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The Christology of Erasmus
Christ, Humanity, and Peace
Terence J. Martin
Catholic University of America Press, 2024
Nothing is more central to the religious thinking of Erasmus of Rotterdam than the reality of Christ—in his eyes, that supreme revelation of divine mercy embodied in the life of Jesus of Nazareth to which Christian scriptures variously testify, but also the divine presence undergirding that life-centering ethic of love and peace, what Erasmus calls the “philosophy of Christ.” The purpose of this book is to distill the Christological elements from his vast corpus in a manner that shows the range, coherence, and value of Erasmus’ thinking on Christological questions. While Erasmus works within the broad parameters of orthodox teaching, his critical skills with languages, accent on rhetoric in theology, keen sense of irony, appreciation for the limits of human knowledge, incipient sense of history, emphasis on the welfare of humanity, and passionate defense of peace, give his work a distinctive stamp and thereby make a singular contribution to the history of Christology. What Erasmus contributes to discussions of the divinity of Christ is a counsel of restraint in metaphysical speculation, an accent on the revelatory breadth of the eternal Word of God, and an invitation to think of Christ incarnate as the eloquent oration of God. But the central impulse of the Christology of Erasmus is the affirmation of the full incarnation of Christ in human existence, abstaining as much as possible from docetic insulation of the divine from the struggles of human experience, in order to highlight the redemptive capacity of Christ for the transformation of human life. With that, the ethical capstone of Erasmus’ reflections on Christ centers on the responsibility to imitate Christ’s love for others, and thus for advancing the cause of peace in personal and social life. This books adds the voice of this remarkable Catholic humanist to the history of theological discussions in the early modern era, while also restoring its rightful place in the broader history of Christology.
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Correspondence on Christology and Grace
Rob Roy McGregor
Catholic University of America Press, 2013
Between the years AD 519 and 523, Fulgentius engaged in correspondence with a group of Latin-speaking monks from Scythia, and that correspondence is translated into English--almost all of it for the first time--in this volume.
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Documents from the Luciferians
In Defense of the Nicene Creed
Colin M. Whiting
SBL Press, 2019

Six important documents for scholars of early church history

This volume includes English translations of several documents concerning the Luciferians, a group of fourth-century Christians whose name derives from the bishop Lucifer of Cagliari. Documents include a confession of faith written for Emperor Theodosius I and a theological treatise written for his wife by Luciferian clergyman Faustinus, the first English translation of a Luciferian petition to Theodosius that focuses on the persecution the community has suffered, Theodosius’s imperial law in response to the Luciferians, two letters composed by Luciferians that purport to represent correspondence from the bishop Athanasius of Alexandria to Lucifer, and the priest Jerome’s Dialogus adversus Luciferianos. These texts highlight connections between developments in Christian theology and local Christian communities in the course of the fourth century.

Features:

  • The first English translation of Faustinus’s Libellus precum
  • An overview of the development of late antique theology and Christianity
  • An introduction to Luciferian beliefs and the translated texts
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Glaphyra on the Pentateuch, Volume 1
Nicholas P. St. Cyril of Alexandria
Catholic University of America Press, 2019
Cyril of Alexandria (ca. 376–444) is best known for his defense of orthodoxy at the time of the Nestorian controversy over the nature of Christ. However, by far the larger part of Cyril’s literary output consisted of commentaries on books of both Old and New Testaments, written before the Christological debate was sparked off in 428. One of these works, of major proportions, was the so-called Glaphyra (“elegant comments”) on the Pentateuch. This comprises a total of thirteen separate “books,” or volumes: seven on Genesis, three on Exodus, and one each on Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The comments primarily concern the narrative portions of the Pentateuch, hence the greater space given to Genesis, though a number of the legal prescriptions are also treated. This present volume, containing all seven books on Genesis, is the first of a projected two-volume set which will offer a translation of the whole Glaphyra for the first time in English. Cyril’s aims within the commentary are both theological and pastoral. His chosen method begins with a consideration of the historia. Here the Alexandrian patriarch deals with the text at the literal level. At this stage he explains any historical, cultural, and at times even linguistic and textual issues presented within the passage, which is then followed by some theological instruction or lessons of a more practical nature based upon the literal interpretation. The exposition then moves on to the theoria. This is Cyril’s preferred term for the contemplation of the spiritual sense, that is to say, the mystery of Christ which he firmly held lay hidden beneath the surface of the Old Testament text. With great adeptness and consistency Cyril identifies elements within the ancient narratives as figures, or “types and shadows,” of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Church, and the teachings of the gospel.
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Glaphyra on the Pentateuch, Volume 2
St. Cyril of Alexandria
Catholic University of America Press, 2019
The translation of the commentary of Cyril of Alexandria (ca. 376-444) on the Pentateuch, known as the Glaphyra, or “elegant comments,” is now completed by this second volume. Volume 1 contained the whole of his remarks on Genesis, and now Volume 2 presents his comments on Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, along with indices for the entire work. At this early stage in his patriarchate Cyril was an avid expositor of Scripture, on books of both Testaments, possibly undertaking this work as a model and guide for the clergy under his direction. While Cyril’s other large-scale commentaries on Old Testament books, such as Isaiah and the Minor Prophets (the latter commentary also published in translation by CUA Press), followed a verse-by-verse approach, the Glaphyra is more thematic. As Cyril works through the narrative passages of the Pentateuch, he pauses to explain those elements within the text that present possible difficulties or admit alternative interpretations, and invariably concludes each section by bringing out spiritual lessons of benefit to the congregation. Many of these latter relate to Christ, since, for Cyril, a Christological reading of the Old Testament was unavoidable. While in the Glaphyra it was not Cyril’s purpose to tackle the legal passages within the Pentateuch, a task that he wished to reserve for a separate work of an entirely different character (De adoratione et cultu in spiritu et veritate, “Concerning Worship and Service in Spirit and in Truth”), he does nevertheless here depart from his own remit on occasion and deal with some of the more prominent ceremonial passages. Cyril gives considerable space, for example, to the sacrifice of the Passover lamb and the levitical ritual for the cleansing of the leper, among others. As with Volume 1, Cyril’s treatment of these books is published here for the first time in English translation.
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Gospel Jesuses and Other Nonhumans
Biblical Criticism Post-poststructuralism
Stephen D. Moore
SBL Press, 2017

