This book has a simple argument: Contemporary Catholic and Protestant Thomistic Christology is an immensely promising development, and it should now be enhanced by a fuller integration of biblical typologies (the New Adam, New Isaac, New Moses, New Joshua, and New David) in order to do justice to the New Testament’s eschatological portraits of Jesus.
When I first conceived this book, I intended to argue that Thomas Aquinas should have included more attention to the New Testament’s Christological typologies in his tertia pars, because this would have allowed him to do fuller justice to the eschatological character of Jesus’ identity and mission. Aquinas knew these typologies well, and he could have integrated them into his tertia pars. On reflection, however, I realized that my concern is not actually with Aquinas himself in his time and place but with contemporary Thomistic Christology. In order to fully convey Jesus’ eschatological identity and mission, Thomistic Christology needs to incorporate the typological materials found especially in Aquinas’s biblical commentaries. This is not a competition between the tertia pars and the biblical commentaries, since, as we will see, the eschatological insights conveyed by the typologies are present in their ontological core within the Summa theologiae. The reconfiguring that I propose in this book is a matter of figural enhancement and augmentation, not of laying new foundations. My proposal accords with Thomas Joseph White’s call for theologians to “seek a progressive unification of classical Christological ‘science’ and modern historical study,” in order to integrate the results of historical and dogmatic approaches “into one coherent narrative.”Footnote 1
Given an understanding of history that allows for God’s providence, the fact that the divine Messiah recapitulates the central figures of Israel’s Scriptures will come as no surprise.Footnote 2 Among the Church Fathers, Irenaeus is representative in teaching that “the treasure hid in the Scriptures is Christ, since He was pointed out by means of types and parables.”Footnote 3 For their part, contemporary biblical scholars recognize that for Second Temple Jews and for the New Testament authors, “God is the mastermind of a vast divine economy that includes both external past-tense events and their inscripturation.”Footnote 4 The New Testament portrays Jesus as the “new” or eschatological Adam, Isaac, Moses, Joshua, and David. For Christians, just as the “New” Testament fulfills but does not negate or replace the “Old,” so also Jesus is the eschatological fulfillment of these central Old Testament figures without negating their own distinctive narrative histories and identities.Footnote 5 Thus the New Testament’s “figural Christology” requires what Richard Hays terms “reading backwards.”Footnote 6
Indebted to the Church Fathers, Aquinas gave explicit attention in his writings to Jesus as the New Adam, Isaac, Moses, Joshua, and David according to the New Testament’s literal sense. Yet, contemporary Thomistic Christology has paid relatively little attention to Jesus’ eschatological fulfillment of these types. Given that “the ‘reign of God’ is the clear and unmistakable central theme of Jesus’ work,”Footnote 7 the question is how to ensure that the reign of God is also a central theme of Thomistic Christology. The theme is by no means absent from Aquinas’s Christology. The tertia pars of the Summa theologiae lacks a distinct quaestio on Jesus as King or on the inauguration of the kingdom of God. But the theme of the reign of God, and the ontological reality expressed by that phrase, appears frequently within Aquinas’s Christological reflections, especially in his discussions of Jesus as the eschatological Moses, Joshua, and David.
