The doctrine of incarnation is a fundamental teaching in traditional Christianity, stating that Jesus Christ and God are one, as the Son is the Father incarnated in human flesh. This affirms that Jesus is paradoxically both fully God and fully human. While there is abundant evidence in the Bible to support the belief in the doctrine, and it is the widely accepted view, still opposition has come against incarnation, branding it intrinsically contradictory. In “Homoousios with the Father” Heron discusses the necessity of incarnation through the study of the word ‘homoousios’; the word provides basic understanding of Jesus’ oneness and equality with God. This sameness is not something that can be comprehended; the attempt to convey the relationship …show more content…
between God and Jesus will always fall short of satisfaction because of the human boundaries of our comprehension. Heron finds fault in fourth century Arian arguments against the doctrine, which were based in rationality and logic and thus not in true theological view. Using Athanasius as a counterpart, Heron shows Arianism to be promoting a mythological perspective as opposed to hailing the doctrine as fundamental truth. The foundations of the doctrine of incarnation are in Jesus’ own words pertaining to His relationship with God: in John 10:30 Jesus explains “I and the Father are one” , and similarly declares in John 10:38 “the Father is in me and I am in the Father” . However, He also relays information about His ‘creation’, His coming into being, which may dispute the idea God and Jesus are one collective being: “The Lord created me at the beginning of his ways… I was brought forth.” The biblical evidence of Jesus’ amalgamation of divinity and humanity can present a perplexing conundrum. How can Jesus be God if he was created, when God has no beginning? Is it more accurate to say that He contains aspects of God, more so than any other man, and this is the reason he must be worshipped and hailed as divine saviour? If it is accepted that Jesus is God, without first believing in the incarnation – or in fact out rightly disbelieving God and Jesus are the same being – then surely Jesus is being worshipped as an individual deity. This would break the very first of the ten commandments: “You shall have no other gods besides me.” It also risks Christianity being viewed as mythology, as it would seem God is simply being depreciated to an anthropomorphic ideal, like the gods of the Hellenistic religions that came before. The Son must therefore be one with the Father as he claims, even though this is epistemologically unreasonable. Due to His proclamations of divinity, Jesus is described as being homoousios, of one substance, with God according to the Nicene Creed (325 A.D.) .
Heron chooses to first outline the positive side of Nicene teaching: “the Son of God is authentically God… his being derives from the being of the Father himself and is therefore shared with the father.” Heron sets this against the negativity of Arian insistence that the Father and the Son should be distinguished as separate entities: “for fathers are before their sons in time, and so if Christ is ‘Son’ he must be later than the Father, and therefore not God.” By calling Jesus ‘the Son’ human constraints are placed on the relationship within the Trinity; our understanding can only fathom this relationship as Jesus coming from the Father, rather than him being the Father incarnate. It is with homoousios that Arius finds an issue; he sees Jesus as “secondary, inferior, creaturely” , so while He surely is appointed by God for a divine purpose, ‘homoousios’ must be rejected as “the Father is ‘different in being’ from the Son.” Believing otherwise, that the Trinity is indistinguishable rather than coeternal aspects, would adopt a Sabellian view, which lessens the importance of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Heron disregards Arian arguments as material and superficial “rehashing of ancient heresy” which is “characterized by… shallowness.” Arius is not alone in finding fault in the term; towards the end of the 350s many variations of ‘homoousios’ emerged in the hopes of more accurately describing the relationship between God the Father and Christ – these did however, ironically, take form due to Arius literalistic interpretation being
unsatisfactory. The multiple convoluted interpretations of ‘homoousios’ serve to provide the opposition with ammunition against the doctrine, dismissing it as muddled religious philosophy at best, irrelevant mythology at worst. The attempts of Arius to dispel the doctrine of incarnation by driving a wedge between the Father and the Son, creating for them two separate identities, also seems to assume the doctrine is little more than mythology. However, Heron suggests that ‘homoousios’ still “belongs within the theologian’s toolbox” of terminology . This is not because of the word itself – on the contrary, he believes there exists a better explanation, one that simply hasn’t been articulated because it cannot be – but because it represents the Word made flesh. It is not mythology simply because it cannot satisfactorily explain that which cannot be explained. The downfall of Arianism is that it assumes literalism, arrogantly trying to define God according to human laws.
One of the main principles of Christianity is the belief in both the divinity and humanity of Jesus, that these two natures are combined harmoniously in one being. In general, all modern Christians believe that Jesus was human, he was considered to be “The Word was made flesh” (John, I: 14). However, Jesus was more than just a human, despite being subjected to pain, suffering and death like all other human beings, he was sinless and also possessed the power to heal and to defy death in order to ascend, both body and spirit, into heaven. He was all man and all God, a combination of these two elements, remaining distinct but united in one being. The deity of Jesus is a non-negotiable belief in Christianity, which is referred to in many parts of scripture, “God was revealed in the flesh” (I Timothy, 3:16). The Christian faith does not perceive Jesus as God but rather a reincarnation of God, a mysterious deity who is the second person of the Holy Trinity. Throughout history, controversy has surrounded the issue of the humanity and divinity of Jesus, leading to the formation of Docetism, the belief that Jesus was fully divine but not fully human, Arianism, that Jesus was superior to all of creation, but less divine than God, and Nestorius, that there were two separate persons within Jesus. This the proportion of the divine and human within Je...
