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Updated: June 15, 2025
The doctrines of Pre-existent Christology could scarcely have had this result, for it is quite clear that the Logos and the Spirit were distinguished only in language, and the Incarnation was, as it were, but an incident in the work of the Logos. Few things are more needed than study of this side of the growth of Christian doctrine.
Redemption must be the work of One who knows God and knows man, of One who has the touch of sympathy; for to such a touch alone can humanity respond. The Christology that makes Christ Jesus consubstantial with God and with man satisfies man's deep-felt need. We have taken a triad of ontologies and a triad of Christological systems, placed them side by side, and examined them.
The result of that examination is a triple correspondence. The metaphysical principle is found in each case worked out in a corresponding Christology. The comparison is of general interest. It reveals Christology as intimately connected with the workings of intellect, as in the main stream of the current of human thought, as capable of philosophic treatment.
But his psychology, not containing the notion of personality, could furnish no principle of synthesis. An agent in the background of life, to combine the multiplicity of experience, is a sine qua non of a sound Christology.
The Epistle to the Hebrews seems at first to be much more obviously "Pre-existent" in its Christology than the Epistle to the Romans, indeed it could well be explained on the theory that it was maintaining a Pre-existent Christology against a rival form of the same general type which identified the pre-existent Christ with an angel.
Unless some theory similar to Holtzmann's be accepted, I think that Colossians and Ephesians stand or fall together. The popular distinction is partly due to the fact that Protestant scholarship is more sensitive to the un-Pauline ecclesiology of Ephesians, which it repudiates, than to the un-Pauline Christology of Colossians, to which it adheres.
The elements of Christology pre-existing in the religious conceptions of Greece, India, and Persia, are too rich and numerous to be discussed here. A very full account of them is given in Mr. It was in Alexandria, where Jewish theology first came into contact with Hellenic and Oriental ideas, that the way was prepared for the dogma of Christ's pre-existence.
If Islam, for instance, were to-day a serious menace to the Faith, Christians would automatically stiffen their attitude towards monophysite doctrines. Toleration of the false Christology would, under those circumstances, be treason to the true. The Church of the fifth century was menaced from many sides. Monophysitism was the foe at her gates. That heresy was not a variety of Christianity.
But splendid though this be, it remains a paradox, and it was diluted very considerably in later theology, which seems to have felt that the abandonment of Adoptionism in the sphere of Christology necessitated its abandonment in the doctrine of salvation.
Where this truth is not recognised, there arises inevitably the tendency to assert that Christ had and must have had but one uniform level of experience, and that assertion is the essence of monophysitism. Bergson's psychology throws further light on a central doctrine of catholic Christology.
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