Hello again, it's Alastair McGrath talking to you about my textbook Christian Theology and Introduction. And we now come to the 10th chapter which deals with the question of the identity and significance of Jesus Christ. And this is an area of Christian theology that's usually known as Christology.
One of the most basic tasks of Christian theology is to clarify the identity and significance of Christ, who after all is the central figure of the Christian faith. And Christians have always insisted there's something special or something qualitatively different about Christ which sets him apart from other human beings, other religious teachers or thinkers. So what exactly is it that's special about him? How can we describe what sets Christ apart? And in chapter 10, Dealing with Christology, we look at this question.
We deal with the doctrine of the person of Christ in this chapter. Before turning to consider the doctrine of the work of Christ in chapter 11. Christology is about the identity of Christ. The term soteriology, again soteriology, is often used to refer to how Christ is understood to be the basis of salvation, as well as the wider question of how salvation itself is to be understood. And in case you're wondering, the word soteriology is derived from the Greek word soteria, which means salvation.
Now there's a very close link between these two ideas of Christology and Soteriology. Christology is about the identity of Christ. Soteriology is about the new way of life and relation to God his death makes possible.
And these are closely interconnected. Who Jesus is determines what Jesus is able to do. What Jesus does discloses who Jesus is. Now all Christian theology is linked to reflection on the Bible, but this I think is especially evident in the field of Christology, which regularly references New Testament writings, especially of course the Gospels and letters. So let's look at three New Testament themes of major importance that are woven into Christian thinking about the identity and significance of Christ.
First of all, Christ is the saviour of humanity. Why is that so important? Well, it's because the Old Testament insisted there was only one saviour of humanity and that was God. So knowing that God was the only one who could save, then Christians began to say well Christ is saviour, therefore Christ must have some deep intimate connection with God.
The fact that Christ is saviour means Christ is doing something that only God is meant to be able to do. The first Christians were absolutely clear Jesus Christ is their saviour. But if only God is able to save, what's that saying?
As Athanasius of Alexandria emphasised in the 4th century, no human being, no matter how great, is able to achieve salvation for anyone else. God is the only one. who can save, and if Christ has brought salvation to humanity, then that says something important about his identity.
Now, early Christians often used the symbol of a fish as both a sign and a summary of their faith. And the five Greek letters spelling out the word fish in Greek are the initial letters of the theological statement Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour. And that early creedal statement I think captures a lot about the New Testament's thinking about the identity of Christ. The second New Testament theme is that Jesus is worshipped. Now that's an extremely important point because Christianity emerged within a Jewish context in which it was firmly believed that God and God alone was to be worshipped.
Yet we know that the early Christian church worshipped Christ as God. Right. And this practice is evident in the New Testament itself. So Jesus was understood by early Christians to be a legitimate object of worship despite the core belief that only God God was to be worshipped.
So you can see here a very important Christological line of thought. Christ is worshipped but only God is to be worshipped. What does this say about the identity of Christ?
And then thirdly, Jesus reveals God, a major theme throughout the New Testament. For example, think of John chapter 14 verse 9. Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. In other words, God acts and speaks through Christ. To have seen Christ is to have seen God. In other words, Jesus is understood to function as God.
Now, really, these three lines of reflection point to an understanding of Christ, which transcends the category of pure humanity. Christ is human, but he is more than human. It's very important to understand that when theologians say that Christ Christ is more than a human being, they are not denying he is human.
Christian theology is often focused on the relationship between the human and the divine in the person of Jesus Christ without seeing one as denying the other. How can these both be maintained, therefore, without compromising each other? How can both be affirmed without contradicting the other?
So the question we're really looking at is how could theology locate the identity and significance of Jesus Christ on a conceptual map? And that's the question we're looking at in chapter 10, which deals with this rich area of Christology. So let's begin to look at the structure of this chapter. It begins with a discussion of the place of Jesus Christ in the Christian faith. To begin with, Jesus Christ is the historical point of departure for Christianity.
