That Brian Daley opens God Visible: Patristic Christology Reconsidered with the story of Aloys Grillmeier's Christ in Christian Tradition is not accidental. Grillmeier's is the standard text in the field and remains, for good reason, an indispensable source for learning the disagreements and compromises that led to Chalcedon's claim of Christ as one person in two natures. His book is known for its now-standard treatment of pre-Chalcedonian Christology as coming in two forms: logos sarx and logos anthropos. The first account speaks of the incarnation as God becoming flesh, and the second is of God becoming human. Grillmeier largely divides this movement historically, so that conceptions of the incarnation develop steadily from anthropologically deficient ones toward more holistic views of Christ's person as the period of the Chalcedonian council in 451 approaches. That Daley calls his a ‘reconsideration’ of patristic christology tips his hand: his reconsideration is primarily of Grillmeier.

Daley's concern is not merely methodological. Rather, he argues that Grillmeier trades much for his orderly account of history's ‘arrival’ at Chalcedon. Grillmeier's Whiggish view of Chalcedonian orthodoxy, in Daley's mind, trades order for the true vision available of God in Christ that is revealed only when the full scope of the history of early christological disputes is considered. Chalcedon for Daley is the tradition's attempt to affirm Nicaea while looking at Jesus. His view shares much in common with Coakley's ideal of Chalcedon's regulative function, but there is more at stake here, too. According to Daley, to consider Chalcedon as the final summation of how Christians should think about Christ is to miss many other interesting and important insights in the interest of order and clarity. In his words:

In order to adequately complicate the tidy narrative of Grillmeier, Daley ‘revisits’ many christological thinkers in his book, beginning with second-century christology and moving through the classic sites of disagreement (e.g., the ‘Arian’ controversy, Apollinaris and the ‘Cappadocian’ Gregories, Antioch and Alexandria). At each point he offers his ‘reconsideration’ of how these well-trod texts might offer something other than a site of stable and predictable disagreement. He introduces his view of Augustine's often-overlooked contribution to patristic christology, drawing from the latter's view of Christ as ‘mediator’ and ‘exchange’ as examples of aspects of his thinking that ‘clearly anticipate[] the language of Chalcedon’ (p. 156).

But where things really get interesting for Daley is after Chalcedon, when christological dispute shifted from oratorial to scholastic form. It is here, with a growing emphasis on precise definitions, that concern moves to the ontology of the person of Christ. And so it is here that, according to Daley, the true subject of Chalcedonian thought is put on display. Instead of asking what kind of person Christ was in terms of his psychosomatic composition, now the Christian tradition began to ask how it is that the concept of ‘person’ applied to Christ, and so implicated not only God as human but also the possibility of each human existent becoming also like God. Leontius of Byzantium is the source of the key insight for Daley when it comes to interpreting Chalcedon, inasmuch as Leontius emphasises the ‘mode of union, rather than the structure of nature, contains the great mystery of religion’ (p. 208). With Maximus the Confessor in the seventh century and the icondule theologians in the eighth, this insight is strengthened: ‘the person of Christ, fully God and fully human in the functional realms where he lives and acts, reveals how God works in the created world to save and transform all of us’ (p. 209).

And so it is that the upshot of Chalcedonian christology for Daley becomes clear. The goal is not to figure out what kind of thing Christ is, but rather what kind of relation pertains in Christ between God and the world, between the uncreated and the created, the invisible and the circumscribed. To misunderstand the struggle that led to and followed the Council of Chalcedon is to miss its true takeaway, which is a vision of God revealed in Christ. In Daley's words:

Daley's work succeeds in a way few texts can in addressing technical concerns in order to strengthen the proclaimed witness of the Christian church. The writing is clear and at times stunningly perfect: Daley's clarification that ‘the divinity of Christ's human nature, one might say, is adverbial rather than substantial’ (p. 222) is alone worth the price of the book. Such insights dance and mingle with a movement toward praise that evokes to Thomas the disciple who can call him ‘my Lord and my God’ only upon seeing the risen Christ. Daley's book echoes Thomas’ ‘complaint’ upon of the need for vision upon hearing the other disciples’ report of the resurrection. God Visible joins Aaron Riches Ecce Homo and Ian McFarland's The Word Make Flesh in a resurgence of Chalcedonian scholarship that trade both in analytic clarity and praise, gesturing toward the circumscribed One, ever in our midst. May their tribe increase.