Daley Brian, SJ – Christology in Early Christianity

Brian E. Daley, SJ – Christology in Early Christianity – Collected Essays

It seems a truism to say that Christology—the interpretation of the person of Jesus in the light of the Christian canon of Scripture, and of the tradition which receives it—is what early Christianity, at its heart, is all about. To recognize in Jesus, on the basis of his crucifixion and resurrection, the unexpected fulfillment of Israel’s hopes for a messianic king, a “Christ”; to understand Jesus’s language about his “Father in heaven” as expressing his sense of a unique relationship to Israel’s single God, and to take him as literally God’s “only Son”; to see in him the final revealer of God’s secrets and plans, the human embodiment of God’s creative Wisdom, God’s eternal Word of self‐communication now made humanly present in time—all of this was clearly involved in the transformation of memories that led his disciples to proclaim a gospel centered on him: to proclaim that God’s kingdom had begun to be real for all humanity in Jesus’s death and resurrection. It was because of their understanding of who and what Jesus was (and is) that the first few generations of Christians gradually came to see themselves as forming a distinct body within the religious tradition of Israel; and it was because of their understanding of Jesus, too, that they believed they had a new message of freedom and fulfillment, as well as a new call to moral uprightness and transforming love, to offer to the pagans’ world.

Christology, then—to use a term originating in post‐Reformation academic theology1—lay always at the heart of the developing worship, life, and thought of the early Church, even as its vocabulary and concepts grew and changed. Our own understanding of that growth, however, has gone through a number of important changes in recent decades. This has been driven less by new archaeological or historical discoveries about late antiquity than by the publication of newly discovered texts from the early Church, on the one hand, and by changes in our commonly accepted assumptions about the history of culture and ideas—including those of religion—on the other. At the same time, the development of new theological perspectives and interests has prompted modern interpreters of the history of Christian faith to ask different questions, and to look for different answers, from those their teachers had proposed in the early decades of the twentieth century.

1. New Perspectives in Christology

Christology, in fact, has moved in the last century from being a theological topic which seemed safe and uncontroversial to an area of bitter controversy and uncertainty. As late as 1954, the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner observed that for theologians of his tradition, at least, Christology was understood to be one of those areas in which all possible problems had been solved by the dense and paradoxical dogmatic formula of the Council of Chalcedon (451), which asserted that “one and the same Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son, must be acknowledged in two natures, without confusion or change, without division or separation” (Neuner and Dupuis 1981: 154, no. 615). In Rahner’s view, the Christological complacency of modern Catholic thinkers suggested a surprising unawareness of the far‐reaching implications of even the language of Chalcedon itself, and a failure to keep “acquiring anew,” at a deeper level of contemplative awareness, an intellectual grasp of the vision of Jesus that the community of faith already possesses (Rahner 1954, trans. 1961: 152–53).

Brian E. Daley, SJ – Christology in Early Christianity – Collected Essays

Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2025

ISBN 978-0-8028-8341-4

Brian E. Daley, SJ – Christology in Early Christianity – Contents

Introduction by Andrew Hofer, OP

Part 1: Christological Surveys of the Early Church

1. Christ and Christologies
2. Seeing God in Flesh: The Range and Implications of Patristic Christology
3. “One Thing and Another”: The Persons in God and the Person of Christ in Patristic Theology
4. The Word and His Flesh: Human Weakness and the Identity of Jesus in Patristic Christology
5. Antioch and Alexandria: Christology as Reflection on God’s Presence in History

Part 2: Cappadocian Christology and the Apollinarian Challenge

6. Divine Transcendence and Human Transformation: Gregory of Nyssa’s Anti-Apollinarian Christology
7. “Heavenly Man” and “Eternal Christ”: Apollinarius and Gregory of Nyssa on the Personal Identity of the Savior

Part 3: Augustine’s Christology

8. Word, Soul, and Flesh: Origen and Augustine on the Person of Christ
9. The Giant’s Twin Substances: Ambrose and the Christology of Augustine’s Contra sermonem Arianorum
10. A Humble Mediator: The Distinctive Elements in Saint Augustine’s Christology

Part 4: Christology after Chalcedon

11. Unpacking the Chalcedonian Formula: From Studied Ambiguity to Saving Mystery
12. Apollo as a Chalcedonian: A New Fragment of a Controversial Work from Early Sixth-Century Constantinople
13. Leontius of Byzantium and the Reception of the Chalcedonian Definition
14. Nature and the “Mode of Union”: Late Patristic Models for the Personal Unity of Christ

Part 5: Christ in Philosophical and Apocalyptic Traditions

15. Logos as Reason and Logos Incarnate: Philosophy, Theology, and the Voices of Tradition
16. “Faithful and True”: Early Christian Apocalyptic and the Person of Christ

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