Now that's a very simple point but it does lead into three more theological points. We've already touched on two of them but they're developed in more detail in this section of the chapter. First of all Jesus reveals God that's a core New Testament theme and secondly Jesus Christ is the bearer of salvation. That makes a very significant if you like assertion about the relationship of Christ and God.
But it's also important to note that in the third place Christ defines the shape of the redeemed life. In other words he shows us what the Christian life is meant to look like. Now I've already emphasized how Christology is well anchored in the New Testament and this leads us to look at some aspects of the New Testament witness to Christ in more detail. And so there's a substantial section entitled the New Testament Christological Titles. This is all about the names, the titles that the New Testament applies to Jesus.
And we look at six of these. Messiah, Son of God, Son of Man, Lord, Saviour and God. So each of these are explored and their implications for our thinking about the identity of Christ are teased out.
So how do Christians try and make sense of this? Well, in the next section, we want to look at the patristic debate about the person of Christ, looking at discussions inside the early church about how best to preserve and express the full significance of Christ. And this section begins by looking at two very early explorations known as Ebonitism and Deceitism.
And both of these eventually came to be seen as inadequate. Ebonitism saw Christ as similar to an Old Testament prophet, a human being, yet with some special gift or some special endowment of the Holy Spirit which set him apart from other human beings. Docetism, which derives from the Greek verb doke, meaning to appear, argued that Jesus Christ was totally divine and merely appeared to be human.
And as the Church increasingly came to appreciate the importance of affirming Christ's humanity, docetism came to be seen as theologically simplistic. Something better was needed. And so this leads us to think about the more mature and reflective approaches that developed following this. I think it's a very important period in the history of Christian theology as Christian theologians began to explore various ways of holding together or modeling Christ's humanity and divinity, some of which turned out to be blind allies, but others turned out to be really productive and helpful. So one of the first we look at is due to the second century writer Justin Martyr, who used the Greek idea of the Logos to develop his account of the identity of Christ.
Now you need to understand that the Greek term Logos was widely used in Greek philosophy around this time. It's often translated simply as word. But there's far richer associations than this simple translation might suggest. Middle Platonism, which was the dominant philosophy in the Hellenistic world of this time, saw the Logos as a mediating principle between the ideal and the real worlds.
And this allowed Christian theologians a kind of intellectual model to explore the role of Jesus Christ as a mediator between God and humanity. Now, not everyone liked this approach. And in this chapter, we look at the case of Arius. Arius was a fourth century theologian based in Alexandria who argued that Christ was not divine.
We have to draw, he argued, a clear dividing line between God and the created order. There is no alternative, no in-between position. And Jesus Christ belongs to the world of the creatures. Sure, he's the best, the greatest creature, but he's a creature. And therefore biblical passages that seem to attribute divinity of Jesus are to be interpreted simply as being honorific in intention.
Athanasius of Alexandria offered a robust criticism of Arius's approach, in effect arguing that Arius's interpretation of core biblical passages was faulty. For Athanasius only God could recreate humanity in the image of God and that could only happen if God became incarnate, in order that the root problems faced by humanity, namely mortality and sin, could be engaged directly. Arius, Athenius argued, had made the gospel incoherent by making it impossible for Christ to be humanity's savior.
Only God could save, and if Jesus was not God, he could not save. and therefore the gospel proclamation was inconsistent or incoherent. Christian doctrines could not be isolated from each other and discussed on their own. They were like a web interconnected with each strand connected to and supporting others. Athanasius also pointed out that Christians worshipped Christ and if Christ was not God that made them guilty of idolatry, worshipping something that wasn't God.
So basically Athanasius argued that Arius failed to do justice either to the biblical witness to Christ or to the church's actual experience of Christ as their Lord and Saviour. And in the end Athanasius' argument proved compelling and brought about a crystallization of these core Christological insights at the Council of Chalcedon in the 5th century. So let's look at this.
