As a bridge between the discussion of Christ in St. Paul’s epistles and Christ in the General Epistles, it is important to discuss a second factor in St. Paul’s understanding of Christ as God. This concerns the oft-neglected area of St. Paul’s own personal practices of prayer and piety, and how this relates to both his vision of the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, in his call to be an apostle, and to his own direct knowledge of Christ as God. While the previous post discussed St. Paul’s identification of the second hypostasis of Israel’s God as the person of Jesus Christ based on Second Temple Jewish tradition, this one will focus on the epistemological issue of how…
The Christology presented in the letters of St. Paul is particularly important to an understanding of the viewpoint of the New Testament as a whole, in that St. Paul’s epistles are the earliest documents, the first written, that discuss who Christ is. Though obviously these letters were written after the events described in the gospels and, in most cases, the events described in the Acts of the Apostles, St. Paul’s written exhortations to the nascent Christian communities which he had established precede the setting down of the gospel accounts in writing. If there was indeed some sort of ‘development’ of the understanding or the idea of Christ, from a ‘lower’ to a ‘higher’ Christology, one would expect to find in…
Several weeks ago, a series of articles discussed how Christ can be seen, and was understood within Second Temple Judaism in the Old Testament. A companion series discussing how Christ is seen in the New Testament may seem counter-intuitive due to its apparently obvious nature. This is particularly true of Christ in the gospels, which are quite obviously entirely about our Lord Jesus Christ. However, the core of that previous series was developing the way in which Second Temple Judaism had come, through careful attention to the text of the Hebrew Bible, to see God as a godhead of two or more persons even before the incarnation of Christ. This then provided those to whom Christ came with the means…
There is a common misunderstanding of the origins of clerical orders within the Church. It is argued that the Christians of the apostolic era, including the apostles themselves, believed that Christ would certainly return within their own lifetime. It is only when that clearly did not occur, when the apostles, or at least most of them, had died, that the concept of the church came into being, as well as varied understandings, which evolved over time, as to how the newly constituted church ought be governed. It is thought that these structures were deeply influenced by the prevailing culture at the time, most especially Roman culture, as the church, by this time, was primarily Gentile. This narrative has been put…
