The opening chapter orients the study in relationship to previous scholarship. I seek to show how previous scholarship has long recognized a tension between John’s Christology and his concurrent emphasis on Jesus’s impending absence but often neglects the way in which this tension pervades John’s narrative and drives the plot. In particular, I argue that studies which understand John’s Christology in terms of a heavenly redeemer figure, the temple, or Stoicism, as well as studies reconstructing the Johannine community, all propose (in various ways) that John eliminate the tension created by Jesus’s absence by minimizing the reality of his absence. In contrast, this study will argue that John uses the tension between presence and absence as a central conflict throughout the narrative. I then lay the groundwork for this argument by briefly describing my understanding of John’s Christology as one focused on divine presence and illustrating how that understanding activates motifs of divine absence underappreciated by previous Johannine scholarship.

This chapter considers John 1:1–18 to establish the basic contours of John’s Christology. It is argued that John depicts Jesus as an extension of the one God’s divinity embodied in a human person. John generates this depiction by comparing Jesus to other figures who throughout Jewish literature functioned as “divine extensions” through whom the God of Israel manifested his presence. Simultaneously, John skillfully employs common features of epiphanic narratives to foreshadow that the plot of his narrative will concern whether humanity recognizes Jesus as the enfleshed divine presence, that is the one in whom the otherwise unseen God becomes visible.

This is the book’s central doctrinal chapter. In it, I claim that Jesus’ whole human life is what God is doing to share God’s own life with the world. The main exposition is arranged around the three parts of that statement: ‘This whole human life’, ‘is what God is doing’, ‘to share God’s own life with the world’. That is, I ask what it means that it is an entire human life, in all its parts and in its unity, that God has chosen as God’s means of self-expression; I ask what sense we can make of the claim that this whole human life is indeed God’s doing, such that this life is God’s own human life; and I ask what it means to say that God’s own life is communicated to the world by this human life. I also argue, however, that every part of the conceptual machinery involved in the doctrine of the incarnation is there for one purpose, and one purpose only. It is there to do what God the Father has already done in the story of Jesus’ transfiguration: to point to this one human being as God’s beloved Son, and to say, ‘Listen to him!’

In this chapter, which focuses on race, I enter into a conversation with Black and womanist theologies, and explore their witness to the Black Christ. I argue in the light of that engagement that Jesus’ consubstantiality with humanity, established in the incarnation, cannot be thought of as a bland universality. It is a relationship in which the poor, those who mourn, and those who hunger and thirst after righteousness come first. It makes sense for Christians in contexts like mine, when looking amidst the many forms of devotion to Jesus that surround us, and seeking to make discernments about what the Spirit might be teaching us about him, to turn first to those with whom Jesus first shared his life. The landscape of forms of Christian devotion is, in other words, not level, but is tilted toward justice, and those places where the love of God most clearly stands against all that denies and betrays this justice are the true heartlands of the imagining of Jesus. It would be wise for those of us not already caught up in such movements of the Spirit to turn first in their direction when seekinig to know Jesus more truly.

This chapter sets the scene for the account of incarnation that appears in Chapter 11. It does so by sketching a theology of the Word. I begin with the Word as the perfect image of God’s life of inexhaustible love. I then turn to creation, arguing that the Word is the pattern of the world’s liveliness, and that the world corresponds to the Word not despite but in and through its materiality and temporality, and precisely by displaying endless variation, animated by the Spirit. And I finish with an account of the Word’s role in salvation, as the one in whom creation is restored to an economy of delight, in which bodies are recognised as gifts from God’s inexhaustible love, and so as always containing more than we have yet seen.

The theology of the incarnation set out in Chapter 12 depends upon the Spirit for its life. In this chapter, I set out something of the pneumatology that is involved. I begin with a speculative depiction of the Spirit’s role in the eternal Godhead, and then transpose that depiction into a series of new settings, moving in turn to the doctrines of creation, incarnation, salvation, and the eschaton. Under each heading I expound the Spirit’s role as the one who unfolds for us the gift of God’s inexhaustible life of love, and draws creatures into that life. I emphasise the ways in which, in doing all this, the Spirit characteristically works with bodies, in all their materiality, temporality, and diversity. Finally, I speak about the limitations upon our reception of the gift that the Spirit is laying out for us – the inherently fragmentary and provisional nature of any one form of reception, and the fallibility and corruption that characterise all forms of reception this side of the eschaton.

In this conclusion, I summarise the guidance that my whole account yields for navigating the landscape of devotion to Jesus. Despite the length of the book and the scale of some of its claims, that yield is simple enough. Look for those forms of devotion in which the gospels, read in the context of worship, are together taken to provide an apt rendering of Jesus, and in which the whole story that they tell is taken to be the word of life spoken to the world by God. And look to the forms of devotion to Jesus that emerge where one sees the love, justice, and mercy of God being pursued and lived out. That is where one can expect to find the Spirit most powerfully at work, drawing people into the knowledge of Jesus and of the love shared with the world in him – the love that is God’s own inexhaustible life.

This introductory chapter explains that the whole book is about the kaleidoscopic landscape of Christian imaginings of Jesus, and that it asks how Christians might learn to navigate that landscape. It sets out the main components of my approach (a focus on ordinary devotion, an avowedly provisional approach to doctrinal theology, a high Christology, and extended conversations with Black, womanist and trans theologies). It gives a preliminary indication of the context from which I write, and it points to the book’s conclusion, which will argue that, to know Jesus more truly, Christians should look to the forms of devotion to him that are sustained where the love, justice, and mercy of God are being lived out. That is where they can expect to find the Spirit most powerfully at work, drawing people into the knowledge of Jesus and of the love shared with the world in him – the love that is God’s own inexhaustible life.