My argument is that by incorporating and expanding upon Aquinas’s reflections on the Christological typologies, contemporary Thomistic Christology can meet the challenge identified by White and laid down by the biblical scholar John Meier in the first volume of his A Marginal Jew: “[F]aith in Christ today must be able to reflect on itself systematically in a way that will allow an appropriation of the quest for the historical Jesus into theology. The historical Jesus, while not the object or essence of faith, must be an integral part of modern theology.”Footnote 8 The “historical Jesus” portrayed by Meier and others is an eschatological prophet who understood himself to be inaugurating the kingdom of God. It is this eschatological Jesus that the New Testament’s (and the Church Fathers’ and Aquinas’s) typological Christology depicts in richly nuanced ways. It does so from within a providentially unified understanding of history that does not subscribe to the limits imposed by modern historiography. This providential understanding of history resonates with contemporary Thomistic Christology, which shares Paul’s view that “nothing – that is to say, no human, no spiritual power, no geographical space, no era of time, and not even death – ultimately stands outside the reach of God’s sovereign control.”Footnote 9
After an introductory chapter that appreciatively sketches the contemporary ecumenical resurgence of Thomistic Christology, each of the five main chapters takes up one typological motif (the eschatological New Adam, New Isaac, New Moses, New Joshua, and New David), exploring its role in the New Testament and in the Church Fathers and addressing how Aquinas employs it. Each chapter also identifies places in the tertia pars of the Summa theologiae where further integration of the typological motif might strengthen contemporary Thomistic Christology. Each chapter has a concluding section titled “An Ontological Note,” in which I supplement the chapters’ typological–eschatological emphasis by briefly examining Aquinas’s insights into the ontological realities expressed respectively by the phrases “New Adam” (Christ’s human perfection under grace), “New Isaac” (atonement), “New Moses” (law and grace), “New Joshua” (the state of glory), and “New David” (the mystical body and Christ’s Headship of grace).Footnote 10
In proposing to “reconfigure” Thomistic Christology by integrating these typologies more fully, I am concurring with the judgment of Romanus Cessario and Cajetan Cuddy that Thomistic theologians should “receive the essential philosophical and theological principles from the Angelic Doctor and then apply these sound principles to the unique questions, challenges, and requirements that their own period raises.”Footnote 11 As noted, I am responding especially to modern New Testament scholars’ questions, challenges, and insights about Jesus’ eschatological understanding of his identity and mission. For contemporary New Testament scholars, one of the clearest elements of the New Testament is “that Jesus was remembered as preaching about the kingdom of God and that this was central to his message and mission.”Footnote 12 Biblical scholars also affirm that “Jesus’ talk of the kingdom was blended with the much older imagery of inheriting the land of promise,” that is, imagery related to the exodus.Footnote 13 Jesus’ eschatological renewal of the Temple and the end of the exile are other frequent themes.Footnote 14
For the purpose of developing these eschatological dimensions of Jesus’ identity and mission from within Thomistic Christology, I argue that the above-named five biblical typologies, well known to Aquinas, can serve as a bridge for joining Aquinas’s Christology to modern biblical scholarship’s emphasis on Jesus as the eschatological Davidic king who restores his people, renews the Temple, and leads the new exodus. Contemporary Thomists have perceived how profoundly Aquinas integrates Scripture and the Church Fathers into his theology, but Thomistic Christology still needs to assimilate more explicitly the eschatological aspects that shape the New Testament’s portraits of Jesus.Footnote 15 Therefore, my chapters propose enrichments to Thomistic Christology flowing from explicit attention to the typologies, and I show how such enrichments can be set forth in relation to the tertia pars.
Lest there be any misunderstanding, let me firmly reject the all-too-common idea that Thomistic Christology is overly philosophical. In fact, the metaphysical richness of Aquinas’s Christology and of contemporary Thomistic Christology is greatly needed for any serious reflection on who Jesus is, what he accomplished, and what he continues to accomplish today. In Chapter 1, I survey a number of contemporary Catholic and Protestant thinkers who have reflected deeply upon Aquinas’s Christology and who have retrieved its metaphysical and theological relevance. I single out recent books by Adonis Vidu and Thomas Joseph White, while describing the work of many other important contributors as well, such as Jean-Pierre Torrell and Dominic Legge. It is noteworthy that scholars with deep Eastern sympathies such as Rowan Williams, and Eastern Catholics such as Khaled Anatolios, have also recently drawn upon Aquinas’s Christology in fruitful ways. My first chapter makes clear that the purpose of my book is not to undermine contemporary Thomistic Christology but to augment it. Recognition of Jesus’ humanity, which Paul Gondreau and others have shown is so central to Aquinas’s Christology,Footnote 16 requires today a focused attention on the way his teaching comports with the eschatological dimensions of New Testament Christology.
