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Updated: July 15, 2025
To connect with Christology such an attitude towards the principle of Establishment may seem forced at first sight. The connection, however, exists. Independence of the temporal power is symptomatic with that unworldliness which, as we have shown above, characterises monophysitism. Its adherents paid no respect to the human as such.
Athanasius' great treatises on the incarnation are hardly more than eloquent defences of the true deity and true humanity of Christ. They contain little or no constructive Christology. Their theme is, autòs enênthrópêsen, hína hêmeis theôpoiêthômen. He maintains the fact, but does not deal with the "how." Apollinaris was, as far as we know, the first theologian to approach this subject.
Paul.+ I am persuaded that we have here the key to the Christology of that great thinker and preacher, the apostle Paul. It is this ideal or eternal Christ who is the object of his faith and devotion.
But he cannot have his head in the clouds of contemplation, unless he have his feet on the earth of fact. Catholic Christology has caught the spirit of Aristotle's teaching. It is not primarily speculative. It is in close touch with fact. It is the outcome of a deep-felt want. Redemption is the first demand of religious experience; so it is the motive and theme of all Christology.
But, so let it please God, some contemporary scholar will arise some day soon, combining in himself Goodwin's incomparable Christology, and Taylor's incomparable eloquence, and Keim's incomparably digested learning, with John Bunyan's incomparable imagination and incomparable English style, and the waiting work will be done, and theology for this life will take on its copestone.
Even apart from the problem referred to, it is more than doubtful whether critics have left us enough stones standing in the life of Jesus to serve as the basis of a christology or doctrine of the divine Redeemer. And yet one feels that a theology without a theophany is both dry and difficult to defend.
The authors of the later Christology did not regard themselves as adding new truths to Christianity, but merely as giving a fuller and more consistent interpretation to what must have been known from the outset.
This belief, firmly held in all that it involves, would have kept them from attributing passibility to the Godhead, and ultimately have neutralised the errors of their Christology. But their Christology corrupted their theology. Abandoning all vital relation between God and man in Christ, they abandoned the relation in the Godhead.
The surest way to combat sacramental errors on both sides is a clear and definite statement of the catholic doctrine of Christology. As the interval of time widens, separating Christians from the human life of their God, the more urgent becomes the obligation to put forth a constructive effort of the historical imagination.
If he retained his belief in a transcendent God, he must surrender belief in a triune God. He could choose between the two; but his Christology permitted no third choice. For him, the only alternative to a finite God was a lone God. As a result monophysite theology oscillated between denial of the impassibility of God and denial of his three-fold personality.
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