This chapter focuses on gender identity. I begin by exploring the gendered complexity of devotion to Jesus in the Christian tradition, from the gospels to the present day. With the help of a variety of trans theologians, I then return to the idea that in Christian devotion the Spirit gathers people in all the complexity and richness of their embodied existence around the imagined body of Jesus. I ask again what it means to negotiate such bodily life in relation to Jesus in the light of all the affordances and resistances provided by our bodies and by his. The movement for trans, non-binary, and queer liberation provides an opportunity to see how, in this ongoing and unfinishable negotiation, we are all discovering the possible ways of living in, with, and as our bodies, at every level from our chromosomes to the patterns of our feelings and our capacities for certain kinds of experience. This is a negotiation that involves each of us in the discovery and articulation of our own gender identity, and in the invention of forms of community life that will do justice to what we are discovering.

This brief chapter summarises the yield of Chapters 9 to 13. Those chapters circle around the claim that, in Jesus, God is sharing God’s own life of love with the world. That is one way of articulating the claim expressed by the shared practice of devotion in which I participate: the claim that we will discover the life of God, and so discover God’s love, justice, and mercy, by following Jesus together. That is the claim that we make by insisting together upon a continual return to him. I then explain why, in the light of this theology, we can expect devotion to Jesus to take an untameable variety of forms, and why no single form or finite set of forms can constitute a grasp upon, or a possession of Jesus; no single form or finite set of forms can give us a vantage point from which to judge all other forms of devotion to him. The forms of devotion that we know can, I insist, only ever be fragments of the moving and multiplex image that the Spirit goes on generating to do justice to the inexhaustibility of the Word.

Turning to a renewed understanding of apocalyptic shaped by a biblical perspective, this chapter reads history confessionally to see in Jesus Christ a radical opening of history by God’s faithful action, the power of which is gathering a new people under Christ’s lordship freed from the dominion of the Powers and Principalities. From his particular life, message, and ministry, a new humanity of interdependence, solidarity, nonviolence, and mutual provision offers the prospect of an alternative path for history out of capitalism and into social renewal.

What did it mean to be human in the Byzantine church? How was humanity conceived theologically? What were the attributes that comprised the human person? This chapter offers an introduction to anthropological understandings of Byzantine theology. Drawing on major points of consensus across various theologians, genres and liturgical contexts, I show that humanity was understood primarily in light of its divinised potential. Although terminology and understandings of the human body and faculties might differ across various theologians, early and medieval Orthodox thinkers agreed upon the divine origin and end of humanity. From humanity’s creation in the divine image to its potential transcendence in divine communion, humanity in all its diverse expressions was understood as having its fullest expression in God.

The main topic of this chapter is the series of ecumenical councils extending from Constantine the Great until the age of Photius. These councils were imperial councils, convened by the emperor, their decrees issued as imperial laws. From the Council of Chalcedon onwards, both the agenda and the decisions taken by each council were dictated by the emperor of the time, who was particularly concerned to secure decrees that would reunite the church after a period of division. Conciliar definitions of doctrine may have served the development of doctrine, but this was not their aim, which was to reaffirm and protect the doctrines of the church fathers from contamination by novel heresy. Also to be examined is the category of council called σύνοδος ἐνδημοῦσα/synodos endemousa, usually translated as ‘home synod’, which were councils whose distinctive feature was their summoning when needed by the patriarch of Constantinople on his own authority; these councils came to replace ecumenical ones. Finally, to illustrate the contrasting situation in Late Byzantium, the pro-Palamite synods of 1341, 1347, 1351 and 1357 will be discussed; these were primarily patriarchal synods, though with imperial involvement.

Chapter 2 considers how requirements for Christian officials intersected with ongoing debates and disputes over the definition of orthodoxy in East and West. Eastern emperors and post-imperial kings felt the need to establish forms of consensus which might unite potentially opposing churches and church factions amidst new Christological disputes (in the East) and renewed Trinitarian controversies (in the West). This chapter considers how that pursuit of accommodation affected the practical implementation of ideals of a religiously uniform state. What Eastern emperors seem to have sought (and officials provided) was not personal commitment to a particular Christological orthodoxy, but rather, public support of and administrative co-operation with the current imperial line on its definition. Post-imperial kings adopted similar strategies. While the Hasding dynasty eagerly (and self-consciously) deployed the precedents of Theodosian legislation on religious uniformity within the state, these provisions were quietly shelved elsewhere in the West. This tacit acceptance of Christian diversity within the state maps onto the wider attempts of Burgundian and Ostrogothic regimes and their elite subjects to skirt the implications of doctrinal difference as part of wider strategies of accommodation.

Chapter 4 examines how Augustine’s theology of the righteousness of faith also becomes more Christological, that is, uniquely shaped by having Christ as its object. This chapter begins with the fundamental contrast between pride and humility. Augustine sees pride as the love of the delusional thought that one is the center of reality, and faith in Christ as the healing remedy which restores the soul’s relationship to God, the true center. Returning to confessiones (Confessions), Augustine understands faith in Christ as more than just an ascent to God. Instead, it initiates a double movement in which the soul is first humbled by its recognition in faith of Christ’s humble humanity and then exalted by its reception of his divinity. Finally, the chapter turns to de trinitate (The Trinity), in which Augustine explains how, because sacraments present eternal realities through temporal signs, Christ as sacrament makes the humility of God accessible to faith.