The Humanity of God and the Mediation of the Church: Lumen Gentium as Christocentric Ecclesiology

In the third part of the Summa theologiae, q. 42, a. 4, Thomas Aquinas asks the question “why did Jesus Christ not write a book.” The answers that he gives are threefold, each of which has consequences for thinking rightly about a Christocentric ecclesiology. The first is that Christ is different from other teachers because his teaching inscribes truth directly into the soul of the human person by grace, illuminating the mind and enflaming the heart with charity. There are outward words of Christ, but these must not be mistaken for the inward effect of those words, which is of