This thesis examines the relationship between Jesus and God in the Gospel of Mark. Against the predominant view since the early 1970’s, it argues that the Markan Jesus is considerably more than a merely human Messiah; he is a divine figure. But he is not placed in a general, Hellenistic category of superhuman or divine beings, nor ascribed only a general transcendent status. Instead, Mark links Jesus directly and closely to YHWH, the one God of Israel. In contrast to many earlier studies of the christology of Mark, which focus on christological titles, this study is primarily concerned with Mark’s narrative and the author’s portrayal of Jesus. Assuming that Mark’s audience were familiar to varying degrees with different traditions of the Hellenistic world, the text is interpreted in its wider Old Testament/Jewish, Greco- Roman, and early Christian context, all the while remaining sensitive to intra-textual links. It appears that the Markan Jesus assumes divine attributes and acts in exclusively divine roles, that he fulfils Old Testament promises about God’s own intervention and coming, and that his relationship to people is analogous to God’s relationship to Israel. It is of particular significance that Jesus in several cases takes on roles which were used to demonstrate someone’s deity or, YHWH’s sovereignty above all other gods. The result is a surprising overlap between Mark’s portrait of Jesus and the presentation of Israel’s God in the biblical and early Jewish traditions and, in some cases, the divine beings of the Greco-Roman world. While early Jewish literature occasionally can ascribe divine roles to a few exalted figures, the Markan description of Jesus is unique in two respects: the majority of the divine prerogatives ascribed to Jesus are without parallel in any of the aforementioned texts, and the number of these is unrivalled. Such a portrait of Jesus may call into question both the true humanity of Jesus (Jesus is not fully human) and the monotheistic faith of Israel (Jesus is a second divine being alongside God), but it is clear that Mark maintains both. The christology of Mark represents a paradox in which Jesus is fully human and, at the same time, in a mysterious way placed on the divine side of the God-creation divide.

In Nigerian Christianity, many theologians and Christians who do not have any formal theological training perceive Jesus Christ primarily as a solution to the problems that confront humanity. As a solution, they expect Jesus Christ to inspire some theological discourses that will deconstruct and overthrow Western theological hegemony, to rekindle the quest to preserve some indigenous traditions, to liberate the oppressed, poor and powerless, to expose the oppressors and all evildoers, to liberate and protect people from the attacks of the malevolent spirits, and to save people from being eternally separated from God. But what these solution-oriented Christologies have overlooked is that the Christ-Event is a paradox for it creates simultaneously a problem and a solution for the Christian community which confesses that God has revealed God’s self in this event. The contextual Christology that I develop in this study probes the theological, christological and anthropological consequences of this claim for interpreting and appropriating Jesus Christ in the Nigerian contexts. To achieve this task, I will converse with and critique some selected ‘constructive Christologies’ of some key theologians and some ‘grassroots Christologies’ that have been informed by social conditions, indigenous worldview, encounter with some versions of Christianity propagated by the West, and some existential issues that confront many Christians. However we choose to interpret and appropriate Jesus the Christ in our contexts, he remains simultaneously a question and an answer to the theological, cultural, religious, anthropological, political and socio-economic issues that challenge us. Viewed from this perspective, I will argue that the Christ-Event upsets, unsettles, critiques, and reshapes the solution-oriented Christologies of Nigerian Christianity. I will explore this claim within the circumference of the overarching thesis of this study; namely, as both a question and an answer, Jesus Christ confronts us as a ‘revealer’ of divinity and humanity. Thus, he mediates and interprets divinity and humanity for the purpose of enacting and sustaining a relationship between God and human beings.

The following thesis examines the way “revelatory acts of God” in each of the canonical Gospels engender reverence for Jesus. “Revelatory acts of God” are disclosures of God by vision or audition (also called, “revelatory experiences”). Thus, any event in which characters hear a voice from heaven or see a vision from heaven is a “revelatory experience.” But what role do these accounts have in the four Gospel for engendering reverence for Jesus? That is, how do God’s direct interventions within these narratives inspire characters to respond to Jesus? The answer to this question is the focus of this thesis. Scholars have noted the power of revelatory experience to “drive and shape” the veneration of Jesus in early Christian devotional practices. Hurtado notes the “demonstrable efficacy of such experiences in generating significant innovations in various religious traditions” (Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, 65). However, one wonders what “faith-producing” role revelatory experiences actually have in the Gospels. The Synoptic Gospels include revelatory experiences as a distinguishing feature of their accounts, with the baptism and transfiguration being two of the most commented-on passages of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. However, such revelatory acts of God are curiously rare in John prior to Jesus’ resurrection. This thesis will analyze the role of revelatory experiences for producing reverence for Jesus in each Gospel and explore the differences between the Gospels in how these accounts are employed. This research focuses primarily on the responses of characters to the revelatory in the Gospel narratives. The purpose of this thesis is to highlight the way audiences in the four Gospels are or are not “shaped” by such revelatory experiences and what implications these findings may have for the interpretation of each Gospel.

