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What Makes a Christology into a Christian Theology?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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What makes a “Christology” count as a “Christian” Christology? Evidently, there is some distinction to be made. Presumably the reverent accounts of Jesus’ person and role offered by Islam, by notable non-Christian Jews of modem times, by Jewish writers such as Vermes, or by Gandhi and others in the Hindu tradition, do not count as “Christian” Christologies — and clearly a respectful account of his person and role offered by an agnostic or atheist could not count as a “Christian” Christology. Whether we situate the sentimental nineteenth century Renan, or modem theologians such as Maurice Wiles’ and John Hick, on the “Christian” or “non-Christian” side of the divide in respect of their Christologies, waits upon some clarification of what it is that makes a Christology a “Christian” one.
The term “Christology” does not mean a “Messianology” which would have to do with the role of a Messiah the question of whose identity lies open. Rather it means what would have better been called a “Jesuology”, that is an account of the person and role in human existence and the universe of the historically identified person, Jesus of Nazareth.
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- Copyright © 1996 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
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1 The first version of this paper was first given informal delivery in 1981 as one part of a response to The Remaking of Christian Doctrine by Wiles, Maurice (S.C.M. 1974)Google Scholar, which was later followed by the collection The Myth of God Incarnate, ed. Hick, John (S.C.M. 1977)Google Scholar to which Wiles contributed the opening essay. In the other part, a paper entitled “The Incarnation and Man's Salvation”, I explain how the Incarnation is indeed necessary to man's atonement in refutation of Wiles' argument that it is not necessary.
2 St. Thomas gives three reasons why Christ did not adopt the method of teaching by writing, firstly because it was aimed at reaching the hearts and not just the minds of his hearers, secondly because if he had committed it to writing then men would have had no deeper understanding of his doctrine than what appeared on the surface of the writing, and thirdly because such teaching needed to reach people in an orderly way, through ministers properly connected with Christ, rather than by magic authority being attributed to this or that book (S. Th. IIIa, Q. 42, Art. 4). The first two reasons give two of the germs of a theory of development as something necessary to the full development of understanding, and the third the context of such development.
3 I argue this strongly in ‘The Inner Jewishness of St. John's Gospel as a clue to the Inner Jewishness of Jesus', Studien zum Newen Testament und seiner Unwell, vol. 13,1988, note especially pp. 142–151Google Scholar,154–155.
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