Essential reading for biblical studies students and scholars interested in cutting-edge critical theory

The current global ecological crisis has prompted a turn to the nonhuman in critical theory. This book breaks new ground in biblical studies as the first to bring nonhuman theory to bear on the gospels and Acts. Nonhuman theory, a confluence of several of the main theoretical streams that have issued forth since the heyday of high poststructuralism, includes affect theory, posthuman animality studies, critical plant studies, object-oriented new materialisms, and assemblage theory. Nonhuman theory dismantles and reassembles the Western concept of “the human” that coalesced during the Enlightenment and testifies to other conceptions of the human and of the nonhuman, not least those found in the canonical gospels and Acts. Stephen D. Moore’s exegetical explorations and defamiliarizations of these overly familiar texts and excavations of their incessantly erased strangeness are the central feature of this provocative book.

Features

  • New paths in biblical ecotheology and ecocriticism
  • A significant contribution to the analysis of emotions in biblical texts
  • Class resource for courses in methods for biblical studies, the gospels, and the Bible and ecology
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The Incarnate Lord
Thomas Josepth White, OP
Catholic University of America Press, 2015
The Incarnate Lord, then, considers central themes in Christology from a metaphysical perspective. Particular attention is given to the hypostatic union, the two natures of Christ, the knowledge and obedience of Jesus, the passion and death of Christ, his descent into hell, and resurrection. A central concern of the book is to argue for the perennial importance of ontological principles of Christology inherited from patristic and scholastic authors. However, the book also seeks to advance an interpretation of Thomistic Christology in a modern context. The teaching Aquinas, then, is central to the study, but it is placed in conversation with various modern theologians, such as Karl Barth, Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Ultimately the goal of the work is to suggest how traditional Catholic theology might thrive under modern conditions, and also develop fruitfully from engaging in contemporary controversies.
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Jesus and the Gospel Movement
Not Afraid to Be Partners
William Thompson-Uberuaga
University of Missouri Press, 2006
The disciples. Mary Magdalene. Lazarus. The New Testament tells of Jesus, to be sure, but it is a Jesus depicted in interaction with many other people. Far too often, Jesus has been studied in isolation rather than as a person sharing relationships. This book seeks to rediscover Jesus in relation to the movement beginning to form around him.
            One of the few books to explore fully the political dimensions of the emerging church, Jesus and the Gospel Movement brings studies of Jesus and Christology into dialogue with today’s social and political sciences. William Thompson-Uberuaga seeks to penetrate the mist surrounding the historical Jesus by inviting readers to imagine him through the perspective of his relationships and to consider how those relationships helped shape his personality and commitments—not just the intellectual aspects but also his feelings, his affectionate bonds, and the reciprocal bonds he stimulated in others.
            This extended meditation represents the first book-length engagement with Voegelin scholarship on these issues, and scholars in Voegelin studies will find a challenging appropriation of that thinker’s political philosophy. It also draws on insights of other philosophers ranging from Nietzsche to Derrida, with a particular emphasis on Gadamer’s hermeneutical thought. Useful for courses in Jesus studies, Christology, and Christianity and politics, the text also features an Internet link to supplements accompanying each chapter, which have been written by the author especially for this book to enable students and readers to delve deeper into the thicket of scholarly debates concerning these issues.
            Thompson-Uberuaga asks readers to imagine the various beliefs about Jesus as the result of forms of participation, helping us make sense of how they emerged and offering a way of evaluating their validity—and arguing that we will form only a narrow, even lopsided view of Jesus if we consider him apart from his relationships. By daring a personal interpretation of Jesus and the Gospel movement that he and his companions originated, this book boldly challenges readers to risk their own interpretations and arrive at their own understanding of the Messiah.
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Jesus, Interpreted
Matthew J. Ramage
Catholic University of America Press, 2017
In this sequel volume to his Dark Passages of the Bible (CUA Press, 2013), author Matthew Ramage turns his attention from the Old to the New Testament, now tackling truth claims bearing directly on the heart of the Christian faith cast into doubt by contemporary New Testament scholarship: Did God become man in Jesus, or did the first Christians make Jesus into God? Was Jesus' resurrection a historical event, or rather a myth fabricated by the early Church? Will Jesus indeed return to earth on the last day, or was this merely the naïve expectation of ancient believers that reasonable people today ought to abandon?
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Jesus the Mediator
William Brownsberger
Catholic University of America Press, 2013
In Jesus the Mediator, William L. Brownsberger offers an account of the human psychology assumed by the Second Person of the Trinity in light of its salvific significance
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Jesus-Shock
Peter Kreeft
St. Augustine's Press, 2008

