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Updated: June 15, 2025
Still it is true that the weakness of much of their Christology and of ours is that it starts with a borrowed notion of God, which really has very little to do with the Christian religion. To this we shall return; but in the meantime we may note that here as elsewhere preconceptions have to be lightly held by the serious student.
Harnack says of this Christ, the Christ of Nicene or Catholic Christology, that he is essentially docetic that is, apparential because the process of the divinization of the man in Christ was made in the interests of eschatology. But which is the real Christ? Is it, indeed, that so-called historical Christ of rationalist exegesis who is diluted for us in a myth or in a social atom?
But soon after the date of our third gospel, a Hellenic system of Christology arose into prominence, in which the problem was reversed, and Jesus was regarded as a semi-divine being temporarily lowered to participation in certain attributes of humanity.
In Nestorian Christology Christ is presented as a dual personality, an abnormal association in one body of two distinct self-existent beings. Thus a pathological case would be elevated to the rank of mankind's ideal. The monophysite psychology plunges men into the opposite error.
The Trinitarian Christology struggled long for acceptance, and did not finally win the victory until the end of the fourth century. Yet from the outset its ultimate victory was hardly doubtful. The peculiar doctrines of the fourth gospel could retain their integrity only so long as Gnostic ideas were prevalent.
It is not hard to account for its prevalence. The clergy are for the most part unable to expound Christology, and the laity are impatient of exposition. Anything savouring of precise theology is at a discount. So pulpit and pew conspire to foster the growth of the tares.
Sanday pleaded for the necessity of a new Christology, it was not because he was primarily zealous for a novel philosophy, but because like John of old in Ephesus he was zealous to present Christ to his own generation in terms that his own generation could comprehend.
No doubt if pressed they would give intellectual assent to the dogma of the two natures, but they shrink from following it out to its consequences. There is a widespread feeling that it is irreverent to dwell on the fact that Christ was a real man. A firm grasp of catholic Christology in its entirety is the cure for this squeamishness.
All that can be done in these pages is to indicate certain lines, which might be profitably followed up, as to the two chief centres of development, Rome and Ephesus, the former representing in the main Adoptionism and the latter Pre-existent Christology. After Antioch Rome seems to have been the most important centre of Christianity in the first and early second centuries.
Origen achieved a synthesis with Greek philosophy which enabled Christianity to accept a belief in Immaterial Reality without a Docetic Christology, but it must be remembered that Origen was able to do this largely because he stood in the line of succession from the Fourth Gospel and Justin Martyr.
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