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Category Archive: Theology - Christology

Wedding Sermon - July 14, 2007
Genesis 2:21-22: So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. The LORD God fashioned into a woman...

Christos kurios - July 11, 2007
One of Afua Kuma's hymns to Jesus describes Him as an arriving hero: "Children rush to meet Him crowds of young people rush about to make Him welcome. Chief of young women: they have strung a necklace of gold nuggets...

Jesus of the Deep Forest - July 11, 2007
In the songs and praises of the illiterate Ghanian Christian, Christina Afua Gyan (or Afua Kuma), Jesus is described as a powerful Protector in a world teeming with dangers. "Should the devil himself become a lion and chase us as...

Cyril and the Bible - June 25, 2007
In his wonderful book, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, Robert Louis Wilken criticizes the Formula of Chalcedon as "formulaic and abstract," which described Jesus as "one person," but "seemed to divide Christ into a divine nature that, for example,...

Necessary incarnation - May 26, 2007
An article by Orthodox theology George Florovsky summarizes some of the history of the discussion of the motive of the incarnation in Western theology: "Rupert of Deutz (d. 1135) seems to be the first among the medieval theologians who formally...

Incarnation without sin? - April 18, 2007
"If there is a natural, there is a spiritual," Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15. This is often read as a statement about two states: As soon as Adam was created a living soul, he was destined to rise to...

Christ and Horrors - March 21, 2007
Marilyn McCord Adams (Christ and Horrors, Cambridge, 2006) proposes to demonstrate the coherence of Christology not by starting with sin and explaining how Christ has dealt with sin, but by starting with "horrors" and asking, What must Christ be and...

True humanity - March 19, 2007
In the second edition of his book on ritual in the early modern period (Cambridge 2005), Edward Muir describes the 14th and 15th century obsession with "Christ's carnality": "As Leo Steinberg has shown, in fifteenth-century Italy thoroughly Christian artists made...

Finite infinite - March 17, 2007
The puzzle of the incarnation is often posed as "how could the infinite become finite?" It's the wrong question. The Son is infinite in all his attributes - His wisdom, power, goodness, truth. But He is not infinite-without-qualification. He is...

Gospel biography? - February 09, 2007
It has become popular to describe the gospels as biographies, but Rosenstock-Huessy pre-challenged this trend (no doubt reacting to the lives-of-Jesus movement of the 18th and 19th centuries). Ancient biographies, he claims were actually "thanatographies," while "the story of Jesus...

God's body - January 18, 2007
Time was when you could despise the body and love God, or despise God and love the body. One could be an ascetic or a hedonist. Then God got Himself a body. Despite efforts to retain this choice (Nietzsche, flagellants),...

Dionysus and the crucified - January 18, 2007
Shaftesbury recognized the stark difference between his own rational Deity and the vulgar bodily and crucifiable Christ. Francis Hutcheson, building on Shaftesbury, tried to conflate the two. Hutcheson was a Christian, a Presbyterian professor of moral theology. Shaftesbury loathed Christ....

Exhortation, Second Sunday of Advent - December 10, 2006
As we'll see in the sermon this morning, in the Bible a "shepherd" is a king. Shepherds lead, guide, rule, control, feed, discipline, and judge their sheep. To say that Jesus is the Good Shepherd is to say He’s king...

Necessity of Incarnation - August 12, 2006
Would the Son have been incarnate if Adam had not sinned? 1 Corinthians 15:44-45 provides a prooftext for an affirmative answer. Verse 44 says that the "spiritual body" is implied by the existence of the "natural body." Human beings were...

Jesus and his enemies - July 31, 2006
The Jewish scholar GC Montefiore wrote: "What one would have wished to find in the life-story of Jesus would be one single incident in which Jesus actually performed a loving deed to one of his Rabbinic antagonists or enemies. That...

Exhortation, Seventh Sunday of Easter - May 28, 2006
Easter is about faith, hope, and love. Easter is pre-eminently about the love of God for us. The Father loved His Son and rescued Him from death. When the Father rescued the Son, He also rescued us, so that we...