Jesus Shock is the second in a series of short works on seminal concerns of the impact that Jesus Christ made in the world. The first work, The Philosophy of Jesus (St. Augustine’s Press, 2007), explored philosophy in light of Jesus, rather than the other way around. The present work investigates the reception Jesus received both in His lifetime and continuously to the present time, not only from His enemies, but from His friends, a reception of shock, astonishment, even disgust.
  Perhaps a few remarks from the book best explains it:

The point of the book:
 The point of the title: Imagine a storm has downed a telephone wire so that everyone who touches it is shocked in every cell of his body. Well, the storm of God’s crazy love has “downed” (incarnated) Jesus, and everyone who touches this “live wire” is shocked in every cell of his soul.
 The question of the book: Why is “Jesus” the most non-neutral, the most controversial, the most embarrassing name in the world? Why is talking about Jesus like talking about sex?
 This whole book is really about a single movie line, the greatest line in the greatest movie in history. Bet you know what it is.
 Jesus-Shock is about the Real Presence of Christ in the Gospels and in the Eucharist. It
is not about the theology of the Real Presence, but about the experience of Him there, and about the experience of everyone in the Gospels who met Him.

 What was the bitterest controversy of the Protestant Reformation, both between Protestants and Catholics and between different Protestant denominations, the one that had both sides calling the other not just heretics but devils?   
 Answer: It was not Justification by Faith, the hallmark of the Reformation, even though that question is about nothing less momentous than how to be saved, how to get to Heaven. It was not the relation between religion and politics, even though that was a matter of life or death (literally, on battlefields and at guillotines and hangings) and not just a matter of truth or falsity, or of good or evil. It was not about the sufficiency of the Bible, or the corruption in the Church, or the relation between the Bible and the Church. It was not about the Pope, and the governance of the Church. It was not about Mary or saints or angels or Purgatory. It was not about the Incarnation or the Trinity or the Atonement.
 It was about the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

 Jesus-Shock, in addressing this controversy forcefully and faithfully, shows the reasons why to this day the name of “Jesus” stirs up controversy, even revulsion, in polite society. In the true spirit of ecumenism, it also points the way toward a true rapprochement among His modern-day disciples.

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The Philosophy of Jesus
Peter Kreeft
St. Augustine's Press, 2007

Amazingly, no one ever seems to have looked at Jesus as a philosopher, or his teaching as philosophy. Yet no one in history has ever had a more radically new philosophy, or made more of a difference to philosophy, than Jesus. He divided all human history into two, into "B.C." and "A.D."; and the history of philosophy is crucial to human history, since philosophy is crucial to man; so how could He not also divide philosophy?

