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There is good reason to believe that the earliest explicit christology, making use of Jewish concepts, titles, etc., thought and spoke about Jesus as a human being whom God had appointed Messiah and, in that sense, Son of God. But between this earliest explicit christology and the classical christology of the councils of Niccea Nicea and Chalcedon, there is evidently an important discontinuity, since Jesus is thought and spoken about in the second very differently, as a divine being who has somehow become human. The great problem with this classical christology, however, is how, presupposing that Jesus is one person, not two, one can assert that he is also a human being. As surely as Alexandrine christology, like later so-called neo-Chalcedonian christology, vindicates the presupposition that Jesus is, indeed, one person, it appears at the same time to deny in effect that he is also truly human. On the other hand, Antiochene christology clearly asserts that Jesus is truly human, but it appears to be able to do so only by in effect overthrowing the presupposition that he is not two persons but one. Of course, the Chalcedonian formula was deliberately formulated to avoid the difficulties of both of these solutions. But there is the most serious question whether the settlement that Chalcedon sought to achieve isn't simply a restatement of the problem, as distinct from anything like a tenable solution to it.

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Consequently, even if one can quite rightly argue that christological assertions are and must be, in some sense, ontological or metaphysicat metaphysical, this ought not to be confused with the very different argument that they can be adequate only insofar as they include the assertion that Jesus is divine, indeed, is truly God. Judged from the standpoint of the constitutive christological assertion that Christian faith and witness make or imply about Jesus, the typical classical christology is, at best, only a more or less adequate way of formulating it, given certain religious or philosophical assumptions.

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