CHRIST IN CHRISTIAN TRADITION

Probably no question was so widely agitated during the first centuries of Christianity as that of the degree and the manner in which Christ combined the human with the divine. As obscure and as pointless as many of the controversies on that point may seem today, the fact remains that the entire theological fabric of christology, from the Council of Chalcedon to the present day, has been either evolved from or adopted from what was said and written on the subject before Chalcedon. The purpose of this book, then, is to present a survey of christological thought from the Apostolic Age to the Council of Chalcedon (451), and the author weaves a logical chain of thought, by means of a well devised thesis-antithesis-synthesis progression, from the seminal Biblical concepts through the Patristic elucidation to the definitions of Chaicedon. This is a book for scholars; it presupposes a familiarity -- linguistic, historical, theological -- with the period in question, but it is an indispensable guide for teachers and advanced students of theology and of patrology, and should be on the shelf of every theological library.