Christology the Nature and Person of Christ

Christology

The Nature and Person of Christ

Christology is a field within the larger project of Christian theology that has as its central focus the continuing examination of the nature and person of Jesus Christ, Scholars in this field focus on the letters of the New Testament as well as the canonical gospels to help them determine the complexities of the relationship between Christ's person and his nature and how these connect with as well as differ from the nature and person of God the Father. Christology looks for evidence about the nature of God the Son by concentrating on every detail of both Christ's earthly life and the teachings that he shared with his followers. All of these different foci converge to help scholars -- and indeed all Christians -- to derive a clearer and more complete picture of who Christ was, what his teachings meant, and how Christ is involved in the salvation of individuals' souls.

The central questions of Christology have shifted from one generation and one century to the next, reflecting the changes in church doctrine as well changes in the larger society. During the Apostolic Age, Christology tended to focus on the writings of Saint Paul and Paul's advocacy for the idea of the pre-existence of Christ, an issue that is no longer central to Christian theology or scholarship.

However, at the time, the idea of Christ's pre-existence was one of the major touchstones of the Trinitarian doctrines of Christianity. The pre-existence of Christ was the literal belief that Christ had an ontological or fully realized personal existence of Christ before he was conceived in the body of Mary. Christologists (as well as other Christians who took the Trinitarian perspective) took as evidence of this pre-existence of Christ passages such as John 1:1-18. In these verses, Trinitarians argue Christ is clearly identified with the pre-existing hypostasis of the Word or the Logos:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth. John testified to him and cried out, 'This was he of whom I said, "He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me." ' From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.

Politics Takes Sides

The question of the pre-existence of Christ as argued by Trinitarians and as argued against by Unitarians was the focus of an entire era of Christology inquiry and scholarship. However, this focus shifted in the post-Apostolic age until by the fourth century a number of relatively small disagreements about the nature of Christ and his teachings created schisms. In retrospect, those divisions seem unimportant indeed compared to the central tenets of Christ's teachings.

However, not to cast stones, we should take care to note that sectarian divisions that today seem very important to us will in all likelihood seem minor to those in another millennium. Then as now, as well, there were intersections between different sectarian stances and different political factors in society so that the strength of a particular religious argument was often measured not in purely liturgical or theological terms but rather because of the political strength of whatever group happened to champion a particular interpretation as different Roman emperors took different sides of the religious debates.

The central debate in Christology during this era focused on the question of whether Christ was fully mortal ranging through the belief that he was a divine incarnation that had taken on a temporary human form. The longest running doctrinaire conflict during this period was that between the Athanasian perspective (also termed the homoousian perspective) that dictated that the divine Father and Son are the same essence for all eternity and the Arian viewpoint (also called the homoiousian viewpoint), which is that while both Father and Son are divine, they are eternally separate entities (Binns, 2002, p. 81).

The Roman Emperor Constantine sided against the Arians in this debate, and used the synod at Nicea in 325 to help enforce the Athanasian perspective. This is a clear example of one debate within the realm of Christology in which the winning side won not because of the theological strength of its arguments (or at least not necessarily because of the theological strength of its arguments) but because of the political strength of the proponent of one viewpoint.

New Questions about Christ's Nature During the Middle Ages

The Middle Ages -- running roughly from the fifth century through the fifteenth -- saw a range of issues come to the fore in Christology. These centuries saw the debate turn not so much on finer theological points as had been the case earlier but rather on the fullness of Christ's nature and character vis-a-vis personal experiences of Christians. So, for example, one of the central debates was between Christ as a figure removed from the common person or as a newly configured tender-hearted Jesus, almost like a personal friend, an individual who would provide love and ongoing support and comfort throughout a Christian's lifetime (Astley, Brown, & Loades, 2009, p. 109).