Maryann Madhavathu presents essential elements of how liturgy structures time – that is, daily, weekly, and yearly rhythms – with special attention to the meaning of Sunday and the important cycles of the liturgical year in different liturgical families. It is no surprise that Easter is of the utmost importance to all of them.

Samuel Goyvaerts explores the notion of liturgical pastoral, the roots of which are to be found in the Liturgical Movement. It is an umbrella term that makes one understand how liturgy is intrinsically connected to the Church’s diakonia, kerygma, and koinonia. Liturgy is essential for building up the Church, for faith formation, and for the faithful’s service to the world.

Harald Buchinger sketches the origins and complex evolutions of liturgies in Christian Antiquity. He focuses on patterns of worship and celebration developed in those times, underscoring how difficult it is to draw straightforward conclusions, mainly because of a paucity of sources.

Inspired by interesting research in the field of neuroscience, Dorothea Haspelmath-Finatti argues that singing in a liturgical context is not only an essential part of the act of praising and praying, but it is also healthy.

Marianne Moyaert tackles the timely issue of the encounter between Christian liturgy and the world’s religions. She puts forward the idea that there is no way back to a time before the dialogical turn. Even more so, the dialogue should not refrain from ritual and liturgical aspects. In that respect, comparative theologians are inevitable and evident partners for liturgical scholars.

After a brief survey of the key christological teachings (along with the major figures) of the seven Ecumenical Councils, this chapter turns in a constructive theological vein to the influential critiques put forward by N. T. Wright, Bruce McCormack, and Sergius Bulgakov. The chapter then articulates a theological defense of the Christology of the Councils in light of exegetical and philosophical commitments.

This chapter focuses on contemporary Jewish receptions of Christology, featuring four scholars with extraordinary knowledge of christological discourse. Harry Austryn Wolfson, the philosophers Peter Ochs and Emil Fackenheim, and the New Testament professor Amy-Jill Levine all encourage Christian theologians to address difficult questions – about the unity of God, about evil, and about Jewish–Christian relations – in the specifically Christian language of Christology.

The chapter begins with an overview of Christology in the history of New Testament scholarship. It next turns to the portrayal of Jesus’s divinity and relationship to God in the Gospels and Acts. The chapter then concludes by exploring how a reframing of our understanding of divinity, especially in terms of “divine fluidity,” can provide a pathway forward to the question of Jesus’s own divinity in the Gospels and Acts, as well as the New Testament more broadly.

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.