AustinStevenson, <i>The Consciousness of the Historical Jesus: Historiography, Theology, and Metaphysics</i> . London: T&amp;T Clark, 2024, xii + 247pp. $135

What does it mean to consider the figure of Jesus Christ historically? In The Consciousness of the Historical Jesus, Stevenson poses this question in the face of the various methods and conclusions of historical Jesus scholarship. Stevenson offers an incisive critique of the movement (considered as an intellectual tradition) inasmuch as it fails to uphold the neutrality and objectivity which is supposed to distinguish it from the apparently ‘unhistorical’ approach of the conciliar christological tradition. Stevenson argues that, underlying many of the conclusions of historical Jesus scholarship, is a philosophical worldview called ‘metaphysical naturalism’, which views all of reality as ultimately reducible to natural phenomena. When assumed within a historiographical approach, the result is that anything inexplicable from natural principles must be ruled out as unhistorical. In contrast, Stevenson posits as an alternative what he refers to as ‘theological ontology’. This approach has the advantage of not prematurely foreclosing on the possibility of God’s involvement in the created world. Like metaphysical naturalism, theological ontology is not a historical but a metaphysical viewpoint; unlike metaphysical naturalism, however, Stevenson suggests that this approach is more historically capacious as it leaves open the possibility that the conciliar tradition of historical inquiry has correctly interpreted past events. To spell out what a ‘theological ontology’ might look like, Stevenson turns to the ‘participatory metaphysics’ of Thomas Aquinas (Chapter 2). Here, the participatory character of being, grounded in the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, comes to the fore. Inasmuch as God creates from nothing, all of creation can be understood as being in a relation of participatory dependence upon God. This means that the integrity of creaturely existence is not violated by God’s presence and action. Such a perspective provides a way of understanding reality that does not automatically preclude the possibility of God’s activity in what are truly human events. To the degree that it is better to be open rather than closed to a given ‘realm of possibilities’, and to the degree that any ‘critical’ approach to history requires a conscientious self-examination of its presuppositions, the tradition of historical inquiry founded upon the conciliar tradition has much to argue in its favour. In the second part of the work, Stevenson seeks to show the constructive fruitfulness of the metaphysical and doctrinal teachings of the conciliar tradition with respect to the historical investigation into the knowledge of Jesus. Here, again, he turns to Aquinas, whose doctrine of Christ’s human knowledge provides important principles, which enable and even encourage critical historical inquiry. Stevenson unpacks Aquinas’s doctrine of Christ’s knowledge by treating the acquired (Chapter 6), the ‘prophetic’ (Chapter 7) and the beatific knowledge of Christ (Chapter 8). In each case, Stevenson makes the case that Aquinas explicitly posits the knowledge in question as a perfection proportioned to the human soul. The graced perfection of Christ’s knowledge is understood by Aquinas explicitly in terms of the sort of perfection to which human nature is oriented by grace and glory. Interestingly, Stevenson’s order of explication reverses Aquinas’s by beginning with Christ’s acquired knowledge. This prioritization of Christ’s acquired knowledge is significant for several reasons. First, as the first scholastic explicitly to posit a knowledge arising from the experience of the senses, Aquinas’s doctrine is a salutary continuation and development of the conciliar affirmation of Christ’s true human nature. Second, Aquinas’s affirmation of acquired knowledge (which depends on ‘historically conditioned’ phantasms or images embodied in the brain) opens the pathway for historical inquiry into Jesus’ knowledge, which is shaped by ‘the processes of maturation and learning appropriate to all humans, and the communal, social, and linguistic webs of dependency and meaning that constitute the frameworks of human knowing’ (p. 145). Stevenson argues further that the historically conditioned nature of Christ’s acquired knowledge grounds the ‘prophetic’ (infused) knowledge of Christ in a fully human mode of knowing (i.e. by recourse to phantasms). Stevenson’s work is impressive not only for its clarity but also for its sheer breadth of engagement with scholarly sources. Additionally, Stevenson provides an admirably lucid explication of Aquinas’s theory of human cognition (Chapter 4), a notoriously difficult topic, which serves as something of a prelude to his thorough account of Aquinas’s doctrine of Christ’s knowledge. With all that said, it is possible to raise some questions about Stevenson’s characterization of Aquinas’s teaching on Christ’s acquired and infused knowledge. First, as Stevenson notes (pp. 155–6), even having affirmed acquired knowledge, Aquinas argues that Christ did not learn from others. Even if this is restricted to ‘scientific knowledge’ (as argued in p. 155n.58), it is difficult to see how the historically (and specifically socially) conditioned character of Christ’s acquired knowledge can be maintained. Second, Stevenson’s account of Christ’s infused knowledge sometimes appears to glide over serious obstacles arising from Aquinas’s account. For instance, Aquinas states that Christ did not need to have recourse to phantasms in order to make use of this knowledge. This is problematic for Stevenson’s account, which posits the historical relevance of the infused knowledge on the basis of its relation to phantasms. For his part, Stevenson acknowledges Aquinas’s teaching and suggests that since he also affirmed that Christ could have had recourse to phantasms, ‘Jesus’ infused knowledge was therefore conditioned by his acquired knowledge’ (p. 167, emphasis added). But the conclusion does not follow. Similarly, the author’s decision to refer to the infused knowledge as ‘prophetic’ is somewhat misleading. Based on the label, Stevenson suggests that ‘far from removing [Jesus] from his historical setting, which is what many historical Jesus scholars claim is accomplished by classical Christology, the prophetic knowledge attributed to Christ is drawn directly from his historical context’ (pp. 182–3). While it is true that ‘prophetic knowledge’ does not appear remote from the biblical narrative, it is nevertheless not the phrase Aquinas uses for speaking of this knowledge; instead, Aquinas speaks consistently of an ‘infused science’. This is not a mere semantic point; for Aquinas, the immediate parallel to Christ’s infused science is not the Hebrew prophet but the angels who have been infused with intelligible species in their creation. How should we understand the disparities between Aquinas’s actual teaching and the interpretation that Stevenson provides? There is one possible straightforward reply. Stevenson is not relying on a narrowly historical interpretation of Thomas Aquinas but on the broader Thomist tradition. In this regard, we can say that Stevenson’s project shows, compellingly, that the Thomist tradition contains principles for developing a metaphysically sophisticated and theologically rigorous approach to critical history. Nevertheless, the discrepancies between the Thomist tradition and the ‘historical’ Aquinas do raise interesting questions. If Aquinas was driven by sound metaphysical and theological principles, what accounts for the disparity between Aquinas and contemporary Thomists with respect to Christ’s knowledge? Unless we are to see ‘metaphysical naturalism’ at work in Aquinas’s later followers (and in Stevenson himself), greater reflection on the interplay between history, metaphysics and theology within the Christian tradition itself appears necessary. Happily, we come to learn that this is one of the aims of Stevenson’s work (p. 212); and in this regard, it should be considered a success.