Echoes and Christology - May 22, 2006
Modern-day Arians have answers to the standard NT texts on the deity of Christ. They aren't good answers, but they have answers. What they don't have are answers to the many texts that demonstrate the deity of Christ through intertextual...

Exhortation, Sixth Sunday of Easter - May 21, 2006
Easter is about faith and hope. Easter is also about love. The Old Covenant was a covenant of separations. Yahweh separated Himself from His people, enclosed behind a series of veils in inapproachable splendor. Yahweh called Abraham and separated him...

Exhortation, Fifth Sunday of Easter - May 14, 2006
Easter is about hope, not only hope for the future, but hope realized in the present. The Lord promised that Abraham's seed would be like the stars of heaven. The point was not simply that Abraham's seed would be numerous,...

Exhortation, Fourth Sunday of Easter - May 07, 2006
Easter is about faith, and Easter is about hope. On the third day of creation, God separated the waters, so that the dry land appeared. When He covered the world with flood waters, His Spirit hovered and divided the waters...

Exhortation, Third Sunday of Easter - April 30, 2006
Easter is about faith, because by His resurrection Jesus has been installed as the mediator, the firmament boundary between God and man. In the Old Testament, priests served as mediators, who stood in the middle between God and man. Organized...

Cosmic mediation - April 29, 2006
Philo's views on the mediation of the logos are summarized in the TDNT article on mediator: "Stretching from the middle of the world to the ends, and back from the extreme edges to the middle . . . [the logos]...

Good Friday Homily - April 14, 2006
Paul determined to know nothing but Jesus and the cross. Was that enough? To answer that question, we need to answer another: What is the cross? The cross is the work of the Father, who gave His Son in love...

Hypostatic union - March 28, 2006
Thomas argues that "if the human nature is not united to God the Word in person, it is not united to him in any way, and thus belief in the incarnation is altogether done away with, which subverts the entire...

Aquinas and Chalcedon - March 28, 2006
Frederick Bauerschmidt claims that "Aquinas is in fact the first medieval theologian in the West to quote directly from the Council of Chalcedon." This is remarkable on all sorts of levels, not least because of the questions it raises about...

Conveniens - March 23, 2006
Bauerschmidt notes that Aquinas frequently argues, especially when speaking of the incarnation, not for "proof" of doctrine but for its "fittingness." Reason has the role of "manifesting how [the incarnation] fits together (convenire means literally 'to come together') with other...

Extra-Augustinisticum - March 23, 2006
In Epistle 137, Augustine writes: "The Christian teaching nowhere holds that God was so poured into human flesh as either to desert or lose - or to transfer and, as it were, compress within this frail body - the care...

Exhortation, First Sunday of Lent - March 05, 2006
What is the cross? Originally a Persian invention, crucifixion became a Roman method of execution, reserved for slaves and for the most dangerous political criminals. Josephus described it as the "most wretched of deaths," as a victim slowly suffocated with...

Pure Father, Pure Son - February 03, 2006
In the course of demonstrating that Christ is not a creature, Athanasius pointed to the difference between human and divine fatherhood and sonship. Human sons have the potential to become fathers, and often do become fathers. But God the Father...

Jesus' Thoughts - January 24, 2006
Donald Macleod offers some intriguing insights in his IVP book on the Person of Christ: In many respects, Jesus' human knowledge was like our own, as He learned about His Father through revelation: "his own capacity for such knowledge would...

The Virgin Birth and Angry Reviewers - January 11, 2006
Analyzing Rodney Stark's treatment of the virgin birth of Jesus in his review of Stark's latest book, The Victory of Reason (TNR January 6, 2006), Alan Wolfe writes, "Mary's virgin birth has what [Charles] Freeman calls a 'shaky' scriptural basis,...

Exhortation, Christmas Day - December 25, 2005
As Pastor Wilson will remind us in the sermon this morning, the Christmas gospel announces the coming of day. Those in darkness see a great light, as the Sun rises with healing in His wings. The light has come into...

