How Jesus Communicates #Metoo

This article offers a practical theological praxis of how the church may participate in Christ’s atoning ministry of healing towards persons who have experienced sexual violence. Drawing from the theory of intergenerational trauma, it uses the mentioning of “the wife of Uriah” in Matthew’s genealogy to convey how Jesus identifies with survivors of sexual violence. The article then focuses on the hypostatic union to establish how Jesus provides ontological healing in the atonement for said survivors. It concludes by demonstrating how Matthew’s Gospel calls radical disciples to a healing praxis of listening to stories of the disenfranchised, thereby pointing towards Christ’s atoning work of bearing and healing humanity’s weaknesses.

Thomas Aquinas on Christ’s Unity: Revisiting the De Unione Debate

The claim that article four of Thomas Aquinas’s De unione verbi incarnati is a reversal of his consistently held single esse position is challenged in this paper. The article argues that reading all five articles of the De unione as a single-structured argument discloses a single esse understanding of the Incarnate Word. The very nature of the radically hypostatic union between God and man in Christ is at stake in this dispute. According to Thomas, positing a second esse in Christ not only contradicts the tradition, especially of the Christian East, that he appropriates, but it would also compromise the reality of the hypostatic union itself.

The hypostatic union – the foundation of the theandry of the Church

God being love, He decided from ages the incarnation of Christ for the salvation of the whole mankind, which was subject to sin and death. In the Person of Christ, through the act of incarnation, performed at ”the fulness of time” (Galatians IV,4), the divine and the human nature are harmoniously completed, the latter becoming entirely obedient to the Father. If Christ had not been incarnated and if He had not lifted our own nature towards complete obedience to the Father, humanity would have never been able to obtain divine forgiveness and would not have known how to exist in the love of the Holy Trinity.

KENOTIC THEOLOGY IN THE EASTERN CHURCH HYMNS

The hypostatic or personal union (enosis ipostatiki) is the wreath and the bond between man and God. The consequences of the hypostatic union form the object of most of the hymns from the cultic treasure of the Eastern Church. The theandric person of our Saviour Jesus Christ is intrinsically present under one form or the other in all the hymns of our Church. Kenosis represents one of the consequences of the hypostatic union and a profound expression of God’s supreme love for mankind. The Orthodox teaching - both in dogma and in divine service - is against a radical kenosis that would nullify the sense of Jesus’ Embodiment as overflowing of the divine energies in the world and in mankind.

The extra Calvinisticum from the Marburg Colloquy to the Consensus Tigurinus

This chapter investigates the historical and theological development of the extra Calvinisticum from the Marburg Colloquy (1529) to the Consensus Tigurinus (1549). During this period, the proponents of the emerging Reformed tradition expanded the theological basis for the extra by incorporating additional arguments from Scripture, the church councils, and the church fathers. First, the chapter investigates the debate at the Marburg Colloquy demonstrating that the christological divergence between Zwingli and Luther was rooted not only in theological and hermeneutical method but also in the doctrines of God and anthropology. The chapter analyzes Zwingli’s final works, Fidei Ratio and Fidei Expositio, in which he presents a more robust understanding of the hypostatic union. The final section addresses the Consensus Tigurinus, written by Heinrich Bullinger and John Calvin, which offers the confessionalization of the extra in the Reformed tradition and effectively marks the definitive parting of ways within Protestantism over the Lord’s Supper.

Peter Martyr Vermigli and the extra Calvinisticum

This chapter expounds the extra Calvinisticum in Peter Martyr Vermigli during the second eucharistic controversy and in polemical dialectic with the Lutheran doctrine of ubiquity. The chapter expounds Vermigli’s mature christological work, The Dialogue on the Two Natures of Christ, written against Lutheran theologian Johannes Brenz. Vermigli brought together various aspects of theological and philosophical argumentation to produce a coherent account of the extra. He continued the trajectory of the extra found in previous works by prioritizing Christ as Mediator, deploying a sophisticated doctrine of the hypostatic union, and articulating a doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum precluding a sharing between the natures themselves. Vermigli contributes to the doctrine in two main ways, corresponding to his training in humanism and scholasticism. He broadened the sources for the doctrine by attending to conciliar christology and patristic testimony, and he incorporated certain aspects of Aristotelian philosophy into his defense of the extra.

Zwingli and the Birth of the extra Calvinisticum

This chapter demonstrates not only that Ulrich Zwingli was the first theologian of the Reformation period to articulate the extra Calvinisticum in its full form but that, contrary to common scholarly opinion, this doctrine was not a reaction to Martin Luther’s doctrine of ubiquity but preceded it. Through analysis of Zwingli’s works before the Marburg Colloquy the chapter demonstrates that Zwingli articulated the extra as one plank in his goal to reform the Zurich church and elaborated it over time in response to Lutheran polemics. At stake for him was nothing less than the soteriological role of Christ as the Mediator between God and man. Zwingli articulates the extra through reflection upon the logic of satisfaction, the ascension of Christ, the hypostatic union, and communicatio idiomatum to defend his understanding of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist.

Pneumatology

Jonathan Edwards’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit played a central role in his theology. Beginning with the immanent Trinity, Edwards argued that the Holy Spirit is the bond of union of the Godhead who unites Father and Son in a communion of infinite, divine love. He then applied this concept Christologically to the hypostatic union, and soteriologically to the mystical union the Church enjoys with God. By closely identifying the Spirit with the divine affection that is communicated to the redeemed, Edwards effectively built his pneumatology directly into his discussions of grace, faith, and religious experience, a point which ensured that his doctrine of the Holy Spirit would pervade much of his writing.

Divine Impassibility: A Comparison of Weinandy's and Culpepper's Perspectives on Whether God Suffers

From being generally regarded as a philosophical and theological impossibility, since the late nineteenth century the idea that God suffers has become popular and attractive among a vast array of Christian theologians. Due to this shift, many theologians no longer see the need to argue for it and divine passibility has even been called the ‘new orthodoxy.’ The matter has not yet been laid to rest and is made more complex because the terms ‘suffering’ and ‘impassibility’ are used with a variety of connotations. At the heart of the debate is the desire to assert God’s personalised love for all human beings. If suffering is intrinsic to love, as some ‘passibilists’ state, only a suffering God can also be a God who loves humankind absolutely and unconditionally. Also at stake is the salvation of human beings. For some, a suffering God necessarily implies His lack of transcendence and thus His impotence. From their perspective, Jesus suffers only in His humanity. The divine attributes of omnipotence and immutability are wholly unaffected by the crucifixion. For others, the intimacy of the hypostatic union makes it possible to attribute suffering to the Son in His divinity. Furthermore, by deciding to grant free will to humankind, God makes Himself vulnerable; the eternal knowledge of the divine permission for evil establishes an ‘eternal wound’ in God. This essay will examine the contrasting positions of Thomas Weinandy and Gary Culpepper to assess how it can be said that God must or must not suffer.