ABSTRACT
Chapter two discusses how the form within which Christianity has chosen to work out its doctrine of the person of Christ is seen in early Christian poetics. Given the literary foundations of the Church from the New Testament onward, a continued search for the essential form, content, and import of the person of Christ has been the very foundation of Christianity’s self understanding. Often discussions surrounding the person of Christ have centred on ousiological arguments (homo -, hetero -, or homoi -) that arose from the Council of Chalcedon seeking reasonably to render the ‘nature’ of Jesus as one who is at once sacred and human. This chapter will instead look at early examples of the search for Jesus in poetics. I argue that it is the dominance of form over content and import found in these early creeds that demonstrates the beginning of arguments for the reasonableness of Christianity as a system of beliefs that eclipses the content and import of this system – the figure of Jesus.
