The Christological Issue

This thesis aims to study the identification of the Matthean Jesus with Wisdom or Sophia, a personified feminine figure. The roots of this identification are traced to the traditions in Judaism as depicted in Proverbs, Job, Sirach, the Wisdom of Solomon, Baruch and 1 Enoch. The early Christians made use of this Wisdom tradition when speculating on the identity and significance of Jesus, and scholars have identified explicit Wisdom Christologies in Paul, Q and John. The thesis has its main focus in the Matthean tradition and demonstrates that Matthew develops a high Christology from his Jewish and Christian sources by portraying Jesus as Wisdom incarnate. This thesis studies Matthew’s Wisdom Christology from the perspective of its Jewish and early Christian contexts. How has Matthew been influenced by these traditions, and how has he developed them? The nature and roles of Wisdom in Judaism differ from text to text. In some she is a distinct pre-existent being, subordinate to and distinct from God, while in others she appears to be an aspect of God and not a distinct entity. In terms of her functions, Wisdom is assigned a variety of roles. She plays a part in the creation of the universe as the assistant of God, mediates between God and humans, plays a salvific role and is identified with the Torah. Wisdom can be described in various ways, including mother, lover and counsellor. In the Judaism of Matthew’s time, Wisdom is only one of many pre-existent beings. Other figures that were thought to pre-exist and await a future revelation include the Messiah and the Son of Man, and these too play an important role in the emergent Christology of the first century. The study of the early Christian texts reveals that the Christians accessed the Jewish Wisdom traditions in different ways. Paul uses the term ‘the Wisdom of God’ for Jesus (1 Cor 1:24; cf. 1:30), but he seems not to use it as a Christological title. The concept of Wisdom as a distinct figure first appears in the Q tradition. In this Sayings Source, Jesus is not identified with Wisdom herself but as her messenger or envoy. The Gospel of John testifies to a further development. John has a clear Wisdom Christology, especially in the Prologue where the pre-existent Jesus is assigned many of Wisdom’s roles. But this author never refers to Jesus as ‘Wisdom’. He prefers the masculine term ‘the Word’. Between the Q and the Johannine traditions comes Matthew, and it is in this Gospel that the early Christian Wisdom Christology is most clearly attested. In distinction to Q, Matthew makes explicit the identification of Jesus with Wisdom herself and, in distinction to John, he has no qualms about using that particular feminine term. For Matthew Jesus is pre-existent Wisdom, subordinate to God and separate from God, who becomes incarnate in the body of a human through a miraculous conception. In portraying Jesus in this way, Matthew adopts many of the attributes and roles of Wisdom in the Jewish tradition, including her role in creation, her close relationship with God, her role as prophet and teacher, her rejection by humans and her identification with the Law. Moreover, in constructing his Wisdom Christology, the evangelist reinterprets and develops some aspects of Wisdom’s traditional roles on the basis of Christian claims about Jesus. Thus in Matthew it is significant that Jesus as Wisdom is a miracle-worker, the definitive interpreter of the Law, dies on the cross to save her people from their sins and will come in the future as the eschatological judge.

This article investigates Rudolf Otto's Christology, and its relationship to his masterpiece The Idea of Holy. The author argues that Otto was actually a theologian notwithstanding he was known as a scholar of religion. A certain Christology is hidden behind The Idea of Holy, which ends with these enigmatic sentences: ”Such a one is more than a prophet. He is the Son”. The purpose of this article is to uncover this Christology, focusing its attention on another book by Otto written some 17 years after the publication of The Idea of Holy. Entitled The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man, this book is in fact the only book on Christology written after The Idea of Holy, and thus very possibly may be deeply influenced by the Christology therein. By studying this second book of Otto and its relation to the first one, this article actually asks the following questions: How did Otto derive his inspiration from The Idea of Holy, and how did he interpret Christ to whom The Idea of Holy refers as the Son? Does the method used in this book correspond to the historical-critical method used by most of the liberal theologians? In order to answer these questions, the article starts from a description of Otto's life. It further introduces The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man, analyzes its interpretation of the Kingdom, and finally enters into its Christology.

