The church in the early centuries focused not so much on natures and their union as on the Savior as a person. The church was united around two major affirmations: First, only God can save us, so Christ has to be the eternal Son of God. Second, only as a human being does God save us, so the Son himself had to become truly human in order to live, die, and be raised for our salvation. The church’s fifth-century articulation of Christ as one person made known to us in two natures grows out of and should be understood in the light of these prior affirmations.

This chapter explores christological underpinnings to eucharistic theology. It delineates transubstantiation, consubstantiation, and three versions of impanation in the effort to offer an incarnational model of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist.

This chapter examines the role of Christology in the subfield of political theology. Political theologies examine the structure and logic of worldly power, assessing its relation to religious and theological dimensions of community formation, the cultivation of the citizen (often in contrast to the non-citizen or the enemy), expectations of messianic emergence and progress, and the potential for enacting meaningful political resistance. Christology is a major focus within the field of political theology both because of the historical role played by Christianity in the political development of Europe and Europe’s imperial and colonial footprint and because Christology is deeply invested in these very questions of power. This chapter focuses on key texts from the twentieth century that remain touchstones for the growing discipline of political theology as it exists today.

That Jesus Christ is sinless is utterly uncontroversial within orthodox Christianity. But the modality of that sinlessness (whether it is necessary that Christ was without sin) and the explanation of that sinlessness (why it is the case that Christ did not sin, and perhaps even could not have sinned) have been the objects of intense christological controversy. This chapter considers and evaluates multiple explanatory models for Christ’s sinlessness, which lead to different accounts of whether and why Christ is impeccable.

This chapter outlines the different ways in which theologians of the Reformation received earlier medieval traditions. Luther himself, and both the Reformed tradition and most parts of the Catholic tradition, accepted the standard medieval view that the human nature hypostatically depends on the divine person. Dominicans followed Aquinas in supposing that the human nature comes to share in the eternal esse of the divine Son. And later Lutherans adopted the homo assumptus view of Augustine and the early Western Church.

This chapter is a description and analysis of the modern and postmodern periods and how they influenced theologians from a variety of traditions as they wrestled anew with the doctrine of Christ. In characterizing modernity as an era which celebrates universal reason and human progress, the author examines the ways in which modern theologians both chafed against and conformed to these insights as they developed their ideas about the person and work of Christ. Likewise, the author engages postmodernity as a disavowal of universal reason and progress, and thereby examines the manner in which these concepts were both rejected and embraced by various theologians as they sought to answer Christ’s question: “Who do you say I am?” within a postmodern era.

The eighteenth-century Wahhābī movement in central Arabia arose with the aim of combatting the Muslim cult of saints, and in so doing led to the establishment of the Saudi state. An analysis of texts authored by the movement’s founder and eponym, Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (d. 1206/1792), demonstrates that he fully adopted the tawḥīd al-ulūhiyya doctrine, together with its attendant terminology and argumentation, from Ibn Taymiyya’s writings. It was due to this doctrine that the early Wahhābīs viewed Muslims who practiced a popular cult of saints as polytheists who must be converted or conquered; in their attempt to do so, the Wahhābīs transformed Ibn Taymiyya’s theoretical and often abstruse polemic into a casus belli with real-world consequences that reverberate to this day. The early Wahhābīs’ intransigent Taymiyyan-based monolatry distinguished them from broader currents of eighteenth-century Muslim revivalism and provided a template for the radical salafī militancy of recent decades.

The chapter offers an overview of various models of trinitarian theorizing in contemporary theology as well as of its roots in nineteenth-century theology which was inspired by German Idealism. The overall question of the chapter is which model of the Trinity can best serve as a framework for a better understanding of the so-called Two Natures Christology and the relation of unity between the two natures in Christ. The chapter points also to the discussions surrounding the notion of “personhood” and its suitability for trinitarian and christological discourses.

This chapter examines a premodern salafī precedent for modern theonomy taken from the field of uṣūl al-fiqh (jurisprudential theory). It traces a polemic waged since the eleventh century CE in Islamic legal writings which argues that categorical adherence to the juridical precedent of a given law school – a practice known as taqlīd – constitutes a form of polytheism. According to these authors, obedience to law is a form of worship, and thus obedience to the ruling of a human jurist, in contravention of a ruling found in a divinely revealed text, is tantamount to worship of that jurist. In contrast with a widespread misconception in the academic literature, premodern opposition to taqlīd was not a condemnation of textual literalism, and in fact the authors who engaged in the polemic could be generally described as fundamentalists who leaned toward ahl al-ḥadīth literalism (Ḥanbalīs, Ẓāhirīs, and eighteenth–nineteenth century revivalists). This polemic’s castigation of taqlīd as adherence to man-made law furnished an important precedent for modern salafīs’ characterization of democracy and parliamentary legislation as inherently polytheistic.

This chapter begins by exploring the prospects and problems of studying Christology in the Hebrew Bible through the lens of “Messiah” language. It then offers a complementary method of studying the roots of Christological ideas by tracing how certain frameworks for a deliverer figure arise in the Hebrew text and receive refinement over time (into the Second Temple period): specifically, a Judahite king, exalted priest, end-times prophet, and transcendent “man.”

Late twelfth and early thirteenth century Christologies took the Lombard’s three “opinions” as their starting place in treating the mode of the union of divinity and humanity in Christ; later scholastic theologians, like Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus, would pursue similar questions in terms of his act of existence. This interest in the union of natures in Christ also gave rise to a deepened interest in Christ’s humanity, represented especially in the early Franciscan school and Thomas Aquinas. Finally, Mechthild of Madgeburg and Julian of Norwich represent two medieval Christologies produced beyond a university context.