as it is, the content of ‘being Jesus of Nazareth’ is grounded in and determined by the esse that is ‘being the eternal Word’.

The single essemodel with which Aquinas works is designed to give us a coherent way of speaking about an uninterrupted created agency which is at the same time in every respect activated, made actually present in the world by the eternal action of the Word.

The central claim Paul makes is not that divine action entails an evacuation of human freedom, but that the particular kind of human freedom that in some sense releases divine action to transform the created world is an act of full openness to divine purpose and divine love.

Belief in the Incarnation is the belief that the specific concrete and historical agent that is Jesus of Nazareth simply is the act of God the Word in a unique sense, quite distinct from the way in which divine agency is universally the ultimate activator of any and every finite substance.

Talking about a supposit is talking about a reality that is more than the bare specification of what kind of thing is being spoken of; it is speaking of a particular subject of active existence

Jesus makes things true about the Word, even though it cannot make anything to be true of the Word in eternity;

the heart of Paul’s theology of the resurrection is not so much the overcoming of death for this human individual as the expansion of the effect of Jesus’ actual bodily life to include the life of the believing community and, ultimately, the cosmos itself

unity in esse – unity at the level of the distinctive act and mode of existing that belongs eternally to the divine Word.

Limitless love has to become actively real in our world through limited human action, including suffering.