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.

Leonard Peltier was convicted in 1977 for the killing of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Despite allegations of governmental misconduct and questionable legal rulings, the conviction was affirmed on appeal by several federal courts. After nearly fifty years in prison, Peltier was granted clemency by President Biden in 2025 and allowed to finish his sentence under home confinement. This chapter recounts Peltier’s background, his involvement with the American Indian Movement, and the events surrounding the incident at Pine Ridge. His memoir, Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance, was published in 1999. The chapter examines the book’s experimental, transgressive form and its subversion of standard memoir style and structure. Prison Writings utilizes a nonlinear structure, multiple voices, surreal elements, and political and legal analyses, as well as the inclusion of poetry and photographs. Peltier also incorporates Native history and social issues as well as a critique of carceral standards in the federal prison system.

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.

In this chapter three prison memoirs are recalled, detailing the stories of three men that significantly shaped the civil rights revolution during the 1960s. Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver wrote about their lives before prison, during the struggle, in prison, and after prison. They tell the story of the Black Panther Party and introduce the readers to their deepest feelings about life in America as oppressed Black men fighting for liberation. Nonetheless, their history stands apart

from other people who have written about this period simply because their personal journeys led them to prison and jail where these narratives were organized, outlined, and composed

as prison memoirs.

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.

From his 1982 conviction for killing a police officer and death sentence to the 2010 commutation of that sentence to life-in-prison-without-parole, Mumia Abu-Jamal has experienced and studied mass incarceration intimately as a political prisoner. At the local level, Mumia’s case is a microcosm of the period of the 1970s and 1980s in Philadelphia – the highpoint of rogue white supremacy within the city’s police department and the District Attorney’s office. At the macro level, the period of his incarceration spans the decades of exponential carceral expansion in the US that began in the 1980s. In the more than four decades since his 1982 conviction, the Abu-Jamal has penned thirteen books and thousands of short radio commentaries from prison, most notably Live from Death Row, which features harrowing, first-hand accounts of aging men and their struggles for medical care in the face of physical illness, younger men who are psychically and spiritually pulverized by guard brutality, barbarous conditions, humiliating body cavity strip searches, and the unnatural social isolation of death row imprisonment.

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 internationally acclaimed Apache-Chicano writer Jimmy Santiago Baca was born into generational poverty in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1952. Both of his parents abandoned him by his seventh birthday, and by age eleven he was living on the streets and enduring stints in juvenile detention. By nineteen he found himself in an isolation cell in the maximum-security federal prison in Florence, Colorado. Therein, he taught himself to read and write, initiating the meteoric literary career of one of the most influential voices in Chicano letters and in prison studies. Baca’s oeuvre currently includes thirty-four books of poetry, fiction, essays, and memoir, as well as the script for the film Bound by Honor (1993). Regardless of genre, Baca writes about traumatic loss and pain, including his remarkable capacity for enduring it. His predominant theme is carcerality, which he ardently critiques from within. His poetry is especially powerful in this vein, consistently exploring incarceration as nothing less than the intentional destruction of human life. Additionally, Baca’s poetry has always shared a vision of the literary arts as a means to bear witness to such cruel violence and to work compassionately toward social justice for all people.

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 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.”