Communicatio idiomatum as the Ontological Foundation of Luther’s Christology (Review of “Creator est Creatura”)

By Piotr Malysz

Creator est Creatura: Luthers Christologie als Lehre von der Idiomenkommunikation,ed. Oswald Bayer and Benjamin Gleede (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), xiii + 323 pp., hb € 88.00 / $ 123.00.

The six essays contained in this volume collectively offer a picture of Martin Luther’s Christology that takes issue with its customary presentation as a diachronic series of contingent responses to crises and controversies.  Luther’s Christological thought did, to be sure, become more self-aware and more precise, as he was compelled to respond to various challenges.  But as these essays so admirably demonstrate, underlying Luther’s variegated Christological reflection was a fundamental and uncompromised insistence on the concreteness of the exchange of properties between Christ’s two natures.  As Luther saw it, only when taken as concrete – that is, as reciprocally holding nothing back – can the togetherness of the natures in Christ’s person give adequate expression to his identity as Saviour, who as a person is never, not even conceptually, to be separated from his work.

Contrary to what the volume’s title might indicate, the essays do not restrict themselves to an analysis of Luther’s Christology.  They also situate the reformer’s particular interpretation of the communicatio idiomatum more broadly within the Lutheran tradition.  And, moving even further afield, they seek to uncover this interpretation’s forerunners in the early church, as well as proposing that Luther’s insights constitute a viable, though neglected, alternative to the speculative or overpsychologized modern depictions of Christ.

The opening essay, ‘The Word Became Flesh: Luther’s Christology as Doctrine of the Communication of Properties’ by Oswald Bayer, introduces the central themes of the entire volume.  It situates the project of recovering Luther’s Christological metaphysic against the backdrop of the early-twentieth-century Luther Renaissance, which severed the reformer’s theology of the cross from the underlying ontology and then distilled this theologia crucis into an abstract epistemological principle.  Against this one-sided depiction, Bayer presents Luther as a theologian firmly rooted in Chalcedonian dogma.  What Luther inherited from Chalcedon were two emphases: (1) in Christ God is not impassible, and (2) in Christ there takes place not some monophysite fusion but a union of the two natures, a union that is very much concrete in its hypostatic actuality.  Because Luther never lost sight of the soteriological intent of these two points, his Christology, according to Bayer, was a genuine breakthrough vis-à-vis the scholastic tradition, which saw any exchange between the natures as largely a matter of verbal predication and reciprocal application of names.  Luther’s fundamental insight was that, in light of God’s philanthropic act in Jesus Christ, humanity and divinity could no longer be treated as essences abstractly predetermined and immovably fixed in their incompatibility.  This led Luther to question Thomas’ philosophical denial of the natures’ reciprocal participation in each other, as well as Ockham’s axiom that there exists no proportion between the infinite and the finite.  Likewise, Luther rejected any notion of a supposital union, whereby the hypostasis of the Son, as such, remains unaffected by the assumption of the human nature, which is reduced to a merely instrumental role.  But the implications were even further reaching.  Christ’s theanthropic actuality called for a revolution in language.  There could now be no uniform concept of (logical) truth that would apply both to theology and philosophy.  In short, Luther did not allow semantic logic to function as a straightjacket for capturing the event of God’s becoming flesh; it was rather the actuality of Christ as God and man that determined the content of these latter concepts, their interrelation, as well as the meaning of salvation.  As Luther made the communicatio into the center of salvation-focused Christological dogma, the actuality of the exchange became the impetus for the happy exchange between Christ and the sinner.

…

[This review has appeared in Reviews in Religion and Theology 16:4 (September 2009), pp. 618-622. It cannot, therefore, be published here in its entirety.]