I.

Introduction

Christology, branch of Christian theology that deals with the person of Christ. Because Christology seeks to explain the saving work of Christ by explaining who the person Jesus was, in traditional Christian theology it logically precedes soteriology, the doctrine of Christ's saving work. In the actual history of the church, however, soteriology preceded Christology, because the belief in Jesus' saving role led to claims about who he was. Christology is not the formulation of revealed propositions as much as it is the Christian response to the phenomenon of Jesus (see Confession).

II.

In the New Testament

In the opinion of modern biblical critics, Jesus did not teach explicitly that he was the Christ (the anointed one, or Messiah); rather, he implemented a Christology through his words and works. The German scholar Günther Bornkamm has postulated that Jesus presented God's offer of salvation through his teaching and actions, thereby evoking the messianic hopes of his followers and the anger and fear of his opponents. After Jesus' death on the cross, the hopes of the disciples were vindicated by their experience of Jesus' resurrection, and they responded to what they believed God had accomplished through Jesus by formulating an understanding of who Jesus was.

The earliest Christians expressed their explicit Christology with titles and mythological patterns borrowed from the religious environment of 1st century Palestine, where both Hebraic and Hellenistic Greek conceptions of God, history, and destiny were at work. Especially important in a consideration of New Testament Christology is the pervasive eschatological consciousness of the period (see Eschatology); many modern scholars think that Jesus himself shared in this consciousness of living at the end of time.

Four early patterns of christological thinking can be discerned within the New Testament. The earliest of these has two focuses—looking backward to Jesus' earthly life as that of an eschatological prophet and servant of God and forward to Christ's coming again as the Messiah, the Son of man (see Acts 3:13, 20-21). In a second two-stage christological formulation the earthly Jesus was also seen as the prophet-servant of the last days, but at the same time he was declared to have become Lord, Christ, and Son of God at his resurrection and exaltation (see Acts 2:22-24, 36).

In the third pattern, these postresurrection titles were applied retrospectively to Jesus in his earthly period in order to articulate the intrinsic connection between Jesus' earthly ministry and his role as savior. A “sending formula” developed, with God as subject, his Son as object, and a statement of saving purpose, as in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (see also Galatians 4:4). At first the moment of sending was identified with Jesus' baptism by John: “... and a voice came from heaven, ‘Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased'“ (Mark 1:11). In the nativity stories of Matthew and Luke, however, the moment of sending is pushed back to Jesus' conception or birth. This is not yet a Christology of preexistence and incarnation, nor of metaphysical divinity; it expresses only the role the man Jesus was to play in salvation history and God's initiative in that role.

In the fourth pattern, expressed in the christological hymns of the Hellenistic-Jewish church, Jesus was identified with the Divine Wisdom, or Logos. Philosophical Hellenistic Judaism had conceived of the Logos as the personified agent of the divine being, the agent of creation, revelation, and redemptive action. The earthly Jesus was now seen as the incarnation of this preexistent wisdom or Logos (see Colossians 1:15-20; Hebrews 1:1-3, John 1:1-18). Early Christians appropriated this Jewish speculation in order to emphasize that the God they encountered in Jesus was not an unknown God, but was the same God they had previously encountered in creation, in human religious experience, and in Israel's salvation history. In the Johannine writings Jesus' Father- Son relationship with God is projected back into eternity, and this equation of the Son with the incarnate Logos results in the use of the predicate “God” for the preexistent Word (see John 1:1), the incarnate Son (see John 1:18), and the risen Christ (see John 20:28). But “God” in this context is carefully nuanced: The Son is not God-in-himself. Rather, through the Son, God “goes out of himself,” communicating himself in the action of creation, revelation, and salvation. Consequently, “Son of God” and “Son of man,” which were originally terms expressive of Jesus' role in salvation history, acquire a metaphysical import and come to denote his divine being.

III.

