1904 saw the bold announcement, by an Austrian philosopher, of a new, distinct faculty in the academic sciences, the Theory of Objects. Heading up a collection of psychological and philosophical forays into Object-Theory, Alexius Meinong declared his intention to ground and inaugurate a new discipline, one dedicated to the exploration of the objective in a world of subjective experience. Meinong himself had established a career in Germanophone culture as a psychologist. A student of Franz Brentano, Meinong occupied the philosophical realm that would in Analytic circles be termed the Philosophy of Mind; he, like Brentano and later Husserl, devoted himself to the state of intentionality: the mind as awareness of an object. Not content with an intensive study of thought’s object-dependence, Meinong sought to clarify the demands of philosophical Realism—how our intention of an object relates to a thing existing outside of thought. “Mind-independence,” a classical definition of philosophical Realism, came under careful scrutiny as Meinong considered the metaphysical categories for Realism inadequate and clumsy for the delicate act of cognitive intention. It is the intentional act itself, Meinong would say, that already embraces both the metaphysical and epistemic dimensions of Realism.

We might accept, for example, the Thomistic definition of knowledge as representation adequate to the object, but that traditional account of true belief does not cover a vast sea of human awareness. It relies upon a notion of an existing object against which we measure our definition and image. But our inner world is far richer than that. Consider how we can speak about, describe, debate an object that does not exist: Gaunilo’s golden mountain, say, or Pegasus, or Bellerophon or Achilles. We can also think about, though perhaps not conceive, a round square, or a married bachelor. Intentional cognition also seems to extend to possibilia: we can lucidly and intelligently discuss Bertrand Russell’s celebrated example of the “present king of France,” a man who does not exist, but might. And we should not overlook the implicature of Meinong’s disciplinary field: every Existent will carry with it a penumbra, its Objective, its Subsistence as reality of our experience. Further afield, we might extend Meinong’s intentional Realism to fictional characters: to the lively world, still expanding, of Sherlock Holmes and his Baker Street Irregulars, to Dorothea Brooks and her tragic marriage to Edward Casaubon, to Macbeth, a king much larger and more terrible than life. These fictional figures span the non-existent, the impossibilia, and the possibilia—the subject-matter of Meinong’s proposed discipline—by exercising real causal powers in our world, and by exhibiting an inwardness that moves and shapes our own. They exercise real causal powers: I might avoid the study of all mythologies, allergic to Casaubon’s fruitless antiquarianism; or I delight in the ambiguity of the negative description, so ingenuously used by Holmes, and adopt it as my own. And they shape one’s own inwardness: Macbeth’s own terror of death, and then his more terrifying embrace of it, can serve as viaticum to my own mortality, my own dread of betrayal and meaninglessness. These powers have been considered, in much traditional Realism, as marks of the real, and the modern realistic novel offers striking examples of the thoughts Meinong considered instances of intentional objects. (We might think that reflections along these lines led Hans Frei to speak of Scriptural events as “history-like” or “realistic-like” narratives.)

Meinong proposed a fresh classification for intentional objects. A fully developed Theory of Objects would examine the complex of Realism, its intimate distinction and union of the object and the “objective”: our field of vision must open up logical space for those figures or things we clearly understand, examine, and debate though we know them not to exist. They are Objectives. And they occupy the realm of being. Much as Karl Barth later expanded the notion of being to include a third, negative form of being, “that which is prohibited,” Meinong proposed that being comprehended that which exists [Existieren], that which subsists [Bestand], and that by which an entity is identified, “being-thus” [Sosein]. (Perhaps Meinong’s influence extended beyond Barth to Thomas Nagel, and his famous notion of “being-like” something.) The Theory of Objects, then, does not reduce itself to epistemology nor to metaphysics, though clearly sharing space with them. It rather examines Being itself, and the capacious halls that encompass the elements of human thought that do not exist yet have power, force, intelligibility, and objectivity.

This little city of the Objectives has become known as the Meinongian object. We might consider it a form of Anselm’s Proslogion argument for the external reality of God. And modern day interpreters of Anselm often assimilate Anselm’s name of God—that than which nothing greater can be conceived—to a Meinongian object. But Meinong himself demurred, with a kind of hauteur of the Ordinarius. The Ontological Argument—Kant’s name for Anselm’s and Descartes’ theological proofs—should be seen only as an immature conceptual schema for what the discipline of Object Theory will commandeer. Meinong proposed instead a kind of Scotist account of the relation of the Object to reality [Wirklichkeit]: “The Object is by nature indifferent to being” [der Satz vom Aussersein]. In such a conceptual field, mathematics will be the initial science in the discipline. It expands into a secondary level, as “meta-mathematics,” or “mathematical logic,” themselves prior to judgments about existence or subsistence. Yet this field attains the highest level of scientific objectivity possible. Other sub-disciplines will follow, Meinong confidently predicted. In them all, the dialectic between existence and subsistence, Realism without and within awareness, will define the domain.

I’d like to propose that we examine Paul’s remarkable Christology using Meinong’s new discipline as our companion. In what way is the Incarnate Son a Meinongian object? This seems to me to go to the heart of Paul’s project: to embed the reality and truth of the earthly Son in the culture, creativity, and passion of the Spirit-led disciples. Unspeakable Cults is a bracing book, filled with careful and daring and intelligent argument. We see various Protestant radicals assembled for Christological construction—Troeltsch, Strauss, Morton Smith, Van Harvey. J. Z. Smith supplies a vital sociological and History of Religion School vocabulary. Much brio in the text stems from its meta-theory of bricolage. We have a mixed genre of high scholastic Christology, where Thomas is the star, paired with Peter Frampton and a monstrous Cthulhu. (The latter seems ripe for Meinongian analysis as it too has real causal powers, posing as a political candidate in Polish and American elections.) We even get the tour-de-force of a forged Latin entry, assigned to the stupor mundi, John Selden, but disclosed in a sly footnote as the work of Paul’s own hand. (An homage, we might think, to Morton Smith and his never fully materialized magical papyri.) But I think, if I read Paul right, this post-modern architectonic is designed to enact the dilemma posed by Strauss long ago: how can the mythology of the God-man survive the scientific historiography of the modern age? I think we might fruitfully transpose this Straussian question into Meinongian idiom: Is the Objective of the figure Jesus of Nazareth also an Object, a historical Existent subject to full and unstinting historical analysis? Or in a more meta-level expression: Is the Incarnate One indifferent to Being [Aussersein]? Though a decidedly twenty-first-century book, Unspeakable Cults speaks eloquently in the dialect of nineteenth-century Protestant dogmatics. This is a book about that sturdy cri de coeur, the problem of Faith and History.

Paul aims to show that an orthodox, Chalcedonian Christology can emerge from this anguished conflict. Here, radicalism will serve his traditionalist goal. He takes Morton Smith and Jonathan Z. Smith—the charmingly medicinal Smith Brothers—to suggest a historian’s Jesus who is an itinerant wonder-worker, an inhabitant of a world suffused by magical forces and fears, a living semiotic sign. Nothing about this picture aligns directly with the narrative unfolded in the Gospels: that is its strength. Paul does not intend to endorse the Smiths’ historical portrait; rather he considers it a proper cauterization of the wistful apologia theologians still make about the historicity of the New Testament Jesus. Orthodox Christology must be able to survive the most hard-headed, critical historical reconstruction without flinching. That seems to me the goal of this work.

It will be accomplished through the elixir of the Holy Spirit, assuming but not intervening in the progress of Christian discipleship. The earliest believers inhabit Jesus’s world, they speak in his apocalyptic and thaumaturgical idiom, they continue in his memory, finding his presence with them as they feast and fast, pray and preach and suffer to the end. This is God directing and assuming human history for His very own ends, to Incarnate in the midst of creatures in their very concrete, tactile, broken lives. Leaning heavily on Thomas’s Doctrine of the Divine Missions—though I think drawing some distinctions I do not find in that Quaestio—Paul argues for a visible Sending of the Son and an invisible guiding of the Church by the Spirit. The Son is Incarnate in the Church, His Body. To be sure, the earthly Body will fail to echo and enact its Head. But just as Calvin said there was no Christ without His Gospel, or Schleiermacher, no Redeemer without His Disciples, so there is no Incarnate Son without His Church: “the Spirit operates to retroactively constitute Jesus as God’s historical body by means of the semiotic body perpetuating and creatively realizing his identity” (9–10). Erik Peterson and Yves Congar are the Catholic periti to this Ecclesial Christology.

