St. John's :: Library Notes.

Library Notes February 15th, 2009.

Christology is a field of study within Christian theology which is concerned with the nature of Jesus the Christ, particularly with how the divine and human are related in his person. Christology is generally less concerned with the details of Jesus' life than with how the human and divine co-exist in one person. The early Christians first defined exactly how Jesus is related to God the Father in the late first and early second century. However, this definition had taken a long time to formulate. Many of the Christological controversies of the first two centuries had direct implications for later thinking about how the human and divine are related within the person of Jesus. By the fourth century tensions within the Church between Christological positions that stressed the humanity of Jesus and Christological positions that stressed the divinity of Jesus produced councils in the fourth and fifth-century that affirmed that Jesus is both fully divine and fully human, making this part of the orthodox Christian declaration or creed. Our library includes several Christological books. A new addition is 'Jesus of Nazareth' by Dale C. Allison.

Many Gospel scholars, including Allison, hold the view that Jesus was an ascetic, eschatological prophet. He preached the coming end of the world and the need for repentance in the facing of the coming judgment. Others, like Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan, have argued that these eschatological elements of the Gospels were not part of Jesus' teachings but were added by the later church. But according to Allison, Jesus likely believed in what is today called millennialism -- a long period of time in which mankind would experience "heaven on earth." Jesus taught that a millennial kingdom would shortly arrive and this would involve a constellation of other events, such as the gathering of the twelve tribes, a time of tribulation and the resurrection of the dead. Allison concludes "Jesus was the millenarian prophet of judgment, the embodiment of the divine discontent that rolls through all things; the prophet of consolation and hope who proclaimed the last would be first, making the best of a bad situation. But his generation passed away, and they all tasted death. Like all apocalyptic prophets, he was wrong; reality took no notice of his imagination." If you want to understand or challenge this conclusion, read Allison’s book as well as other Christologies in our collection.

Fuad Saba

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