Historical traditions, religious or otherwise, are ambiguous inasmuch as they transmit mixtures of truth and falsehood.  No tradition, in other words, is innocent.  The Reformed tradition in Protestantism that takes John Calvin’s achievement as its primary point of departure is no exception to this rule.  For this reason, the upcoming celebration of his five-hundr

 For Holy Week, see the beautiful set of posts on "Why I need the Resurrection ... in 100 Words or less" that just appeared on Patheos.com

    The history leading up to our present debates over christology is a long and complex one, to say the least.  Yet gaining clarity on the historical development is just the first step toward moving forward on the contemporary questions of theology.  While this essay is not the place to propose a full-blown christology, I do have some suggestions as to how we might go about addressing the issues now facing us.  And my point of reference here will be Calvin since, I believe, there are some important, albeit neglected, themes in his theology that can be fruitful

    The modern world represents a watershed in the history of Christian theology.  After the Enlightenment theologians faced problems that had never before been on the theological agenda.  The two most notable challenges were posed by historical-critical study of the Bible and the method of natural science.  Both of these modern ways of knowing reality (the historical and the scientific) called into question assumptions that had been taken for granted by Protestant and Catholic alike.   Let me begin with the impact of the modern sciences upon traditio

    The Reformation of Luther and Calvin did not in any way deviate from these doctrinal affirmations.  For their part, the Reformers were more interested in soteriology than christology since their argument with the Roman Catholic Church was over the meaning of justification,  whether it is “by faith alone” (sola fide) as the Protestants affirmed or through “faith formed by love” (fides caritate formata) as the Catholics believed.   With respect to christological concerns, the Reformers simply assumed their continuity with the anci

      The next major crisis that led to a more precise formulation of the christological doctrine was the Arian controversy which issued in the “Nicene Creed” (325, 381).15   Here the question revolved around the interpretation of the prologue to John’s gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (Jn.

    Although the church’s classical christology was formulated in the fourth and fifth centuries, the groundwork for it was laid in the second century.  The church then needed to clarify how the new revelation of God in Christ was related to the old revelation of God to Israel.  There were two challenges on this front, both of which were internal to the Christian community itself.  First, Marcion argued that the gospel was antithetical to the Torah of Judaism.  Here was a radicalizing of Paul’s distinction between faith in God’s grace and

The Christological Question Yesterday and Today (Paul Capetz)
            
                    

Big Tent Christianity

1:00-1:30 pm     Registration, Dessert/Light refreshments

As the big “Theology After Google” event closes down, it finally strikes me: this major conference wasn’t really about Google. In one sense, it wasn’t even about technology. At a deeper level, it was about two questions: should the church adapt to the rapidly changing world around us? And, if so, what precisely should we do?