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.
Albert Schweitzer 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.” In this ...article, 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 argue, 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 an implication of this discussion for the role of metaphysics in theological reflection.
Abstract
Albert Schweitzer 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.” ...In this article, 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 argue, 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 an implication of this discussion for the role of metaphysics in theological reflection.
Albert Schweitzer 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.” In this ...article, 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 argue, 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 an implication of this discussion for the role of metaphysics in theological reflection.
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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