50 Key Concepts in Theology

Christology
The study of Jesus’ identity as Christ, the messiah.
Christians believe that Jesus was not only human, but a divine Messiah or
Christ (literally, ‘the anointed one’) with the power to save humanity. The
study of Christ is called ‘Christology’.
The debate about Jesus’ christological identity starts in the Gospels. The
Jews of Jesus’ time expected the arrival of a Messiah. We see evidence of this
expectation when both John the Baptist and Jesus are asked whether they are
the Christ. But Jesus spoke evasively about himself as the Christ and
discouraged his disciples from talking too openly about it. Jesus most
commonly refers to himself as ‘the Son of Man’, an ambiguous title which
may refer back to a messianic phrase in the book of Daniel, but is not
obviously christological. The disciples appear to have treated Jesus as the
Christ, referring to him not only as ‘Lord’ (kyrios) but as ‘the Lord’.
For St Paul and the earliest Church, Jesus’ christological status appears to
have been neither controversial nor theologically problematic. But the
paradox of the man who was God soon started to puzzle theologians. The
problem was how one person could be both a creature and the creator, the
divine source of everything and a carpenter in first-century Palestine.
The simplest solution to the problem was to argue, as the Docetists did,
that Jesus only appeared to be human, that he was a God who wore his
humanity like a garment – as it says in the famous carol, ‘veiled in flesh the
Godhead see’. Alternatively, one could argue, as Arius did, that Jesus was just
a very special being, with a unique relationship with God. These, and other
reductionist solutions, were eventually rejected by the churches at the Council
of Chaldecon (451), which affirmed that Christ was fully human and fully
divine.
Before the modern period, theologians made no real distinction between
Jesus the human being and Christ the Messiah: Jesus was Christ, Christ was
Jesus. But from the eighteenth century onwards there was a growing
awareness both of human history and of the geological history of the planet.
As a result, biblical scholars started to study Jesus as a historical figure like
any other. This involved stripping him of his christological trappings in order
to reveal Jesus the ‘real’ human being.
This produced various liberal christologies that saw Jesus as a more
human figure – an ethical teacher rather than a cosmic, divine Messiah. These
theologies argued the ‘kenotic’ view that Christ ‘emptied himself’ of his

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divinity in order to live just like us. The idea that Jesus swapped his divinity
for humanity was a tidy, if not altogether satisfactory, solution to the age-old
christological conundrum.
A number of twentieth-century theologians – D. M. Baillie and Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, for example – argued that the paradox of christology is not a
problem but is the structure of an alternative divine rationality which cannot
be prised open by our human logic. If this is correct, then there will be no end
to christological debate, because no christology will ever be adequate to
‘solve’ the puzzle of Christ’s two natures.
In the 1970s and 1980s radical theologians started to voice explicitly a
thought that had been lingering in theological circles for some time: that Jesus
might really just have thought of himself as a human being with a remarkable
character and message. John Hick, for example, edited a volume called The
Myth of God Incarnate that claimed that ‘the historical Jesus did not present
Himself as God incarnate’ and that the doctrine of the Trinity was invented by
Church theologians.
The very open-endedness of Christ’s identity is perhaps significant,
meaning that he can never be reduced to our doctrines about him. The issue of
Christ’s identity invites theological curiosity as much now as it did for the
first disciples.
THINKERS
St Anselm (1033–1109) argued that Christ’s identity was centred upon
his atoning work on the cross. (See ‘Atonement’.)
D. M. Baillie (1887–1954) argued that Christ’s nature is inherently
paradoxical and that ‘this paradox in its fragmentary form in our Christian
lives is a reflection of that perfect union of God and man in the Incarnation on
which the Christian life depends, and may therefore be our best clue to the
understanding of it’ (God was in Christ).
Marcus Borg (1942– ) argues for a modern form of Arianism, saying that
Jesus was a person with a very special sensitivity to God.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) saw Christ as a cosmic figure
guiding the fragments and processes of the universe towards unification in a
time of fulfilment and atonement that he called ‘the omega point’.
Paul Tillich (1886–1965) argued that Jesus is an existential Christ who
enables us to come to terms with our existential estrangement.
IDEAS

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Arianism: the heresy named after its leader, Arius, who said Jesus was a
higher being, but not God.
‘Benefits’ christology: the argument that we know Christ through the
‘benefit’ of the salvation that he won for us on the cross. It was summed up by
Philip Melanchthon: ‘to know Christ is to know his benefits.’
The Black Christ: the assertion that Christ was black and not the fair-
haired white man of Western Christian tradition. Albert Cleage, for example,
argued that Jesus should be seen as a Black Messiah with a particular
relevance for black people.
Christa: the image of a female Christ used by some feminist theologians
(for example, Carter Heyward).
The Council of Chalcedon in 451 settled the question of Jesus’ divinity
and humanity in the following formula (the so-called ‘Chalcedonian
definition’): Christ is ‘truly God and truly man … one and the same Christ,
Son, Lord, unique: acknowledged in two natures without confusion, without
change, without division, without separation’. Critics have argued that the
definition merely re-stated the problem, rather than explaining how the two
natures of Christ are possible.
Docetism: the belief that Jesus was God disguised as a human.
Incarnation: a term derived from the Latin for ‘to enflesh’. The
incarnation is the doctrine that God ‘took flesh’ to become a human being in
Jesus Christ.
Monophysitism: the view that Christ has only one nature – either human
or divine.
Kenosis: the idea, derived from the letter to the Philippians (2:6–8), that
Jesus ‘emptied himself’ of his divine nature in order to be human: ‘though
[Jesus] was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing
to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in
the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and
became obedient unto death.’
The messianic secret: the intriguing phenomenon in Mark’s Gospel
where Jesus appears to keep his christological identity a secret (see for
example, Mark 7:36).
The Myth of God Incarnate: the title of a collection of essays, published
in 1977, that drew considerable attention, and criticism, for suggesting that
Jesus was not God.

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The speculative Jesus: Hegel’s idea that the truth of Christ lies in his
eternal spiritual significance rather than in his historical identity. Hegel’s use
of the term ‘speculative’ is distinctive, meaning the spiritual dimension that
transcends the particularity of time.
BOOKS
Kelly Brown Douglass, The Black Christ (Orbis Books, 1994)
Gerald O’Collins, Christology: A Biblical, Historical and Systematic
Study of Jesus Christ (Oxford University Press, 1995)
John McQuarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought (SCM, 1990)

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