I propose augmenting Thomistic Christology along typological lines because Aquinas himself employed these typologies and because they have a strikingly eschatological import. Of course, given the biblical and patristic testimony, all theologians – not only Thomists – should have a strong interest in exploring Jesus Christ as the eschatological New Adam, New Isaac, New Moses, New Joshua, and New David. As Joseph Ratzinger says of one of these types, along lines that can be extended to the other four: “[I]t is important to emphasize that Jesus adopts the tradition of Sinai and thus presents himself as the new Moses.”Footnote 17
Biblical Scholarship and Typology
Before proceeding, let me offer some further background to my proposal. One of the most influential New Testament scholars of the past fifty years, E. P. Sanders, reconstructs Jesus’ self-understanding as follows: “Through him, Jesus held, God was acting directly and immediately, bypassing the agreed, biblically sanctioned ordinances, reaching out to the lost sheep of the house of Israel with no more mediation than the words and deeds of one man – himself.”Footnote 18 For Sanders, Jesus understood himself to have “full authority to speak and act on behalf of God,” and Jesus experienced his relationship to God to be uniquely intimate.Footnote 19
Sanders’s remarks are only partly correct, in my view. He is correct about Jesus’ authority and intimacy with the Father. But it is not the case (as Sanders elsewhere helps to showFootnote 20) that Jesus simply “bypassed” Torah and Temple or that Jesus reached out to his people in a way that bypassed the mediation of Israel’s Scriptures. On the contrary, Jesus fulfilled, rather than bypassed, Israel’s covenantal law and cult.Footnote 21 Jesus’ words and deeds are unintelligible without the mediation of Israel’s Scriptures. This can be seen throughout the New Testament, not least in Paul’s devotion to Jesus. As Robin Scroggs remarks, “Paul believes that the eschatological age has been inaugurated by a man who embodies God’s intent for all men – an intent thwarted by the first Adam, fulfilled by the Last.”Footnote 22 Scroggs calls this belief Paul’s “Adamic Christology.”
From the Church Fathers onward – most certainly including Aquinas – Christians have upheld this Adamic Christology. Moreover, Adam is not the only figure from Israel’s Scriptures who helped Jesus and the apostles to illuminate the meaning of Jesus’ words and deeds. King David has a central role as well, since Jesus is repeatedly described as the Messianic king in the line of David. So do Melchizedek, Abraham, Isaac, Moses, Joshua, and Solomon.Footnote 23
But should these Old Testament figures matter to Christology today? In Sanders’s view as a historian, they should not. No doubt Jesus thought of himself as uniquely God’s “viceroy,” helping to inaugurate the imminent kingdom of God,Footnote 24 but for Sanders there is no need to describe Jesus as a New David or New Adam. Sanders offers an illustration of what is wrong with such typological Christology. He states that according to the Bible, “God called Abraham in 1921 BC, Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt around 1500 BC, and David flourished about 1030 BC…. An approximate parallel today to the gospel’s treatment of Jesus would be to describe Elizabeth II by saying that she is heir to the throne of William the Conqueror, that she fulfills the promise of King Arthur.”Footnote 25 When the New Testament authors affirmed that Jesus fulfilled the work of Moses and David, they reflected a commonplace manner of thinking in Second Temple Judaism, but for Sanders this cannot be taken seriously today. In Matthew 16:14, for example, the people imagine that Jesus might be the return of Elijah or Jeremiah!
Sanders represents a standard historical viewpoint when he dismisses as mere invention Matthew’s references to Jesus as the New Moses or Luke’s references to Jesus as the New David. Yet, Sanders considers that a significant amount of truth about Jesus can still be discerned in the Gospels, notwithstanding all the typology. He states, “Echoes of Jewish scripture are everywhere in the gospels, but nevertheless no one would ever mistake the Jesus of the gospels for either Moses or David…. [T]he gospels claim a connection between Jesus and David, but they do not present Jesus as being in the least like David.”Footnote 26 Surely Sanders is correct that Jesus did not do a lot of the things done by Moses and David, both of whom killed other people, for example. In fact, Sanders recognizes that the evangelists “thought that Jesus had gone beyond Moses and was a different sort of king from David. Thus we do not get a cardboard pop-up depiction of Jesus as a new Moses or David.”Footnote 27 But Sanders still thinks that the historical Jesus must be separated from the typological overlay by which the evangelists sought “to convince readers that Jesus fulfilled God’s promises to Israel” and that Jesus is the “universal saviour who fits into Jewish salvation history.”Footnote 28 According to Sanders, the historian must do the “patient spadework to dig through the layers of Christian devotion and to recover the historical core.”Footnote 29