Thesis advisor: André Brouillette / Thesis advisor: Barton Geger / Thesis (STL) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

Thesis advisor: Lisa Sowle Cahill / Contrary to current transhumanist, medical, and cultural perspectives that aging is something solely to lament or even eradicate, this work explores the meaning of aging and death from the perspective of Christian theology, particularly within the schema of St. Augustine and Karl Barth. Both authors describe the complexity of aging in terms of our curse and calling as creatures aimed at participation in God through union with Christ. Locating Christology as central to our understanding of aging illuminates the ways in which the God revealed in Christ enters our humanity, sharing in our vulnerability, dependency, frailty, and even passivity. By turning to the incarnation, Christ's nature and work not only give us future hope, but transforms the daily aging experience - both active and passive waiting within our present, temporal reality for aging individuals and their surrounding communities. By maintaining union with God through contemplation and action, Christ dignifies our status as receptive and active agents. Thus, building from these two authors, I argue that aging serves as a sign and preparation for Sabbath rest by which aging persons might enact virtue through their specific vocation before God. Likewise, those persons surrounding the aging are called to enact virtues that reciprocally respond through interdependent communities that give and receive in union with Christ. Chapter One opens with preliminary questions on the meaning of death and aging while Chapter Two delineates Augustine's view on these realities as a result of the fall and original sin. However, even in Augustine's negative view of death and aging, he highlights the good in the soul/body relation and resurrected bodies. His position legitimizes grief and the human emotions, thus offering an ethics of compassion in loss. Finally, I constructively locate the positive view of aging and death is its sign and preparation for eternal Sabbath rest. Chapter Three considers Barth's analysis of death and aging as both negative and positive, evil and good through his dialectical lens. While death is a sign of judgment, finitude constitutes human identity as good in our temporal end. His ethics mirrors his anthropology in protecting life while accepting limits. He ends by describing the three stages of life including youth, middle age, and old age as composing our vocation. Each stage includes our call before God that legitimizes agency for the old as well as interdependent relationships. Chapters Four and Five explore the Christology of Augustine and Barth. Christ's divine and human natures bring together wisdom and knowledge for Augustine in Chapter Four. Aging persons grow in wisdom and knowledge through contemplation and action in union with Christ. Not only does union with Christ become the foundation for moral agency, but Christ also achieves the benefits for aging persons through his incarnation and atoning work. Christ experiences psychological anguish and forsakenness before God as the Totus Christus. Aging persons also receive the benefits of Christ's person and work that reverses the consequences of aging and death. Chapter Five claims that participation in Christ serves as the key to understanding Barth's Church Dogmatics. God's movement to humanity and our movement to God are embodied in the hypostatic union. Here we see Christ's active agency in his divine humility/obedience through the incarnation and atoning work. Christ's passive agency or human response perfectly embodies gratitude, prayer, and obedience through union with the Spirit in fulfilling his vocation in time. Moreover, in congruence with the work of W.H. Vanstone, Jesus' passive agency that receives the activity of the world legitimizes dignity and worth for those aging stages of life involving decline and dependence. Aging persons are agents who are active and passive, giving and receiving through a mixture of contemplation (prayer) and activity in union with Christ. Finally, Chapter Six synthesizes the Christology and participation present in the theologies of Augustine and Barth as the foundation for a moral virtue theory as it applies to aging persons and their surrounding communities. By emphasizing union with Christ in Augustine's virtue theory and union with Christ in Barth's morality of `vocation,' I argue moral agents are contemplative/acting persons intended for union with God. By receiving and giving in relationship with God and others, aging persons and their communities embody virtues that reciprocally benefit one another. Virtues for the aging include humility, gratitude, generosity, wisdom, prudence, memory, friendship, fortitude, and hope. Virtues for those communities surrounding aging persons entail respect, justice, mercy, and love. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis advisor: Roberto S. Goizueta / We live in an age of globalization and exclusion. In light of this reality and context, I argue that a Christology of liberation is a critical resource that enables excluded people to resist, redeem and re-imagine globalization. The reality of globalization and exclusion is the setting and situation in which the Christology developed here takes shape. I critically analyze economic globalization, its neo-liberal ideology and the negative consequences of this type of globalization—economic and social exclusion of the poor and vulnerable. Finally, I reflect on a theological, more specifically, Christological response to this situation drawing on the Christological contributions of Jon Sobrino and Edward Schillebeeckx. Chapter one offers a descriptive and critical account of neo-liberal globalization and exclusion, and analyzes theological responses to this situation. Chapter two turns to the Christology of Jon Sobrino to describe and analyze some of the main tenets of Sobrino’s Christology. I argue that, at the heart of Jon Sobrino’s Christology is the liberating good news of the crucified and risen Jesus. The liberating good news enables people who have suffered de-humanization and have become victims of neo-liberal processes of globalization to resist, redeem, and re-imagine globalization. Chapter three focuses on Edward Schillebeeckx’s Christology. Here, as in chapter two, I offer a descriptive account of some of the main tenets of Schillebeeckx’s Christology. I argue that, according to Schillebeeckx, the story of Jesus, the living one, who in his liberating praxis reveals what it means to be human and what God is like, bears universal relevance, particularly as it relates to human suffering. Indeed the experience of salvation in Jesus empowers and requires believers to engage in a liberating praxis where there is unjust suffering and a peoples’ humanity is threatened. This story and experience enables people who suffer unjustly and whose humanity is threatened by neo-liberal processes of globalization to critique the neo-liberal ideology undergirding these processes and to resist, redeem, and re-imagine globalization. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

