I have Karkainnen’s christology book, and hopefully enough time this summer to read it.

That is my inclination as well. I don’t remember much from my seminary classes that just offered a really broad overview of things because I never had mental hooks in place from which I could hang everything together. If I was able to remember something, it was an oversimplification of someone’s view, or a contrived bifurcation of the tradition.

The example of my recently completed Christian Liturgy survey course comes to mind. Each lecture was an assault of information covering a broad range of related topics, and I came away every Monday with ejaculatory notes and a few snippets of interesting information. Studying for my exam was near-nightmarish, I simply couldn’t retain enough information to feel prepared, and my final grade suggests I got a mere B+. There was simply too much to know.

I would have gained much more from the class had I been equipped to engaged liturgical material on my own, with particularly important information used to equip me and ensure I came away from the class with the most relevant knowledge. This was the approach taken in my Pentateuch and Historical Books survey couse, and though we only worked our way through 20 chapters of Genesis, I am now well prepared to engage the rest of the texts on my own.

Equipping the students to learn on their own while ensuring they come away with some of the most important information is, in my opinion, the better approach because it allows us to come away from the class with the skills to do theology but without an overload of information. As a student myself, more internalising of method and less memorising of facts is always the more enjoyable and effective learning experience.

For a subject like Christology, I think the better approach would be to give the students a good understanding of the big questions, Historical Jesus, homoousios, etcetera, with a focus on equipping the students to engage critically with those questions. I love Christology, but when i’m in an introductory course I don’t really care about the names of the faction leaders at Niceae, I care about thinking critically about the questions they were fighting over.