#Christology

[tonreihe]

Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation

[blackswaneuroparedux]

There was a quotation from Simone de Beauvoir that I read in the paper only the other day… You may agree with those words or not, but those are the key spring of The Lord of the Rings.

J. R. R. Tolkien, 1968

Tolkien is talking about Original Sin in which death ("the wages of sin is death" as Paul would put it in the gospels) was never part of the original design of God before the Fall. De Beauvoir unwittingly makes the point for Tolkien. Had she known she might have choked on her coffee in Café de Flore.

[marcella-delaney]

What [Jesus’] life meant, what his spirit was, what his disciples did, this ‘yes’ to God’s will lived, and lives today, and this life appears in the cross. Redemption without the cross is not the redemption in which we become one with love.

Dorothee Soelle, Thinking about God: An Introduction to Theology, pg. 132

[sistersorrow]

With it being Pride and all, I'm seeing a lot of well meaning, progressive Christians being supportive and saying "calling for the death of queer people is bad actually" and "Jesus never condemned being queer", and less people wanting people like me dead is always nice, but this reminded me of something I have noticed a lot over the years:

A lot of Christians seem to kinda believe in some form of Arianism

So in mainstream denominations of Christianity, Christians believe in one God in Trinity (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit) with all three persons of the Trinity being of the same substance, having always existed, and none being subordinate or superior to the rest

Arianism is a heretical Christian doctrine which rose to prominence in the 3rd century, which took a bunch of different forms based on disagreements of sub-sub-doctrines, but the gist of it was that the Son was not eternal, but rather a creation begotten by the Father who was distinct and subordinate to him (Arius, the namesake of the heresy believed this happened before time, while others overlapped this belief with other heresies to declare Jesus did not exist until the Holy Spirit impregnated the Virgin Mary)

I bring this all up cause in a lot of debates about things like which, if any, Old Testament laws still hold and what things count as sins, it's pretty common to see Christians say "Jesus never said anything on this," in that there don't seem to be any recorded statements from him on things like homosexuality in the Gospels

A lot of Christians treat Jesus as seemingly having a separate set of opinions from those espoused by God in the Old Testament, and in many cases seem to believe that every appearance of God in the Old Testament is specifically God the Father, with the Son only showing up in the New Testament

The Father and the Son in a lot of casual religious discourse are treated as fully separate beings with different opinions, with Christ being assumed to be radio silent before his incarnation

Also the Holy Spirit is just kinda...there? Ask people about what the Holy Spirit even is and the answers get even more fragmented than the discourse I just described

TL;DR: a lot of Christians, in pursuit of not being awful people, accidentally and unknowingly reinvented a centuries dead heresy, and the ghost of Arius is laughing

[theexodvs]

Christ is King. Adam was also king, but he failed to exercise dominion over the serpent. Jesus has conquered the serpent, and all authority on Heaven and on Earth has been given to Him. He is enthroned at the right hand of the Father and will reign until His last enemy, death, is subdued.

Hosanna!

[entanglingbriars]

How would you differentiate between Jesus being in heaven and alive and Jesus being in heaven and dead? Like, what's the difference?

[mythohumanism]

While the obvious parallel (even made explicit in the text) is with the Grimm Brothers’ “Little Mermaid”, the animated film “Bubble” (2022) contains nearly all of the elements of a Christological narrative. In this essay I will

[offcampusstillnerdy]

Excellent new resource with a ton of careful research behind it. Amazing to see how in UK some evangelical churches are confronting and undoing histories of prejudice.

[walkingthroughthisworld]

He has not assumed a body as proper to His own nature, far from it, for as the Word He is without body. He has been manifested in a human body for this reason only, out of the love and goodness of His Father, for the salvation of us men. -Athanasius

[dialmforolrik]

Me: Do you think Jesus ever put up his hair in a chignon? Or was he more a ponytail kind of guy?

Priest: Son, this is a Wendy's.

[tonreihe]

A review of George Hunsinger’s Reading Barth with Charity.

[wisdomfish]

The King’s invitation to the repentant [Matthew 11:25-30]:

This invitation is a sign of Israel’s rejection of her King since with it Jesus invited those who had believed in Him to separate from unbelieving Israel and to follow Him. In Matthew 11:20-24 Jesus addressed the condemned, but in Matthew 11:25-30 He spoke to the accepted. This section is a Christological high point in the Gospel. ~ Constable, Thomas [ref. Matthew 11:29]

[salty-ofthe-earth]

Ok, so Jesus was fully human, right? That means He had DNA. If we somehow acquired His holy DNA and cloned it, who would that clone be? He surely can't be Christ, because Christ was also fully divine. But this being would be identical to Christ in every testable way. So who is Jesus without His divinity?

Two answers to this:

Clones and identical twins share the same DNA. Jesus and a clone would be at least as different as twins. The twin would not be a divine person but a human person and so would not be sinless (following the St. Joseph paradigm). Human personalities are not determined based on their DNA, but their choices. The purported clone or twin would be dependent upon his own choices. There is no problem differentiating twins or clones from each other in the real world in which we live.

Cloning any human being, however, is a violation of the sanctity of human sexuality within marriage, which is the proper context for human procreation.

[eli-kittim]

Eli Kittim Reddit

[buggie-hagen]

The current trend toward Christologies of identification are no improvement. We look, supposedly, for a Jesus who identifies with us, or with whom we can identify. That backfires, for example, when feminists find it impossible to identify with a male Jesus and start casting about for female divinities. But that is symptomatic of the difficulty with all Christologies of identification. We forget or ignore the fact that Jesus was one with whom no one identified in the end. ~Gerhard O. Forde, Theology is for Proclamation, 72.