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It would be possible to fill a volume with the discussion of the development of the Logos doctrine after the time of Justin Martyr. All that can here be done is to note how it passed from Rome to Alexandria from Justin to Origen and to compare certain aspects of it with Adoptionist Christianity, and to consider the position which either of these Christologies can take in modern theology.

William Sanday: Christologies Ancient and Modern. In the history of human thought and social organization there is an interesting pendular swing between conflicting ideas so that, about the time we wake up to recognize that thought is swinging one way, we may be fairly sure that soon it will be swinging the other.

Christ was apprehended as a being of more than national or terrestrial importance. The Pauline and Johannine Christologies gave cosmic significance to His work, and so inevitably to His Person. Theologians made the tremendous surmise that Jesus of Nazareth was no other than the Logos of the Neo-Pythagoreans or the Wise One of the Stoics.

Thus He is not so much a divine revelation as He is a human achievement. Humanity and divinity are one in essence. The Creator is distinguished from His creatures in multifarious differences of degree but not in kind. We do not see, then, in Christ, a perfect isolated God, joined to a perfect isolated man, in what were indeed the incredible terms of the older and superseded Christologies.

The catholic mind conceives the person of Christ as an eternal self-existent synthetic unity that has combined in an indissoluble union the natures of God and man. Human parallels make intelligible the co-existence of the two natures in the one person and the one body. What is normal in man is surely possible in the ideal man. Heretical Christologies err in their psychology.

The rigid monotheism of the Jews made it hard for them to conceive an intermediary between God and man; they were naturally disposed to embrace a humanistic explanation of Christ. Docetism was elaborated by Valentinus, Manes and other gnostics and adopted into their systems, while ebionitism provided the basis for the Christologies of Paul of Samosata, of the Photinians and Adoptionists.