There is a certain tension within any ressourcement project between faithfully reconstructing a theological vision from the past and constructively applying that vision to the concerns of the present. While most ressourcement projects have tended to place greater emphasis on the historical side of the equation, Joseph Walker-Lenow makes it clear from the outset that his ressourcement of Augustine’s doctrine of the totus Christus is ‘resolutely constructive’ (p. 31). Walker-Lenow is not concerned with the exegetical, liturgical or psalmic contexts that were crucial for Augustine’s own articulation of the totus Christus; rather, he wants to marshal the doctrine of the totus Christus to build a constructive christological proposal that directly responds to some of our most pressing contemporary social, political and cultural concerns.
The book itself consists of eleven chapters, which are divided into three parts. In Part I, Walker-Lenow outlines what he considers to be a ‘broadly Augustinian’ account of God’s relation to the created order (p. 25). This is meant to establish the theological foundation he will build on in the rest of the book. The key to this Augustinian vision is what Walker-Lenow refers to as the ‘noncompetitive’ character of God’s relation to the world (p. 16). He argues that the doctrine of the totus Christus offers a fruitful way to challenge the binary thinking that plagues modern christological paradigms and recast contemporary christological reflection in the light of God’s non-competitive relation to the world: rather than pitting the created order over against its creator by locating Christ’s identity in either his humanity (‘Christology from below’) or his divinity (‘Christology from above’), the doctrine of the totus Christus demands that we consider Christ’s identity as embedded in and bound up with his followers here on earth. As such, Walker-Lenow concludes, we should take seriously the full scope of human experience in our christological reflection.
Building on this theological foundation, Walker-Lenow considers in Part II how the doctrine of the totus Christus as an expression of the non-competitive relationship between God and creation helps us appreciate the full value of this-worldly realities in our understanding of Jesus’s identity. He argues that affirming Jesus’s full humanity and conceiving of that humanity in a non-competitive relationship to his divinity means that we must consider Jesus’s historical and sociopolitical context, as well as expressions of human ignorance and human love, as constitutive of his identity rather than merely accidental to it. This is because, Walker-Lenow asserts, human identity amounts to ‘whatever marks a human off as particular, all the characteristics and patterns of action that make up one’s particular way of inhabiting the world’ (p. 3). If Jesus’s humanity is to be fully appreciated in the manner that he believes the doctrine of the totus Christus demands, features of Jesus’s cultural and historical situatedness help to constitute his identity. Furthermore, if we take the totus Christus to mean that Christ continues to be present in the world down through the centuries, our cultural and historical situatedness naturally plays a constitutive role in his identity formation as well. In this way, Walker-Lenow argues, the work of incarnation becomes an inherently social event into which every human throughout history, and indeed the world itself, is drawn.
In Part III, Walker-Lenow charts the scope of the incarnation’s social character in greater detail. He argues that the ‘shape’ of Christ’s identity depends on the members of his mystical body throughout history, and that the poor, marginalised and oppressed have a privileged place in this process. It is worth noting at this point that Walker-Lenow refers quite often in these final four chapters to the ‘shape of Christ’s life’ and the ‘shape’ or ‘form’ of faith, without ever defining what, precisely, he has in mind. Nevertheless, his fundamental point is clear: if we take the social character of the incarnation seriously, we must take the systemic evils of racism, misogyny and homophobia seriously as part of our christological reflection as well.
Walker-Lenow has done us a great service in providing this highly stimulating and ambitiously constructive proposal. It is Augustinian in the sense that it calls us to place Christ at the centre of our social and political lives. Yet, there are at least two critical points on which Walker-Lenow departs from Augustine. The first has to do with Walker-Lenow’s insistence that the christological conversation should take its cue from current political and social realities, rather than the exegetical, psalmic and liturgical context that determined the contours of the doctrine for Augustine himself. There is, for example, no serious engagement with Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos, where Augustine’s doctrine of the totus Christus is developed most fully; nor is there any careful interaction with other key secondary sources, such as Emile Mersch or Michael Fiedrowicz, who have already explored the richness of this doctrine from a more historically sensitive perspective. The second point has to do with assumptions made about identity throughout the book. By defining identity as ‘whatever marks a human off as particular, all the characteristics and patterns of action that make up one’s particular way of inhabiting the world’ (p. 3), Walker-Lenow establishes from the outset that identity will be considered as an immanent category, necessarily ruling out a Christology rooted in Jesus’ identity as the Word of God. Given the heavy lifting this notion of identity does in this book (it is the critical link between the totus Christus and political realities, for example), the use of this definition deserves at least to be substantiated.
Nevertheless, while one might want to call into question how Augustinian the book’s Christology really is, as a work of constructive theology, it is rich and thought-provoking. Students and scholars alike will benefit from reading it carefully and contending with its argument seriously.
