Doing Christology within a Baptist Heritage

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article first explores the way that five Baptist theologians, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, present a Christology inherited from Chalcedon. Their own thought shows that while they are faithful to the formula of ‘one person, two natures’, they are driven to conclusions in which the modern reader can see the Christological model deconstructing itself. The article goes on to propose an alternative path in a Christology ‘from below’, such as advocated by Wolfhart Pannenberg, which stresses a oneness of person between the human Jesus and God, while discarding a duality of natures. However, going beyond Pannenberg, the article proposes that the Chalcedonian statement of ‘one and the same son’ is best affirmed when Jesus the human son is understood as participating perfectly in a relationship of ‘sonship’ in the triune God. In this covenant of sonship – or daughterhood – all created beings participate to some degree.