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The Logos Who Descends to Me

St. Gregory of Nazianzus’s Christology

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Part of the book series: Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue ((PEID))

Abstract

St. Gregory of Nazianzus (329–90) is among the first Church Fathers who elaborated a coherent and complex teaching regarding the person of our Savior, Jesus Christ. In addition to the biblical arguments that root his teaching, his linguistic and philosophical propensities helped him offer an accurate and thorough definition of the Christ’s evangelical image and saved him from the false heterodox interpretations. While his philosophical education invested his dogmatic assertions with rigor and technical accuracy, many of these becoming classical expressions, his poetic genius, together with his characteristic intuition and sensibility, enlivens these abstract definitions and brings the reader of today (and the auditorium of those times) closer to a more intimate and familiar Christ, the good Shepherd set out in our search.

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Notes

  1. Christopher Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 116.

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  2. St. Gregory of Nazianzus, “The Second Theological Oration (Oration 28),” in On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius, trans. Frederick J. Williams and Lionel R. Wickham (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), 62–63.

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  3. St. Gregory of Nazianzus, “Second Theological Oration (Oration 28),” in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd series, vol. 7, ed. Schaff Philip, trans. Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow (New York: Christian Literature, 1893), 292–93.

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  4. St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 21.16 (Patrologia Graeca, ed. Jacques Paul Migne [Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1857–66; hereafter PG] 36, 96A) and Oration 31.19 (PG 36, 153B–56A); Donald F. Winslow, The Dynamics of Salvation: A Study in Gregory of Nazianzus (Cambridge: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1979), 77.

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  5. I. Vasile Bria, “Hristologia Sfântului Grigorie de Nazianz,” Ortodoxia 2 (1960): 201.

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  6. For a more ample discussion on this matter, including all the patristic answers, see Georgios Martzelos, Ορθόδοξο δόγμα και θεολογικός προβληματισμός: Μελετήματα δογματικής θεολογίας, vol. 1 (Thessaloniki: P. Pournara, 1993), 57–82. See also

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  7. Georges Florovsky, Aspects of Church History (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1975), 49–62.

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  8. Ibid., 316. See also Thomas Spidlik, Grégoire de Nazianze: Introduction à l’étude de sa doctrine spirituelle (Rome: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalum, 1971), 91.

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Authors

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Nicu Dumitraşcu

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© 2016 Florin Tomoioagă

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Tomoioagă, F. (2016). The Logos Who Descends to Me. In: Dumitraşcu, N. (eds) The Ecumenical Legacy of the Cappadocians. Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-50269-8_13

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