Paul offers an allegory to narrate such a sign-filled Christology. We are to imagine a rock ’n’ roll musician—a mythic Frampton—spoken of in glowing terms by the first enthusiasts. Others hear the music on recordings; they become his advocates. His fame, now world-wide, is traced back to his quiet origins: he is born a musical genius. The imprint and recordings are his, yet his life is far beyond that earthly frame. He lives as and in his admirers; the faithful receive and create Frampton the god. Now this is an allegory, a kind of delightfully cheeky one, but I think it poses exactly the question Alexius Meinong raised for us in the beginning. Just what kind of Object is Jesus Christ, mutatis mutandis, the Rock Star who lives on? Is He a kind of Objective, a Possibilia, or Subsistence that does not exist but might? Remember the real causal powers of Meinongian Objects. Remember too the genuine knowledge, the meaningful intelligibility we can possess when we speak of those things that do not or cannot exist. We can define Pegasus; we can recount a story with Bellerophon; we can depict a winged horse; perhaps we could believe in one. We can take a visit to London and ride the tube to Baker Street; we can honor and memorialize Holmes as we wander along the thoroughfare. This is why they occupy the realm of Being, even of Sosein, “being thus.” But they do not exist. And while Peter Frampton assuredly does exist, his avatar as allegory does not. In what way has Paul understood Incarnation—the Word becoming flesh—that wards off the chilling notion that Jesus is a history-like character, an Intentional Object that works wonders in the realm of existence?

Note the radical claim that the Spirit acts “retroactively to constitute” Jesus as God’s historical Body: this cuts right to the quick. It is not clear to me that this gracious work of the Holy Spirit acts upon an Existent, the Incarnate Son in His visible Mission. Might it rather be that the Spirit, in an act of virginal conception, makes what does not exist into a conviction that it does, and has? Remember the prominent role that the Invisible Missions play in Paul’s thought. Has all the work, truly, been done in the inward intention, the movement of the Spirit to hallow our thoughts of the Anointed One, such that our lives reflect this Savior, the Idea of the God-man? It seems to me that Paul’s criterion of truth would be satisfied by either the Subsistence or the Existence of the Incarnate One; and indeed the stark language of “retroaction” makes me hesitate to say which should be preferred. Paul has clearly assimilated the radical adiaphora of Bultmann toward the historical question and quest of Jesus. Perhaps he would be satisfied by a bare Das, a man of some sort on whom the projections rest. But it is not evident to me that Chalcedonian or Catholic Christology can find this a matter of indifference.

The Vatican II Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, offers some delicate language about history and Tradition, or perhaps in a more Thomist vein, Visible and Invisible Mission:

The plan of revelation is realized by deeds and words having an inner unity: the deeds wrought by God in the history of salvation manifest and confirm the teaching and realities signified by the words, while the words proclaim the deeds and clarify the mystery contained in them. (Dei Verbum, 1.2)

I read the Constitution to be advocating an inner penetration and coherence of historical event and proclamation, Existence and Subsistence, in my idiom here. It may well be that Paul has in mind that his Spiritual Ecclesiology simply presents and explicates the “inner unity” of the two. But it is not transparent to me, in this case, how the distinction, rather than identity, of the Objective and the Object, can be maintained. I do not for a moment doubt Paul’s aim, to defend a fully orthodox Christology before the “tribunal of conscience and truth,” as Karl Rahner often expressed it. But it seems to me that there must be a moment when Scripture is declared Holy: that is, that its narratives and figures are considered not inerrant nor infallible, but genuinely reliable. Deeds must be seen as trust-worthy and that, supremely, in the historical event of the Visible Mission of the Son. Perhaps this is the cost of a “non-interventionist” Christology: if God only assumes the human order, but does not become, does not break into or act upon our created ways, the Incarnation will be an ordinary human nature, caught up in the Divine Life—miraculous, or perhaps better, wonderful, in a perfectly general sense, but not a miracle. Such a view recommends an historicism bound by the laws, commonplaces, and causal properties of everyday life. (In this way I find Paul’s Christology more Schleiermacherian than Thomist.) So I would say, with Paul, Yes, radical historians must have their say. But I believe Christians also, must be able to say, not always, and not in every case, but in full honesty and conscience, they are wrong. That is the stubborn facticity of the Man from Nazareth, and it is from Him, not toward Him, I say, that the saving word goes forth.

Of course there is much more that should be said here. It may well be that I do not interpret Paul properly, nor catch the force of his eschatological and back-tracking form of historical truth. But my questions are intended to sharpen and deepen this conversation, for it is vital to our common faith, and to the fine achievement of this wonderfully creative book.

On its face, Unspeakable Cults is an involved exposition of and proposed resolution to certain protracted fights about the believability of Scripture in the face of an historical self-consciousness that renders dubious the sources of Christian belief. Accordingly, it tries to square the circle of biblical criticism and biblical faith. Beyond that immediate goal, I see its work as part of a broader effort to solve a metaphysical problem, one that gets to the heart of the Christian claim of incarnation, a whole problem set put in place by belief that, variously, God became human by hypostasizing humanness, the second person of the eternal Trinity became finite, the Word was uttered to a culture that made of it what it would as culture (that which interprets utterances within the confines of its ongoing habits of speech), etc. It’s Professor DeHart’s seriousness to see the problem for what it is and his genius to see the problem through to a solution, or what he takes to be a solution. No doubt he knows of the Christian tendency to answer such problems with premature moves to “mystery”—punting on problems too hard to answer—and likely sees such moves less as answers and more as evasions of intellectual honesty, or simply willful ignorance, stuff unbecoming of theology, or more likely just not theology. He takes himself more seriously and so gives himself the task of thinking through the metaphysical problem.

The problem he concerns himself with is this, put here as a problem set: How does God save us without killing us? How does the infinite not blow up the finite while inhabiting it? Can creation be miraculous and remain creation? Does not the incarnation mean the end of the world? The problem here arises initially in answer to a previous problem. Recall one of the animating questions of creedal Christology: Why did God become human? From Athanasius to Anselm to Barth the answer is that God became human to save humans. Problem solved. But this solution came with a new problem: If God became human in order to save humans, how could God do so without obliterating the very thing God came to save? God might by becoming human save humans from sin but in a way that would not save them from God. How is it possible for humanity to absorb “fully God” and not instantaneously cease to be “fully human?” If time took in eternity, if eternity truly inhabited time, how would it not become eternity? How could it remain time?

Professor DeHart doesn’t pursue the problem in these terms, instead taking up a line of inquiry that follows out the aforementioned modern notions of historical consciousness. But it’s the same problem, or at least subsets of the same problem. Historical consciousness names just what it says and epitomizes the achievements of middle and late modernity: We became conscious of ourselves—of our history—and in so doing became conscious that human history is nothing less than human, indeed, all too human. If nothing less than human, how could history be anything more than human, which is precisely the claim incarnation makes? How could consciousness of our humanness make room for something not only more than human but infinitely more, especially in a way that the arrival of that infinitely-more does not overwhelm the human and obviate that consciousness?

As an example that plays out the achievements, take modern science, especially since science stands in for modernity’s great accomplishment vis-à-vis explanatory theories that can explain what “God” previously explained. This great accomplishment came with two benefits: the explanations and methods that promised more explanations. With the latter we received not only the promise of more explanations but also a self-consciousness of the explanations. This self-consciousness does enormous methodological work because it reminds us constantly that our explanatory theories are only that, explanations for what we think explains something. We could be wrong, just as we could be right, injecting a permanent dose of humility into the scientific mind that makes scientists perpetually modest in their claims (scientists who act otherwise simply are not scientists but more like charlatans, much like theologians who say more than they are licensed to say). This historical consciousness (the recognition that science proceeds by trial and error) amounted to a self-consciousness that it could at each turn be wrong, precisely the kind of thing that “God” precluded insofar as “God” presumed explanatory warrant. Hence no scientist worth her salt says, “I’ve arrived at the truth; I know the answer.” Rather, her claim is never more than “The evidence allows me to say . . .” with the attending disclaimer “. . . further evidence might suggest otherwise.” This is historical/self-consciousness at its best. And it applies to all knowledge. Foucault was famous for painting the Enlightenment as not only offering explanatory theories but explanatory theories of explanatory theories, that this flowering self-consciousness (often coming under the guise of genealogy as the science of science, of science come of age) marked the great achievement of the age, modernity’s high-water mark arriving both in the benefits and a self-awareness about the status and standing of those benefits. It allows us to say without shame what we should have always said: “Everything we think we know we now know we only think we know.” This could-be-wrong-at-every-turn posture should be applied to everything, from the sciences to literary theory to the practical projects that determine our daily lives.

