The Box and the Briefcase, the Moleque and the Old Man and the First Coming of the Second Son of God by John M. Keller

2014 ◽  
Vol 88 (5) ◽  
pp. 78-78
Author(s):  
Constance Squires
Keyword(s):  
2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-66
Author(s):  
Leslie Baynes

C. S. Lewis’s ‘Liar, Lunatic, Lord’ argument elicits important questions about Jesus and scriptural interpretation that need addressing, not least because of its immense popularity in some Christian circles. Did Jesus really go about saying that he was God, or the Son of God, or that he had always existed? After examining the biblical record, must one conclude that Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic, or God? Are there really no alternatives? The point of this paper is most emphatically not to attempt to disprove Jesus’ divinity, but rather to demonstrate that Lewis’s use of the gospels is insufficient to prove it. The paper argues that even without deeming the gospels ‘legends,’ but rather accepting them as a reliable portrayal of the words of Jesus, Lewis’s argument falls short because he fails to put the gospels into their first-century context. He instead reads post-Nicene Christology into Hellenistic Judeo-Christian documents.


Author(s):  
George Hoffmann

On a warm summer afternoon in 1561, Calvin’s chief editor donned a heavy stole, thick robes, and a gleaming tiara and proceeded to strut and fret his hour upon the stage in a comedy of his own devising. For little more than a century, Christians in the West had celebrated on August 6th Christ’s Transfiguration as the son of God in shining robes. But on this Sunday in Geneva, the city council, consistory, and an audience fresh from having attended edifying sermons at morning service gathered to applaud the transfiguration of the learned Conrad Badius into the title role of ...


Author(s):  
Richard Cross

This book offers a radical reinterpretation of the sixteenth-century Christological debates between Lutheran and Reformed theologians on the ascription of divine and human predicates to the person of the incarnate Son of God (the communicatio idiomatum). It does so by close attention to the arguments deployed by the protagonists in the discussion, and to the theologians’ metaphysical and semantic assumptions, explicit and implicit. It traces the central contours of the Christological debates, from the discussion between Luther and Zwingli in the 1520s to the Colloquy of Montbéliard in 1586. The book shows that Luther’s Christology is thoroughly Medieval, and that innovations usually associated with Luther—in particular, that Christ’s human nature comes to share in divine attributes—should be ascribed instead to his younger contemporary Johannes Brenz. The discussion is highly sensitive to the differences between the various Luther groups—followers of Brenz, and the different factions aligned in varying ways with Melanchthon—and to the differences between all of these and the Reformed theologians. And by locating the Christological discussions in their immediate Medieval background, the book also provides a comprehensive account of the continuities and discontinuities between the two eras. In these ways, it is shown that the standard interpretations of the Reformation debates on the matter are almost wholly mistaken.


2001 ◽  
Vol 57 (1/2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yolanda Dreyer

This study makes use of Ferdinand Hahn's insights (with Son of God as case study) to indicate how the naming of Jesus developed in stages. It is shown that the name Son of God was not used by Jesus. It functioned within the context of the cultic activities of early Christianity, was taken over from the surrounding religious, political and cultural world while its referential meaning shifted in the various layers. Hahn focuses on the multi-stage development of the Jesus tradition from an Aramaic "Judaism", through  a Hellenistic "Judaism" to a Gaeco-Roman stage. First the possible historical origins of the title Son of God are discussed, after which Hahn's view is taken into consideration.


2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danny Yencich

Against a longstanding tradition of ascribing religious conversion to the centurion who witnesses Jesus’s death in Mark 15:39, I argue that his acclamation of Jesus as υἱὸς θεοῦ is better understood within the narrative as the words of a conquered enemy. The centurion’s confession parallels the responses of unclean spirits and Legion, two other vanquished enemies who, in the moment of defeat, see and name Jesus υἱὸς θεοῦ. By framing the centurion as a defeated enemy, Mark contests the meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion: rather than remembering it as a performance of Roman rule, Mark commemorates it as the summary victory of the rule of God. Turning from an ancient capital offender to a contemporary one, I recast the memory of Kelly Gissendaner, who was executed in Georgia in 2015, and attempt to narrate and commemorate her state-sanctioned death in light of the Markan Jesus’s.


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