However, Sanders’s approach has an evident weak spot. Namely, assuming that God exists and is the provident Creator – assumptions that are quite reasonableFootnote 30 – why could not the incarnate Lord actually be in a real and fully historical way the New Adam (inaugurating a new creation), the New Isaac (fulfilling the sacrificial cult of the Temple), the New Moses (teaching God’s law, mediating between God and his people, and establishing the new covenantFootnote 31), the New Joshua (leading God’s people across the Jordan of death to the fullness of the Promised Land), and the New David (inaugurating the kingdom of God)? For Sanders, this may be all very well as theology, but the historian cannot pay attention to it. The historian must “distinguish one kind of truth from another, and … study only the second, mundane kind,” namely, the “bit of ordinary history within the grand framework of salvation history.”Footnote 32
What if, however, the ordinary history at issue actually is “salvation” history? Sanders assumes that the “ordinary history” of Jesus of Nazareth is obscured by the salvation-historical typologies. But what makes this assumption true, unless one deems a priori that Jesus is not the incarnate Lord or that history has no providential unity? While affirming the possibility of “Jesus’ own conscious imitation of scriptural types,” Sanders holds that such imitation did not express an underlying truth about Jesus.Footnote 33
This is a common viewpoint among scholars today, many of whom find Scripture’s typologies to be implausible, arbitrary, and historically anachronistic. I grant that some of the Old and New Testament’s typological links may well be arbitrary, just as there are instances of patristic and medieval typological or allegorical exegesis that are implausible.Footnote 34 But I think the five Christological types presented here, which are not invented by the Church Fathers but are found in the New Testament’s literal sense, can be demonstrated to be reasonable entailments of Jesus’ status as the eschatological Messiah. In my view, Christians should affirm these typological portraits to be historically true about Jesus, rather than mere metaphors.Footnote 35
Put simply, Jesus really is the eschatological (and therefore “New”) Adam, Isaac, Moses, Joshua, and David. To call him the Messianic Son of David or the Last Adam is not a mere metaphor. This entails that from the beginning, in God’s plan, Jesus is the one to whom the earlier figures inchoately pointed, since “it is a law of Biblical exegesis that the types in Scripture derive … their meaning and value from the anti-types to which they refer. Adam is therefore entirely subordinated to Christ.”Footnote 36
In critical dialogue with Sanders, N. T. Wright has argued that the New Testament’s worldview in this regard should be taken much more seriously by contemporary historians – and by contemporary theologians. The New Testament authors would not be surprised to find that their faith-filled understanding of Jesus as fulfilling God’s covenants with Israel in the midst of history is difficult to accept for modern secular historians. But Wright argues that to understand the historical Jesus requires understanding how in Jesus “the symbols and stories of Israel had been fulfilled in a shocking and decisive manner.”Footnote 37 This at least was the claim made by the New Testament authors, by the first Christians, and in various ways by Jesus himself. When one reads the New Testament, one perceives that its authors continually show us the truth about Jesus typologically, in light of the central figures of Israel’s Scriptures, beginning with Adam. The authors of the New Testament understood these figures to be part of “the saga of God’s election, judgment, and redemption of a people through time,” and they understood Jesus to have recapitulated and perfected the missions of these figures through his eschatological fulfillment of God’s covenants with Israel.Footnote 38
Thus, Wright maintains that underlying the Gospel narratives about Jesus’ life, death, and Resurrection, we see in a fulfilled and transformed way “the narratives of Israel’s vocation: Abraham’s call and covenant, Moses’ Exodus and Tabernacle, David’s and Solomon’s victories and Temple.”Footnote 39 For his part, the biblical theologian Thomas Schreiner takes us back to Adam: “Jesus is the true Adam, who exercises the rule that Adam was supposed to carry out.”Footnote 40 Jesus thereby overcomes the consequences of human sin and death.Footnote 41 Brant Pitre emphasizes the theme of the new exodus in the Gospel narratives. He contends that Jesus “identified himself as the eschatological Moses, whose prophetic signs would not only signify the new exodus spoken of by the prophets, but actually set it in motion.”Footnote 42 Joshua Jipp directs us toward Jesus as the eschatological David, known through “royal honorific[s] such as Christ, Son of David, Branch, the Lion of Judah, shepherd, King, and so on.”Footnote 43 These typological Christologies are the means by which the New Testament authors communicate eschatological truths about Jesus. Francis Watson nicely sums up the point: “Old Testament conceptuality establishes the preconditions for the intelligibility of Jesus’ person and work.”Footnote 44