As the title of the present work ("Christological re-reading of the Shema [Deut 6.4]in Mark's Gospel")indicates, the present thesis explores the question of how the Shema is used and undersstood in Mark's Gospel. The main point to be argued is that the Shema language of Deut 6.4 is not simply reiterated in a traditional sense but is re-read in a programmatic way that links Jesus directly with Israel's God and presents Jesus in equivalence to that unique God. While such an innovative re-reading needs to be views within the context of Mark's complex portrait of Jesus' relationship to God, which integrated Jesus' fundamental correspondence to God and his distinction from God, the one-God language in Mark appears to be used in the context of portraying Jesus as fundamentally corresponding to Israel's God, rather than being differentiated from him. Following chapter 1, which discusses the history of research, the combined methodology of composition and narrative criticisms and the life setting of Mark's Gospel, chapter 2 addresses the issue of Second Temple Judaism. The second chapter aims to argue that Judaism in the Second Temple period should be seen as "monotheistic" despite its diversity and the widespread recognition of the exalted mediating figures in the era, and that the concern for God's uniqueness was central among the Jews of this time. In chapters 3-4, specific Markan texts are explored in an attempt to present a fresh reading of the Shema (12.29; cf. v.32; 2.7; 10.18). The third chapter argues for the collectivity of 12.28-34 and 12.35-37, which ultimately unites the confession of the Shema (12.29) and the view of the exalted Messiah alongside God (v.36). Chapter 4 deals with the two Markan Shema-allusions (2.7 and 10.18). It is argued that the Markan use of the είς ό θεός phrase in 2.7 has a strong Christological thrust, namely to attribute to Jesus as God-like authority to forgive sins and, by doing so, to link Jesus inseparably with the one-God of Israel and to present Jesus in equivalence to God. While examining different interpretations of Mark 10.18, the second part of the chapter argues that the εί μη είς θεός phrase in 10.18 needs to be read in light of the identical phraseology of 2.7 and that, if so, Jesus' objection to the epithet "good teacher" in 10.18 serves to invite a more adequate understanding of Jesus' status and significance. Jesus' additional commands with the Decalogue in v.21 and Mark's description of Jesus' unique qualities throughout his narrative tend to support the suggested reading. Lastly, chapter 4 integrates the discussions of the previous chapters in light of the macro-text, i.e., Mark's narrative as a whole. It is argued here that Mark's Christology is not monolithic, but a nuanced one, which facilitates the concurrence of Jesus' fundamental correspondence to God and Jesus' distinction from God. It is also argued that the aspects of Jesus' inseparable linkage to God and his distinction from God, alike, appear repeatedly across the narrative and that both aspects are integrally bound up with each other in the Gospel. Mark's innovative re-reading of the Shema, therefore, needs to be viewed within the context of this complexity in Jesus' relation to God. The present thesis can benefit Markan scholarship in several ways. It contributes not only to the study of Mark's theo-logy, but also Christology since Mark's Gospel is a narrative about Jesus - whose orientation is consistently theo-centric. As a result, the relationship between the two will also be illuminated. Moreover, in view of the inclusion of Second Temple literature (chap. 2) as a primary background for the discussion of Mark's one-God language (chaps. 3-5), the thesis can offer valuable insights for the twenty-first-century readers of Mark's first-century Gospel, whose idea of God's "one-ness" has been formed largely under the influence of the seventeenth-century definition of the term.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Baylor University, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 189-200).

