Sean McDonough's book falls into three parts. The first deals with the question set by the title. The second brings exegeses of the New Testament texts which directly teach Christ's participation in creation; these turn out to be little concerned with the teaching's origins. The third is a single chapter, on ‘dogmatic implications’ of the New Testament doctrine. I will devote most of this review to the book's first part, for reasons which will appear.
McDonough asks: how are we to explain the sudden appearance in the New Testament of a full-fledged doctrine that God created the world ‘through’ Christ? According to McDonough, most modern scholarship has begun by identifying some figure of first-century religious rite or speculation – often personalised Wisdom – one aspect of whose role was to mediate the dependence of temporal reality on the divine. Then such scholars have constructed tradition-histories whose common plot McDonough summarises: ‘For a variety of reasons’, the earliest Christians equated Jesus with the identified figure, and attribution to Jesus of the figure's function in creation ‘came along as part of the package’. It is unlikely that this summary would be accepted by many of the scholars who have proposed such reconstructions. But McDonough is surely right in claiming that the various scenarios only postpone the question. We still have to ask: would the earliest Christians really have identified Jesus with a creation-mediator unless they already thought of him as somehow an agent in creation?
McDonough does not deny that various mediatorial figures were available in Jewish thought and in that of the ancient world generally. Nor does he deny that some such figure or figures played a role in the tradition-history behind the New Testament doctrine. His own candidate for the chief role is the biblical King-Messiah, whose work of redemption ‘was at one level . . . the outworking of the project of creation’, which required some involvement in that project itself. But the impetus to seeing Christ as Creator must lie elsewhere.
This impetus McDonough finds in the remembered deeds of Jesus himself. As Richard Hays – whom McDonough does not credit – has been asking for years, ‘According to Israel's Scripture, who but the Creator is it whom, e.g., the winds and waves obey?’. McDonough is aware that no memory of an event is interpretation-free, but rightly says that this does not entail that it is inaccurate. In his view, we may accept that those who followed Jesus observed him do and say things that, as Jews who knew the Creator, they had to assign to the Creator's agency. From such memories to the doctrine it was then only a matter of reflection, perhaps invoking handy theologoumena.
I am inclined to accept the argument that we must seek the decisive origins of the doctrine in Jesus’ remembered acts. But then I have a complaint: McDonough devotes great pains and many pages to the history of mediation in religious and philosophical antiquity, the relation of most of which to his thesis is unclear. Does he or does he not think that the tradents behind the biblical texts can have been influenced by, say, Stoic speculations about the Logos? Does he mean to say that everybody was looking for mediators between the eternal and the temporal, and so too were Jesus’ disciples? Is antiquity's general quest for mediators relevant ‘background’ for the New Testament doctrine or is it not? Sometimes McDonough treats it as such; at other times he regards this quest and the biblical doctrine as opposites.
The second part's exegeses of 1 Corinthians 8–10, Colossians 1:15–20, and of the distributed treatments in Hebrews and John at first struck me as belonging in a different book, until I accepted that the title of this one should have been simply Christus Creator in the New Testament. McDonough's exegetical observations are wide-ranging and often subtle and surprising. One need not accept all of them to profit from his work here.
At this point there is indeed a ‘theological undercurrent . . . which pulls the reader beyond pure historical inquiry’ into dogmatic inquiry. Two questions are hanging – at least for me. The first: McDonough says both that God ‘hands over’ Creation to the Messiah, and that God allows the Messiah to ‘participate’ in his own act. Which is it? The second question: Who is this Messiah, who creates? Jesus of Nazareth? Or a not-yet incarnate Logos?
We turn to the final chapter, and are disappointed. For all that McDonough brings are exceedingly cursory reports of the views of others. Barth is given pride of place, but then McDonough misses Barth's point. After reporting Barth's refusal to separate the pre-existent Son from the protagonist of the Gospels, he says ‘The problem remains as how one is to conceptualise a Word who is personal but is not yet Jesus of Nazareth’, not realising that eliminating the ‘not yet’ is – rightly or wrongly – Barth's whole labour.
