Christology

Paolo Veronese, The Resurrection of Jesus Christ (c. 1560)

In Christianity, Christology[a] is a branch of theology that concerns Jesus. Different denominations have different opinions on questions such as whether Jesus was human, divine, or both, and as a messiah what his role would be in the freeing of the Jewish people from foreign rulers or in the prophesied Kingdom of God, and in the salvation from what would otherwise be the consequences of sin.[1][2][3][4][5]

The earliest Christian writings gave several titles to Jesus, such as Son of Man, Son of God, Messiah, and Kyrios, which were all derived from Hebrew scripture. These terms centered around two opposing themes, namely "Jesus as a preexistent figure who becomes human and then returns to God", versus adoptionism – that Jesus was human who was "adopted" by God at his baptism, crucifixion, or resurrection.[web 1] Prior to 2007 the scholarly consensus was that the divinity of Christ was a later development,[6] though most scholars now argue that a high Christology existed prior to Paul.[7][8]

From the second to the fifth centuries, the relation of the human and divine nature of Christ was a major focus of debates in the early church and at the first seven ecumenical councils. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 issued a formulation of the hypostatic union of the two natures of Christ, one human and one divine, "united with neither confusion nor division".[9] Most of the major branches of Western Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy subscribe to this formulation,[9][10] while many branches of Oriental Orthodox Churches reject it,[11][12][13] subscribing to miaphysitism.


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  1. ^ Ehrman 2014, p. 171.
  2. ^ O'Collins 2009, pp. 1–3.
  3. ^ Ramm 1993, p. 15.
  4. ^ Bird, Evans & Gathercole 2014, p. 134, n. 5.
  5. ^ Ehrman 2014, p. ch. 6–9.
  6. ^ Gerd Lüdemann, "An Embarrassing Misrepresentation" Archived 24 March 2019 at the Wayback Machine, Free Inquiry, October / November 2007: "the broad consensus of modern New Testament scholars that the proclamation of Jesus's exalted nature was in large measure the creation of the earliest Christian communities."
  7. ^ Ehrman 2014, p. 125.
  8. ^ Cite error: The named reference Pitre was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  9. ^ a b Davis 1990, p. 342.
  10. ^ Cite error: The named reference Olson1999 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  11. ^ Armentrout & Boak Slocum 2005, p. 81.
  12. ^ Espín & Nickoloff 2007, p. 217.
  13. ^ Beversluis 2000, pp. 21–22.


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