Romanticism in the Kenotic God: Receptivity, Engaging, Affective Unity, and the Psychological Ontology of the Christic Person

The ‘romantic vs. classic’ dispute in the literary field is proposed as a useful frame of reference from which to analyse, mend, and expand Bruce McCormack's latest theological model. The first part of the essay identifies several clashes of McCormack's theory with classical theism, explaining how their ontologies are mutually incompatible. The second part uses insights from romantic poetry and thinking in order to develop McCormack's concept of ‘ontological receptivity’ (in the Son) and introduce the new concept of ‘engaging’ (in Jesus) as its conceptual pair and to propose ‘affective unity’ as the basis for Christic unity. Throughout, an argument for the value of employing a psychological ontology in discourses about the God-human is shaped.