The scientific self-consciousness certainly applied to theological knowledge and took direct aim at knowledges founded on Scripture, and it likely began there. Self-consciousness through the scientific study of religion meant genealogies that traced biblical faith to biblical source materials like JEPD, ruining forever any pretension that Christian faith fell fully formed from the sky. Instead, human belief was just that, human, through and through, owing to human artifacts crafted (“constructed” became the operative word) and passed on by human hands. We thought peering hard enough at Scripture would return to us the face of God. But then we saw ourselves, and this newfound consciousness of ourselves did not square easily with our expectations.

For many this wasn’t so much of a problem, since the benefits of modernity (those explanatory theories and the promise of more) meant that we no longer needed God to explain much of anything. But for Christians, this presented a huge problem since God, for them, explained everything in a way that could not easily brook the genealogical skepticism internal to historical consciousness. Imagine someone thinking overly hard about JEPD while trying to sing praise songs, realizing that the source of one’s worship was less the Holy Spirit and more Jahwist source material buried in the desert. Again, some Christians dealt with this problem by softening the God-explains-everything explanation of God, often by reframing matters in terms of mystery and so much apophaticism, thereby moving the goalposts of what invoking God was supposed to do. But invoking mystery simply moved the bubble elsewhere under the rug, further forcing the question: Where does God figure in now that God no longer need figure in? Professor DeHart’s wide learning means he situates the problem in terms of luminaries from middle and late modernity, from Schleiermacher and Strauss to his University of Chicago teacher Jonathan Z. Smith, to whom the book is dedicated, imagined as it is as an extended attempt to square his Catholic faith with his teacher’s famous dictum “map is not territory.”

The problem the incarnation presents within DeHart’s problem set can be understood in terms of how one thinks of miracles—specifically the miracles the canonical gospels present Jesus as performing. What is happening there? Is Jesus doing miracles or magic? Miracles are God intervening on the integrity of creation—say, the causal order according to which things work in the world. Magic is humans pretending that is the case while themselves exploiting (and therefore presuming) creation’s causal order so as to make it look like God has intervened on creation. Magic knows that creation’s causal order cannot be changed, that the world works the way the world works no matter our feelings about it—consider natural disasters like a tornado or stage-four cancer. Magicians know this and try to spin things so as to leave the impression of something else, a world more magical than the world we have. We have what we have, it is what it is, says the magician, but that doesn’t mean I can’t entertain folks along the way. Most know magic is magic, nothing more and nothing less, with some wanting to unmask the magic for the false consolation it is and some quite content for the magic to enchant them into the possibility of something more. Think of a great many Christians as the latter, and those staunchly conscious of history and the self as the former.

Of course, a great many other Christians don’t think of Jesus as a magician at all, but rather as miracle worker, and they understand the incarnation to be the great miracle. The problem set Professor DeHart concerns himself with isn’t Christianity’s cultural despisers believing Jesus only a magician (including those liberals who want his magic to portend something more than magic and less than miracle). He grants those sentiments pride of place and lets the Schleiermachers and Strauss’ and Smiths play out those sentiments. In taking on the problem metaphysically, DeHart concerns himself with those Christians who don’t see the problem for what it is: the problem of the incarnation blowing up the incarnated, a problem brought to bold relief in this question of miracles. For those who believe in miracles (including the miracle of the incarnation), God upset the natural integrity of creation in becoming human—which by definition is what incarnation does (e.g., Christ’s virgin birth)—and disrupted the cause-and-effect workings of its operations. The same is true of Christ’s miraculous acts, which the gospels seemingly portray in order to validate the claim of incarnation; but, it turns out, the hermeneutic works the other way round. The miracles are meant to make incarnation the only possible conclusion one can come to. After all, it’s the previously doubting Thomas whose conclusion from the miracle of Christ’s resurrection is “My Lord and my God.” But the very apologetical work done by the miracles presents a set of metaphysical problems regarding what we understand creation to be and hence puts in doubt whether salvation is all it promises to be. How? Restating the problem again: For God to save through the miracle of the incarnation (and its concomitant miraculous events, e.g., everything from cleansing lepers to healing the sick to raising from the dead) requires God to irreducibly change the order of creation (i.e., a world with those miracles is no longer the world), thereby raising the question of what remains left to be saved?

One answer in recent years to the metaphysical problem has come in the form of Pauline apocalypticism, which grants the premise and says that, “indeed the incarnation inaugurates the end of one world and the beginning of a new one.” But the apocalyptic move only exposes the problem to other problems. Once we say that the world is no longer “world” as we know it, how do we live? Do all criteria for the effective assessment of and practical judgment necessary for life in the world go out the window? How would, for example, science work? Would the predictive capacities of evidence-based conclusions need to take a backseat to possible supernatural activity? Apocalyptic hermeneuts seem to want it both ways, claiming both the end of the world and its continuation, likely the kind of unserious thinking Professor DeHart worries about. A more honest approach would be to put on the table the metaphysical problems miracles present, which again amounts to the possibility of God obliterating the very world God saves. That is, the honest approach requires we take seriously the question that the world can only be saved by being obliterated. Or that the only way to save us is to replace us with God. DeHart is not so much doubting that miracles happen as much as doubting that miracles can happen without any untoward effects on the belief systems of those who claim them.

If we Christians want to keep our miracles, we will need to come up with a solution to the problems miracles present. If we want to believe that the second person of the Trinity miraculously became human, we need to learn to talk about the incarnation and the Trinity in ways that keep the human intact, in a way that protects rather than runs roughshod over humanness and creaturely integrity. Salvation doesn’t mean much if what is saved bears little resemblance to the saved. Professor DeHart does so by a sometimes elegant, sometimes circuitous story of non-contrastive agency whereby God coordinates the Holy Spirit’s saving activity with ordinary human activity, thereby allowing the Word to be spoken into culture by way of the ordinary operations of language (say, linguistic projection), all of which ensures culture remains culture (say, the church as cultic projection extended in time). This process envisages the mind of Christ to be fully human while also fully divine, both immediately aware of and answering to specific contexts while also being globally aware of all contexts. These are miracles that tread lightly—a pneumatology that leaves the world as is, where the Holy Spirit lands lightly because God remains intent on both saving and preserving creation. Indeed, God is more likely saving the world by finally preserving it. The solution is powerful and compelling, even while remaining hospitable to other non-contrastive stories that work out God and creation where each importantly remain each.

My point in going on about miracles, biblical criticism, and science isn’t to doubt miracles or champion historical critical methods, much less to exaggerate the virtuousness of modern science, which is just as likely to exploit those virtues as honor them. Rather, my point is to show what historical consciousness comes to, thereby flagging what denying it means. The consciousness that says, “What I say answers to something beyond my saying it” is consciousness to the world in all of its creaturely integrity, something I must remain available to if I’m to be morally serious about the life of world, including my life in it and my life with God through it. Integrity requires I attune myself to how the world works, whether it be the operations of cellular mitosis or how man-made artifacts become revelation, all the while remembering that creaturely integrity further requires believing that one does not preclude the other. Integrity requires us to examine these worldly operations for what they are, which includes remembering what they are not and searching out ways to narrate God in some form or fashion in continuity with them. Those who deny historical consciousness by denying revelation as cultural artifact or cellular mitosis as a natural fact refuse the integrity of God and all that is not God, which God enables by locating all within the divine life. One should no more refuse that which is discovered by historical consciousness than deny that the world gives us God (as ordained by God). The strange fact is that what orders Christian worship began in source material buried in the desert, just like the one who inspires Christian worship began buried in a tomb at the dusty edges of an expiring empire. The claim of incarnation has always been that such humble beginnings do nothing to diminish the status of revelation or the standing of the one revealed. One has no choice but to square the circle of biblical criticism and biblical faith—just as some have no choice but to square the circle of stage-four cancer and biblical faith. One can evade this serious work by moving the goalposts and invoking mystery, just as one can refuse it by declaring biblical criticism nothing but modernist ideology. Professor DeHart is convinced that opting out of historical self-consciousness is not an option for the morally serious, and he thereby emblematizes that seriousness in Unspeakable Cults.

As I read him, Paul DeHart in Unspeakable Cults strives to meet this basic modern challenge: How can the Jesus critical reason perceives by historical methods ever hope to be the Christ faith confesses in classical or traditional Christology? What has Tübingen to do with Chalcedon?

The first thing to say about DeHart’s entire approach to this question is that it is utterly refreshing. It refuses to indulge the fable that the rise of historical consciousness in the modern era was a phenomenon foreign to Christian faith, an enemy onslaught against Christianity’s decrepit ramparts. Scandals “only lately come to light” in modernity “were always implicit within the radical truth of incarnation” (159). This seems exactly right.

Also quite right, to my delight, is DeHart’s claim that the path forward lies neither in an apologetic rationalism that would seek to establish the veracity of all historical facts as presented in, say, the canonical Gospels, nor in a postmodern failure of nerve that undermines the very task of history, which would thus excuse itself in principle from having to face any scandal. The path “will instead be a simultaneous embrace of D. F. Strauss and Origen,” a recognition of “the fictive and mythic elements that at the deepest levels constitute the past’s witness to Jesus” together with “discerning the deeper truth in the falsity of that witness” as “part of faith’s interpretive work” today (206).

Still another merit of DeHart’s book is that it doesn’t merely run damage-control for a faith wrecked by modern criticism but can be read as an exercise in taking Luke 24 as the revelation of what revelation is and how it unfolds. Jesus “walks along with” the two disciples heading to Emmaus (v. 15). He asks them what they’re discussing—thus his very presence poses the hermeneutical question of his identity, though they don’t yet know this (vv. 17 and 19). They reply with an interpretive category (“a prophet”) and a narration of then-recent historical facts (vv. 20–24). He then responds that these facts were always already signified in the OT (vv. 25–27). That revelation seems to have remained formal for them, since they did not recognize him until he enacted the Eucharist before their eyes. The moment they recognize him, he vanishes (v. 31).

The key elements here are, I suggest, those of DeHart’s basic argument. We have no reason to fear the scandals and falsities uncovered by modern historical-critical research into the NT, since, as this Gospel story shows, having Christ as the object of our perception does not guarantee that we’ll perceive his identity. His very objectivity might even provoke our misapprehension of him, or at least our half-truths about him (he initially seems to them “a prophet,” and even when he becomes their perceived object, he ceases to be an object perceived). The whole event is hermeneutically elusive: they knew him; they don’t know him here; they learn of his past-revealed significance from him even as they misrecognize him; suddenly they know him right then, right here, in fuller significance—which also means they no longer see him as they first did at all. Why then suppose that even a “perfect” reconstruction of Jesus as a historical object/figure would render Jesus himself more perceptible to us, i.e., would reveal the truth of his identity as the eternal Word incarnate?

DeHart goes further. An “incarnational faith” must resist any desire for “direct visibility of Jesus within history” as “a temptation” (191). Both modern historical consciousness (Strauss) and classical Christology (Aquinas) invite this conclusion.

“For the quintessentially modern tradition of historical consciousness,” writes DeHart, “any factual element of the past is appropriable only as utterly contextualized and relativized by the overall flow of causal contingency” (21). History as a science cannot in principle entertain suprahistorical causes of history, since that would open any event to arbitrary explanation and thus undermine the sense that one gains knowledge in doing history. It must assume regularity and predictability, “the continuous web of finite cause and effect” (164; cf. 195). Just here we meet Strauss’s Lessing-like challenge: even if we could bridge the gap between a historical fact and its later “appearance” in historical memory/interpretation—and DeHart argues contra Strauss that we can—how could we ever leap from historical, finite appearance to metaphysical, infinite truth (14)? Following Kierkegaard, DeHart actually concedes the historicist critique: “if Jesus really was God, in the monotheistic and not the pagan sense, he could not for that very reason appear as such” (201). Only DeHart doesn’t consider this detrimental to classical Christology.

Aquinas, unlike Spinoza, delineates a “threefold scheme of God’s inner-worldly presence” involving “not just a gradation of intensity but a layering of distinct though related modes” (144). This relieves any pressure to reduce one mode into another: God appears in all creatures as primary metaphysical cause, in the faithful as gracious cause of supernatural habits, and in Jesus as the cause of the grace of union, i.e., as the Word who assumes a human (historical) life. The last mode is utterly unique. Therefore, we shouldn’t expect it to appear in the other two modes. For DeHart, this implies (and he knows this goes beyond Aquinas’s intentions) that we can simultaneously concede to modern critics even the most radically un-traditional portrait of the historical Jesus (e.g., Morton Smith’s “Jesus the magician”) and still insist that, from within the very logic of classical Christology, such a scandalous result is not only assimilable but inevitable. Not that Smith’s portrait has to be the right one (DeHart makes no properly historical judgment). The broader point is that metaphysical “non-rivalry” among differing modes of divine presence necessitates that an authentic incarnation of the divine Word renders that Word utterly human, utterly historical:

Jesus, though he was the absolute fact (because he was the absolute fact), was historically unexceptional, ordinary through and through. Though he was the eternal Word incarnate (because he was the eternal Word incarnate), the consciousness in which he experienced this world and himself was saturated by the cultural currents of his time. The Gospels, though they truly testify of the absolute fact (because they truly testify of the absolute fact), are filled with mythic fictions and contrafactual claims. (193, his emphasis)

Much to commend in both the question posed and the approach undertaken, but for time’s sake I’ll get straight to my lingering worry: DeHart’s account, rigorous indeed, seems to accommodate the scandal of incarnation only by indulging a sort of post-liberal extrinsicism. And I wonder if this difficult balancing act finally falls off in both directions at once, on the side of historicism and on the side of Christology itself.

By “post-liberal extrinsicism” I mean that DeHart tends to conceive history and Christology as two basically separate, integral spheres of thought whose actual identity or interpenetration can only be posited in an act of ecclesial faith, never really perceived as one. On one level, the perpetual armistice comes from the laudable motive to oppose any arbitrary violation of one integral sphere or the other, as when the hasty apologist does “history” for ideological ends (examples abound). But the division is not merely a double negation. It makes the positive claim that, precisely because historicism entails a closed system of “merely human” and “merely finite” relations, then the perception of the historical Jesus’s divine identity is available only to a mind ecclesially “attuned” by “pneumatic socialization into the Christian body” (117). This is “the total self-venture of faith” that cannot (in principle?) remove the perduring perils of historical consciousness (165), such that the application of any “extraordinary” category (e.g., “theophany”) to the historical Jesus is either historically irrational or a claim of faith—Jesus’s miracles are “legible only by faith” (202).

But if, for DeHart, faith’s perception of Jesus’s identity as the Word incarnate is of such kind that “historical explanation can never go ‘too far’ or ‘too deep’ or be ‘too exhaustive’ for faith” (211), then the question arises: What has history to do with faith at all? If history can never go too far for faith, doesn’t that just mean that history is inherently unrelated to faith? Must the price of granting history its causal autonomy be that history itself has no effect on faith itself? What then is “incarnational” about this “incarnational faith”? DeHart’s preferred analogy—that the Spirit or divine providence gives significative form to historical matter—again postulates a connection without explaining one, still less an intrinsic one. If it’s only “through the special involvement of God” that the interpretation of a certain “segment” of Jesus’s followers proves true yet “nonfactual” (183)—think again of the canonical Gospels—then we’re locked into a closed circle: How do we discern God’s special involvement? Any answer seems question-begging. What began with a desire soberly to face the demands of modern reason appears to end by shielding faith from any result achieved by historical reasoning.

My worry comes from the side of Christology too. Just as DeHart preserves the integrities of ecclesial faith and historical reason by maintaining their inability to interpenetrate or relate as one, so too does he maintain the integrity of Christ’s two natures by rendering them incapable of actual relation or interpenetration as one. I suspect that this is what makes Aquinas’s Christology useful for DeHart. Unlike, say, the Neo-Chalcedonians, Aquinas understands the grace of union itself to be a created term or relation. So while he affirms that Christ is one person in two natures, he fails to see Christ himself as the actual oneness of his two natures. For thinkers such as Maximus Confessor, by contrast, Christ’s very person is the union of his two natures, created and uncreated (historical and eternal, etc.). Hence the actuality or factuality of the union cannot be exhaustively characterized as either merely created or merely uncreated. For he is the condition of their union rather than they the condition(s) of his person as their union. From this vantage, I’d balk at DeHart’s claim that “theology should begin from the assumption that [Jesus’s] acts are humanly explicable as such, at every point, scientifically, psychologically, culturally” (197). It doesn’t follow that because Jesus’s acts “were always at least fully human acts” that they might be “no more than fully human acts” (198, original emphasis). Rather, if Jesus’s acts were not also simultaneously divine acts, then God was never meaningfully incarnate in a life of fully human acts. Fully needn’t mean exclusively.

