Theology: A Very Short Introduction by David Ford

Author:David Ford [Ford, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199679973
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-12-15T06:00:00+00:00

Classical Christology

The resurrection is the right place to start to follow developments in the Christian understanding of Jesus, the part of theology called Christology. Without belief in the resurrection the whole development is unthinkable. As Chapter 3 has already suggested, the development of the Christian communities who held this belief is a messy, complicated story. There was an explosion of oral communication in narrative, preaching, teaching, worship, prophecy, and so on. There were also writings such as gospels, letters, historical narratives, apocalyptic visions, short statements of faith, collections of quotations from scripture, lists of key elements in teaching, attacks on rival positions, and responses to attacks. All of these had their own interests, settings, authors, and readers which helped shape how they were written. There were intense pressures from the surrounding society and passionate disagreements among Christians.

Given the potential for disintegration, it is remarkable that there was so much integration among the network of communities that spread around the Roman Empire and beyond. Clearly the key to this was their common allegiance to Jesus Christ. There was also widespread agreement on vital elements of what this meant. They saw themselves in continuity with faith in the God of Israel, taking the Jewish scriptures as their scriptures but with Jesus identified as the Messiah. They continued to be in relationship with the risen Jesus Christ, focused in celebrating the Lord’s Supper (also called the Eucharist, Holy Communion, and Mass), and they identified him as saviour through his life, his teaching, and his death. They slowly agreed on which were their most authoritative writings besides the Jewish scriptures, and these became the New Testament—some books were very late being accepted, and it took until the 4th century for the book of Revelation (or the Apocalypse of John) to be generally acknowledged in the Eastern parts of the Empire. They also developed forms of church order, discipline, and consultation, ethical teaching, ways of initiation, and short summaries of the main headings of their faith which eventually became creeds.

In the 20th and 21st centuries there has been an unprecedented amount of historical and archaeological research into how Christianity developed and how it defined itself against other groups and also against those whom the ‘catholic’ Christians decided were heretical and not ‘catholic’. (‘catholic’ comes from a Greek word meaning ‘about the whole’ or ‘universal’; the term was used in the early development of Christianity to refer both to the wide spread of Christian communities who shared the same beliefs and the all-encompassing scope of Christian faith.) As regards Christology, one of the fascinations of this story of the beginning and development of Christianity is that it played out many of the options facing Christology in other periods too. If you learn the story of the first seven centuries you have met many of the theological positions which are continued or revived with variations in the following centuries. This is not too surprising: Christianity as it spread in the Roman Empire had to engage with a very sophisticated culture, and many of the key intellectual issues were bound to be raised there.

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