Luther Christmas Sermon - December 24, 2005
Here is a selection of a 1530 Christmas Sermon by Martin Luther. You have heard the story from the Gospel of St. Luke of how it came to pass that our Lord Christ was born and then also the message...

Athanasius and the Humanity of Christ - December 17, 2005
RPC Hanson, among others, argued that Athanasius' Christology minimizes the humanity of Jesus: "We must conclude that whatever else the Logos incarnte is in Athanasius' account of him, he is not a human being." Not so, argues Khaled Anatolios in...

The Nestorian Shuffle - December 17, 2005
In his book on Saint Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy (St. Vladimir's, 2004), John McGuckin describes the Nestorian reading of the gospels. The gospels describe the birth and growth of the man Jesus, and also describe a person...

How much does God care? - November 24, 2005
Gerard O'Collins points out that Arian and modern neo-Arian Christologies have significant implications for our understanding of the extent of God's favor toward us. According to traditional Christologies, "God so valued us and our historical, space-time world that the Son...

Christ's nature - September 22, 2005
Conceptual difficulties that arise from attempting to express incarnation in categories drawn from the Greeks. Sarah Coakley points to one such problem in a discussion of the work of Richard Norris on the Chalcedonian settlement. She finds fault with some...

Introduction to Christology - January 25, 2005
Below are some notes for an introductory lecture on Christology. INTRODUCTION Christology is frequently divided into two sections, the first dealing with the person of Christ and the second dealing with the work of Christ. That division is far from...

Embodied Torah - January 22, 2005
Basil Studer (Trinity and Incarnation, pp 36-37) points to the use of biblical titles for Jesus among early Christians influenced by Judaism. Among these is the designation of Jesus as "law" or "covenant": "the Shepherd of Hermas, the Kerygma Petrou...

Will and Nature - January 13, 2005
Is the begetting of the Son an act of God's will or nature. Barth, with the tradition, says that it is not an act of God's will if will means the freedom to be thus or not to be thus....

Wedding Homily, December 30 - December 30, 2004
In the past week, we have celebrated Christmas, commemorating the human birth of the Only-begotten Son of the Father. At this feast, we were reminded of central mysteries of Christian faith: The Son who is eternally in the bosom of...

Lordly Obedience - December 23, 2004
The following is a Christmas Eve homily, largely paraphrased/quoted from Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 4.1, pp. 185ff. John 5:30: �I can do nothing on My own initiative As I hear, I judge; and My judgment is just, because I do...

Crossan on Resurrection - November 19, 2004
Responding to NT Wright's response to the critics of his resurrection book, John Dominic Crossan registered three agreements and three points in what he called an amicus curiae brief. The agreements: 1) "Resurrection" means the general bodily resurrection. To say...

Childhood - August 06, 2004
Von Balthasar argues that Jesus is the archetypal child, who lives in constant dependence on His Father, who clings to "Abba," who is constantly filled with thanks and awe toward His Father. And from that he develops a theology of...

Exhortation, Ascension Sunday, 2004 - May 23, 2004
Thursday was Ascension Day. It is celebrated to mark Jesus' ascent to heaven that occurred forty days after His death and resurrection at the time of Passover. Though Ascension Day is rarely emphasized in the church calendar, it is essential...

Ascension - May 23, 2004
In his remarkable book, Ascension and Ecclesia, Douglas Farrow points to the common modern conflation of resurrection with ascension, and points to some of the theological consequences of this conflation: "First of all, it puts in jeopardy the continuity between...

Good Friday Homily - April 09, 2004
This was delivered at a joint Trinity-Christ Church Good Friday Service, April 9 2004. 1 Corinthians 2:8-9: We speak God�s wisdom among you in a mystery, the hidden wisdom, which God predestined before the ages to our glory; the wisdom...

Exhortation, March 28 - March 28, 2004
The NT teaches that Jesus was a man of faith. Jesus trusted in God throughout His passion, His trials, torture, and death. Among other passages, Peter wrote in his first epistle: �Christ also suffered for you, leaving an example for...