Here again we hit the familiar post-liberal extrinsicism. On the one hand, if the historical Jesus’s divine acts are perceived only by a faith sequestered from historical reason, then the fact that Jesus’s divine acts are in principle inaccessible to historical reasoning suggests they never meaningfully appear as human. On the other hand, if in principle his divine acts could have appeared in his human (historical) life, yet they didn’t, then it’s again difficult to see how Jesus’s divine identity ever actually appeared as human. What began with a desire to take the Word’s incarnation more seriously appears to end by making a truly historical incarnation impossible in principle.

Hence DeHart’s ambiguity around the Resurrection, treated brusquely in the text. He shares “the assumption of traditional Christian faith that Jesus is really, bodily alive and not dead,” such that this reality exceeds “the believing attitudes of his followers” (199). But is the Resurrection historical? It would seem so. Is it miraculous too? This seems less clear. DeHart argues (often cogently) that miracles in general “play no systematic role in actualizing the union of the eternal Word and the human being Jesus” (196). But precisely with the Resurrection such an axiom strains to the breaking point: if Resurrection is miraculous, then it too plays no part in “actualizing” the oneness of the God-human; if it is not miraculous, then it seems there is something inherently human that we’ve ruled out in principle when doing history—rendering history less than humanly reasonable. The latter option undermines history, the former undermines Christology.

I suspect that DeHart might have unnecessarily restricted himself both historically and Christologically. And I suspect that the latter is more determinative for both. For much of the dialectical opposition is generated by the unquestioned equation of our abstractions about created and uncreated natures—all the talk of “as such” in the text—with what is real and perceptible of both in Christ. DeHart works, as it were, with a latent notion of “pure nature,” whether of history or the divine Word. Yet the logic of pure nature will never yield the logic of their actual oneness in and as his person.

For if the incarnate Word’s “enduring significance” occurs “only through being taken up into and causally mediated by further events of equally conditioned character” (21), then not even the eschaton will reveal Christ’s divinity—not even the perfected community—unless, that is, the eschaton is inherently ahistorical. At length, then, DeHart seems merely to defer, not to explain, how two non-rivalrous agencies (divine and human) are ever actually one without canceling each other. And this exposes a surprising if unintended oddity in DeHart’s picture: his non-rivalrous metaphysics and Christology, designed to grant integrity and autonomy to historical fact-appearance and divine truth, together conceal a rivalry so total that its resolution proves not only unspeakable but impossible.

I trust that in Unspeakable Cults, Paul DeHart and I are fellow travelers. We share, I think, similar desires: to affirm the power of human history beyond the mere attestation of its facts (as on 15, 98–99); to testify, somehow, to a more-than-general divine revelation in Jesus Christ (57, 99–102); and to acknowledge the difficulty of doing either of these things, however much one might wish to rely instead on the intensity of one’s own desiring to fill in all the logical gaps. “The invincible ambiguity of the wondrous acts of Jesus,” DeHart says, “means that theology must always reckon with their principled explicability in purely human and historical terms” (217). So we are fellow travelers: we might have different methods and even different conclusions, but we wander the same wide and dark forest of intellectual challenges facing an historical faith—facing historical faith, that is, precisely in its historicity.

With the trust of a fellow traveler in mind, I want to “play” with kinds of nearness and distance to DeHart’s work. Below, I will briefly explore Unspeakable Cults’ description of Christ as a “monstrosity” (esp. 217–37). I will question what that description makes of historical facts and ultimately relate these questions to Maurice Blondel, whose lot is often thrown in with the “modernists” Alfred Loisy (mentioned on 228) and George Tyrrell (237), despite great differences between Blondel and them.

By “monstrosity of Jesus,” DeHart means “the strange and repellent visage he ever threatens to turn toward those attempting to grasp his divinity” (19). Hans Urs von Balthasar might toy with that “grasping” imagery: human beings titanically attempt (he might say) to lay hold of, to control, to capture divinity. Instead of kenosis, or “letting-be”—instead of an open hand—one can try to control and contain; one can try to “grasp.” In Unspeakable Cults, DeHart’s reference to monstrosity implies something like this impulse of ours, whose basic shape is, in Balthasar’s terms, “mastery.” But God cannot be mastered; as Augustine says, “si comprehendis non est Deus.”

DeHart also means something more by “monstrosity.” More, I mean, than a reference to the superluminous light, the brilliant darkness, of God. I think that I am so accustomed to this other way of viewing God’s supraintelligibility that it took me some time to discern exactly what DeHart’s “more” is. “[T]he ‘God-man,’” DeHart says, “is a monstrosity for the understanding” (220). By “monstrous,” DeHart almost always means an experience of faith, and an experience that is underway. Jesus is “traumatic,” “wounding us in our illusions” because he “truly is the God-man” (222). “This trauma of faith confronting the humanity of Jesus is the key to his monstrosity” (223). Instead of Balthasar’s open hand and his letting-be, which is a near image for Augustine’s “non est Deus,” DeHart wants to name something more startling and strange. Something that hurts. DeHart explains that Jesus’s monstrosity-to-the-understanding is some kind of ongoing process, an “enormous vitality” (219) playing out in constant historical “dilation” (223).

Again, DeHart’s description here is something different than more customary Western scripts. For someone like John of the Cross, God in Christ is the great hunter who “wounds” the soul with love. That “pain” becomes a “flame” of desire, of love, which burns while also driving the soul upward and onward. This coincidence of pain and desire is as old as Plato’s Symposium: desire is ecstatic partly because it is having-and-not-having. This coincidence is older still than Plato: Sappho invents the phrase “bittersweet” to describe love. But DeHart’s “trauma” and “monstrosity” are different than these coincidences. He builds around a too-much-ness that threatens to tear apart the possibility of human understanding: “the Christian has no rational or dialectical way to resolve the difficulty of seeing Jesus now in the Jesus of the Gospels” (224). By “understanding,” DeHart might most of all mean a wound, a trauma, not to historical-scientific knowledge, but to the intelligence and intelligibility of faith: “the monstrous combination of humanity and divinity in these [Scripture] stories has always supplied a possible offense to faith that no philosophy could eliminate” (Ibid.).

It is, perhaps, stereotypical for a Catholic theologian—at least, one built like I am, which is to say: anxiously—to wonder, “What about dogma?” Dogma would be a more technical form of worrying over whether the Christian can say something, anything, true about Jesus. And DeHart allows, I think, for true things to be true: as long as they are also provisional. “The community of his cult struggles to recognize Jesus as it grows with him in the world, but it is haunted by the realization that it cannot yet name him, cannot yet definitively identify him (which is not to say that he is unknown to it)” (235). Such a claim would probably not be enough to soothe the anxious dogmatist. I grant that it’s unclear whether anything would or could. But even so: I am asking, in a roundabout and somewhat self-effacing way, whether there is space, here, in this haunted place, for Bernard Lonergan’s “virtually unconditioned.” Or, to borrow Balthasar’s adaptation of New Testament terms: can the quaerens of faith also contain an inveniens?1 Can we say things of God that we need not take back?

Let me try a different angle of engagement. DeHart’s use of hybridities and composites (i.e., “God-man,” historical-cultic layers or fragments, the creative-integrative accretions of the historical community) is an intriguing attempt to tackle the problem of Jesus Christ. Hybridity is a “classic” feature of the literary monster. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen explains: “[T]he monster is dangerous, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions. […] The too-precise laws of nature as set forth by science are gleefully violated in the freakish compilation of the monster’s body.”2 Thus, on some level, DeHart’s Christ-the-monstrosity: “smashing” distinctions with his compilation of features.

Cohen also thinks of monsters as historical moments. They are not timeless or transcendent. They are “born.” And, since born, they signify. “Monsters must be examined within the intricate matrix of relations (social, cultural, and literary-historical) that generate them.”3 Monsters are helpful to read about and think about because they say something about those that made them. Monsters usually exist at the borders of the meanings that people make, signifying both the boundary of meaning and its transgression. As Toni Morrison says of Beowulf’s Grendel, “Humans have words for madness, explanations for evil, and a system of payback for those who trespass or are judged outlaws. But Grendel was beyond comprehension, unfathomable. The ultimate monster: mindless without intelligible speech.”4 Therefore, monsters exist ambivalently. They are not our enemies, but they are not our friends, either. They signify taboos we might like to overthrow, and ones we might like to keep: sexual difference, communal coherence, cannibalism, incest, etc.5 Monsters tell us where the borders are and not what to do with them.

