Karl Barth's unique adoption and adaptation of the concepts of anhypostasis and enhypostasis represents a principal building block in the ontological foundation of his christology. In The Humanity of Christ, Haley appreciatively explores the depths of Barth's language of the revelation of the triune God in the person of Christ as the reconciling mediator between God and humanity, probes the significance of Barth's ontological frame of reference (the hypostatic union, vere Deus and vere homo) and considers how Barth understands the human nature of Christ to exist in union with the divine Logos.
As Haley highlights, it was as early as 1924 that Barth, in the course of reading Heinrich Heppe's Reformed Dogmatics in preparation for his own lectures on the topic at Göttingen University, came across the concepts of anhypostasis and enhypostasis. Haley's book sets out Barth's use of the concepts as a dual formula, which expresses the convergence of time and eternity in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and which Haley highlights as innovative. The study's central task is to show how this interpretation – or misinterpretation – might move beyond or even contradict that of the church fathers, the scholastics and the post-scholastics.
Chapter 1 sets the scene with an explanation of the humanity of Christ through the historical and conceptual development of anhypostasis and enhypostasis. Noteworthy interlocutors in this chapter are four patristic writers – John of Caesarea, Leontius of Byzantium, Leontius of Jerusalem and John of Damascus – all of whom understood these key concepts to be autonomous (for these figures, therefore, Barth's understanding of the concepts in dual formulation would have been foreign). Chapter 2 scrutinises the dual formula Barth uses to express the human nature of Christ, and chapter 3 then traces Barth's own christological development from the Göttingen Dogmatics through to the Church Dogmatics. Haley uses chapter 4 to analyse those themes related to the person and work of Christ that coalesce in the hypostatic union, including the themes of time and eternity, the mediation of reconciliation and divine election. Chapter 5 then assesses Barth's engagement with the Chalcedonian definition of the two natures of Christ, focusing on the communicatio idiomatum, the communio naturarum and the communicatio gratiarum. Finally, chapter 6 considers the ramifications of anhypostasis and enhypostasis for the life of the church, examining Barth's christology of the ‘Royal Man’ and his relationship to his people.
The ultimate importance of this doctoral work lies not only in its engagement with Barth's adoption of anhypostasis and enhypostasis, but also in its invitation to think afresh about the significance of conciliar christology in the life and flourishing of the twenty-first-century church. For this reason, it is richly deserving of a place on the theological bookshelf of teacher and student alike. Principal among the title's strengths is also that chapters 2–5 represent a genuinely close engagement with Barth's rich thought, tracing Barth's own christological development over a period of more than forty years and providing an invitation to the reader to think further with Barth about the significance of christology. Indeed, chapter 6's express endeavour is to go beyond Haley's doctoral dissertation, extending the discussion on christology ‘Beyond Chalcedon’.
However, we might argue that this approach (‘Beyond Chalcedon’) also presents its own methodological challenges. Though chapter 1 introduces the reader to that Council's ontological formulation of Jesus as ‘one hypostasis with two natures’, which is the central theme continued throughout the following chapters, the concern arising here is whether ‘Beyond Chalcedon’ represents as fruitful a theological undertaking as a journey ‘deeper into’ Chalcedon might. For whilst it is clear that much fine theology involves an act of journeying further and moving ‘beyond’, the author's claim throughout that Chalcedon's definition is a ‘static’ one, as opposed to Barth's ‘active’ one (p. 236), might be viewed as debatable.
In fact, whilst tracing Barth's development from the beginnings of Romans to the mature christology of the Church Dogmatics is a praiseworthy undertaking, it may itself risk constituting a ‘static’ interpretation of and engagement with Barth. Arguably, original Barth scholarship requires more than mere exegesis of Barth's work, which in one form or another simply repeats the theologian's own interpretation and therefore fails actively to engage with his thought. Ultimately, this active interpretation can only occur in scholarship which seeks to show how we can simultaneously learn from Barth whilst also moving constructively beyond him. For it is this undertaking which has the capacity truly to propel Barth's thought into the pulpit and in so doing, align itself with Barth's own theological agenda: to be a function not simply of the theological bookshelf, but of the church itself.