Exhortation, Feburary 29 - February 29, 2004
The reaction to the release of Mel Gibson�s film The Passion of the Christ this past week proves that Americans are still very interested in and curious about Jesus. In just a few days, the film made tens of millions...

Comic Christianity - December 26, 2003
The resurrection of Jesus, and our participation in it, is of course foundational for the "comic" vision of Christianity. Barth, however, expresses this in a particularly sharp way, when he describes how the Christian looks back to death and the...

Incarnation - December 24, 2003
You know the scene in the movie: The hero, finding that he can no longer resort to half-measures and fighting through intermediaries, decides he must take things into his own hands, and challenges the villain in hand-to-hand combat. That is...

Sermon Outline, December 21 - December 20, 2003
God In Us INTRODUCTION Confessing that God the Son was incarnate as the baby Jesus is once of the church's non-negotiable beliefs, however offensive it is to high-minded reason. But the church has often placed a wrong stress on the...

Ward on Bodies - December 18, 2003
Graham Ward, writing about the "displaced body of Jesus," argues that "none of us has access to bodies as such, only to bodies that are mediated through the giving and receiving of signs." To which I want to say, Hmmm....

Sermon Outline, December 14 - December 11, 2003
Sermon Outline for Third Sunday in Advent: God With Us INTRODUCTION When John describes the incarnation, he uses an image drawn from the Pentateuch, saying that the "Word became flesh and 'pitched His tent' among us" (John 1:14). The phrase...

Incarnation and God's Lordship - December 07, 2003
The incarnation is no contradiction of God's transcendence or sovereignty. Never think of Christmas, the incarnation, in any way as a qualification of God's sovereignty, His Lordship. We shouldn't say: Yes, God is sovereign Lord, who does as He pleases;...

Advent and Election - December 06, 2003
Picking up on thoughts on Romans 2, some additional reflections on Advent, and reading further in Church Dogmatics 2.2: Here is the gospel of election, of the decree, that Jesus Christ was, from all eternity, elected and chosen as the...

Sermon Outline, December 7 - December 04, 2003
Sermon outline for Second Sunday in Advent: God For Us INTRODUCTION Last week, we meditated on the fact that God became flesh. This week, we will make that more specific. The incarnation is an event in human history, but more...

Girard on Christ's Death - December 03, 2003
There's an intriguing interview with Rene Girard in Touchstone as well. His most provocative comments come in response to a question about his "non-sacrificial" understanding of the death of Christ: "It is not quite true that I take what you...

Coakley on Norris on Incarnation - November 26, 2003
Sarah Coakley's article from a symposium on the incarnation (published by Oxford) analyzes the work of Richard Norris on the Chalcedonian settlement. She finds fault with some of Norris's historical anlaysis (she sees him importing post-liberal obsessions into his interpretations...

Incarnation as Contradiction? - November 26, 2003
Barth (CD 4.1) attacks the notion that the incarnation is a "contradiction" or "paradox" or "rift" in God on two bases. First, he argues that there cannot be any contradiction in God; God is a God peace, not of confusion....

Sermon Outline, November 30 - November 24, 2003
God in Flesh, John 1:1-18 INTRODUCTION Many Christians puzzle over the incarnation, the fact that the Son of God took on human flesh. But most of the difficulties come from trying to think about the incarnation using categories from outside...

Crossan on NTW on Resurrection - November 23, 2003
Interacting with NT Wright's book on resurrection, Dominic Crossan says that what's important for him is not whether the claims of the resurrection are literal or metaphorical. Either way, the claims forced a clash with imperial Rome, and that's what...

Grentz on Imago Dei - November 20, 2003
Stanley Grentz presented a paper on the imago Dei as a Christological title, and along the way offered some observations on the relation of anthropology and Christology. One of the most revealing things he said was that when imago Dei...

Arminius's Christology - October 17, 2003
I finally got my mitts on Richard Muller's article on the Christology of Jacob Arminius (published in the Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiendenis, 1988). Here is a summary of some of the salient points. In the years leading up to Dordt,...

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