Christology

It may seem something of a tautology to assert that Christianity could be nothing without Christ, but the content of that statement is that Christ functions as a powerful symbol of both history and religion and that symbols are important to both religion because they illustrate the relationship of Christ to life and the character of the relationship of Christians to one another and to non-Christians. The figure of Christ, indeed, is more than a symbol of human experience (although of course it is that), whether idealized or historicized. Christ is bound up with human experience, and conceptions held of Christ have historically informed the quality of human experience, at both individual and "macro" levels.

In Cone's formulation, the position of Jesus in religious experience is to be found where it lends meaning to social experience of the oppressed. What that comes down to in Cone

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or justice is the substance of meaning that Jesus has in the modern period, according to Cone's line of thought. In developing a narrative line of Jesus' biography that is consistent with this meaning, Cone emphasizes the fact that Jesus took on the struggle for justice when he functioned as a revolutionary teacher. The meaning of Jesus' death is that it was part of the pattern of injustice against which he had preached, and the meaning of the Resurrection is that in the his divine aspect he was able to make good "God's promise to bring freedom to all who are weak and helpless" (Cone 97). In this view, the resurrection is God's demonstration that Jesus as the risen Lord has literally overcome the finality of death, where death itself has been an exercise in social injustice. Further, the resurrection, embodied in the figure of Jesus, illustrates the power of the divine to intervene in or to lend meaning to human experience, and by extension to remain a presence in current human experience, not just a historical artifact or a biography of an unusual man, however miraculous the story of rising from the dead might be. It would be a mistake to get bogged down in whether the resurrection "really happened"; indeed, it can be said that t
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Faith Jesus', Jesus Christ, God Liberator, Christianity Christ, God Oppressed, Spirit Jesus, Positioning Jesus, Black Christ, Christology Christian, Cone Christian, human experience, meaning jesus modern, positioning jesus, jesus modern, meaning jesus, freedom cone, figure christ, jesus' suffering, social liberation, modern experience, christian theology,
Approximate Word count = 1657
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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