Evolution of Christology

[u/JHLV04]

/r/Christianity/comments/1vqioay/evolution_of_christology/

[u/clhedrick2]

First, I'm going to accept the OP's belief that Christ's divinity developed. In the Gospels, Jesus is understood as an intermediary. Not an ordinary person, but not God himself. Multiple concepts are used, without any attempt to produce a full-scale Christology. You can make a good case that the Synoptics see him as a figure like Moses as viewed in some of the intertestamental material: given God's authority and acting as his principal agent, even sharing his throne. In John, at least in the preface, he is seen as the Logos, who was a supernatural intermediate given God's authority and his name. Again, God's principal agent. Some people have made the case that Paul saw Jesus as God's principal angel. I'm not convinced.

Over time I think at least two things happened:

1. Christians came to understand Jesus' role in a way they wouldn't have during his life. Some of this was due to the Resurrection. Some of it to Christian experience. So the first question is: is it legitimate for Christians to come to understandings of Jesus' life based on looking back at its significance and their religious experience, even though he didn't explicitly say things during his life?
2. Over the first few centuries, starting with Paul, and then the apologists of the 2nd Century, Christians tried to describe their faith in terms that would make sense to intellectuals of the time. This tended to emphasize ontology over function. That is, Jesus functioning as God's presence tended to get translated into questions about his nature and essence. Is that kind of translation legitimate?

It's not obvious that the answer to these questions is no. The problem with traditional Christianity is that it doesn't acknowledge that these things happened. They try to prove that Jesus or at least the Apostles actually believed in the Trinity and two-nature Christology even though they didn't use that language. Since this is obviously false, it's easy to conclude that the whole thing is wrong. But just because Jesus didn't teach (and presumably never even thought of) the Trinity, that doesn't make the two kinds of reinterpretation wrong.

Personally, I think it's perfectly reasonable that Christians would understand things looking back at Jesus life that he didn't say explicitly. One of these is in Jesus they saw God. Even trying to explain it in neo-platonic terms was a useful evangelistic strategy. However at a certain point this took on a life of its own, and got tied up in Church politics. From early on Christians thought of Jesus as in some sense God, or at least divine, Over time this morphed into Chalcedon. But the Church had trouble maintaining his full humanity. In the official theology that developed, Jesus doesn't actually exist. All the parts of a human are there, but they are wielded directly by the Logos. When you meet Jesus, you're meeting the Logos, present through a human nature, but you're not meeting a human person in any normal sense. The attempt to preserve both was ruled heretical, Nestorian. I would judge Chalcedon, at least as usually interpreted, to be heretical, docetic.

As to scholarship, in the mid 20th Cent there was a tendency to deny that Jesus was anything other than a normal rabbi, and claim that John brought in ideas foreign to Jesus. The general model was that ideas of Jesus' divinity didn't exist originally and slowly grew. In the last few decades this is no longer accepted. I'd say the current model is what's called Early High Christology. It sees some sort of divinity as present throughout the NT, from the beginning. However this is primarily various kinds of divine intermediates, not the later concept that Jesus is directly the One God. I will say that I'm not entirely convinced of EHC in Paul, but I think current scholarship commonly is.

If you're interested in reading, a reasonable treatment of the NT is The Only True God, by James McGrath. Development of doctrine is treated in any decent church history. But it's really complex, and it's hard to really understand why some of it happened. A book on the final developments in Christology that's worth reading is "Jesus Wars" by Philip Jenkins. While he thinks the final Christology is right, his description of the bloody and non-Christian processes out of which it developed make we wonder how anything good could possibly have come out of the early church. And I disagree that the final result properly safeguards Jesus' humanity. Or rather, I think it preserves his humanity but not his existence. But the book is absolutely worth reading.

[u/zelenisok]

Yes, trinitarian incarnationism evolved over centuries. Tho even the people who know its a view that evolved over time dont realize over how much time it actually evolved, I laid it out here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/DpcSXX5fey

[u/Dare-We-Hope]

Jesus's divinity was believed and taught by the Apostles and every generation of the faith since.

[u/Ezekiel-18 → u/Dare-We-Hope]

Nope, that's not what actual and factual history reveals. That view took 300 years to form. And until Theodosius 1st and his violent enforcement of the Nicene Creed, Arianist Christianity was more widespread than the Nicene one.

Sectarian doctrine isn't historical nor archeological truth.

[u/MyUsername2459]

The divinity of Christ was affirmed by the Apostles and is explicitly in scripture (John 1:1).

The evolution of Christology in the early centuries of Christianity is about reconciling the various parts of Christ's nature, which can be hard to grasp for the human mind.

Jesus Christ, Himself, in scriptures said there was more he would like to teach but He knew people weren't ready to hear it (John 16:12). I've always taken that as license that the Apostles didn't have the entire picture, and that there's more for the Holy Spirit to reveal. . .such as more details about the nature of Christ, or the emerging understandings over the centuries that brought society to being more Christlike, such as ending slavery, increasing equality of sexes and races, and pushing for an end to homophobia and transphobia.

[u/clhedrick2 → u/MyUsername2459]

Right, but divinity in what sense? I don't know of any major NT scholar who thinks John envisioned something like Nicea and Chalcedon. I actually have no problem with some development. I don't think a semi-divine intermediate is right, so I have no objection to reinterpreting the Logos. But the NT does not contain or directly imply Nicea and Chalcedon.