Asymmetry or Identity?

Rowan Williams’s Christ: The Heart of Creation (2018) and Jordan Daniel Wood’s The Whole Mystery of Christ (2022) mark two recent and profound attempts to re-think the Creator-creature relation in light of the hypostatic union of Christ’s divine and human natures. As others have noted, both books are notable not just in terms of the quality of their respective contributions to contemporary Christian theology, but also because of the illuminating contrast that emerges from a consideration of their positions. This brief intervention considers these positions of Williams and Wood on the hypostatic union, albeit in a rather particular, targeted manner. My basic contention is that Wood’s absolute distinction of “hypostatic” and “natural” logics is problematized by any sufficiently rigorous account of divine simplicity. Since all parties (Williams, Wood, and indeed Maximus himself) have independent reasons for accepting this implication of divine simplicity, I argue that Williams’s “asymmetrical” account of the hypostatic union enjoys an accordant theoretical advantage over Wood’s in this specific respect.