In Created Being: Expanding Creedal Christology, Rebecca L. Copeland presents an account of Jesus Christ that focuses not on the particularity of his humanity, but rather on God’s union with all of created being as a more appropriate basis for incarnational Christology. To say that God is united with created being in general is to say that the presence and work of God can be identified in all that God has made.
The first chapter divides traditional critiques of creedal Christology—the stance that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine—into three groups: justice challenges, coherence challenges, and plausibility challenges. All of these focus on the particularity of Christ’s humanity as a problem. Justice challenges see particular attributes of Jesus’s humanity (e.g., gender, ethnicity, species, etc.) as inherently exclusive in their implications for salvation. Coherence challenges similarly focus on particular attributes, but on how human characteristics cannot coexist with divine characteristics. Finally, plausibility challenges find a particularly human incarnation implausible in a decreasingly anthropocentric and increasingly pluralistic world. Copeland argues for a new approach to creedal Christology against these challenges through a cosmic Christology, which understands “created being” as the locus of God’s incarnation.
The second chapter examines the spectrum of created being in conversation with the natural sciences, looking at biological limestone, Big Bluestem (a prairie grass), ants, and birds from the Corvid family, as existing in mutually dependent relationship with attributes approximating rationality that, traditionally, have been seen as unique to humanity. Copeland then points out that God values this interconnected web of created being, in all its evolutionary mutability, as good (56), and so mutability is potentially a great-making attribute and therefore attributable to God. This idea of divine mutability can lead to a pantheism that expands the incarnational logic beyond a particular human, or even humanity in general, but it need not. The human Jesus already satisfies Copeland’s definition of created ousia as “being involved in interdependent relationships of mutual transformation” (62), and so can bear the post-anthropocentric Christology that she proposes.
Chapter 4 provides a “creation Christology” that interprets the incarnation as a union of two ousiai rather than two natures (73). Here the extent of the critique of traditional Christological formulae is unclear to me, and depending on how sharply it is read, there may be occasion to question some of the book’s claims. Copeland writes: “Instead of alleging that the Word brings divine nature into hypostatic union with particularly human nature (in the individual incarnation of Jesus Christ), this proposal suggests that the Word brings divine ousia into hypostatic union with created ousia in the individual incarnation of Jesus Christ” (73). Nature (physis) and being (ousia), however, are substantially overlapping terms in Chalcedonian Christian philosophy, which Copeland notes (107 footnote 59). The main proposal of the book, then, has more to do with expansion of the non-divine component of the union from the particularly human to creation in general.
Is Copeland intending to argue that an incarnation of particularly human ousia would not imply, or is incompatible with, a union with created being? This doesn’t seem to be the case, as elsewhere she talks about a shift in emphasis only (25, 50, 95 footnote 28). Such a shift is a laudable corrective project to the tradition, and more defensible than the stronger critique that a Chalcedonian doctrine of divine and human union precludes a wider creational or cosmic Christology. Similarly, Copeland’s discussion of “The Metaphysics of a Two-Ousiai Christology” (72-74) makes a case for the interdependence of universal and individual being that does not privilege either one, which would seem to allow space for a traditional individual “human” incarnation that, by proper recognition of its interdependence with the universal “created being,” also already implies a wider cosmic scope.
To unpack some of these questions, it would be interesting to see a more direct engagement with the Chalcedonian Definition and the complex debates surrounding it. Copeland discusses the Nicene Creed more than one might at first expect for a book on Christology, although this is understandable given her intent to utilize ousia language more extensively (19). The Nicene argument that Copeland is making is that Jesus Christ is not only homoousios (“consubstantial,” of the same substance/essence) with God, but also with all that is not God. Homoousios language is also the basis of the Christological definitions established at Ephesus and Chalcedon, however, where it was affirmed and reaffirmed that Christ is consubstantial with us in His humanity. The nature of that humanity, Copeland convincingly argues, stands in fundamental continuity with the rest of creation.
Copeland’s contribution will be helpful to read alongside two books that came out too recently to have been included in Created Being. Johannes Zachhuber’s The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2020) discusses the development of technical terminology, and ousia in particular, during the patristic period in a way that is relevant to Copeland’s work. Also, Timothy Pawl has published In Defense of Extended Conciliar Christology (Oxford University Press, 2019), a second study with almost the same title as his earlier book, which Copeland does engage with at length. In Pawl’s new book, the question of “multiple incarnations” is especially relevant to Copeland’s argument, not because Copeland is advocating for multiple incarnations, but rather because such Christological proposals likewise seek to get at the fullest possible scope of non-divine agents of incarnational union.
While Christology, and especially Christology based on the Council of Chalcedon and other patristic sources, is a very technical field of theological research, Copeland’s book is concise and clear in a way that invites a broad audience into the discussion. It introduces the reader to traditional theology while also blazing a path forward, asking important questions in order to keep theology accountable to modern scientific developments. This is a highly recommended work. It will be indispensable for any future Christian theology that claims to be systematic.
Evan Kuehn is assistant professor of information literacy at North Park University, Chicago.
Evan Kuehn
Date Of Review:
April 27, 2024