The Council of Chalcedon took place in 451 and is widely regarded as a landmark in Christian theology and is discussed in detail in this chapter. And Chalcedon vigorously affirmed the two natures of Christ. Christ is both human and divine, yet at the same time allowing a generous degree of diversity on how this was to be understood. And in this chapter we look at two of these actually rather different approaches to this question which emerged from the theological schools of the cities of Antioch and Alexandria. Because during this period there was disagreement in the church over the best way of understanding the relationship between Christ's humanity and divinity.
And Chalcedon made it clear these two were essential, that you could not be a Christian without accepting these. But there were various ways of understanding how they could be held together. And the term Chalcedonian definition is very often used to refer to the Council's affirmation of the two natures of Christ as truly God and truly human.
The chapter then moves on to look briefly at an interesting medieval debate about whether the Incarnation was a response to the Fall or whether it would have happened anyway. And we then turn to modern discussions of eight classical and contemporary Christological models. Here they are. First the substantial presence of God in Christ.
That's really about the idea of incarnation. Second, the idea of Christ as a mediator between God and humanity. Then the revelational presence of God in Christ. Then Christ as a symbolic presence of God. Christ as a bearer of the Holy Spirit.
Christ as the example of a godly life. Christ as a hero. And finally, canonic approaches to Christology.
In other words, Christ empties himself. Jesus. of these is explained and illustrated with reference to some of its leading advocates.
Let's look at one of these very very briefly. The idea of Christ as a mediator between God and humanity. It's a very helpful and productive model and the New Testament refers to Christ as mediator at several points. And two distinct strands of interpretation can be discerned here.
First of all Christ as a mediator of revelation on the one hand, and of salvation on the other. So let's look at the idea of Christ as a mediator or the embodiment of revelation. We find this idea in the Logos Christology of Justin Martyr. Here the Logos is understood to be a mediating principle which bridges the gap between a transcendent God and the creation. And although present in a kind of transient way in Old Testament prophets, For Justin, the Logos became incarnate in Christ, thus providing a fixed point of mediation between God and humanity.
We find a similar approach in the modern Swiss theologian Emil Brunner, who argued that faith was primarily a personal encounter with the God who meets us personally in Jesus Christ. And Brunner was worried that the church had understood Revelation as a kind of doctrinal truth rather than realising it was also about the self-revelation of God. For Brunner, truth is a personal and relational concept, not simply about information but about personal self-disclosure. We then move on to look at the famous quest for the historical Jesus.
Now this is really a matter of New Testament scholarship but it's relevant to Christology so we talk about here. And as you may know the quest for the historical Jesus has origins in the 18th century Age of Reason when the predominant rationalism of that period in effect made people suspicious about any idea of one human being having privilege, insights or status. This idea was sometimes expressed using the phrase the scandal of particularity.
So rationalist writers of the 18th century argued that Jesus had been misunderstood. by the early church. If you went back beyond the early church you would find a simple historical figure.
Jesus was simply a religious teacher and there was nothing about God as Christ as God incarnate. The historical Jesus was seen as a good religious teacher and going back to this historical Jesus yielded a simpler and more credible version of Christianity. But that's not what people think today. And this chapter considers some important episodes in this debate and then moves on to look at what we think today, including some significant theological interpretations of the resurrection of Christ.
We look at people like Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Barth and Wolfhard Pannenberg and understanding how to interpret the resurrection. Then we look at this whole question of how the person and the work of Christ are held together. That's a very important point because it leads into the next chapter. It makes a lot of sense for us to move from thinking about the identity of Christ to the work of Christ, which is the topic of chapter 11. So in many ways, chapter 11 is a continuation of chapter 10. And I look forward to discussing chapter 11, dealing with the doctrine of salvation and how we understand Christ as the basis of salvation in the next presentation. Thank you so much for listening.
I'll speak to you again very soon.