Christology

Christology. The study of the Person of Christ, and in particular of the union in Him of the Divine and human natures, and of His significance for Christian faith. In the NT Jesus of Nazareth is presented as a teacher, a prophet, and as Messiah (the Christ), but such merely human categories were felt to be inadequate; instead of being an interpreter of the Law, Jesus is seen as superseding the Law (Mt. 5: 21–48), and the role in the work of creation that Jewish thought had ascribed to the Torah or Wisdom is attributed to Christ, the Son of God, the Word (1 Cor. 8: 6; Heb. 1: 2; Jn. 1: 3).

The idea that in Jesus was encountered the One through whom God had made the universe provided a starting-point for a more philosophical approach to Christology. The Apologists of the 2nd cent. saw Jesus as the Logos or Word of God, understood as the source of all order and rationality; in Jesus the Logos united Himself to a human being. For them, however, the Logos was an intermediary between God and the world, distinct from Him. When Arius (d.336) held that such a subordinate Logos was not the uncreated God but part of the created order, he was opposed by those for whom to say that Jesus was the Logos incarnate was to say in some way that He is God. At the Council of Nicaea (325) Arius was condemned and it was asserted that the Son of God who became incarnate in Jesus is ‘consubstantial with the Father’. Such a clear affirmation of the divinity of Christ provoked debate. The Alexandrians stressed that in Christ God Himself was living a human life; the Antiochenes emphasized that in Christ both humanity and divinity co-operated without involving any encroachment on the reality of either nature. After the Council of Ephesus (431) had rejected Nestorius' objection to the title of ‘Theotokos’ (‘Mother of God’) being applied to the BVM, Cyril of Alexandria and the moderate Antiochenes reached an agreement enshrined in the ‘Formulary of Reunion’ (433); this affirmed the unity of Christ and asserted that He is ‘consubstantial with the Father in Godhead and consubstantial with us in manhood’. Eutyches in 447 began to teach that after the union there was one nature and that this nature was not ‘consubstantial with us’, but this teaching was condemned at the Council of Chalcedon (451), which asserted that there is ‘one Christ … in two natures, without confusion, without change, without separation’. It also endorsed the Christological teaching of Pope Leo that there is one subject in Christ, to which, paradoxically, two sets of attributes, Divine and human, are to be ascribed. Neither the Council of Ephesus nor that of Chalcedon secured complete agreement. Those who supported Nestorius rejected the Council of Ephesus and formed a schismatic Church, the Church of the East. The so-called ‘Monophysites’ rejected the Chalcedonian Definition. In an effort to secure agreement between the Chalcedonians and the Oriental Orthodox Churches the 6th cent. ‘Neo-Chalcedonians’ developed the doctrine of ‘Enhypostasia’ (q.v.). In the W. the Chalcedonian Definition was generally accepted.

At the Reformation Christological concern shifted from the question of the two natures of Christ to a more direct analysis of His work in redemption. J. Calvin stressed the Divine transcendence, while the Lutheran tradition developed a new Christology of the two states of Christ's humiliation and exaltation in cross and resurrection, in accounting for the biblical stress on historical contingency in the Incarnation. This led to reflection on kenosis (self-emptying) in Jesus and in God.

After the Enlightenment a new Christology was produced which tended to see belief in the divinity of Christ as a way of articulating the conviction that the distinctive character of Christian faith in God is that this faith is focused on Jesus of Nazareth. It looked for the divinity of Jesus in the unique quality of His life on earth. In reaction to such an approach the so-called ‘dialectical theology’ arose. K. Barth's God is wholly other; in Christ He reveals Himself as and when He wishes. For R. Bultmann Jesus is the one who confronts man with an eschatological message, demanding response. Bultmann's pupils developed a ‘New Quest’ of the historical Jesus, accepting the importance of kerygma, but seeking again to relate it to history. J. Moltmann sees the cross of Christ as the key not just to Christology but to all legitimate talk about God. Liberation Theology relates the Incarnation to salvation directly in its commitment to love of the poor and dispossessed. See also HISTORICAL JESUS, QUEST OF THE; INCARNATION; and JESUS CHRIST.