In the ideas about the Lord’s Supper set forth by Huldrych Zwingli, Luther thought he saw a threat to the orthodox doctrine of Christ, and he denounced those doctrines vehemently. As that controversy progressed, Luther interpreted the ancient dogma of the two natures to mean that the omnipresence of the divine nature was communicated to the human nature of Christ and that therefore Christ as both God and human being was present everywhere and at all times. Although he repudiated both Luther’s and Zwingli’s theories, Calvin was persuaded that the ancient Christological dogma was true to the biblical witness, and he permitted no deviation from it. All this is evidence for the significance that “Jesus Christ, true God begotten of the Father from eternity, and also true man, born of the Virgin Mary,” to use Luther’s formula, had in the faith and theology of all the reformers.
At one point the theology of the reformers did serve to bring together several facets of the biblical and the patristic descriptions of Jesus Christ. That was the doctrine of the threefold office of Christ, systematized by Calvin and developed more fully in Protestant orthodoxy: Christ as prophet, priest, and king. Each of these symbolized the fulfillment of the Old Testament and represented one aspect of the church’s continuing life. Christ as prophet fulfilled and elevated the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament while continuing to fulfill his prophetic office in the ministry of the Word. Christ as priest brought to an end the sacrificial system of the Old Testament by being both the priest and the victim, while he continues to function as intercessor with and for the church. Christ as king was the royal figure to whom the Old Testament had pointed while exercising his rule among men now through those whom he has appointed. In each of the three, Protestants differed from one another according to their theological, ethical, or liturgical positions. But the threefold office enabled Protestant theology to take into account the complexity of the biblical and patristic pictures of Christ as no oversimplified theory was able to do, and it is probably the chief contribution of the reformers to the theological formulation of the doctrine of the person and work of Christ. The debate over Christology in modern Christian thought
Few Protestant theologians in the middle of the 20th century were willing to endorse the ancient dogma of the two natures in Christ as unconditionally as the reformers had done, for between the Reformation and modern theology there intervened a debate over Christology that altered the perspective of most Protestant denominations and theologians. By the 20th century there was a wider gap between the theology of the reformers and that of many modern Protestants than there had been between the theology of the reformers and that of their Roman Catholic opponents. Origins of the debate
The earliest criticism of orthodox dogma came in the age of the Reformation, not from the reformers but from the “left wing of the Reformation,” from Michael Servetus (1511?–53) and the Socinians. That criticism was directed against the presence of nonbiblical concepts and terms in the dogma, and it was intent upon safeguarding the true humanity of Jesus as a moral example. There were many inconsistencies in that criticism, such as the willingness of Servetus to call Jesus “Son of God” and the Socinian custom of addressing prayer and worship to him. But it illustrates the tendency, which became more evident in the Enlightenment, to use the Reformation protest against Catholicism as a basis for a protest against orthodox dogma as well. Although that tendency did not gain much support in the 16th century because of the orthodoxy of the reformers, later criticism of orthodox Christology was able to wield the “Protestant principle” against the dogma of the two natures on the grounds that this was a consistent application of what the reformers had done. Among the ranks of the Protestant laity, the hymnody and the catechetical instruction of the Protestant churches assured continuing support for the orthodox dogma. Indeed, the doctrine of the Atonement by the vicarious satisfaction of Christ’s death has seldom been expressed as amply as it was in the hymns and catechisms of both the Lutheran and the Reformed churches. During the period of Pietism in the Protestant churches, that loyalty to orthodox teaching was combined with a growing emphasis upon the humanity of Jesus, also expressed in the hymnody of the time.
When theologians began to criticize orthodox ideas of the person and work of Christ, therefore, they met with opposition from the common people. Albert Schweitzer dates the development of a critical attitude from the work of H.S. Reimarus (1694–1768), but Reimarus was representative of the way the Enlightenment treated the traditional view of Jesus. The books of the Bible were to be studied just as other books are, and the life of Jesus was to be drawn from them by critically sifting and weighing the evidence of the Gospels. The Enlightenment thus initiated the modern interest in the life of Jesus, with its detailed attention to the problem of the relative credibility of the Gospel records. It has been suggested by some historians that the principal target of Enlightenment criticism was not the dogma of the two natures but the doctrine of the vicarious Atonement. The leaders of Enlightenment thought did not make a sudden break with traditional ideas but gave up belief in miracles, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and the Second Advent only gradually. Their principal importance for the history of the doctrine of Christ consists in the fact that they made the historical study of the sources for the life of Jesus an indispensable element of any Christology. The 19th century
Although the Enlightenment of the 18th century was the beginning of the break with orthodox teachings about Jesus Christ, it was only in the 19th century that the break attracted wide support among theologians and scholars in many parts of Christendom—even, for a while, among the modernists of the Roman Catholic Church. Two works of the 19th century were especially influential in their rejection of orthodox Christology: one was the Life of Jesus, first published in 1835 by David Friedrich Strauss, and the other, bearing the same title, was first published by Ernest Renan in 1863. Strauss’s work paid more attention to the growth of Christian ideas—he called them “myths”—about Jesus as the basis for the picture presented in the Gospels, while Renan attempted to account for Jesus’ career by a study of his inner psychological life in relation to his environment. Both works achieved wide circulation and were translated into other languages, including English. They took up the Enlightenment contention that the sources for the life of Jesus were to be studied as other sources are, and what they constructed on the basis of the sources was a type of biography in the modern sense of the word. In addition to Strauss and Renan, the 19th century saw the publication of a plethora of books about the life and teachings of Jesus. Each new hypothesis regarding the problem of the Synoptic Gospels implied a reconstruction of the life and message of Jesus.
The fundamental assumption for most of that work on the life and teachings of Jesus was a distinction between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith.” Another favourite way of putting the distinction was to speak of the religion “of” Jesus in antithesis to the religion “about” Jesus. This implied that Jesus was a human being like other human beings but with a heightened awareness of the presence and power of God. Then the dogma of the church had mistaken that awareness for a metaphysical statement that Jesus was the Son of God and had thus distorted the original simplicity of his message. Some critics went so far as to question the very historicity of Jesus, but even those who did not go that far questioned the historicity of some of the sayings and deeds attributed to Jesus in the Gospels.
In part that effort grew out of the general concern of 19th-century scholarsip with the problem of history, but it also reflected the religious and ethical assumptions of the theologians. Many of them were influenced by the moral theories of Kant in their estimate of what was permanent about the teachings of Jesus and by the historical theories of Hegel in the way they related the original message of Jesus to the Christian interpretations of that message by later generations of Christians. The ideas of evolution and of natural causality associated with the science of the 19th century also played a part through the naturalistic explanations of the biblical miracles. And the historians of dogma, climaxing in Adolf von Harnack (1851–1931), used their demonstration of the dependence of ancient Christology upon non-Christian sources for its concepts and terminology to reinforce their claim that Christianity had to get back from the Christ of dogma to the “essence of Christianity” in the teachings of Jesus about the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. The 20th century and beyond