MM Thomas - Life, Legacy and Theology

THEOLOGY OF MADATHILPARAMPIL MAMMEN THOMAS
This new covenant would be offered to all people until justice had been
established across the earth (Isa: 42:4-7), with the creation of a new humanity liberated
from the slavery of ‘all Pharaohs.’ 113 Through the new covenant, established in Jesus
Christ, the “social, liberation purposes underlying the old covenant, and which was
incapable of getting practiced on the basis of it, will get realised powerfully in
history.” 114 In his early meditations, The Realization of the Cross, Thomas writes:
When thus God sent his own Son into the world to befriend the
sinner and to seek and save the lost, the very essence of the humanity
which is of God was revealed in all is fullness. In a real sense it
became available for the human race…The very nature of God’s
relationship with man was unveiled in him as a fact in history – the fact
we call Redemption. 115
3. The Christology of M.M. Thomas
The theology of M.M. Thomas cannot be understood apart from his Christology,
for he views the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, as the guarantee of God’s
redemptive purpose for humanity. Christ thus becomes the central focus of the
creation-fall-redemption-consummation paradigm. 116 Although Thomas’s Christology
is examined as a separate unit here, it remains integrally connected to and continuous
with the observations made in the previous section.
3.1. The Incarnation of Christ
M.M. Thomas interprets the salvation act of God in Jesus Christ to be a
historical event representing the goal of human history. 117 Reflecting on the core
message of the Christian Gospel, he writes: “It is for the…sake of the world that
God became man in Jesus Christ. The heart of the gospel is that God loved the
world so much that he gave his only begotten Son to be its salvation (John 3:16),
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