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The Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas. By Dominic Legge. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, 256 pp., $95.00 hardback.
The evangelical theological world is going through something of a renewal of interest in the work of Thomas Aquinas. The present offering by Dominic Legge, who teaches at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC and who is also the Assistant Director of the Thomistic Institute, is going to be welcomed as an excellent introduction to the Christology of the Angelic Doctor.
Legge's aim is to demonstrate that the Christology developed by St. Thomas is Trinitarian through and through. The perception that he wishes to dispel is that Aquinas does not pay sufficient attention to the actual events of salvation history and that he develops his Christology in a predominantly abstract manner. Karl Rahner has been responsible for this perception in large measure, through his attack on Aquinas's notion that any of the divine persons might have become incarnate. If that is the case, Rahner suspects, there is no intrinsic relationship between the incarnate Lord and the eternal Son, as a unique divine person.
A second common critique at which he aims suggests that Aquinas's Christology is too singly driven by the notion of the hypostatic union, so that no room is left for an operation of the Spirit in the life of Jesus. Should that be the case, Christ's personal holiness and activity would be explained by his being the second person of the Trinity, leaving the Spirit to idle, and by consequence rendering Christ inimitable by the faithful.
Legge proposes to address these very serious concerns by setting Christology within a theology of the divine missions, as the proper framework for understanding the person and work of Christ. He thus divides the book in three parts. The first part unpacks a theology of the divine missions in general terms; the second part focuses on Christology proper, more specifically on the hypostatic union; finally, in the third part, Legge discusses at length the relationship between Christ and the Holy Spirit.
Legge rightly situates the Christological problematic under a theology of the divine missions in part I. From a Thomistic standpoint, this is fairly standard. For the readership of this Journal, however, it needs...