The question of the relation between the historical humanity of Jesus and God's eternal reality is a matter of central concern for all Christian theology. Specialists in biblical studies, philosophical theology, dogmatics and historical theology have all made substantive contributions on Jesus’ divine identity. But keeping up with all these developments is no easy task, much less engaging in fruitful dialogue with representative voices from all of them. Steven Duby has undertaken this vital task in Jesus and the God of Classical Theism, offering a rigorous model of how the tools of Reformed scholasticism might connect and at times critique current trends.
Duby's work in this volume is a continuation of the project he has been developing in his previous two monographs, Divine Simplicity: A Dogmatic Account (Bloomsbury, 2015) and God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology (IVP Academic, 2019), and it should be read in light of that work. In particular, two key features of these earlier works play a significant role in Jesus and the God of Classical Theism but are largely assumed, requiring the reader to be familiar with the earlier arguments. First, Duby's pervasive proof-texting sits uneasily with the standards of argumentation in biblical studies as well as the movement of theological interpretation of scripture. Duby argues (in part from concursus) that one can read biblical passages in which qualities like immutability or simplicity are not overtly predicated to God with a dual purpose: they can (and should) be read both in their historical context and as indicators (often implicitly) of God's eternal nature (see Divine Simplicity, pp. 57–8). The resulting knowledge of God's nature ideally enriches and illuminates the biblical passage in its historical context, and appreciating the text's historical sense is necessary for proper inferences to theological claims. Second, Duby works on the conviction that the economic action of God (oikonomia) both enables and requires knowledge of God's immanent life (theologia). This makes it possible to use metaphysics for theology, though metaphysical categories are only used analogically of God, since metaphysics as such is a science of created being, and God transcends created being (see God in Himself, chapter 4). As a result, metaphysics, with analogical porosity, aids our apprehension of God in God's eternal perfection through revelation in the economy.
These two convictions underpin the approach Duby takes in his newest book, where he follows up on the claims made in God in Himself about the dogmatic function of Christology with a full-blown constructive Christology rooted in scholastic metaphysics. The book's structure and scope are audacious, staking interventions in biblical and dogmatic theology, though as often as possible operating with a hermeneutic of charity. After framing in chapter 1 the tendency to reject ‘classical theism’ – and metaphysics and speculative doctrines of God along with it – Duby dedicates each following chapter to a well-defined and judiciously selected theme in Christology. The themes are thoughtfully laid out, so that each chapter builds constructively and logically on its predecessor. Out of consideration of space, I outline a few chapters to give a sense of the mode of argumentation.
In chapter 2, Duby addresses the Son's eternal relation to the Father. Here, Duby develops the structure repeated in later chapters: first, he summarises the broad sweep of biblical witness to the topic, which, in this case, presents the Son (i.e. the person incarnate as the first-century Jesus) as eternally generated from the Father, distinguished from the Father by relation of origin, and having the fullness of the divine essence communicated from the Father (p. 61). Next, Duby moves into dogmatic elaboration, sometimes constructively working through a sequence of related matters, at other times operating in the mode of disputation. In chapter 2, Duby exposits the unity and simplicity of God, which enables an account of the Son's identity as the eternal relation of filiation, confirming his biblical description.
Chapter 3 addresses a crucial matter in post-Barthian dogmatics: namely, the election of the Son. After providing biblical description, Duby engages in direct dialogue with Barth's doctrine of election. Several significant conclusions result from this dialogue. First, Barth's basis for revising the Reformed tradition's doctrine of election is undercut, which leaves his alternative with less warrant (particularly the radically determinative function of the eternal decree vis-à-vis the eternal Trinity). Second, Duby dismantles Barth's argument for an antecedent and eternal subordination of the Son to the Father, making his case both on biblical and dogmatic grounds. Duby's arguments here deserve a wide reading, because they have implications not only for Barth's rendering of the Son's subordination, but also for the ‘eternal functional subordinationism’ being invoked in recent decades by evangelical complementarians.
Duby turns his attention to the relation between the Son's divinity and humanity in chapter 4. Here, the biblical description yields a union in which the Son's presence in the human nature is sui generis (exceeding God's ordinary presence to all creatures), the humanity of the Son is complete and uncompromised by union with the Son, the Son's divine identity is unaltered, and the two natures remain distinct through being united in the one divine person. In dogmatic elaboration, Duby defends Cyril's single-subject Christology and follows Aquinas in seeing this single subject as a composite person with the humanity as an instrument of divine action. Here, Duby enters dispute over the communicatio idiomatum and the extra Calvinisticum, engaging the critiques of Dorner and Barth, respectively.
In the remaining three chapters, Duby treats the Holy Spirit's role in the incarnation (chapter 5), the extent to which Christ possessed faith and the beatific vision (chapter 6) and the suffering of the impassible Son (chapter 7). Throughout the whole volume, Duby's conclusions are rarely surprising for those with some familiarity with the ‘classical’ tradition culminating in Aquinas and leading into the Reformed scholastics. What's noteworthy is the process. Duby reads critics as sensitively as space allows in order to clarify and strengthen his thesis: the very Jesus presented in scripture is none other than the eternal Son, who is one in immutable simplicity with the Father and the Spirit and who took on human nature in all its finitude and capacity for growth, maturation, suffering and death.
This book is no easy read, but it is worth the effort. Duby remains fully rooted in post-Reformation scholasticism, bringing the best of that tradition to the task of articulating the sui generis union of humanity and divinity in the person of the Son. This work has the potential to help increase the dialogue across disciplines, and I hope it also inspires others to mine their own traditions for conceptual riches for the work of articulating a vision of Christ rooted in scripture's proclamation.
