Anders-Christian Jacobsen Livres

Christ, his nature, and his works are the most central elements of Christian theology. Origen of Alexandria (185-254) plays an important role in the history of Christology and soteriology. He wrote his many biblical commentaries, theological treatises, and homilies before the Councils of Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451) issued their Christological doctrines, which were to set the agenda for Christological thinking for many centuries. In many respects Origen’s work paved the way for the decisions made in Nicaea and Chalcedon, yet Origen’s Christology is much more multifaceted than these creeds. His Christology is characterized by his understanding of Christ as God’s Wisdom and Word who includes and creates cosmos as a whole. His soteriology is characterized by his pedagogic and universalist thinking, which portrays Christ as a physician and a teacher who leads all human beings and the whole cosmos to completion in God. The present book provides a detailed analysis and interpretation of Origen’s Christology and soteriology as it is expounded in a number of his most important writings thus providing a comprehensive and coherent picture of Origen’s multifaceted Christology and soteriology.

This book contains 13 contributions from an international conference held in 2007. The idea of the conference was to investigate the confrontations and the cultural, philosophical and religious exchange between different religious groups in antiquity and to establish a more comprehensive theory about what apologetics was considered to be both in the context of antiquity and from the perspective of modern scholarship: is it possible to define a literary genre called apologetics? Is it possible to talk about apologetics as a certain kind of discourse which is not limited to a special kind of texts? Which argumentative strategies are implied in apologetic discourses? The essays in this volume present a new approach to these questions.

The volume deals with the writings and the theology of the great Greek apologists of the third and fourth centuries. Its aim is to identify the differences and similarities between them. It can be asserted that there is a Christian-apologetic line of tradition from Origen to Eusebius, and further to Athanasius, and that this has a particular theological and literary profile. Der Band zielt darauf ab, die Texte und die Theologie der großen griechischsprachigen Apologeten des dritten und vierten Jahrhunderts in ihrer Unterschiedenheit und in ihren Gemeinsamkeiten wahrzunehmen. Die Aufsätze zeigen, dass man eine christlich-apologetische Traditionslinie von Origenes über Eusebius zu Athanasius ziehen und wie man diese auch inhaltlich profilieren kann.