Book Description

In Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics, Book V, Soteriology Part 1 Matthias Joseph Scheeben delineates who and what Jesus Christ is as the Incarnate Son of God in Person. With characteristic brilliance, Scheeben sets forth in this first half-volume the essential nature and attributes proper to Christ as the hypostatic union of God and man. Beginning with the Scriptural and traditional foundations, he elucidates the Catholic Church’s traditional teaching on Christ’s unity of Person in two natures as they were developed in response to the main Christological heresies of the early Christian centuries. On this basis, he then delves into the speculative depths of the hypostatic union itself as well as the attributes of the God-man that arise from this union. “[T]he translation of the Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics by the greatest speculative theologian of the nineteenth century into the modern lingua franca is an invaluable service to the future of the Church in the secular age. With his speculative penetration of the mystery of the Incarnation in the present volume—enriched by a comprehensive knowledge of patristic, scholastic, and modern theology—Matthias Joseph Scheeben preserves the mystery of Divine Revelation from attempts to naturalize it and the Church from the tendency to reduce it to a merely functional civil religion. He proves that even on the highest level of rational reflection the believer can give to modern man an account for ‘the hope that is in him’ (cf. 1 Pet 3:15), which puts us in a position to clarify definitively our understanding of ourselves and of the world in light of the knowledge of God.” —Cardinal Gerhard Müller— Prefect Emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith