Christology: Ancient & Modern

Catalog description

Taught by JST. The first sessions of the course will explore the formative developments of Christology in the early centuries of the church, exploring how the Christological diversity of the New Testament is constrained towards the more metaphysical debates leading to Chalcedon (451). We shall then examine the extent to which the definition of Chalcedon truly answers the questions it seeks to settle, and briefly considers the later fate of "Antiochene" and "Alexandrian" emphases in Scholastic and Protestant Christology, focusing especially on the communication of idioms. We will then turn to the "liberal" Protestant critique of Chalcedonianism and compare it with a variety of modified Chalcedonian positions in the contemporary period, including feminist/ liberationist approaches. The course will conclude with a discussion of black/Asian/Latin American approaches, emphasizing the need to reinterpret the Chalcedonian idiom in different cultural contexts. [25 max enrollment; Auditors with faculty permission]