In the Early Church

From Ignatius of Antioch, in the 2nd century, through the Council of Chalcedon in 451, Christian thinkers wrestled with the logical problems presented to the Greek mind by the christological thinking of the New Testament: If the Son is God, yet distinct from the Father, how can God be called “one”? If Jesus is divine, how can he also be human? The 2nd-century Docetists (Greek dokein,”to seem”) maintained that the humanity of Jesus was apparent rather than real, for in Greek thought the deity was held incapable of change or suffering (see Docetism). Against them, Ignatius insisted on the reality of Jesus' flesh. The outcome was the addition to the creed of the words “born of the Virgin Mary” to safeguard Jesus' humanity (see Apostles' Creed).

A second controversy raged around the endangered concept of the unity of God. Concerned with preserving this unity, the Modalistic Monarchians (or Sabellians) asserted that the one God had revealed himself in three successive manifestations: Father, Son, and Spirit; the Dynamic (Adoptionist) Monarchians, however, viewed Jesus as a man upon whom the power of God had descended (see Monarchianism). In the 4th century, Arius and his followers (see Arianism) contended that the preexistent Son was not identical with God, but was the first of God's creatures. He was homoiousios (Greek, “of like substance”) with God, a kind of clone or demigod. At the Council of Nicaea in 325 Arianism was condemned, and the creed was expanded: The preexistent Son was declared to be “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being (Greek homoousios,”of the same substance”) with the Father” (see Nicene Creed).

Questions regarding the nature of God's incarnation in Jesus also proved troublesome. The theologians of Alexandria, Egypt, tended to emphasize the divinity of Jesus at the expense of his humanity, and their frequent opponents, those of the school of Antioch, Syria, emphasized Jesus' humanity at the expense of his divinity. On the Alexandrian side, Apollinarians (see Apollinarianism) argued that in the human Jesus the Logos had replaced his mind or spirit. This view amounted to a denial of the full humanity of Christ. Apollinarianism was condemned at the First Council of Constantinople in 381. From the Antiochene school emerged the 5th century heresy of Nestorianism. Nestorians held that two separate persons were united in the incarnate Christ, and they rejected the Alexandrian title of Theotokos (God- bearer) for Mary. For Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople (present-day İstanbul), and his followers, Mary had been the mother of the human Jesus but not of the divine-human Son. In response to the challenge of Nestorianism, the councils of Ephesus, in 431, and Chalcedon, in 451, affirmed the title Theotokos. At Chalcedon the incarnation was defined as being of “two natures, one person”—a formula that has remained standard Christian orthodoxy. The Chalcedonian definition itself, however, led to further disagreement; an extremist faction within the Alexandrian school argued that the incarnate Son had but a single, divine nature (see Monophysitism), and in this view, again, Jesus' humanity was compromised.

IV.

Modern Criticism of Chalcedon

Orthodox Chalcedonian Christology has been assailed on various grounds. Modern theologians have noted its dependence on a precritical understanding of the Gospels. The christological pluralism of the New Testament is not recognized by the Chalcedonian formula, which is supported solely by the Gospel of John and the conception of the virgin birth expressed in Matthew and Luke. Another criticism, articulated by the German New Testament scholar and theologian Rudolf Bultmann, hinges on the fact that the Chalcedonian conception of Christ is based on antiquated mythologies (Jewish messianism and apocalypticism and perhaps Gnosticism) and on an obsolete metaphysics, in which the terms person, nature, and substance are understood in ways that are fundamentally different from the way these terms are understood today. The use of Chalcedonian christological definitions in interpreting the Gospel portraits of Jesus has tended to restrict the access of modern Christians to the man Jesus in his historical actuality. Thus, Bultmann has advocated “demythologizing” the New Testament and reinterpreting the mythological elements that lie behind early christological formulations, in order to make the proclamation (kerygma) and Christ's saving work meaningful to modern persons. Some theologians advocate using alternative christological models to explain the doctrines of preexistence and incarnation, preferring the New Testament metaphor of God's “sending” his Son to the later, entirely intellectualized Christology of the Council of Chalcedon. A few contemporary Roman Catholic theologians, such as Edward Schillebeeckx and Walter Kasper, have chosen to begin their christological inquiry “from below” rather than “from above”; they start with the fully human Jesus and then go on to discover and confess the saving presence of God in him.

See also Biblical Criticism; Jesus Christ; Theology.