of divinity and humanity). This, in DeHart's analysis, is translated from the vertical scandal of metaphysical union to the horizontal scandal of two-fold descent, in which the incarnate body is ‘extended’ into the Church as the sign-body of Christ.
In many respects, DeHart's proposal is a reiteration of classical Chalcedonianism in a quasi-hermeneutical idiom. Those seeking great innovation will be disappointed. Nonetheless, DeHart rightly emphasises the essay-character of his work: truncated, schematic, and in parts merely suggestive. His own proposal is sometimes crowded by a cacophony of engaged voices (not to mention others—like Congar, Peterson, and Williams—who exert a more remote structuring influence); it is likely that scholars of Eliade, Scheleiermacher, Troeltsch, Aquinas, and others will question aspects of his readings. There are systematic questions left underexplored: the burdens carried by ecclesiology risk veering towards Christomonism (notwithstanding the emphasis on the Spirit's triangulating presence); the sacraments as a mode of divine presence are somewhat neglected; and, given the semiotic focus, there is surprisingly little engagement with Schillebeeckx. But little more could be expected from an essay that is as generative and provocative as DeHart's affirmation of God's presence to the world not by leaking through Cohen's ‘cracks in everything’ but in and as the humanity of Christ.
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