According to the faith of the Church Catholic, Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ and the Son of God. The problem of the relationship between Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of faith is, of course, still there in Jesus research. This article looks at some recent approaches and theses in Jesus research concerning the question of continuity (or discontinuity) between Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of faith. Here instead of following up these hints concerning a continuity from Jesus of Nazareth to the post-Easter church and then on to the Christological dogma of the Church Catholic, this paper will take a brief look at some proposals regarding a Wisdom Christology in sayings of Jesus in the synoptic gospels. Keywords:Christ; Christological dogma; Church Catholic; faith; historical Jesus; Nazareth; post-Easter church; Son of God; synoptic gospels; Wisdom Christology

AOBERT BROWNING'S A DEATH IN THE DESERT, WHICH FIRST APPEARED IN THE collection Dramatis Personae, published in May 1864, is a poem of exceptional interest, intimately related to the intellectual life of its time. The date of composition is uncertain. Relatively long at 687 lines, the blank-verse poem consists largely of the spiritual last testament of the dying St. John, the evangelist and last surviving apostle. St. John's speech, intellectually dense and often extremely concentrated, almost elliptical in expression—together with introductory and concluding narrative passages in the person of the narrator-witness (who is probably, though not certainly, Pamphylax)—is presented as the contents of an ancient Greek parchment manuscript: the elaborate framing device is introduced in the opening parenthetical interpolation (ll. 1-12), enclosed in square brackets, in the person of the manuscript's early Christian owner. In A Death in the Desert Browning engages urgently, though always implicitly, with modern questions of religious belief and doubt—as contemporary readers and reviewers immediately recognized. The poem needs to be read in the context of the profound crisis of religious belief of the early 1860s, in which both the Essays and Reviews controversy 1 and the deeply disturbing intellectual influence of modern, mainly German, Biblical criticism played an important part. Browning attempts to "take on"—the phrasal verb, with its suggestion of energetic combativeness, seems peculiarly apt—and answer the various insistent, questioning voices of modern doubt and skepticism, including the Biblical critics, by reaffirming the inner spiritual truth of Christianity, the primacy of the individual spiritual life actively lived, and the essential "acknowledgment of God in Christ" (l. 474). 2 In the later partof his speech, with surprising severity, the apostle admonishes his followers of the terrible spiritual death that is the inevitable consequence of the intellectual rejection of God and God's love, a theme later picked up by the impersonal narrator in the last half-line of the concluding parenthetical interpolation, "But 't was Cerinthus that is lost" (l. 687). [End Page 333]

Charles Harrison Mason is the founder of North America's largest African American Pentecostal denomination; the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). He has been described as one of the “greatest African American organizers” of the 20th century. A son of emancipated slaves Jeremiah and Eliza Mason, Charles Mason was born September 8, 1866 in Bartlett, Tennessee, near Shelby County. Mason was raised in the African American Baptist church. His early religious preparation and experiences came from his mother, “mother Eliza”; she was a product of the slaves' “underground church” and the first spiritual person to impact his life. His mother's prayers, her spiritual power, and strong dedication to God allowed young Mason to witness the inner workings of black folk religion. In 1878, after a devastating yellow fever epidemic hit Shelby County, Mason's family moved to Plumerville, Arkansas where Mason and his brothers worked as sharecroppers with their father. In 1880 Mason fell sick with tuberculosis and later claimed that God miraculously healed him. Afterward Mason said he dedicated his life to the service of God. At age 14 Mason was baptized, ordained, and licensed to preach in the black Baptist church by his half brother Rev. Israel Nelson, a Baptist preacher pastoring Mt. Olive Missionary Baptist church near Plumerville, Arkansas. In the 1890s Mason and his colleague Charles Price Jones established a holiness association of churches. Mason and Jones' association later became the Church of God in Christ.

