Broadly speaking, this dissertation seeks to defend the enduring importance of ancient Christian hermeneutical practices in the contemporary interpretive landscape. More specifically, my project invites the cosmic Christology and hermeneutical instincts of seventh-century luminary, Maximus Confessor, to guide my own theological interpretation of Matthew’s Gospel.
Famously, for the Confessor, “the Word of God and God wills eternally and in all to accomplish the mystery of his embodiment” (Amb. 7.22). This enigmatic phrase gestures at the Christological core that occupies the Confessor’s cosmic theology. Especially, it reflects Maximus’s insight that “the mystery” of the first-century Incarnation of the divine Word, as articulated in the Chalcedonian definition, establishes the metaphysical grammar through which the faithful may contemplate God’s origination, sustenance and salvation (deification) of creation itself.
Seeking to bridge the fields of biblical studies and historical theology, then, this project asks how Maximus’s “cosmic Christology” can illumine our contemporary exegesis of Matthew’s Gospel. If we shine Maximus’s (Scripturally rich) articulations of the “God-world” relation back upon Matthew, what “Christ” do we encounter in Matthew’s pages? What “world”? What “humanity”? How might Maximus’s own patterns of reading and thinking become generative of our own theological attention and exegetical insight? How might we encounter the story of the First Gospel anew? Ultimately, I will argue that we encounter a Christ who 1) mystically embodies the sufferings of each of his creatures, and 2) inaugurates the healing and new creation of all things through their deification. Even in Matthew’s Gospel, the divine Word is the One and the many—where “each part is the whole Christ himself” (St. Symeon the New, 2010, p. 87)—so that “in him” all disparate things find their perfect end “in” God, who is all in all (1 Cor 9:22).