Jesus Christ for Contemporary Life. Don Schweitzer

Читать онлайн книгу.

Jesus Christ for Contemporary Life - Don Schweitzer


Скачать книгу
in order to understand who Jesus Christ is and the nature of his saving significance. It was as a result of Jesus’ resurrection that he was proclaimed as the Christ and became the center of what became a new religion. In the course of this Jesus’ resurrection triggered a far-reaching doctrinal development that eventually helped transform the Christian understanding of God.

      Chapter 3 traces the course of this transformation, examining the development of the patristic church’s understanding of Jesus Christ that culminated in the decisions of the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon. These decisions did not end christological inquiry. They are interpreted here as providing guidelines for understanding Jesus Christ. In tracing this development this chapter also notes some gains and losses it involved for the early church’s understanding of Jesus Christ.

      Chapter 4 reverses the direction of inquiry and presents a descending Christology. Chapter 3 traced and critically accepted the developments leading to the affirmations of Nicaea and Chalcedon. This chapter seeks to understand Jesus Christ and God in light of them. Given that Jesus is the Christ, the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity, how should the Trinity be understood? What was the reason for the incarnation? By answering these questions, this chapter provides a metaphysical framework for the understanding of Jesus’ saving significance and relationships that follows in parts II and III.

      1 The Historical Jesus:

       His Message and Person

      The quest has produced numerous contradictory images of Jesus. These often betray an ideological bias in relation to cultural, political, and religious conflicts of the present. Yet understandings of Jesus produced by the quest cannot be simply dismissed as expressions of current

      This chapter presents a description and interpretation of Jesus’ message and person drawn from the work of people engaged in the quest for the historical Jesus. Subsequent chapters will return to the historical Jesus in relation to particular questions. This chapter has a broader focus: Jesus’ proclamation of the coming reign of God and how this was intertwined with his person. Who Jesus was and how he lived was a medium for his message. Conversely this message and the way he proclaimed it made an implicit claim about his person, which eventually led to his death.

      The Setting

      John the Baptist

      John the Baptist was a preacher of eschatological renewal whose message centered on the theme that all people, even those considered righteous and good, needed to repent to escape God’s impending judgment. Jesus went to John to be baptized. The significance of this can be summarized as follows:


Скачать книгу