THE MORE usual view of theologians today is that the Christian revelation of God is not given directly in propositions. It is seen rather as an event, an experience, a meeting with God in Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. Subsequently, propositional judgments are legitimately made about this experience. However, the experience itself is always mediated to some degree by one's own world view, by one's philosophy. As Karl Rahner has written, one cannot hear another's word without confronting it with the rest of what is already present in one's mind and consciousness. . . . Faith is already a human activity in which man's own subjectivity, together with its logic, its experience, native concepts and perspectives, already enters into play. The of the message is hearing by means of categories already possessed from elsewhere, a reception within previously given horizons, however much these horizons themselves may be altered by this hearing, and hence the of revelation itself necessarily implies philosophy, i.e. a previous, transcendental, as well as historical self-comprehension of the man who hears the historical revelation of God. It is impossible, then, for man to escape the necessity of bringing to the experience of revelation something of his own world view. This world view includes insights gained from psychology, sociology, the physical sciences, and one's own, even implicit, philosophy. It is the conviction of this essay that today one can no longer exclude parapsychology from those human efforts which influence man's world view. The Parapsychological Association was accepted as an affiliate member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1969. Parapsychology challenges some of our scientific models. It has implications for philosophy, and theologians in particular owe its findings a new respect.

The flag of the modern state of Israel has two equilateral triangles set across each other to yield a six-pointed star. It may be read as telling the material truth of a tri-unison of people, place and past which embodies the triple theme of the spirit, namely how Yahweh bestowed the land on the people, that in the land they might glorify the Lord. Thus Jerusalem became a focal point of missionary diaspora. By the apostolic understanding of the ministry and the passion of Jesus there came ‘the Christ of faith’. Galilee and Jerusalem were indeed fulfilled far beyond their own perimeter, but returning within it is a precious soul experience where devotion informs itself, no less – and more vitally – than archaeology unearths and investigates for scholarship with truth. The Jerusalem pilgrim may well be defeated in anything approaching comprehension but the effort must be made, or ‘holy places’ become idols of the mind and snares of heart.

Finding Ourselves after Darwin: Conversations on the Image of God, Original Sin, and the Problem of Evil

Introduction Anthony B. Pinn and Katie G. Cannon Section One: Sources Chapter One - African American History and African American Theology - Stephen C. Finley Chapter Two - Reading and Using Scripture in the African American Tradition - Allen Callahan Chapter Three - African American Religious Experience - M. Shawn Copeland Chapter Four - The African American Christian Tradition - Sylvester Johnson Chapter Five - Culture/Cultural Production and African American Theology - Clarence E. Hardy, III Chapter Six - Reason in African American Theology - Terrence L. Johnson Chapter Seven - Theoretical Commitments in African American Theology - Edward P. Antonio Chapter Eight - Methodologies in African American Theology - Frederick L. Ware Section Two: Doctrines Chapter Nine - Doctrine of God in African American Theology - Keri Day Chapter Ten - Christology in African American Theology - Diane L. Hayes Chapter Eleven - Holy Spirit in African American Theology - James H. Evans, Jr. Chapter Twelve - Humanity in African American Theology - J. Cameron Carter Chapter Thirteen - World/Creation in African American Theology - Torin Alexander Chapter Fourteen - Liberation in African American Theology - Juan Floyd-Thomas Chapter Fifteen - Evil and Sin in African American Theology - Larry Murphy Chapter Sixteen - Church in African American Theology - R. Drew Smith Chapter Seventeen - Eschatology in African American Theology - Derek S. Hicks Chapter Eighteen - Heaven and Hell in African American Theology - Eboni Marshall Turman Section Three: Internal Debates Chapter Nineteen - Womanist Theology as Corrective to African American Theology - Cheryl Kirk-Duggan Chapter Twenty - Humanism in African American Theology - Anthony B. Pinn Chapter Twenty-One - Audiences of Accountability in African American Theology - Dennis W. Wiley Chapter Twenty-Two - Embodiment in African American Theology - Stephanie Y. Mitchem Chapter Twenty-Three - Pedagogical Praxis in African American Theology - Katie G. Cannon Chapter Twenty-Four - Religious Pluralism and African American Theology - Dianne Diakite Chapter Twenty-Five - Sexuality in African American Theology - Horace Griffin Section Four: Ongoing Challenges Chapter Twenty-Six - The Problem of History in African American Theology - Lewis R. Gordon Chapter Twenty-Seven - Social Theory and African American Theology - Corey D. B. Walker Chapter Twenty-Eight - Black Ontology and Theology - Victor Anderson Chapter Twenty-Nine - African American Theology and the Global Economy - Anthony G. Reddie Chapter Thirty - African American Theology and the American Hemisphere - Josef Sorett Chapter Thirty-One - The African in African American Theology - Peter J. Paris Section Five: Prospects for the Future Chapter Thirty-Two - Prosperity Gospel and African American Theology - Jonathan L. Walton Chapter Thirty-Three - African American Theology and the Public Imaginary - Willie Jennings Chapter Thirty-Four - Cultural Boundaries and African American Theology - Emilie M. Townes

