This article argues that John’s christology affirms the material visibility of God by reconciling the notion of an “unseen” God to the visibility of the Father that Jesus presents. Three pieces of evidence support this claim. The first is that “unseen” and “invisible” are not synonymous. A survey of Second Temple, biblical, and rabbinic literature reveals that one may not assume that all hellenized Jews embraced Platonist notions of invisibility. Second, Jesus presents the Father as visible, however restricted that visibility may be to Jesus’s person. Third, John’s use of Isaiah suggests that the visibility of God in the theophanies is consonant with God’s visibility in Jesus.

Forty years ago, Leander Keck criticised the ‘tyranny of titles’ in the study of New Testament Christology. While Keck rightly criticised early- to mid-twentieth approaches to titles for Jesus, there is no denying the importance of titles in New Testament texts. This article summarises classic twentieth-century approaches to christological titles and discusses the most important criticisms. The root issue of such approaches is the conflation of titles and concepts. A constructive proposal is offered for reading christological titles as literary strategies of characterisation. This approach begins by carefully defining what is meant by a title and how titles might be distinguished from common nouns and names. Six principles for the productive interpretation of titles are then discussed: 1) titles must be distinguished from other christological material like motifs, typologies, and references to biblical texts; 2) titles must be distinguished from each other; 3) titles are meaningful not because they refer to particular ideas but because of their relationship with biblical texts, religious life, and culture; 4) what a title does is more important than what a title means; 5) titles are flexible, polyvalent, and ambiguous; 6) titles must be read alongside other titles and non-titular material. Finally, it is demonstrated how this literary approach to titles will be fruitful for contemporary discussions in New Testament Christology and contribute to the renewal of New Testament Christology that Keck called for several decades ago.1

Twentieth-century theologians advanced a consensus position that the doctrine of deification was alien to Augustine’s theology—even impossible to square with his other commitments—and that even if traces of the doctrine could be detected, they were, at best, of marginal importance to his intellectual topography. This position, however, has been persuasively challenged by several investigations during the past three decades. This article builds upon these latter investigations to demonstrate how the notion of deification is prevalent throughout his corpus—whether linguistically evident by his use of technical terms such as deificare and cognates, or more often, conceptually in his reflections upon anthropology, Christology, and ecclesiology. The article concludes by noting two of Augustine’s distinctive contributions to the post-Nicene development of deification—that is, an emphasis upon the sacramental and ecclesiological contours of the doctrine.

Jc Beall's Divine Contradiction proposes a bold response to the so-called ‘logical’ problems of the Trinity: we should admit without embarrassment that divine reality is flat-out contradictory. Beall defends his proposal against a wide range of objections and contends that it enjoys various philosophical and theological virtues, including the virtues of metaphysical and epistemological neutrality. While I agree that ceteris paribus these are desirable, I question whether the possession of these virtues really gives Beall's approach any advantage over its competitors when the chips are finally counted.

In the last century, beauty has not often found itself enlisted in struggles for justice. As Alexander Nehemas recounts, beauty's severance from goodness and truth in the modern period renders beauty dangerous, its charm easily wielded as an instrument of oppression in the hands of the powerful. While some scholars have argued for a return to the pre-modern metaphysics that binds beauty to truth and goodness, the abuse of beauty is not simply a modern phenomenon, and its resistance requires more than a pre-modern solution. Beauty is eschatological; thus its abuse points to a failure to order it properly to its eschatological end. This article will argue that the abuse of beauty can be resisted not by spiritualising beauty, but by ordering physical beauty to its eschatological end. This end is most clearly seen in the ascended Christ, with his beautiful body that is human, wounded and hidden.

Recent analytic theology has seen a wave of excellent work on the fundamental problem of Christology, the question of how one and the same person can be human full stop and divine full stop. Along the way, new objections have been raised for a venerable family of Christological views, whose distinctive is the employment of qua-devices to dissolve the difficulties stemming from the dual nature doctrine of Chalcedon and its successors. My objective in this article is twofold. First, I propose to lay out a hierarchy of principles that should guide the search for a Christological theory. I then use these principles to illuminate the best qua-theoretic approach to Christology. Finally, I argue that the best qua-theory is at worst on a par with major recent views.

The development of Thomas’s teaching on Christ’s headship relies upon the principle of the causality of the maximum: ‘the maximum in a genus is the universal cause in that genus’. This principle appears in the fourth way to demonstrate God’s existence. Applied to the humanity of Christ, Thomas argues that Christ, on account of his perfect fullness of grace, is, according to his humanity, the universal source of grace for all the members of the Church, including the angels. How does this cohere with Thomas’s teaching elsewhere in the Summa theologiae that it is only as Word that Christ causes grace in the angels? In this paper, I explore this tension and offer a way of understanding Thomas’s broader approach to the mystery of Christ.

Bruce L. McCormack's recent christological proposal intends to move beyond the apparent impasse in theological discourse between God's aseity and God's world relation. In describing the second mode of divine being as personally constituted by receptivity to the human Jesus of Nazareth without losing the logos asarkos, McCormack's proposed christological innovation offers a way to consider relation to the world as proper to God through the Son, without absolute pronobeity coming to dominate in the doctrine of God. This being said, his christological proposal, as it stands, implies both that election is antecedent to triunity and that the person of Jesus of Nazareth is antecedent to the act of the incarnation. With the former comes the problem of sequence in the priority of divine act over divine being. With the latter comes the problem of offering a unified account of two agencies. As such, while ontological receptivity continues to hold significant possibilities for the doctrine of God, it requires more careful coordination to the relation of passive generation as such.

Cyril of Alexandria's Festal Letters are an underutilised source of his theology. Through them one can trace the development of his thought throughout the tumultuous years of his episcopacy. In this article, I draw attention to Cyril's ‘unitive’ Christology and the way he explains the incarnation to those under his pastoral care. Cyril employs key strategies informed by strong theological convictions to describe Christ as one subject who is fully divine and human.

The recent recovery of the teaching that the three divine persons share one operation in their outward works raises the question of whether or in what sense the human operation of Christ belongs to the Son alone. My thesis is that all three divine persons move and support the Son's human operation while the Son alone is the proper subject of his human operation. In order to substantiate this thesis, I will consider two main issues: (1) the relationship between divine movement and human energy and (2) the relationship between nature and person in Christ's human action.

Schleiermacher's theological champions like Kevin Hector contend that his Christology is ‘high’ and is Chalcedonian in spirit. I offer a number of objections to this view, suggesting that Schleiermacher offers a distinctive, early modern account of Christ as a uniquely deified redeemer but not of Christ as the uncreated God. This raises some surprising questions for the dogmatic relation of Christology, soteriology and anthropology.

This article examines a long-standing association of Martin Luther's christology with that of Cyril of Alexandria. However, for all its heuristic promise, the designation ‘Cyrillian’, must in Luther's case be understood either as an overly generalised statement of a well-established grammar of christology – in which case it simply is Luther's foundation and, as such, explains nothing specific about Luther's christology and, moreover, fails to do justice to the reformer's crucial argumentative moves. Alternatively, when taken for a set of material similarities, the designation is simply inaccurate, for Luther is decidedly not a Cyrillian, despite some fundamental convergences with the thought of the Alexandrian patriarch. Luther's context, as we demonstrate, leads him not only to go beyond Cyril, but also to argue in a manner contrary to Cyril, in order to secure what for both theologians is a realist eucharistic backdrop of their commitment to the Word's incarnation.