The “trauma” and “offense” that DeHart ultimately wants to point out and protect is not quite the Cthulhu of his final chapter’s title. For Cthulhu is, beyond even Grendel (who can at least be defeated), sheer and terrifying mindlessness. The great beyond opens wide its maw and reveals that there is nothing to appropriate or negotiate with. Against this kind of unknowing, DeHart wants to discover something positive in the middle of all that terror: “[H]istory seeks Jesus as a dead fact, fixed in a bygone distance. Only the faith that knows his total claim, the uncontrollable surplus of his humanity, also knows the dread that comes when you look down that same well, only to see the unutterable living thing climbing up toward you” (237). So a tension results in the monster imagery. Jesus is doing the work of existing at a border, even ambivalently, at least with respect to our capacity to fully understand. This is a kind of threat. But Jesus the monster is also—well, good.

I have been indicating and mimicking various means that theologians use to describe a divine superabundance of meaning, including DeHart’s text. Here I could also invoke John Henry Newman’s “Christian idea,” at least in the sense that this idea, structured as it is, bears the capacity for doctrinal development. Not everything about the faith needs to have been said by the fourth century, or the thirteenth, or the twentieth. And I think there are ways to say (as with monsters) that not every encounter with God needs to be nonviolent—with respect to falsity, or obstinance, or sin. God does not merely soothe us. He gives, and asks for, more.

But I wonder whether fulfillment needs to be monstrous or the open hand of si comprehendis non est Deus traumatic. Which I think for DeHart they are. In a way that is offensive and also good. Surely these are monsters and traumas that, like all the other ones, are of a place and a time. A place and a time that expected, maybe, that Scripture’s task would involve less of our own confusion. Or (in terms of Catholic obstinacies) a place and a time that wished tradition were more self-evident, more solid, more out-there-now. Hell, that dreamed that the Vatican always knows what the Vatican is doing. The monster, that is, of a fantasy that fantasized humans to be other than they are, and that fantasized God to be dealing with them.

In such a fantasy, there is less room for strategies like Maurice Blondel’s, which organize the whole difficulty of our natural “deficiency” (whether that of sin or of self-completion) in terms of supernatural fulfillment. “Catholicism,” Blondel says, “far from being a religion against nature, against reason, against freedom, is essentially the path of the triumph of man and of humanity.”6 It is less that I want to just disagree with DeHart than I want to wonder about these other things like Blondel’s and how we might make room for them without Cthulhu. For they are not things of Cthulhu. The glory of God, says Irenaeus, is man fully alive. It is not that we need to know everything about this life or what it will be like; it is that it is life.

Dogma is a function, according to Maurice Blondel, of life. It is, even before proclaimed, practiced. “[T]he proper and truly unique mark of Christianity is the coincidence of historical reality and of dogmatic truth.”7 Lonergan’s “virtually unconditioned,” similarly, has a historical hook, for it is the mind’s act of judgment, and acts of judgment occur in history. Something similar follows Thomas Aquinas’s quidquid recipitur (discussed esp. on Unspeakable Cults, 137–44): the modum of the receiver includes history so intimately that grace is understood to be infused in the believer, cascading into every operation of being a human being. Into human being-alive.

I do trust that my fellow-traveler affirms some sense of these kinds of things, too. Meanwhile, I have been exploring my nearness and distance from these many senses. They are not merely lexical nearnesses and distances, though some of them might “merely” be so. I find them interesting to struggle with, which is one great gift of Unspeakable Cults: its earnest struggle to take seriously the problem of history and of Christian faith. But let me not end on struggles or question-marks. Let me finish with agreement: “The Christians in their millions,” DeHart says, “with all their undeniable record of smugness, ignorance, and viciousness, are those whom the divine irony has gifted with the ability to see that whole collection of sordid historical facts for what it is: the saving disclosure of God to all humanity” (237).

In Praise of Christological Monstrosity

DeHart’s principal claim in Unspeakable Cults is that the Word becoming flesh means the Word becoming culture, and that the Word becoming culture is the raw material of the Spirit-led church as it realizes itself—fallibly—in history. Both the Christological claim and its ecclesiological complement strike me as largely correct.

The claim that the “incarnation . . . should be interpreted as involving a relation or synergy between human religious symbolization and the divine ontological mission” (12) establishes a sound starting point. DeHart is effectively urging theologians to pair an affirmation of Christ’s divinity with a “thick description” of Christ’s identity as a human embedded in a particular patch of time and space. It is not sufficient simply to contend that Christ has a human soul, experiences certain emotions, and aligns his human will with God’s direction. Such abstractions only ever take thought so far, and their value will only be realized as a theologian considers how Christ lives, speaks, feels, and acts in this and that cultural matrix, local to this and that patch of time and space. And precisely this concern for thick description enables DeHart to be refreshingly un-nervous about historical-critical scholarship, even when it heads in potentially disconcerting directions. Granted that a historian might train attention on dynamics immanent to context, resulting in an account of Jesus as, say, a “magician,” a Cynic philosopher, or a frustrated prophet, a theologian need not become alarmed. Quite the contrary: she now gains the opportunity to consider how Christ’s engagement with his quotidian fosters new modes of christological discourse, and she can begin to reflect on how these discourses might be drawn into the orbit of God’s redemptive activity. To make the same point differently: Yes, Martin Kähler was correct to worry about historical research becoming a condition of faith. But he was wrong to suppose that one starts upon a slippery slope whenever historical-critical study has a material influence on dogmatic reflection. If Christ has a “unique, supra-historical significance (übergeschichtlichen Bedeutung) for the whole of humanity,” a more relaxed posture is needed.1 One can grant that Christ engaged his quotidian in various ways, and that this engagement is patient of diverse kinds of explication; and one can approach the scholarly “afterlives” of this engagement as an opportunity to think anew about the Word that births itself, and is always born anew, in culture.

The suggestion that there is an “unbounded surplus of human meaning concentrated in Jesus,” which gains “expression through the endless historical constructions of a cultic community” (13) is a vital expansion of DeHart’s starting point. Evident here is a Troeltschian sense that varied forms of Christian community, different modes of christological reflection, and the semiotics of diverse cultures are entangled symptoms of Christ’s “transit” through history. To be sure, the incarnate life of the Word is indelibly marked Jewish and Greek environments. But this life gains density and complexity in its reception across time and space, given that God is “in” the risen and enspirited Christ who presents himself to later generations just as much as God is “in” the human whose life spans the first decades of the common era. Christ, in fact, is “‘smeared’ across the centuries,” for the “assuming Word horizontally dilates [his] human being . . . in an unending history of reception that extends and expresses him” (222–23). So, just as the Spirit appropriated the words of early believers to forge the New Testament, artfully coordinating cultural forms to forge a witness to God’s self-revelation, in later years the “personal arrival of the Spirit spread among the multitude of believers . . . sets up a field of force operative among the discrete facts of history” (232). Subsequent cultural apprehensions thereby bear witness to—and, in a sense, become part of—Christ’s “kinetic reality” (234).

A broader point of commendation: DeHart’s program is a useful model for theologians who would steer a path between a lamentable Scylla and Charybdis: either supposing that the “unfolding” of Christ’s body is an asymptotic affair, with recent interrogations of Christ’s person and work being vastly superior to anything found in the past, or supposing that the “right” unfolding of this body requires a cranky reversion to earlier (and putatively superior) dogmatic formulae. Alternative to both suppositions is the idiom of “monstrosity”—a deft framing of christological reflection as an imperative and a site of failure. An imperative, because a theologian is obliged to reckon with Christ as he imposes himself on some “here and now,” and because a theologian can and should and will use whatever resources lie to hand when making sense of this imposition: ancient, medieval, modern, avant-garde, whatever. (Again, the theologian needn’t worry if his engagement with the “Christ of faith” intersects with his interest in the “Jesus of history.” If the “Spirit-force . . . released by Jesus’s resurrection . . . provides the heat . . . that fuses the diverse cultural elements into the single living being of the Christ-event” (232), it is possible that the Spirit will make good use of intellectual endeavors in the present and future.) A failure, because every attempt to capture Christ in thought does him an injustice. We are always running to catch up. And, on this side of eternity, we don’t just lag; we’re constantly falling over our feet, embarrassing ourselves as mediocre competitors in a race whose terminus is unknown and whose route is unclear. In fact, even as Christ “trails . . . his glory behind him in history, like a king’s heavy velvet train” (237), we are not merely believers who strain, pathetically, to touch the hem of his garment; we are also the “mud” through which he drags himself, and our acts of misrecognition are compounded by grievous distortions of his Kingdom. Still, to twist the screw once more, the travesty of our misrecognition and misconduct might at some point be overmastered by the monstrosity of grace. And this overmastering is a consolation. It may so happen that the labors of faithless servants are given a part to play in the outworking of God’s redemptive purposes.

With précis and praise in hand, I want next to offer three points of commentary. The first engages DeHart’s reading of Schleiermacher. The second suggests that a continuation of the project of Unspeakable Cults might do well to engage theological projects that are already in the business of connecting historical-critical engagements with the “Jesus of history” with dogmatic acclamations of the “Christ of faith.” Third and finally, I offer a dialectical—and manifestly Reformed—counterpoint to DeHart’s outlook.

Re-engaging Schleiermacher

Central to DeHart’s reading of the Glaubenslehre is the contention that Schleiermacher does not adequately reckon with Christ’s enculturated life. Certainly—and DeHart is wholly right to move past outdated (but persistent) interpretations—Schleiermacher offers a robust account of Christ as one who bears the fullness of God’s presence. Schleiermacher is also explicit in identifying Christ as a redeeming “archetype” (Urbild), not a mere “exemplar” (Vorbild). Christ is “the only ‘other’ in which there is an existence of God in the proper sense”; and Christ’s human relationship to God, defined by a maximally stabilized “God-consciousness,” establishes the pattern by which others are brought into right relation with God.2 But things go awry because Schleiermacher’s sense of the “primordial conditioning of [Jesus’s] human subjectivity by a unique presence of God” is paired with “a quasi-docetic removal of Jesus’s Innerlichkeit from contamination by his own culture” (137–38). The upshot is that Schleiermacher fails to show that Christ’s humanity is genuinely embedded in the historical-cultural quotidian in which he exists—a failure that makes it difficult, in turn, to understand how Christ’s humanity is fully coessential with ours. By extension, DeHart argues, Schleiermacher does not explain convincingly how God’s redemptive action shapes subsequent historical-cultural spheres. The problem of a Christ who seems to float “above” history is compounded by an ecclesiology that focuses more on “the dynamics of community formation” (152) than the operations of the Spirit.

I would offer three responses to this reading of Schleiermacher.

First, I fully agree that Schleiermacher does not think effectively about Jesus’s relation to ancient culture. An obvious “tell” is the tendency to minimize Jesus’s association with ancient Israel, and it is surely worth asking if theologians who disinvest in something like an “Israelology” are invariably on the backfoot when it comes to reflecting on the Word become culture. (Schleiermacher’s beloved Calvin, incidentally, did offer some kind of “Israelology,” and it is perhaps no coincidence that one could extend his Christology in DeHartian directions.) Another “tell” is Schleiermacher’s preference for descriptions of Christ’s God-consciousness that foreground a blissed-out indifference to existential struggle, with Christ’s humanity figured as “purely receptive” (or, worse, “passive”) in relation to God’s causal activity. Beyond the fact that this pairing of divine activity and human receptivity/passivity risks an outsized Cyrillianism, shorn of interest in the cross and lacking Cyril’s appreciation of the complex experience of the Word incarnate, Schleiermacher hereby loses the opportunity to develop a textured account of Christ’s human life. With that opportunity lost, there isn’t much of a basis on which to correct Schleiermacher’s inattention to Christ’s existence in and for ancient cultures, much less an opening to think positively about Christ’s existence in and for the cultures that follow.

Second, and more critically, I worry that DeHart overplays the claim that Schleiermacher affirms the presence of God in Christ but shies away from viewing Christ as “the being of God acting in his own persona” (147). Schleiermacher’s understanding of the incarnation as grounded in God’s elective decision—a point that DeHart rightly emphasizes—arguably mitigates this concern, given that the configuration of all events in time and space is put in service of the “divine purpose” (Ratschluss) as it is expressed in the union of “the Divine essence with human nature in the Person of Christ.”3 Schleiermacher’s contention that God’s love involves a full “impartation” of God to human beings in the work of redemption, such that human beings “come to a knowledge of the divine love” is also, possibly, a mitigating factor.4 True, neither of these claims enables the incarnation to be described straightforwardly as the self-revelation of God qua Son. Divine purpose and the impartation of God’s being do not add up to Christ being identified as the second person of the Trinity. But Schleiermacher can at least be read as establishing the groundwork for such an affirmation, especially if one sets about reworking the final pages of the Glaubenslehre to provide DeHart with the trinitarian framework that he (rightly) seeks. (Yes, such reworking is a tall order! But it might be possible. Schleiermacher’s closing remarks do more than disclose the trinitarian shape of piety; they also lay out a series of dogmatic challenges. That some in the nineteenth century shied away from the challenges does not mean that theologians in the twenty-first century might not take them up.)

Third, I would contest the claim that the dynamics of community formation displace the work of the Spirit. Although questions might well be raised about the way that Schleiermacher thinks about the God-world relationship—and, certainly, Aquinas might help in addressing such questions—Schleiermacher is adamant that the Holy Spirit establishes, sustains, and intensifies the unio cum Christo. That all of this happens through processes susceptible to “immanent” explanation does not count against the dogmatic assertion; it simply requires that one think (as DeHart does) about divine and human activity in noncompetitive terms.

The deeper problem, to my mind, is that Schleiermacher does not manage to think positively about diverse receptions and responses to Christ’s “transit” through history. While he affirms the spontaneous “prolongation of Christ’s fellowship-forming activity” as the work of the Spirit, and can even say that certain “divisions” in the church “must ultimately be reckoned among the effects of the Holy Spirit,” the force of these claims is blunted by a sense that Christian life is largely a matter of imitating Christ’s God-consciousness.5 This emphasis on imitation obscures the creativity of the Spirit and constricts the ecclesiological imagination, for it encourages an unduly homogenous approach to Christian culture. Improperly so! Being “of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind” with Christ (Phil. 2:2) is arguably a recipe for heterogeneity, partly because the “mind” of Christ is as rich as the mind of God herself, and partly because Christ’s mind and love, by way of the Spirit, transforms different people in different ways. The same point in DeHart’s favored idiom: Christ’s monstrosity, unleashed upon the world through the Spirit, begets a monstrously diverse array of Christian cultures, of which Pentecost is but a foretaste.

Liberating Monstrosity?

As noted, I find commendable DeHart’s willingness to move past an opposition between the “historical Jesus” and “historic, biblical Christ.” If Martin Kähler sometimes glances toward the possibility that these approaches might productively interact (an example: “we would not deny historical research can help to explain and clarify particular features of Jesus’s actions and attitudes as well as many aspects of his teaching”), the burden of The So-called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ is to force a stark choice.6 Either one uses one’s imagination to agglomerate scattered fragments into a coherent whole, thus continuing the ill-fated task of offering a “biography” of Jesus that reflects modern norms, or one honors the risen Christ, who reveals himself to us through scripture and preaching, through an elaboration of the understanding that is ingredient to faith.

The way that DeHart overcomes this either/or is ingenious. Granted the significance of scripture and proclamation, it is apt to consider how Christ presents himself to us through multiple cultural media and diverse intellectual technologies. And it is vital for theologians not to hold those media and technologies in preemptive contempt, since they are (potentially) instruments of the Spirit. More fully: the very fact that the Word becomes flesh means that Christ “had to assume in his consciousness contemporarily available cultural forms” (179). Christ would not be truly human otherwise. And it is salutary that scholars now continue in the “imaginative labor of cultic recognition” (182), retrieving and recombining ancient cultural forms as they pursue the “Jesus of history.” Why? Because there has never been a direct line of sight on the God who “hides” in Christ qua human; because there has only been a “provision of meaning” in relation to “the constitutive human act of interpretation” (191) that is integral to religious life; and because any number of provisions and interpretations of Jesus of Nazareth are occasions for God to reveal Godself. The Spirit made use of an “array of signals surrounding the temporal presence of the eternal Word” (197), turning them to God’s redemptive advantage in the first centuries of the common era, and the Spirit might well be doing the same thing right now.

