doi.org/10.1111/moth.12795

Guest Editors: Darren Sarisky, Pui-Him Ip, and Austin Stevenson

This special issue of Modern Theology gathers together full research essays that were first presented, in summary form, at the 2021 online conference Theological Genealogies of Modernity. For both the original event and now this collection, theological genealogies of modernity serves as a term of art referring to any complex, broad-sweep narrative account of the rise of a modern Western cultural order that highlights theology's role within that process. The conference organizers deliberately employed the term in a capacious sense out of a desire to find a rubric under which to include a range of narratives and disciplinary perspectives on them. Defined broadly, the terminology extends both to stories celebrating the Enlightenment for bringing about progress and also to narratives stressing the need constantly to recur to a pre-modern cultural synthesis from which people today should continue to receive instruction. Of course, this simplistic distinction deserves to be challenged, and several of the essays here contest this stark division of options. The overall aim of the inquiry into genealogies is to help theologians understand how these narratives work, regardless of which account is attractive to them, so that they may develop a well-informed position on how (and even whether) to employ them.

doi.org/10.5325/jtheointe.16.2.0234

Since the fourth century, Mark 13:32/Matt 24:36 have regularly been taken in hand as evidence of Jesus’s ignorance and used to advance subordinationist, kenotic, or Ebionite christological agendas. Meanwhile, modern biblical scholars regularly use patristic commentary on this passage as evidence that the classical Christian tradition advanced ahistorical, docetic eisegesis. In this essay, I consider patristic commentary on this pericope to show that these criticisms are unwarranted. The church fathers did not consider Jesus’s humanity to be an abstract, philosophical conundrum. Rather, their approach was driven by intertextual concerns set within a theistic metaphysical framework. They did not resolve a competition between Jesus’s humanity and divinity in favor of his divinity but upheld the confession that he was fully God and fully man in the face of a variety of approaches that threatened to corrupt or relinquish his humanity. I suggest that certain philosophical developments in the thought of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) allow us to make distinctions that both uphold the patristic exegetical tradition and extend it in ways that do greater justice to the passage.

dx.doi.org/10.1111/moth.12663

Albert Schweitzer once wrote that, at Chalcedon, the “doctrine of the two natures dissolved the unity of the Person, and thereby cut off the last possibility of a return to the historical Jesus.” I argue that a likely cause of this pervasive perception of Chalcedon is the reflexive deployment by modern thinkers of a Lockean concept of personhood grounded in consciousness. I suggest, by way of contrast, that Thomas Aquinas’s substantial account of personhood provides greater space for historical approaches to Jesus by protecting the finite integrity of Christ’s human nature and the unity of his personhood. I conclude by highlighting one implication of this discussion for the role of metaphysics in theological reflection.

doi.org/10.1017/S0036930619000346

This article argues that the quests for the historical Jesus have largely operated with an understanding of history hindered by a severely constricted range of divine and human possibilities. By outlining human ‘self-understanding’ as a historiographical question, it emphasises the determinative role in historical judgement played by the historian's assumptions about the range of possibility available to the processes of human thought. Highlighting three particular concerns that historians tend to connect to ‘docetism’, it suggests a couple of ways that metaphysical and theological forms of reasoning could expand the horizon of possibilities available to historical Jesus scholarship in a way that will augment access to the historical figure of Jesus.

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The term ‘Spirit-Christology’ has begun to play an increasingly conspicuous role in contemporary theological discussions. Arising on the one hand from a growing field of Pentecostal theological reflection, and on the other from a post-Kantian desire to replace metaphysics with ‘history’ and ‘narrative’ (an aspiration evident among both biblical scholars and Barthians), the concept of Spirit- Christology remains somewhat ambiguous in its meaning and usage. Although it often serves as a moniker for contemporary Adoptionism, there is a mounting interest in Chalcedonian approaches to Spirit-Christology, which strive to uphold both a sufficient ontology and an adequate understanding of Christ’s activity. In a recent book, Dominic Legge has argued persuasively that Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) evidences just this sort of balanced Spirit-Christology. In this essay, I engage with and extend Legge’s argument in order to suggest some possibilities that it opens up with respect to biblical hermeneutics and the theological interpretation of Scripture.

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In this article, I begin by outlining the development of the doctrine of the eternal generation in Origen and the resulting corollary of the eternal existence of creation. My focus then turns to the later Alexandrian tradition, whose unease with Origen’s understanding serves to introduce a discussion of Athanasius’s doctrine of the eternal generation, focused especially on his distinction between being and will and on the properly Christological orientation of his approach. Finally, I describe the resulting impact of the doctrine on the Christology of Nicaea. Through this investigation, I argue that, although Origen’s treatment exhibits significant shortcomings, the doctrine of the eternal generation served for both earlier (Origen) and later (Nicaea) Christology as the biblically ordained language through which the church was enabled to speak truly about the unity and distinction of the Father and Son, securing the status of the Son as equal in divinity with the Father while differentiating the two in ways that upheld biblical revelation.