Book Review: Guest Christology: An Interpretative View of the Christological Problem in Africa

Christianity, although a worldwide religious tradition, is counted as a minority in the People's Republic of China (PRC), both by the Christians themselves and by non-believers. "House churches" in the PRC, being illegal and thus underground, are the "minority in a minority." Based on two years of participant-observation, I give a description of the beliefs and rituals of an immigrant workers' Protestant house church system in Beijing. Belief in the Christian God's ability to provide relief from suffering by performing earthly miracles and by bringing the faithful to eternal life in heaven are the main attractions drawing people to the house churches. I argue that the way the believers value and emphasize miracles performed by the Christian God is derived primarily from an orientation found in the Chinese popular religious tradition. Additionally, glorification of suffering in Christianity gives the believers inner strength to face the trials of the world.

Discussion of the putatively Christian character of Hegel's philosophy focuses on the question of the relation fHegel envisages between philosophy and religion. There are those who argue that his philosophy is simply a foundational Christian metaphysic, a species of the philosophy of religion.2 Others are no less convinced that Hegel's system is the end of religion,3 and there are innumerable variations between the two extremes. This discussion dates back at least to the years immediately following Hegel's death in 1831, when those who interpreted him as a Christian philosopher and those who thought of him as at least implicitly atheistic were polarized into the so-called right and left wings of Hegelian philosophy.4 Classical right-wing interpretation saw Hegel as a metaphysician, thus leaving room for the identification of the Hegelian absolute with the Christian God. On the left, Hegel was (at the highest) an ontologist, and the Christian god could not survive. Still today, though in a severely modified way, it is possible to talk in mean-

Hugh Jackson’s Australians and the Christian God is a valuable first attempt to articulate the historical relationship of Australians to the Christian God. Although this book contains some discussions that may serve to stimulate further investigation, its major shortcoming is that it is simply too short and therefore covers its subject matter only superficially. Disciplines Arts and Humanities | Law Publication Details Matesic, J. (2014). Book Review: Hugh Jackson: Australians and the Christian God: An Historical Study. Journal of Religious History, 38 (2), 292-293. This journal article is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow.edu.au/lhapapers/1487

The Sacrament of the Eucharist is the sacrament to which all the others are ordered. The reception of all the others should be followed by it. It is the crown and consummation of the sacramental system. The sacrament of the Eucharist is not merely the consecrated species of bread and wine, which really and substantially contain the body and blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ and which we receive in Holy Communion: it is also the words of transubstantiation uttered by the priest, which are the vehicle of Christ's substantiative action and make physically present to its his priestly act of self-oblation. The sacrament of the Eucharist in so far as it does this thing, makes present in a sacrament, but really, the priestly action of Christ, is called the Mass. The Mass is thus the supreme sacrament in its active part, as Holy Communion is the supreme sacrament in its passive Part.

The divinity of Jesus Christ is often questioned and debated by certain circles, both past and present. The letter to the Hebrews describes Jesus Christ as the light of God's glory and the image of God's own being. Jesus Christ is the Son of God, who will possess all things that are revealed to be God, and atone for the sins of mankind, is the main channel of revelation, which is higher than the prophets and angels. The description of Jesus as the Great High Priest in the letter to the Hebrews (Hebrews 4:14-16). Priesthood Superiority of Jesus Christ built on the Melchizedek typology. the writer of Hebrews finds congruence between Christ and Melchizedek. Typological results prove that the priesthood of Jesus Christ is superior to the priesthood of Levi, where Christ is a greater priest than the priest of Levi and he himself has been replaced; and only His priesthood can draw sinners closer to God and communicate with God. and the only perfect and final priesthood can offer the atoning sacrifice, once and for all. In Hebrews there are several warnings that also relate to followers of Christ today. We are warned not to waste the salvation that has been handed down to us. Jesus Christ is already seated at the right hand of the Father, and because He will defeat His enemies and establish His kingdom, and we inherit that victory of salvation. We must hold fast to our faith to the end.