Reviewed by: Communicatio idiomatum: Reformation Christological Debates by Richard Cross Corey L. Barnes Communicatio idiomatum: Reformation Christological Debates. By Richard Cross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xxiv + 288. $85.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-19-884697-0. Richard Cross’s Communicatio Idiomatum: Reformation Christological Debates approaches the development of Lutheran Christologies with attention to the Scholastic background, to the intertwined metaphysical and semantic issues at play, and to internal and external pressures shaping the conversations. The result is seven chapters of careful exegesis leveraging finely wrought distinctions to offer a precise analysis of the nature and stakes of the debates. The Introduction sets out crucial parameters and terms for the investigation. The seven chapters trace developments in Lutheran and Reformed Christologies from the 1520s to the 1590s, featuring a lengthy cast of characters and several clearly drawn fault lines. The Council of Chalcedon serves as a point of initial departure and of constant reference, allowing Cross to introduce as technical terms “person,” “hypostasis,” and “suppositum” as well as to present overlapping metaphysical and semantic questions. Chalcedon affirms a union of and in two natures without change, confusion, separation, or division. This union is typically designated the hypostatic union. Chalcedon’s affirmation provides a limit marking off permissible and impermissible theological reflection, excluding as impermissible any combination of divine and human natures into some new nature (a tertium quid) and any assignment of separation of the natures between “two distinct concrete particulars” (3). Within the permissible limits, Cross argues that theologians “have by and large identified two ways of construing this union” (ibid.). One “makes the union between the natures basic” (ibid.), and the other “makes the hypostatic union derivative of or parasitic on some more basic relation” (5). Cross traces this second way of construing the union from Cyril of Alexandria to John Duns Scotus, whose own account focused on the dependence of the assumed nature on the person assuming, in a way akin to the dependence of an accident on a substance. Scotus’s articulation of this model proved influential on late medieval and Reformation debates. Lutheran scholars labelled the model “according to which the human nature was something like a (complex) contingent property of the divine person” the “supposital union” (8). Cross employs this label to indicate the assumed human nature’s dependence upon the divine person assuming and distinguishes the supposital union from the hypostatic union, which more generally indicates the relationship of the divine and human natures. Whether or not one affirms the supposital union can change one’s conception of the relationship between the divine person and the properties of the human nature. Cross employs the term “properties” to designate “both (contingent) accidents and propria, things that follow automatically from a given nature without being included in it” (9). Porphyry lies behind these [End Page 322] discussions. One fault line dividing the thinkers Cross treats is whether they view the divine person directly to bear the properties of human nature or indirectly to bear the properties insofar as they are directly borne by the human nature assumed. Another fault line concerns the assumed human nature as a concrete particular and the reasons why the concrete particular human nature assumed does not fulfill the necessary conditions for personhood. These metaphysical considerations relate to semantic issues as well. Cross establishes a detailed framework for categorizing a broad range of approaches in their general classifications and in their specific forms. He builds from a “semantics for Christological predication” suggested by Timothy Pawls, a semantics that allows symbolic formulation of fine-tuned differences (helpfully listed under “Frequently Cited Principles” on xxiii-xxiv). Using various symbolic formulations within this semantics allows Cross to develop precise designations to indicate the metaphysical grounds for different predications of Christ. In Cross’s analysis “one of the major fault lines in Reformation Christological debate focuses precisely on whether or [not] the divine person bears not only his human nature but also human properties” (19). Framed otherwise, intra-Lutheran and Lutheran-Reformed debates concerned different understandings of the communicatio idiomatum, a phrase Cross notes “specifically applies to predicating divine or human properties of the one person under a description appropriate to the...
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Feb 9, 2023
Renfeng Zhu + 5
Open Access
