FPE board member Matt Elia published “Slave Christologies: Augustine and the Enduring Trouble with the ‘Form of a Slave’ (Phil 2:5–7)” in Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology in January of 2021.
Here’s an abstract of the piece:
This essay finds in the thought of Augustine of Hippo a key moment in the development of a strand of the Western theological tradition I will call slave Christologies: theological accounts of the person and work of Jesus Christ that, drawing from the Philippians hymn (Phil 2:5–11), symbolically identify his body with the body of the enslaved, and in so doing, weave the order of slaveholding into the texture of Christian thought. I approach the political and theological implications of this tradition under the pressure of a twofold haunting: of the perennial, if hard to specify, interplay between ideas and forms of life, between the symbolic and the social; and of the contingent, specific historical afterlife of racial slavery which provides the conditions for contemporary Christian thought.
Congrats, Matt! Find his article here.