Francesca Murphy
— University of Notre Dame
“Ecce Homo: On the Divine Unity of Christ fulfills a need for a readable, philosophically well-informed Christology. Perceiving that the great temptation of modern Christians is to imagine Jesus as so very nice that he was just about God, Riches shows how the Christian tradition has envisaged Jesus as so profoundly divine that he was able to enter human nature and transform it. . . . With his learned reinterpretation of the tradition, Riches is creating a new paradigm for Christology. This book is a milestone for Christology in the twenty-first century.”
John Behr
— St. Vladimir’s Seminary, New York
“This book, in a way that is all too rare today, unites genuinely historical and theological study. Contemporary scholarship tends to separate the man Jesus from the divine Word and, consequently, to banish the divine from the created realm. Aaron Riches shows us, instead, how to understand — boldly, coherently, and consistently — the paradox of the one Lord Jesus Christ. . . . An insightful, stimulating, and often provocative presentation of the person of Christ for today.”
John Milbank
— University of Nottingham
“Aaron Riches has here produced by far the most novel, scholarly, and consequent contribution to Christology of recent times. He exposes the dominant semi-Nestorianism of modern theology, traces its ultimate roots in the difficult reception of the conciliar tradition from Ephesus to Constantinople II in the Latin West, and the resurgence of homo assumptus Christology in the Middle Ages and then, more powerfully, among Scotists; against this perennial semi-Nestorianism he argues instead for the more radical orthodoxy of the Cyrillian position, recovered in the Middle Ages by Thomas Aquinas, and expressed for Riches in a mystical key by the seventeenth-century French Dominican writer Louis Chardon.”
Uwe Michael Lang
— Heythrop College, University of London
“A remarkable achievement. This book brings to life the great Christological themes of the later Patristic period, which are often buried under the weight of their technical terminology. Aaron Riches shows how the tradition shaped by Cyril of Alexandria, received in East and West, sheds light on the theological conversation today and leads us to a fuller and richer understanding of the mystery of Christ than do many modern approaches.”
Tracey Rowland
— John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, Melbourne
“A highly significant contribution to the field of Christology. Aaron Riches argues that the Christology sanctioned by the great ecumenical councils of the first millennium was not about finding some middle line that balanced out excessive and mutually competitive emphases on Jesus’ divinity or humanity. Rather, it was animated by an existential and liturgical encounter with the one Lord Jesus Christ, whose integral duality is recognizable only to the extent that his absolute singularity is maintained.”
David L. Schindler
— Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family
“Pondering the confession of the ‘one Lord Jesus Christ’ that is the basis of the Nicene faith, Riches demonstrates what is at stake in recognizing that Christianity reaches into the most intimate depths of the human being.”