The medieval theologian Julian of Norwich was a mystic, writer, anchoress and spiritual director for her time. She is gaining in popularity for our time as she provides a spiritual template for contemplative prayer and practice in her compilation of writings found in Revelations of Divine Love. The insightful meditations provide the backdrop and basis for her Trinitarian theology’s embrace of God’s Motherhood found in the Trinity. Her representative approach of the all-encompassing unconditional love of a mother who nurtures, depicts Christ as our Mother ascending to the placement of Second hood within the Trinity while giving voice to the duality of God.
This paper is written to discuss the many different ideas that have been discussed over the first half of Theology 104. This class went over many topics which gave me a much better understanding of Christianity, Jesus, and the Bible. I will be addressing two topics of which I feel are very important to Christianity. First, I will be focusing on the question did Jesus claim to be God? This is one of the biggest challenges of the Bibles that come up quite often. Secondly, I will focus on character development.
A character’s emotions of loneliness and loyalty are often shown by the experiences that happen in their lives. In both stories “A White Heron” and “Shiloh,” loneliness is created by the lack of communication by the main characters. Other characters in the stories try to establish or prove loyalty between the main characters or nature by influencing. However, the lack of communication intensifies the loneliness and destroys loyalty to family members while establishing loyalty to self or to nature.
N.T Wright (2008) stated that “When we read the scriptures as Christians, we read it precisely as people of the new covenant and of the new creation” (p.281). In this statement, the author reveals a paradigm of scriptural interpretation that exists for him as a Christian, theologian, and profession and Bishop. When one surveys the entirety of modern Christendom, one finds a variety of methods and perspectives on biblical interpretation, and indeed on the how one defines the meaning in the parables of Jesus. Capon (2002) and Snodgrass (2008) offer differing perspectives on how one should approach the scriptures and how the true sense of meaning should be extracted. This paper will serve as a brief examination of the methodologies presented by these two authors. Let us begin, with an
The crucifixion of Christ is one of the central defining moments in human history. The revelation of God in the cruciform Christ is the central defining image for Christians. This is at the very heart of the case being made by Michael Gorman in Inhabiting the Cruciform God. Gorman, examining Paul's soteriology, makes the argument that for Paul justification is centered on theosis. Gorman thesis centers around defending his definition of this theosis in Paul's writings. Gorman writes, “Theosis is tranformative participation in the kenotic, cruciform character of God through Spirit-enable conformity to the incarnate, crucified, and resurrected/glorified Christ.”1 The following will examine Gorman's defense of this thesis focusing especially
Schaff, Philip, and Henry Wace. A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. 5 vols. The Christian literature company, 1890.
Kung, Hans. The Incarnation of God: An Introduction to Hegel's Theological Thought As Prolegomena to a Future Christology. T&T Clark, 2001. hard cover.
"EXPLORING THEOLOGY 1 & 2." EXPLORING THEOLOGY 1 2. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 May 2014.
The foundations of the Arian contention might be found in the improvement that occurred much sooner than Constantine. Surely, the contention was an immediate consequence of the way in which Christians came to think about the way of God, because of the works of Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and others. Tending to such regarded powers, Christians contended that they had faith in the ideal being of savants, and what they implied when they spoke of God. This contention had two results, first it helped the acknowledgement of Christianity around the scholarly people, however it additionally was conceivable that Christians, in their excitement to show the likeness between confidence and established rationality, might arrive at the conclusion that the most ideal approach to discuss God not in the way of consistent with the scriptures journalists, but instead in the way of Plato, Plotinus and the rest. Since those thinkers persuaded of flawlessness as consistent, numerous Christians arrived at conclusion that such was the God scripture. Because of the convention of the Logos, advanced by Justin, Clement, Origen, and others, the view that, between the changeless One and the alterable planet, there was the Word, or Logos, of God, which got boundless in the Eastern wing of the congregation. This was inside the connection that the Arian debate occurred.
Be sure to illustrate your response with details from the life and writings of Oscar Romero. The meaning of “incarnation” as we have seen from this course is the idea that Jesus is the Word Incarnate or the embodied Word. In John 1, we learned about the Word.
This essay would be debated in the view of the Theology of Christianity. The theology of Christianity would be that there was and is a man that Jesus that came to Earth on behalf of his father name God to save sinners of their sins, and have a chance of eternal living in Heaven. The theology of Christianity is to believe in the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit and the jobs that they hold eventually and as an whole. This debate of an essay will include the following Tillich and his views on Process Theology, Bonhoeffer and his views on Secular Theology of the nature of God, the validation of Process Theology of the nature of God, and lastly the non-validation of Secular theology's view on the nature of God.Tillich views on Process Theology
His book presents three main perspectives on Christology (biblical, historical, and contemporary). He attempts to combine classical views and contextual views of Christology.
258-259). Although he maintained the subordination of the Son, he held that the Logos “is not simply the second person of the Trinity in His virtual existence. . . . He is already God” (Pressense, p. 363). “‘Dionysius summed up his doctrine in this formula: ‘We expand the indivisible Monas [one deity] into the Trias [three deities], and we bring back the Trias undiminished to the Monas.’ This singular formula sets aside absolutely the idea that the Son is of a different nature from the Father” (Pressense, p.
Concerning the Person and Work of Christ Often referred to as the second Adam, Christ’s incarnation was the culmination of countless prophecies, Biblical themes, and the Father’s love. In both his humiliation and exultation, Christ served in the the Old Testament offices of prophet, priest, and king. In doing so, He not only succeeded where the first Adam failed, but atoned for all of the sins of His chosen flock. In Christology, the study of the person and works of Jesus Christ, there are two states of Christ, a state of humiliation and a state of exaltation.