In his masterwork Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, Hays addresses the challenge mounted by scholars such as Sanders. Hays remarks that historical-critical scholarship “characteristically judges that the New Testament’s Christological readings of Israel’s Scripture are simply a big mistake.”Footnote 45 Influenced by Hays, I offer three observations in response. First, these central figures of Israel’s Scriptures shed light upon Jesus’ words and deeds.Footnote 46 Did Jesus say or do anything that suggests a parallel with Adam? Yes, he inaugurated Israel’s restoration and thereby stands at the center of a renewed creation. Did Jesus say or do anything that suggests a parallel with Isaac? Yes, he made clear that he was to shed his blood, in obedience, as the Father’s beloved Son, thereby enacting the perfect sacrificial offering. Did Jesus say or do anything that suggests a link with Moses? Yes, he taught with unique authority, correcting Torah when needed; and he symbolically presented his ministry as a new exodus, in which his twelve disciples represent the twelve tribes of the people of God. Did Jesus say or do anything that suggests a link with Joshua? Yes, in accord with his baptism in the Jordan and through his death and Resurrection, he crossed over into the fullness of the Promised Land at the head of the people of God.Footnote 47 Did Jesus say or do anything that lays claim to Davidic royal authority? Yes, he preached the kingdom of God and did so as the one whose work is central to its inauguration.
Second, our contemporaries are unlikely to be able to make sense of Jesus as the Christ unless we retrieve the role of these typologies in illuminating his eschatological work. As Christopher Seitz says, “The challenge of our day is how to see in Jesus’ death and raising actions truly in accordance with the Scriptures of Israel. For that, we shall need to return to typological and figural senses.”Footnote 48 If we Christians are going to teach about the real Jesus Christ, who brings God’s plan to eschatological fulfillment, we must use the two-Testament Bible to underscore that Jesus taught and did things that enable us to recognize him as of universal relevance (the New Adam), as possessing definitive royal authority in establishing justice (the New David), as accomplishing the perfect offering in self-sacrificial love (the New Isaac), as teaching the authoritative law of love and enacting the new covenant (the New Moses), and as leading human beings into the true Promised Land (the New Joshua). If much of the Old Testament “is simply bewildering to modern Christians,” as Leroy Huizenga remarks,Footnote 49 then this requires a Christology that unlocks the whole of Israel’s Scriptures and covenantal life.
Third, Christianity stands or falls upon the existence and providence of God. Indeed, these two realities are the main point of much of Israel’s Scriptures, so much so that the Letter to the Hebrews maintains in its chapter on the scriptural heroes of faith that “whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Heb 11:6). The covenantal God enters into a relationship with his people in order to show them who he is (and, of course, that he is) and in order to show them that he cares for them and is trustworthy, despite their sufferings. The providential convergence of the two-Testament scriptural witness in the figure of Jesus Christ is what would be expected if Jesus is the incarnate Lord. No wonder Seitz remarks, “The crisis in [biblical] hermeneutics is in reality a crisis involving God’s providence.”Footnote 50 One way that God shows his fidelity consists in his shaping of Israel’s history and Scriptures to illuminate the person and work of Jesus.Footnote 51
Thomism, Ressourcement, and Typology
As noted above, although Aquinas does not fully exploit the Christological typologies in the tertia pars of the Summa theologiae – although even if he does observe that Christ’s death on a Cross fulfills “very many figures” found in Israel’s ScripturesFootnote 52 – the typologies appear more centrally in Aquinas’s biblical commentaries. Moreover, Aquinas treats Christ as the New Melchizedek in the tertia pars’s question on Christ’s priesthood. Thus, the fact that Aquinas’s theology is scientific, in an Aristotelian sense (while also employing reasons of fittingnessFootnote 53), does not prevent Aquinas from decisively employing Christological typology within his sacra doctrina.