Morton Smith and J. Z. Smith are useful test-cases for the elaboration of this argument, not least because of the former’s controversial identification of Jesus as a “magician” and the latter’s staunch historicism (flavored with dashes of Foucault). But I wonder if DeHart misses the opportunity to reckon with projects contemporaneous to Smith & Smith—projects that engage historical-critical scholarship directly, and that do so with a concern to integrate an incarnational sensibility with a pneumatology of culture. Of particular note in this respect is the christological program adumbrated in Jon Sobrino’s Christology at the Crossroads, then expanded in Jesus the Liberator: A Historical-Theological Reading of Jesus of Nazareth and Christ the Liberator: A View from the Victims.7 At key points, Sobrino’s sensibilities align with DeHart’s. There is resistance to theological reflection that posits an “abstract, idealistic logos” and a concern to draw on historical-critical research in ways that “draw close . . . to the totality of Christ.”8 There is something akin to the idea that God assumes discrete cultural formations, given Sobrino’s claim that divine “transcendence . . . become[s] trans-descendence, benevolent closeness, and thus becomes con-descendence, affectionate embrace.”9 And, given Sobrino’s insistence on the correctness of Ignacio Ellacuría’s claim the global South is disproportionately populated by “crucified people,” an intriguing extension of DeHart’s argument about the “hiddenness” of God incarnate can be espied—namely, that God’s “hiddenness” gains a macabre echo in the invisibilization of the poor in much theological reflection.

I am not here suggesting that the christological agendas of DeHart and Sobrino are substantially similar. DeHart’s dependence on Aquinas is profound, and his claim that the incarnation is “the incorporation of the entirety of [Jesus’s human subjectivity] in its historical actualization instrumentally within the personal self-relation of God” (149) is likely paired with the claim that Jesus’s human history does not bear materially on the eternal life of the Son. Sobrino, by contrast, expands the theological metaphysics of Karl Barth, Eberhard Jüngel, and (especially) Jürgen Moltmann, with the history of the Word become flesh being constitutive of the eternal life of God’s second way of being—this being the basis for an endorsement of theopaschism. My concern here is different: I want to press the issue of how DeHart’s programmatic essay might gain constructive articulation in the years to come. To offer a trio of overlapping questions, each of which attests to my belief that the integration of liberationist and systematic thinking is crucial for the health of Christian thought: (a) How does a prolegomenal statement about Christ as a “monster” who is “now extending itself into history as a cultural body” (218) connect with projects that emphasize Christ’s solidarity with those beset by forms of injustice that portend death, yet nevertheless identify God as (to borrow now from Gustavo Gutiérrez) the “God of life”?10 What manner of dialectical monstrosity is this? (b) If it is correct to say that the liberationist christologies of Sobrino, Gutiérrez, and others do not naively “nudge the ‘historical’ Jesus into some religiously or ethically satisfying shape”—say, the “guerilla destabilizer of the social order” (226)—but instead ensure that the project of faith seeking understanding includes attention to praxis, especially the praxis of those whose lives are deemed unimportant or expendable by the operations of global capital, what is the next step? How might the revolutionary demand for justice intersect with the Word becoming culture? (c) On the assumption that Christ’s “work” has some manner of salvific impact in the here and now, is it apt to risk the claim that the work of the poor can sometimes be a site of “salvific power”?11 Is the “lag” of Christian life sometimes offset with proleptic anticipations of the Kingdom, realized not only in the preaching of the Word and the distribution of the sacraments but also in the hard work of political organizing?

Reforming Monstrosity

The moments in which Bultmann and Barth make an appearance in Unspeakable Cults are noteworthy. Both are right, DeHart suggests, to exchange the hesitancy of “liberal” Protestantism for unembarrassed affirmations of God’s action, with Bultmann charting an eschatological (and existential) path beyond Kähler, and with Barth tying an awed sense of the Krisis of the Word “veiled” in flesh to the twists and turns of the Gospel narratives. Both authors stumble, however, in their failure “to fully embrace the historicity” of the incarnation. Barth’s particular misstep is to construe the “transcendent, ‘noncompetitive’ mode of the Spirit’s work in history” in ways that “threaten . . . to bypass the inherent ‘local’ human possibilities completely, leaving the Word operative somewhere ‘above’ history but never really incarnate in it” (104).

I am not sure that this critique is fair, particularly when it comes to Barth. And granted that DeHart tenders his critique passingly, exploring it helps sharpen an issue that I want to raise in conclusion.

Against the grain of some interpretative stances in the mid-to-tail-end of the twentieth century, I would argue that the late Barth offers an unusually rich account of Jesus’s humanity, presenting Christ’s human being and action as vital elements in God’s saving work.12 And while Barth’s presentation does not engage the motif of “culture” in ways that connect with DeHart’s interest in Smith & Smith—Kähler’s either/or was lodged too deep in Barth’s theological psyche to permit that—it never loses sight of the fact that Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection are only intelligible in their relation to ancient Israel. Put more precisely: Christians simply cannot understand Christ aright unless he is viewed as the Messiah of Israel, as the Word become “Jewish flesh,” and it is ancient Israel’s distinctive literary culture, codified in the texts that comprise the Hebrew Bible, that sets the parameters for understanding him as such.13 (Perhaps not coincidentally, attention to Israel’s literary culture goes hand in hand with a marked difference with Schleiermacher: Barth does not hold Christ at a distance from the world in which he lives; Jesus bears human sin and God’s conclusive judgment upon it, and Jesus does so in ways that are local to the quotidian in which he lives.)

But does this establish a basis on which to integrate historical-critical study into christological reflection? And does Barth move toward DeHart’s claim that Jesus is “smeared” across the centuries, gathering density and complexity through the efforts of those who receive him?

In response to the first question, there is likely room for improvement. Although Hans Frei was right to say that Barth engages historical criticism in an ad hoc way, Barth’s determination to be a “critically naïve reader”—one for whom “historical-critical exegesis” never holds the role of “governess” but is always demoted to the status of “handmaiden”—it is fair to add that such a stance foreclosed some avenues for reflection.14 Why? Because theological exegesis, in advance, relates to other discourses from a position of presumed dominance, thereby limiting the possibilities available to an interpreter. If that posture amounted to an invaluable course correction in the first half of the twentieth century, it now seems unduly restrictive. (It is also important to object to the gendered terms in play: they suggest a symbolically male theologian drawing selectively on the work of unnamed female aides.) Further, if one reads Barth’s Christology through his doctrine of election, such that the concrete life of Jesus is integral to the eternal being of the Word, there are reasons to urge greater openness to historical-critical study: it might add valuable texture to an account of the Word becoming and being this “unsubstitutable” person, located in an utterly particular patch of time and space.15

The response to the second question, however, is more complex. To my mind, Jesus is not only to be understood in view of the literary culture of ancient Israel; one must also grant that God has authorized (and, John Webster would add, sanctified) the literary culture of the New Testament to serve as the preeminent witness to God’s saving work.16 So even as the incarnation prompts a “relation or synergy between human religious symbolization and the divine ontological mission” (12)—“synergy” might seem risky, but it aptly reminds us that God’s direction of the processes that funded the formation of the New Testament includes the exercise of human creativity—this very event of “religious symbolization” is now given to us as a witness, and it is a witness that should order and shape all subsequent exercises of the imagination. To be clear: I am not suggesting that theological work requires a slavish reiteration of biblical terminology. Nothing good comes of that. I am also not advocating for a debased doctrine of inspiration, crafted to exempt scripture from the obvious fact of historical conditioning and, by extension, to isolate it from the inevitable operations of sin. My (obviously Reformed) point is that all exercises of Christian reason should now take their cues from this text, and that theologians are called always to “test” their accounts of Christ against its witness.

To make the point in a different way: DeHart is clear in stating that the “terrible flash of the Christ-event” preserved in the Gospels supplies the church with an “indispensable orientation for all future efforts” (234). My concern is to make this “terrible flash” (which is of course chronologically posterior to the first Christian cult) materially determinative for every ensuing theological project. This “flash,” after all, is not an early link in the chain of Christian culture as an unfolding of Christ’s person. It is our Urkultur. It is the primordial material according to which one must approach Christ’s monstrosity. And Christians are thus obliged to return to this culture, time and again, beset with worries about misrecognition while strengthened by the hope that the Spirit—the Spirit of the Word made flesh and the Spirit that directs our reception of the Word made text—will enable the church to begin again. This might still be a recipe for monstrosity. But it will be a monstrosity that invests less in the “dilation” of Christ across the centuries, and a monstrosity that fixates on the particularity of his identity as it is mediated through and delimited by the witness of scripture.