My goal was not only to give a current evangelical formulation of Christ’s identity but to do so in way that is first, faithful to Scripture, second, true to historical theology, and third, an illustration of how to move rightly from biblical text to theological formulation….
Seminary is an interesting and formative time. Church history class is perhaps one of the most important times, since it demonstrates to students (to many for the first time) the boundaries for orthodox theology that have been worked out in ages past. What a better setting in which to learn you’re a heretic….
At the center of biblical and systematic theology is the doctrine of Christ. The early church hammered it out with treatises, councils, and creeds. Moderns have hammered it out with philosophical and theological developments. Christology is ever-developing, although one wonders whether any significant alterations to traditional Christology have been made….
Paul’s Divine Christology is a slightly revised version of Chris Tilling’s Ph.D. dissertation completed in 2009 under Max Turner at the London School of Theology, with Steve Walton and Larry Hurtado as external examiners. It was originally published in 2012 by Mohr Siebeck in the prestigious NT monograph series WUNT II. Tilling’s thesis joins the ranks of Gordon Fee’s Pauline Christology, Larry Hurtado’s Lord Jesus Christ, and Richard Bauckham’s God Crucified as one of the most significant volumes in modern scholarship arguing for (Pauline) divine Christology. That is one reason why this monograph deserves a wide readership and why it is such a good thing that Eerdmans recently released a much more affordable reprint….
Last week at SBL I attended a review session on Richard Hays’ new book, Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness. The reviewers included Marcus Bockmuehl, Marianne Thompson, and Francis Watson. The reviews were mostly positive, with most of the reviewers asking pretty tame (yet good) questions that either challenged small points of the book or gave slight push-back to Hays’ methodology. Hays in this work tried to do for the Gospels what he did for Paul, using his…