Session 9 – Who is Christ? (Reader Zachary Armstrong)

Christ is central to our Christian faith, yet throughout the history of the Church, there have been massive disputes over Who exactly Christ is. In order to truly understand and therefore assimilate the saving work of Christ, the understanding of Who He is becomes tantamount. What is termed a Christological error, no matter how small, can cause huge repercussion in theology and praxis further down the line. Arianism is one such Christological error, which posited that Christ the Word was not God but rather the greatest of all created beings, thus undermining the dogma of the Holy Trinity. It was in response to this that the first ecumenical council at Nicaea was held, from which we receive the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed that we are now lecturing through in this very catechism series today. In this session, we will look at the mind of the Church Fathers and describe their Christology, while looking at some Christological errors that they responded to in order to help us further understand the ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ of statements describing Who Christ is.