Some Reflections on My Current Writing Project

I’ve been spending the past several weeks deep in what feels like a grand conversation across two thousand years—listening, comparing, and trying to catch the tone of how the Church has spoken about Christ. The project began simply enough: to identify the most significant contributions to Christology through the centuries and write short, paragraph-length summaries of each. But somewhere along the way it stopped feeling like data collection and turned into a kind of pilgrimage. Each figure—ancient, medieval, modern—has their own cadence, their own astonished vocabulary for the same wonder: that the Word became flesh.

One day it’s Gregory of Nazianzus, his sentences like lightning over Cappadocia, stammering to describe the “Godhead veiled in flesh.” The next, it’s Thomas à Kempis, quiet and practical, reminding you that imitation is itself a kind of knowing. Then suddenly you’re in the 13th century, with Bonaventure and Duns Scotus arguing (beautifully) about whether the Incarnation would have happened even without the Fall. You move forward a few centuries and find Richard Baxter, Puritan and pastor, urging his readers to “know Christ and him crucified” with the urgency of a man who’s seen too much suffering to waste time on abstractions. By the time you reach Bonhoeffer’s Christ the Center, the whole panorama feels almost overwhelming—centuries of voices, each trying to make sense of the same mystery, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in friction, always circling back to the same luminous center.

What’s surprised me most is how exhilarating it is to see the sweep of it all at once. Reading these works side by side—Origen and Calvin, Aquinas and Barth, Sonderegger and Crisp—you start to notice the recurring astonishment, the stubborn conviction that everything else in theology, and maybe even in life, bends toward this one question: Who is Jesus Christ? It’s not tidy work. Some summaries come easy; others require rereading entire treatises just to catch the glint of a single insight. But when it comes together—when a line from a 4th-century oration suddenly rhymes with something from a 21st-century analytic theologian—it feels like standing on a high ridge at dusk, seeing how all the rivers below eventually join.

There’s more to come, of course. The list keeps growing, the paragraphs keep multiplying, and I’m still not sure where and when it will end. But for now, I’m just grateful to trace the outlines of the Church’s long astonishment, one voice at a time.