This book (1) looks at Jesus as a complete human being (as well as divine), therefore also as a philosopher; (2) looks at philosophy as Jesus' pre-modern contemporaries did, as a wisdom, a world-view, and a way of life rather than as a super-science (Descartes, Hegel) or as a servant-science (Hobbes, Hume); and (3) looks at philosophy in light of Jesus rather than at Jesus in light of philosophy. It explores the consequences of Etienne Gilson's point that when St. John brought Christianity and Greek philosophy into contact and identified the Messiah the Jews had most deeply sought with the logos that the Greeks had most deeply sought, nothing happened to Christ but something happened to the logos.

This book explores the most radical revolution in the history of philosophy, the differences Jesus made to metaphysics (the philosophy of being), to epistemology (the philosophy of knowing), to anthropology (the philosophy of man), and to philosophical ethics and politics.

And, besides, it has the greatest ending of any philosophy book in a century.

Contents

Introduction 1: Who Is It For?

Introduction 2: How Is Jesus a Philosopher?

Introduction 3: What Are the Four Great Questions of Philosophy?

I. Jesus’ Metaphysics (What is real?)

* Jesus’ Jewish Metaphysics

* Jesus’ New Name for God

* The Metaphysics of Love

* The Moral Consequences of Metaphysics

* Sanctity as the Key to Ontology

* The Metaphysics of “I AM”

II. Jesus’ Epistemology (How do we know what is real?)

III. Jesus’ Anthropology (Who are we who know what is real?)

IV. Jesus’ Ethics (What should we be to be more real?)

* Christian Personalism: Seeing “Jesus only”

* Jesus and Legalism

* Jesus and Relativism

* Jesus and the Secret of Moral Success

* Jesus and Sex

* Jesus and Social Ethics: Solidarity

* Jesus and Politics: Is He Left or Right?

Conclusion

Index

Peter Kreeft, Professor of Philosophy at Boston College, is author of over forty books, including two from St. Augustine’s Press, Socratic Logic and The Sea Within.

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The Reason of Following
Christology and the Ecstatic I
Robert P. Scharlemann
University of Chicago Press, 1991
In the Reason of Following noted scholar Robert P. Scharlemann takes Christology in a radically new direction, suggesting that Christology itself represents a form of reason and an understanding of selfhood. For the first time, Scharlemann establishes a logical place for Christology in philosophical theology.

Scharlemann presents a christological phenomenology of the self, tracing the connections between the "I am" of the God who spoke to Moses, the "I am" of Christ, and the "I am" of autonomous self-identification. How, he asks, can the self that spontaneously responds to Jesus' "Follow me!" be compared with the everyday, autonomous self? What is the nature of "following" on the part of those who answer the summons of one whose name is "I am"? Pursuing these questions, Scharlemann develops a christological phenomenology of the self—an account in which following means not the expression of the self in action or reflection but rather self-discovery in another person.

With a deep sense of both culture and philosophy, Scharlemann distinguishes the forms of reason involved in "following" from those in ethics, aesthetics, and other modes of religious philosophic thought. His penetrating readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German theological and philosophical traditions provide an introduction to lesser-known thinkers such as Hermann and Picht as well as a profound critique of major figures such as Descartes, Heidegger, Fichte, and Kant.

Finally Scharlemann outlines a program for a more systematic and rounded presentation of what Christian doctrine might mean in the contemporary world. His work will be of interest to students of theology and philosophy alike.
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The Roles of Christ's Humanity in Salvation
Insights from Theodore of Mopsuestia
Frederick G. McLeod S.J.
Catholic University of America Press, 2005
This book enables one to judge Theodore's christological statements in the wider context of how he conceives of Christ's roles in salvation.
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Selected Prose Works
Commentary on Genesis, Commentary on Exodus, Homily on Our Lord, Letter to Publius
Saint Ephrem the Syrian
Catholic University of America Press, 1994
This volume presents for the first time in the Fathers of the Church series the work of an early Christian writer who did not write in either Greek or Latin. It offers new English translations of selected prose works by St. Ephrem the Syrian (c. A.D. 309-373).
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Three Christological Treatises
St. Cyril of Alexandria
Catholic University of America Press, 2014
Twenty-nine in all, these letters cover all but three of Cyril's years as a bishop. The first twelve were published in 2009 (Fathers of the Church 118). The present volume completes the set. Festal letters were used in Alexandria primarily to announce the beginning of Lent and the date of Easter. They also served a catechetical purpose, however, allowing the Patriarch an annual opportunity to write pastorally not just about issues facing the entire see, but also about the theological issues of the day. Thus, in these letters we catch a glimpse of Cyril the pastor writing about complex theology in an uncomplicated way. These letters also illuminate other realities of the ancient church in Alexandria, especially the relationship with the Jewish community and the rising influence of asceticism.
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Wisdom, Christology, and Law in Matthew's Gospel
M. Jack Suggs
Harvard University Press, 1970


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