Blessing, Way Of Life: A Christian Theology Analysis

This essay will compare the Christology presented in two books by two different theologians. The first theologian is Dr. Douglas John Hall who wrote, The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World. Dr. Hall is the Professor Emeritus of Christian Theology for McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. The second theologian is Dr. Clark M. Williamson who wrote, Way of Blessing, Way of Life: A Christian Theology. Dr. Williamson is a Professor Emeritus of Christian Though at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, Indiana. Each of these theologians are widely published in the field Christian thought and theology and each of them approach the study of Christology in different ways despite both being process theologians. Christology …show more content…
Hall’s Christology that will be addressed here within this essay is that of the dual nature of Jesus. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to any Christology is a failure on the part of the theologian to acknowledge the dual nature of Jesus. In order to provide Christology with the most complete picture possible of the person/divine image of Jesus, both the person of Jesus of Nazareth and the divine Jesus the Christ must be developed and understood. It is the fixation on one or the other, or the failure to develop one or the other that often leads to erroneous assumptions and errors in developing Christology. It is been the case that far too often Christianity has dwelt exclusively with the divinity of Jesus Christ and all but ignoring the personhood of Jesus of Nazareth, from which all of the gospels of the New Testament are based on. This loss of the humanity of Jesus poses a serious problem to any Christology, simply in that Christ died on the Cross. The Divine is eternal to our understanding and therefore how could a totally divine Jesus die on the Cross. It is only in the dual nature of Jesus that a human Jesus of Nazareth could suffer and die on the Cross. Dr. Hall and H. Richard Niebuhr rightly point out that the fixation of the North American Church creates an almost “Unitarianism of the second person” of the Trinity almost completely wiping out the theology of the Trinity without actually doing so or stating it clearly. The relationship between God and Jesus is of profound importance to Dr. Hall just as the relationship between Jesus and humanity is profoundly important. It is this relational nature of Jesus that Dr. Hall uses to explain Jesus liminal place between God and humanity. “The informing concept in this relational Christology is that of representation. Without wading into the murky waters of substantialist ontology, it is possible to keep hold of the biblical witness to the God-relatedness of Jesus by saying that Jesus is