Short Answer Flashcards
Discuss how the church transitioned from an emphasis on Jesus’ life within God’s economy of salvation (the Economic Trinity) to an emphasis on Jesus’ relationship with the Father and the Spirit from all eternity (the Immanent Trinity).
In its first two centuries the church emphasized God’s revelation in and through history, in time and space, first through Israel as God’s people and ultimately through the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus the Messiah. It focused on God’s revelation in Jesus as His economy or plan for the ultimate salvation of the world and the overcoming of sin and evil. Yet this view tended to be seen as subordinationist. It emphasized the biblical narrative as chronological, with God revealing himself first as the one and only God of Israel, then through His Son Jesus as the incarnation of the Logos, and finally by His Spirit sent on the Day of Pentecost to inhabit and empower people for Christian discipleship and witness. Through the centuries prior to and after the Council of Nicaea, the church increasingly adopted a method that emphasized God’s intra-divine life from all eternity as a way to combat the tendency to see Jesus and the Spirit as less divine than God the Father. This led both the Latin West and the Greek East to emphasize that Jesus’ divine nature was the reason for how He lived in His human nature, resulting in a practical if not theological Docetism.
Describe how the Nicene Creed (a) served as the church’s correction to Arius’ view of Jesus and (b) helped to solidify the church’s transition from focusing on the Economic Trinity to focusing on the Immanent Trinity.
(a) Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 to settle a dispute between Arius and other bishops. Arius believed the Logos incarnated in the person of Jesus had not always existed but had been created by God the Father at a particular point. Arius used the term homoiousios (“a similar substance”) to refer to Jesus’ relationship to the Father in regard to His divine nature. The Council of Nicaea condemned Arius’ teaching and inserted into its creed the word homoousios (“the same substance”) to emphasize that the Logos’ incarnation in Jesus was as eternally and fully divine as the Father. (b) Whereas this corrected the error taught by Arius, it also helped to solidify the church’s transition from its emphasis on Jesus’ life within the economy of salvation to its emphasis on Jesus’ intra-divine life within the Immanent Trinity. It focused on Jesus’ divine nature from all eternity and minimized His earthly human nature in time and space.
Outline the main events and theological ideas in the Western Christian tradition that caused the church to change from its earlier view of Jesus’ cross to its later view during the Middle Ages.
The Western Christian tradition’s view of Jesus’ death on a cross began to change when Constantine sanctioned the church’s protection from persecution in 313. Eventually the church showed its authority over the Roman Empire when Pope Leo III coronated Charlemagne as emperor in 800. During these centuries the church transitioned from seeing Jesus’ cross as God’s answer to human rebellion (by Jesus surrendering His will to the Father’s will in death by Roman execution) to regarding it as a mystical experience. In this medieval view, a person attained unity with God by growing from a “lower state” of imperfection to a “higher state” of Christ’s perfection exemplified through Christ’s suffering and death. Whereas the early church saw Jesus’ death as the public, religious, and political event it was, the later medieval church saw Jesus’ death as the highest spiritual example of how a person attains an inner, private, spiritual, and mystical union with God through suffering and penance.
Explain the development of Martin Luther’s theology that led him to discard his scholastic training to adopt a completely different view of Christ and salvation.
Martin Luther came to see righteousness that avails before God as something unmerited by any works but rather merited only by having faith in God’s promises. He began to understand this concept from studying and teaching on Romans 1:17 (“The righteous shall live by faith”) and Paul’s description of Abraham’s faith that availed unto God as righteousness (Romans 4:1–12). To Luther, this work of faith is produced by the Spirit’s “doing Christ” to and in a person through Scripture, not by inner growth achieved through works of penance and love toward God. Luther described this as the “happy exchange” whereby God puts our unrighteousness on Christ and gives Christ’s righteousness, attained by His death on a cross, to us through faith.
Discuss Friedrich Schleiermacher’s main views of Christ, how they became the basis for the liberal Protestant view of Christ, and what made his views so agreeable to a church caught up in nationalism.
Schleiermacher believed Jesus was the fulfillment of the human feeling of absolute dependence on God. Jesus had the greatest degree of God-consciousness of any human; He was unique but only by degree. This human quality in Jesus gave His life and death meaning for Christians when many Europeans were departing from the Christian faith. Schleiermacher’s theology attempted to “save Christian faith” and give it more respectability among the social elite and intellectuals. It became the basis of liberal Protestant theology by being agreeable to Christians who focused on allegiance to their particular nation and its government. This theology was agreeable to nationalism because it made Jesus’ life insignificant and gave higher importance to the universal Christ. It made the first-century Jesus merely a naïve and premodern peasant who had little, if any, current relevance for people.
Describe the characteristics of the new Docetic Christology that arose out of liberal Protestant Christology. Explain what makes it different and more dangerous than the Docetism common during the early church period.
The newer Docetic, Gnostic Christology does not deny Jesus’ full humanity, as did the earlier version. It elevates the benefits of the eternal Christ for the believer while neglecting Jesus’ human existence and the cross that was the end result of His life. It is more dangerous in how it presupposes Jesus’ divine nature so that His human nature is “swallowed up” and becomes virtually invisible for influencing a person’s Christian life. This is furthered by Christologies “from above” that also presuppose Jesus’ full divinity. Jesus’ life and death then become only what “had to happen” to Him, with little importance for how a person comes to faith in Jesus as the Son of God. Thus, a person can “dodge the cross” by keeping it at a safe distance from his or her own life. This makes Jesus’ cross only something a person has to confess agreement to in doctrine without having to pick it up to follow Jesus’ life as one of His disciples.
In light of its description in Lesson 10, discuss the most significant feature of God’s curse on humanity in Genesis 3.
The most significant feature of the curse in Genesis 3 is that it was an “upward fall” in humanity’s continual attempt to take the place of God himself. God reversed His original order of peace and harmony, replacing it with permanent chaos and strife, causing disorder at all levels of relationships.
Describe the most important features of Jesus’ life and death, from Luke’s perspective, that show how Jesus was declared to be the Son of God in the Spirit, the son of David coming to claim His throne and set up His kingdom.
Luke describes the aspects of Jesus’ life—His conception by the Spirit, His birth as the heir to the throne of His father David, His Spirit-anointed ministry to reverse human sin and its effects, and His death as the ultimate trust in His Father God—all as elements that show how Jesus overcame and reversed God’s curse of rebellion and death. All of these resulted from the Spirit’s presence in Jesus’ life, constituting Him as the Son of God who would bring about His Father’s kingdom as the anointed heir of the throne of David.
