Theology of God

Catalog description

Life in God is life in the Spirit: God is Spirit, God is Truth, God is (breath of) Life, life Giver. The burning issue in the Christian theology of God (Trinitarian theology) is how the community called Church, spread throughout the world, makes its confession, ?I believe in One God,? and struggles to express its understanding of the One God-Father revealed in Jesus, the Son, in and through the Holy Spirit. How does one understand or articulate in our times the relationship between Jesus, as the Christ, and God, in the Holy Spirit, faithful to the inherited Hebrew Shema and the New Testament witness? The question is pertinent for the Church of all times and contexts. The delimitation of the terms and the focus of the Trinitarian debate during the first 5 centuries CE were controlled by the concerns of Greco-Roman sense of the world and its philosophical categories. (There was more agreement over the text/Symbol/Creed of Nicaea, 325 CE, than over the text of Chalcedon, 450CE). Christian churches that emerged in Africa, Asia and the Americas, especially since the 19th century Western missionary movement, faithful to the inherited Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament texts, confess the Trinity enshrined in the Nicene Creed and struggle to express this faith in ways that evoke their sense of the world, their contextual concerns, and their anthropological-philosophical assumptions. This seminar purposes to explore this faith in the One God-Father, Spirit and Life-Giver, revealed in Jesus the Christ, confessed and expressed, in their language, by the Apostolic and Patristic Church, confessed today and expressed in the languages of Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia.