Archive for the 'Christology' Category

Bulgakov Blog Conference, Response to Karlson and Bruce-Aragon

Published
by
DWM
on October 5, 2008
in Bulgakov and Christology
. 4 Comments

“Orthodoxy, Heresiology, and Why We Should Care:
A Response to the Essays on Bulgakov and Apollinarius”
by Anthony D. Baker
Seminary of the Southwest
Austin, Texas

Rarely is new research on heresiarchs of the ancient church of any real theological interest.  Whether or not Augustine was right about what Pelagius meant is an archeological matter, since he was certainly right about the disasterously contractual conception of grace that his “fictive Pelagius” offered.  One of a small handful of exceptions to this rule is Rowan Williams’s Arius, which digs deeply into the source materials of fourth century Christology in order to deliver a punchline not so much about what we are to do with Arius, but about the relation of a creative theologian to the church, especially the church in a time of great doctrinal ambiguity.

As another exception to this rule, though, we must surely count Bulgakov’s reassessment of Apollinarius, part of a beautifully-crafted 88-page essay on Patristic Christology.   As Mr. Bruce points out here, this now seventy-five year old thesis holds up remarkably well alongside the recent work that has been done on Apollinarius, which must now cause teachers of Christology to stop assigning him that remarkably naïve notion that the human nature of Christ was void of a human soul.  In fact, as Bulgakov shows, the bishop of Laodicia understood quite well that what is not assumed is not healed, and so that a body and soul must both be assumed by the Logos.  What he lacked, however, was consistency of language and a thoroughly worked-out anthropology, leading later readers to make a rather insane caricature of his position in order to show the sanity of Cyril’s. Bruce points out very helpfully the crude scholarship of 19th century dogmatic histories on this point, and this makes Bulgakov’s rise in popularity over the last decade even more timely, since only now are these broadly sweeping and almost universally inaccurate tomes finally being exiled from seminary and undergraduate lecture halls. Continue reading ‘Bulgakov Blog Conference, Response to Karlson and Bruce-Aragon’

Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 4

Published
by
DWM
on October 4, 2008
in Balthasar, Bulgakov and Christology
. 2 Comments

Bulgakov and Apollinarius
by Henry Karlson
The Catholic University of America

Back in 1952, Hans Urs von Balthasar had some rather shocking words to say about Christology: “And what a dryness there is in the doctrine about Christ, which likewise has made scarcely any progress since Chalcedon, where an abstract formula has to answer for the central mystery. Once again the formula is excellent, but only if it is a skeletal structure that enables the living flesh of the word of revelation to stand and walk.”1 Not many years before, Sergius Bulgakov made a similar point. While Chalcedon must be recognized as normative, it should not have ended Christological discussion. Its declaration was mostly negative: it stated who and what Christ was not, but left much room as to who and what Christ is.  The expectation was that there would be theological development. To be sure, there were few theological developments at II and III Constantinople, but they were minor, and beyond them, there really has not been any significant development in Christology.2  It was not meant to be this way.

Bulgakov believed that Christian theologians have far too long neglected this dogmatic problem. Christology, as it is today, provides answers which no longer satisfy the questions brought to it by believers and skeptics alike. Continue reading ‘Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 4′

  1. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Razing the Bastions. Trans. Brian McNeil, C.R.V. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 29.↩
  2. Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God. Trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2008), 194-6. ↩