Oosterbaan identified a tradition of Anabaptist christology running from Ziegler in Strassborg in the 1520s to Menno Simons in the 1550s. I demonstrate that this tradition continued until at least around 1700, first amongst the Waterlander Mennonites in the Netherlands, and then amongst the English General Baptists. I sketch the development and diversity of the tradition, and then ask whether it might be considered ‘orthodox’, and whether reflecting on the scholarly reception of this tradition might help academic theologians to engage better with marginalised Christian communities today.

The use of συντɛλέω to speak of God's ‘completion’ of the new covenant (Heb 8.8) has generated various explanations. Yet none of them factor in an important clue in Hebrews, namely, the rest discourse. By establishing literary and theological connections between Heb 3.7–4.13 and 8.8–12, this study argues that the promise of the completion of the new covenant evokes the completion of creation and its ensuing sabbath rest. Such an evocation brings to surface a logic of Christology and new creation embedded in Hebrews.

John Webster and Dietrich Bonhoeffer are two theologians invested in prioritising certain conceptions of divine transcendence within their respective theological projects. Specifically, both appeal to conceptions of divine transcendence and agency amidst what they understand to be the problematic naturalisation of theological discourse in modern Protestant theology, particularly within its liberal German traditions. The way they understand transcendence, however, and the doctrinal loci they choose to affect it, leads to different conceptualisations of the possibilities, scope and organisation of systematic theology. Where Webster (especially in his later work) seeks to prioritise God's immanent perfection and aseity through theology proper, Bonhoeffer instead emphasises God's freedom pro me within the person of Jesus Christ. These differences in first theological foundations have important consequences for the shape of theological method and doctrinal architecture within the practice of contemporary systematic theology.

In much modern christology, the notion of the incommensurate governs the relation of divine to human in Jesus Christ. In christologies influenced by Austin Farrer, and more distantly, by Nicholas of Cusa, the incommensurability of the infinite to the finite makes the idiom of paradox congenial, even necessary. Such demanding and unrelenting emphasis upon diastasis echoes a more ancient preoccupation with holiness in a fallen and unholy world. In Israel's scriptures, and in their lasting influence in the patristic era, the transcendent holiness of God threatens to prohibit the presence of the Holy One in the midst of unholy people. A record of this threat can be seen in the alien, fragmentary and unrecognisable Gospel portraits of the holy Christ to a sinful world. Yet the doctrine of the incarnation demands a divine presence to sinners and a sinful cosmos, a ‘making flesh’ as well as an ‘assuming flesh’. The concept and practice of sacrifice is proposed as a form of relation between deity and humanity such that the holy Christ can dwell and abide in an unholy world.

Although the Christology of the Ebionites in general, and the so-called Gospel of the Ebionites cited by Epiphanius of Salamis in particular, has been commonly classified as adoptionist, the utility of the term ‘adoptionism’ has been recently called into question. This article will focus on the fragment about Jesus’ baptism in Panarion, 30.13.7–8 to determine whether it depicts Jesus’ adoption to divine sonship. Although the text does not use adoptionist terminology and imagery, Jesus does acquire a new christological identity in the pericope when he is possessed by the spirit and metaphorically begotten by the deity. This should be relabelled as a possessionist Christology. However, Epiphanius wrongly interpreted the text through the lens of Cerinthus’ Christology, in which Jesus is only temporarily inhabited by the Christ aeon between his baptism and his crucifixion.

This article argues that adoptionism is an anachronistic category when used to describe texts from the first three Christian centuries, a mirage created by later theological controversies about the relationship between the Father and the Son. I survey the evidence for second- and third-century figures and texts generally identified ‘adoptionist’ in order to show that these figures do not advocate a shared christological stance. Instead, we find a variety of distinct postures that disagree with both each other and with common scholarly definitions of adoptionism. Although metaphors of adoption were theologically productive in early Christianity, to identify early Christian figures, texts and movements as adoptionist implies a theological unity that does not exist. The category itself is a problem. Not only are historical adoptionists absent, but early Christian metaphors of adoption and divine sonship functioned within diverse articulations of Jesus’ identity which do not map onto modern definitions.

Maximus the Confessor says that the Word of God wills to be embodied always and in all things. Against many who wish to render this ‘universal incarnation’ metaphorical, I attempt a literal reading. When Maximus speaks of the Word's universal incarnation, he refers to the deification of human beings, which constitutes a single reality with the Word's incarnation. For Maximus, deification perfectly realises and completes the very logic of the Word's incarnational descent: just as God became whole man while remaining whole God, human beings will become whole God while remaining wholly human. Herein all things become enhypostasised into the Word – rendered one by grace with Christ himself, through his humanity – and so the Word becomes embodied in all things.

Supralapsarian christologies all hold that the incarnation is not contingent upon sin but may differ on the nature of the gift given to us in the incarnation. In this essay I conceptualize and evaluate a crucial difference between two supralapsarian strategies. One strategy, exemplified by Kathryn Tanner, focuses on the natures of the incarnate One: it argues that in the incarnation the Word takes on a human nature which, being transformed in the act of assumption, becomes the conduit of grace for those who share in the same humanity. The other, represented by Samuel Wells, thinks of the incarnation as a gift of a transforming presence of the incarnate person. In taking on human form, the person of the divine Word comes as close to us as God can – the invisible God now can be seen, touched, heard – and draws us into a community of friendship and love.

The uncovering of manuscripts over the last one hundred years has repeatedly changed how early Christian history is told. With no signs of this trend abating, this article seeks to take stock of how scholars respond to manuscript discoveries by focusing on three debates over the orthodoxy of an early Christian figure that extend over two hundred and fifty years. New manuscript evidence sparked no less than three debates over the christological views of the Syriac author Jacob of Serugh (d. 520/521) from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. In the first debate, the arrival of manuscripts in Western Europe led to a conflict between the Maronite scholars who viewed Jacob as a Chalcedonian thinker and certain textual evidence that suggested otherwise. The second debate began in the late nineteenth century after manuscripts from Egypt arrived in London that contained Jacob’s extensive epistolary corpus, which includes clear expressions of non-Chalcedonian, miaphysite christology. A new acquisition by the Vatican Library in the mid-twentieth century featured a previously unknown homily that included two lines that could be interpreted in a Chalcedonian manner. This inspired several Western scholars to dig yet deeper into the manuscripts to resolve this long-standing debate over his christological views. The focused analysis of the pendulum swings initiated by manuscript discoveries in the scholarly discourse surrounding Jacob of Serugh serves as a mirror for self-reflection on the way that scholars discuss a past whose many unknowns still await discovery.

This article engages Thomas F. Torrance's landmark work, Space, Time and Incarnation (1969), suggesting that his approach needs amplification in the light of recent studies emphasising the importance of the affective aspects of theology. The alternative framework of ‘place, history, and incarnation’ is proposed as a means of safeguarding the important subjective aspects of the incarnation, and the theological task of interpreting its significance. The article makes use of Simeon Zahl's account of ‘affective salience’ in developing this richer account of the significance of the incarnation.