Aquinas states that “all the senses are founded on one – the literal – from which alone can any argument be drawn, and not from those intended in allegory.”Footnote 54 It may seem that the New Testament typologies are the spiritual sense (specifically, the allegorical sense), and for Aquinas “nothing necessary to faith is contained under the spiritual sense which is not elsewhere put forward by the Scripture in its literal sense.”Footnote 55 But in fact Aquinas makes clear that “the literal sense is what is first intended by the words whether properly speaking or figuratively.”Footnote 56 Given this definition, the typologies that are most notable for Christology belong to the New Testament’s literal sense. According to the literal sense of various New Testament texts, Jesus is the New Adam, New Isaac, New Moses, New Joshua, and New David. Although he transcends these Old Testament personages, they are “types” of him and he eschatologically recapitulates and fulfills their missions.
In the patristic and medieval eras, as Hans Boersma says, “Christian readers were convinced of the providential guidance of God throughout history. So they would be more likely to regard similarities between various events reflected in different [scriptural] passages as the result of God’s faithful character rather than as mere historical coincidence.”Footnote 57 We should do the same in our reading of Scripture. Even more pointedly, Ephraim Radner advises: “If … the Word is indeed the living hand that shapes events, then we should rightly seek the meaning of such events in their figural identity.”Footnote 58 We should not expect to be able to understand Jesus as the Christ outside of his figural identity. For example, if Jesus were not the New David, he could not have brought Israel’s covenants to eschatological fulfillment. Indeed, as Matthew Barrett says, “Jesus’ own Christological reading of the Old Testament, one imitated by his disciples,” is typologically structured.Footnote 59
In the mid-twentieth century, Ressourcement theologians and neoscholastic theologians argued about what place to give to biblical typologies and the spiritual senses. While otherwise being close collaborators in the retrieval of typological awareness, the Jesuits Jean Daniélou and Henri de Lubac sharply disagreed with each other about whether typology can or should be distinguished from allegory (Daniélou thought so, de Lubac thought not).Footnote 60 Among the views condemned in Pope Pius XII’s 1950 encyclical Humani Generis is the view that “the literal sense of Holy Scripture and its explanation, carefully worked out under the Church’s vigilance by so many great exegetes, should yield now to a new exegesis, which they are pleased to call symbolic or spiritual.”Footnote 61 Some neoscholastics feared that if biblical history were interpreted typologically in a vigorous manner, then the defense of the historicity of the biblical narratives could be imperiled. With regard to Christology, this reasonable fear should lead us to recognize the need for a defense of the historicity of the New Testament’s witness to Jesus,Footnote 62 but there is no need to play down the typologies woven into the fabric of the New Testament.
In an earlier book, Participatory Biblical Exegesis, I argued in favor of a typologically rich understanding of “history,” and thus of the literal sense, due to history’s participation in divine providence.Footnote 63 I was indebted to Francis Martin, who remarks that “the persons of Israel share proleptically but metaphysically in the reality of Christ,” and so “the relation between Jesus and Moses or David is analogical and not merely intertextual.”Footnote 64 Although my arguments in Participatory Biblical Exegesis fit with Ressourcement theology, I advanced the arguments on Thomistic grounds. Despite significant philosophical differences (where the neoscholastics were largely in the right) and despite significant differences in historical erudition (where the Ressourcement theologians had the upper hand), these two movements of twentieth-century theology should complement each other.
My approach in the present book brings together neoscholastic or Thomistic insights with Ressourcement insights into figural Christology. My approach may also help to further unite Protestant and Catholic Thomistic Christologies, by highlighting biblical theology in a manner congruent with Reformed theologians’ emphasis on Scripture, while doing so in a way befitting Catholic (and Orthodox) emphasis on the importance of patristic exegesis. Overall, I strive to contribute to what Piotr Roszak and Jörgen Vijgen have called “Biblical Thomism” – defined not as something other than “Thomism” but as an effort “to understand and employ the praxis of sacra doctrina, as exemplified primarily by Thomas Aquinas” in light of “the pivotal role of Scripture in such a speculative engagement with Revelation.”Footnote 65 In his own recent contribution to Biblical Thomism, Serge-Thomas Bonino has highlighted Aquinas’s practice of a “conversio ad Scripturas” by which “the theologian returns to the Bible, on one hand to verify the conformity of his theology to the permanent standard that is the Word of God, and on the other hand to deepen the understanding of the Scriptures by means of perspectives opened up by theological contemplation.”Footnote 66 This is the standpoint from which my “reconfiguring” of Thomistic Christology in an eschatological key will proceed.