The theology of Eberhard Jüngel endeavours to rethink the being of God and how humanity comes by knowledge of God from the crucifixion of Christ. By focusing on the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, Jüngel proposes that a theology of the cross should be the basis of human knowledge of God as all can be said about the Trinity and christology must be said from the cross. As Jüngel holds that the humanity of Christ is the example and basis for humanity, the cross is also the source of information for Jüngel’s theological anthropology. This thesis seeks to determine whether Jüngel’s focus on the cross as the source of all theological knowledge results in a limited view of God, of Christ, and of humanity. In order to do this, the thesis looks at the history and context of Jüngel himself and why he is interested in basing a theology on the cross. The thesis also looks at the history of critical engagement with Jüngel, and the conclusions that those works have come to. The history of the theology of the cross is explored, from its provenance in Luther through to its rise during and after the Second World War. After detailing the history of the cross Jüngel’s own particular formulation is explicated, alongside Moltmann and Sölle who were the main exponents of a theology of the cross in Germany. Having done so, the effects of Jüngel’s theology of the cross on christology, the doctrine of God, and on anthropology are detailed, and it is argued that Jüngel’s theology of the cross restricts the activity of the person of Christ and that this restriction contradicts his emphasis on the perichoretic union of the Trinity, as well as restricting human action to a creative passivity. However, the thesis also explores the positive sides of Jüngel’s theology of the cross. Jüngel’s theology of the cross is the most theologically and philosophically rigorous of his time, and a theology of the cross is still needed as a normative control in theological thought. Furthermore, the thesis examines how Jüngel’s account of love can be used to advance his theology and repair some of the damage that the limits of his theology of the cross cause.

This thesis is a study of the relationship between John Wesley's Christology and his broader theology. No specific effort has yet been made to assess whether or not a meaningful change to Wesley's Christology ever occurred, or to what extent Wesley's Christology shaped his broader theology. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap by first demonstrating that a change to Wesley's Christology did occur and describing the implications of this shift for his broader theology and, second, by evaluating to what degree Wesley's broader theology arose out of, or was shaped by, his Christology. Chapter one describes Wesley's inherited theology, which he received from his family and faith tradition, in order to provide a foundation from which to examine changes to his Christology. Chapter two then demonstrates that a change to Wesley's Christology did occur around his 1738 'evangelical conversion', and describes the implications of this shift for Wesley's evangelical theology. John Wesley identified the core doctrines of the early Methodists as repentance, faith, and holiness. Following Wesley's lead, this study examines three correlating areas of focus as representative of these core Methodist doctrines, in order to describe the relationship between these doctrines and Wesley's Christology. Chapter three, 'Christ and Humanity' examines Wesley's doctrine of humanity, including his understanding of the image of God, original sin, and the nature of salvation as restoration of the divine image. This chapter lays out Wesley's understanding of the need for human repentance. Chapter four, 'Christ Working for Us' examines those doctrines most closely tied to justification as an orienting concern. This includes Wesley's understanding of grace, the stages of faith, repentance itself, works meet for repentance, Christ's imputed righteousness, and adoption. Finally, chapter five, 'Christ Working in Us' examines those doctrines most closely linked to sanctification as an orienting concern. This includes the doctrine of the new birth, freedom from sin, assurance, and Christian perfection. By identifying the changes that occurred to Wesley's Christology and evaluating the relationship between his Christology and other core doctrines, this thesis will contribute to the growing body of research into the theological foundations of Methodism and the life and thought of the Rev. John Wesley.