Review: The Holy One in Our Midst (Gordon)

Gordon, James. The Holy One In Our Midst: An Essay on the Flesh of Christ.




This is number two out of the three books I plan to read on the extra Calvinisticum. In short, the extra states that the Logos exists outside the person of the Son during the incarnation. the extra has a long pedigree in spite of its name—which arose because of its importance in debates over the Eucharist00but that is not the major concern of the author.

After the first introductory chapter, the author gets down to explaining and responding to the major objections to the doctrine. Ultimately all of these doctrines come down to the question of the hypostatic union and the relationship of God the son to the person of Jesus more broadly. The author ably responds to each objection, showing how, for example, affirming the extra does not mean that God only partially became incarnate, or that we can only worship the Logos and not the person of Jesus. Chapter 4—actually the wekest in my book, in my opinion—uses the Biblical nature of the temple as God’s dwelling place to argue that the extra reflects this Biblical model. While it is an interesting argument, I’m not sure how necessary it was to the author’s overall thesis. The last chapter provides suggestions as to other loci of doctrine besides soteriology the extra might illuminate.

This was originally a dissertation, but it is fairly well-written. The strongest chapters are those where the author engages with dogmatic objections, but the book as a whole is still a good read.

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