Conclusion
Hays has encouraged contemporary theologians and biblical scholars to appreciate “the revisionary figural ways that the four Gospel writers actually read Israel’s Scripture.”Footnote 67 Similarly, Jeffrey Pulse calls upon the Christian Bible’s readers “to identify the various biblical motifs that weave their way through the entirety of the biblical narrative…. These motifs show the unity of the narrative as they connect all Scripture – Genesis to Revelation – into one story.”Footnote 68 The Gospels’ figural reading practices have dogmatic significance, insofar as they shed light on Jesus’ Incarnation, teaching, Cross, and Resurrection. Just as typologies are important for Scripture’s presentation of the mysteries of Christ, so also can they contribute much to Thomistic Christology.
On this basis, my book sketches a typological path for Thomistic integration of contemporary eschatological portraits of Jesus’ person and work. Thomists can agree with Dale Allison’s claim that “Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet.”Footnote 69 Jesus understood himself to be proclaiming and inaugurating the eschatological kingdom, healing the fallen creation and restoring his people. Allison notes that “the major theme of Jesus’ preaching was the kingdom of God” and that “Jesus himself is, in the canonical Gospels, the eschatological king, or destined to be such.”Footnote 70
As noted above, Aquinas affirms that Jesus is the Messianic king who has inaugurated the eschatological kingdom of God, even if Aquinas does not give this point an explicit place in the tertia pars. As we will see, explicit reflection on Jesus as the New David would be helpful for contemporary Thomistic Christology (Chapter 6).
Pitre has shown that Jesus placed the new exodus at the very center of his worldview. Commenting upon the symbolism of the Last Supper, Pitre reconstructs its likely rationale: “Just as the first exodus was set in motion by the Passover sacrifice, so too the new exodus, which will usher in the kingdom, is set in motion by a new Passover – an eschatological Passover – that is accomplished by means of his own suffering, death, and restoration to life ‘in the kingdom.’”Footnote 71 The new exodus theme receives a prominent place in the New Testament, and it sheds light upon many of the central aspects of Jesus’ words and deeds. Attention to Jesus as the New Moses (Chapter 4) and New Joshua (Chapter 5) can enrich contemporary Thomistic Christology’s reflections on various aspects of the new exodus, such as Christ’s teaching and covenantal enactment (New Moses) and Christ’s baptism and Ascension (New Joshua).
Jesus in the Gospels strongly associates himself with the Temple. Anthony Le Donne has argued that the title “Son of David,” in the Gospels, “was both Davidic and Solomonic,” and he finds that “the charting of memory refraction will show how early memories of Jesus were initially shaped by typological interpretation.”Footnote 72 Le Donne suggests that Mark 11 and Matthew 21 – Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem and his cleansing of the Temple – should be read in light of Solomon the Son of David and Temple builder.Footnote 73 Michael Patrick Barber has provided further arguments along similar lines.Footnote 74 For contemporary Thomistic Christology, Christ as the New Isaac (Chapter 3) – the perfect cultic sacrifice – offers a path for engaging Christ’s relation to the Temple.
Among the more pressing theological issues today are whether Christ really is the universal Savior and whether faith (implicit or explicit) in Christ is necessary for salvation. In my view, attention to Christ as the New Adam (Chapter 2) provides a way for contemporary Thomistic Christology to deepen its appreciation of Christ’s Headship and to explain what it means to affirm that Christ is the universal Savior.
Aquinas’s use of the New Melchizedek typology sets the pattern for my chapters. When he addresses Christ’s priesthood in the tertia pars, he recalls the Letter to the Hebrews’s statement that Jesus was “designated by God a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek” (Heb 5:10). In an insistent and evocative manner, Hebrews discusses Jesus in light of Melchizedek. After showing why Christ did not descend from the Levitical or Aaronic priesthood, Aquinas concludes his quaestio on Christ’s priesthood (III, q. 22) by discussing what it means for Christ to be a New Melchizedek.Footnote 75 His discussion here exemplifies the value of the “reconfiguring” that I hope to encourage in Thomistic Christology today.
In sum, after an opening chapter demonstrating that the present ecumenical renewal of Thomistic Christology offers an exciting prospect, my five constructive chapters will outline a biblical, patristic, and Thomistic typological approach whose consistent purpose is to integrate contemporary Thomistic Christology more fully with the New Testament’s inaugurated eschatology.
