Terminology Tuesday: Recapitulation

recapitulation (Lat. recapitulatio; Gk. ἀνακεφαλαίωσις, a ‘summing-up’, ‘summary’). The term is used in its verbal form in Eph. 1:10, where God is said to sum up all things in Christ, and from this passage was taken over by the Fathers. The conception of recapitulation was elaborated esp. by St *Irenaeus, who interpreted it both as the restoration of fallen humanity to communion with God through the obedience of Christ and as the summing-up of the previous revelations of God in past ages in the Incarnation. Besides these two meanings, which are common in patristic literature, there is a third found in St *Chrysostom, who applies the word to the reunion of both angels and men under Christ as their common head.

Cross, F. L., & Livingstone, E. A. (Eds.). (2005). In The Oxford dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd ed. rev., p. 1380). Oxford;  New York: Oxford University Press.