Brownsberger unashamedly adopts a realistic approach in theological method, where the reality of Christ as the Mediator of our salvation demands that certain things be really true of the Saviour's mind and heart. At the basis of the book is Brownsberger's eschewal of any purely voluntaristic account of salvation, where it would be reduced to an arbitrary divine act. According to Brownsberger, on such a view salvation would become something of which the Saviour had no real understanding, to which his emotional life was at best peripheral, where he would be, as far as his humanity is concerned, but a pawn in a game, an unwitting passenger. For Brownsberger, however, salvation makes real sense, and it is this that requires a certain picture of the Saviour's intellect, will and emotions.
The bulk of the book consists in the first chapter, where Brownsberger's argument is at its most successful, but at the same time its most controversial. The chapter takes us into the debates about Christ's consciousness that were a prominent feature of twentieth-century neoscholasticism, and treads its way with skill and care through questions of Christ's divinity and humanity, unity, self-consciousness, subjectivity, personal agency, and so on. Though these scholastic concerns may seem somewhat dated to readers, Brownsberger holds such questions about Christ's psychology to be justified by the fact that he was a real figure whose history, as our Saviour, affects us today. The implication of a realist soteriology for Christ's knowledge is that he must know what he is about such that he can love specifically and personally in the act of salvation as the Saviour of each one of us. This provides Brownsberger's position in these debates, for which he argues convincingly: for such knowledge in Christ's humanity only the beatific vision will do. While he does not intend to solve issues of biblical interpretation, where passages in scripture might seem to militate against this interpretation of Christ, he takes the view that we cannot begin to read scripture aright in these cases without sorting out such questions about the Saviour's consciousness. There is no avoiding the fact that this position, as well argued as it is, will be unpalatable to many.
Unfortunately the middle part of the book loses something of the vigour and direction of the first chapter. Brownsberger wants to show how the Saviour must unite in himself finite and infinite, with regard to will and, interrupting the book's anthropological structure, to being. The latter he treats in chapter four, where he enters another scholastic debate and makes a good case that in the incarnation Christ assumed a second(ary) finite being. Chapter two had focused on Christ's will through the lens of Sacred Heart devotion. It did this not by looking at neoscholastic reflection on this devotion as it relates to the themes of Christ's knowledge treated in chapter one, but from the viewpoint of the Christology of Maurice Blondel, whom Brownsberger pictures not as an opponent of scholasticism but as Leonine Thomism's ally against Modernism. Since Brownsberger feels obliged a number of times to distance himself from Blondel's ‘panchristism’, it is unclear what substance the appeal to Blondel really adds to the book. Likewise with Hegel, whose notion of infinity opens chapter three, providing an analogy for us refusing to misconstrue the nature of virtue and charity, leading to an account of Christ's charity as enfolding the finite in the infinity of divine love. One is left wondering how far Blondel and Hegel are more or less token non-scholastics in the argument.
Brownsberger is firmly back on track in his final chapter on Christ's emotions, specifically his anger, and their intrinsic connection to salvation. According to Brownsberger, where the beloved is deprived of a good intended in love, that love is displayed in anger. Anger thus drives Christ to act, and the anger of which we read in the gospels is consummated on the Cross, the victory of his holy anger over the depraved anger of the world, and the anger of Christ burns its way into human hearts. I am disappointed not to have been able to read an account here of the whole panoply of Christ's emotions, but I am looking forward to reading more Brownsberger.
