A Challenging Thesis

The thesis submitted by Philip McCosker for the doctor of philosophy degree at Cambridge University is a challenge to even the most skilled theological scholar. He ploughs deep furrows in the field of philosophical theology and more specifically the area known to theologians as Christology, also known as the study of the person and work of Christ. The topic is indeed mysterious, mystical and paradoxical.

McCosker stated his hypothesis thus: “that one textual marker of the mysteriousness of the mysteries of Christianity – one of the expressions of the theological mystery – can be loosely described as its paradoxicality.” The mystery of which he writes is the true nature of Christ as both divine and human, as contained in the Chalcedonian Creed, “truly God and truly Man…. Two Natures unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the difference of the Natures being in no way removed because of the Union, but rather the properties of each Nature being preserved, and (both) concurring into One Person and One Hypostasis.”

Without doubt this is a very abstruse discussion with which few will wish to grapple. To provide a theological basis for his argument McCosker looks to the work of several late mediaeval and renaissance theologians in the Roman Catholic tradition with mystical attributes, namely Bonaventure (c.1217-1274), Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-c.1327), Nicholas of Cura (1401-1474) and Pierre de Berulle (1575-1629). 

By no means limiting himself to these “base authors” (McCosker’s term), he also refers frequently to the ancient Greeks like Plato and Aristotle as well as Church Fathers of the early Christian Church in both its  Eastern and Western traditions. It was the participation of these so-called Church Fathers in the many church councils that led to the formulation of the historic creeds of Nicea (325 CE) and Chalcedon (451 CE). These creeds determined the fundamental Christian doctrine of the Trinity – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit - held by most Christian traditions to this day.

McCosker’s concern is the paradox that persists in the context of this doctrine and especially as related to the difference and identity of the relationship between God and Jesus Christ. His discussion begins with a definition of paradox in its many forms. Then he analyses four distinct “configurations” or “models” of paradox related to the nature of Christ: Mixture of the divine and human; Middle, Centre and Circumference; Enhypostasia; and Kenosis. 

None of these models fully satisfies our human need (or McCosker’s theological referents) to describe exactly what we mean when we say, as many New Testament authors assert, that Jesus Christ was at one and the same time, both divine and human. McCosker’s purpose is to analyse the core issue in what we mean by the connective and.

If McCosker has any preference for the above four models, it is enhypostasia. He feels that his base authors “will show the intrinsic connection between this doctrine in chistological expression and its expression in theologies of the Christian life. (McCosker’s italics) It directly and explicitly relates to and deeply influences our lives in the everyday world as Christians.

The term enhypostasia is a Greek word that denotes how “the Son and the Father have some kind of reciprocal … existence whereby they can be said to be ‘in’ each other.” At the start of his chapter on enhypostasia McCosker lists two quotations from the New Testament exemplifying the term: “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me.” (John 14:11) and “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. (Gal. 2:20)

After searching the writings of the Church Fathers without much success, McCosker turns to his ‘base authors’. There he found that “this christological model yields a christological account of the christian life in various ways in Eckhart, Nicholas and Berulle with their different accents.” However, McCosker also found that with regard to his investigation of the various models of paradox, “that paradox appears to involve two senses of opposition. The divine is characterised by a peculiar kind of opposition such that it can assume humanity ‘within’ its own hypostasis.”  One would therefore conclude that the true nature of Christ in inevitably bound up with the nature of God. This places the whole subject of the nature of Christ as both divine and human in the realm of a mysterious and mystical reality we name “God.”

McCosker’s least favoured model is kenosis which he sees as prominently held by modern Protestant theologians from the 17^th to the 20^th centuries. McCosker found no evidence of kenosis (based on Philippians 2:5-11) in the writings of the Church Fathers and rarely in his select “base authors.” Even in the title of his chapter on kenosis: “a wrong turn: divine or human?” his conclusion regarding this model is “at base – an exclusive, displacing one. This model did not display the parsings which the other models, especially mixture and middle, did. God and humans are conceived in this model as in competition: in the theories of the modern kenoticists this model is of the “or” kind, even though most of the kenoticists only gingerly dip a toe in the corrosive waters of this logic, not diving in as Gess does.” (W.F. Gess was a German theologian of the 19^th century “who thought that God straightforwardly desisted from being divine when human and … gave up inessential attributes while incarnate.”)

Our Christian doctrine of Christ rests finally on our doctrine of God. By also sounding his base authors’ doctrine of God, McCosker finds that “most of the authors we have looked at reveal a paradoxical core of the descriptions of God…. All our authors share a view of the unity of God which is dynamic and overflowing; for none of them is God static, fixed, and definable…. An adequate christology depends on an adequate doctrine of God, and vice versa.”

McCosker realizes that his analysis does not exhaust the subject. His final words are prophetic: It preserves, we may say, an open wound in the craft of theology. It encourages us not to lose our sense of wonder at the newness of the Gospel and the person it reveals, and to discipline our theology to that wonder, and make our theology appropriately and precisely humble.

It would have been a thrilling experience to have been present when Philip McCosker faced his examiners who listened to his presentation of his thesis and defended it against their challenges. His aunt and uncle live in Oakville, Ontario, Canada, and were the source of McCosker’s thesis for my review. Educated at both Harvard and Yale Universities, McCosker is Research Associate to the Norris- Hulse Professor of Divinity and an Affiliated Lecturer at Cambridge University. He is currently engaged in the preparation of a book based on his thesis with the title, Christ the Paradox: Reconceiving Ressoucement Theology.