The third chapter of Beyond Old and New Perspectives on Paul is “The Current Crises” by Douglas Campbell. Here Campbell sets up his understanding of the contrast between two views of salvation in Christ. Oddly enough, for something about the “current crisis”, it has a lot to do with the fourth century argument between Arianism and Athanasius.
Campbell is not specifically talking about whether Jesus is divine or not, which is what I have understood that the Arian controversy was about. He is talking about what he calls methodological Arianism. His idea is that even though the Church rejected the results of Arian thought, a major strand of Christian thinking continued to use an Arian method.
As I understand him, he means that Athanaius started with Christ as the ultimate self-disclosure of God and reasoned back from that to all other doctrines. Arian method, on the other hand, was to…
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James' Ramblings 