Jesus Christ for Contemporary Life. Don Schweitzer

Читать онлайн книгу.

Jesus Christ for Contemporary Life - Don Schweitzer


Скачать книгу
which came to be known as the second person of the Trinity, assumed flesh. Appollinaris carried this Logos/sarx Christology further to the point of denying that Jesus had a human soul. In this way he wanted to exclude any possibility of there being a conflict between Jesus’ human and divine will, “thus safeguarding the sinlessness of Christ, without which there was no redemption from sin.”63 But opposition soon arose on the grounds that if the Logos did not assume a fully human nature, then that which was not assumed was not healed. To be human is to be subject to change. As the divine was understood to be immutable, the two seemed mutually exclusive.64 How could Jesus be both at once? Yet it was only by their coming together in the one person of Jesus that salvation in its fullest sense had been effected. For most theologians involved in this debate, the fundamental saving significance of Jesus lay in the appearance in his person of a new reality in which God and humanity were united while still distinct.65 In the Christ event, which included Jesus’ ministry, death, and resurrection, the new reality promised in his preaching of the kingdom of God became present in his person. The presence of this in his person is the basis of the hope for its coming in fullness in the future.66 The question was, how did this come about and how was it to be understood? Three major positions developed in this regard: the schools of Antioch and Alexandria in the East, and the Western tradition influenced by Augustine, which found expression at Chalcedon through Pope Leo the Great.

      Theodore insisted against Apollinaris that Jesus was only able to effect salvation because he had been fully human and lived a genuinely human life. But Theodore’s account of the unity of the Logos with Jesus’ humanity remains problematic. For Theodore and others in the school of Antioch there seem to be two subjects in the one person of Jesus Christ. The Logos inspires Jesus and identifies with him in his resurrection, but this was a functional unity. The danger here is that Jesus becomes only a moral hero rather than the person in whom a new reality appears within history, in which God and humanity exist in a reconciled and new state of differentiated unity. Jesus can only be the Christ if he is a moral exemplar. But as the Christ he is not simply a great person but a new person, in whom a new reality is present in which others can participate through faith and in him. Theodore and the school of Antioch celebrated the arrival of this new reality in Jesus but had difficulty conceptualizing the unity of his person.


Скачать книгу