Excerpt from
Who Is Jesus?
An Introduction to Christology
Thomas P. Rausch, S.J.
© The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., Collegeville,
Minnesota. All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced by any means,
without the written permission of Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota
56321.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Images of Jesus
Starting Points for Christology
Abbreviations
1. The Three Quests for the Historical Jesus
The First Quest: Reimarus to Schweitzer
The New Quest: Käsemann to Schillebeeckx
The Third Quest
Conclusion
2. Methodological Considerations
From Precritical to Critical Christology
The Development of the Gospel Tradition
Recovering the Historical Jesus
Doubtful Criteria
Conclusions
3. The Jewish Background
The Messianic Tradition
The Wisdom Tradition
The Apocalyptic Tradition
First-Century Palestinian Judaism
Conclusion
4. Jesus and His Movement
Jesus and John the Baptist
The Jesus Movement
Conclusion
5. The Preaching and Ministry of Jesus
The Sayings of Jesus
The Parables of Jesus
The Kingdom of God
A Note on the Miracle Tradition
Conclusion
6. The Death of Jesus
The Offense Behind Jesus’ Death
Theological Perspective
How Did Jesus Understand His Death?
Conclusion
7. God Raised Him from the Dead
The Easter Experience
The Easter Tradition
Reflections on Easter Faith
Conclusion
8. New Testament Christologies
Parousia/Exaltation Christologies
Son of God Christologies
Wisdom Christologies
Preexistence Christologies
Conclusion
9. From the New Testament to Chalcedon
Faith and the Dialogue with Culture
From the Third Century to Nicaea
From Nicaea to Chalcedon
Conclusion
10. Sin and Salvation
Sin and Salvation in Scripture
Sin and Salvation in Christian History
The Sixteenth Century
Conclusion
11. A Contemporary Approach to Soteriology
The Mystery of Iniquity
Jesus Mediates God’s Salvation
Is Jesus the Source of Our Salvation?
Conclusion
Glossary
Index of Names
Index of Subjects
Introduction
Who is Jesus? This is the fundamental question for Christology. From the earliest days of the Christian community there have been various answers to this question. The earliest Christians used various titles, most of them drawn from the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures, to express their faith in Jesus. They called him prophet, teacher, Messiah, Son of David, Son of Man, Lord, Son of God, Word of God, and occasionally even God. The New Testament offers a rich variety of Christologies, as we will see below.
Images of Jesus
The Christian tradition has been no less rich than the New Testament in reflecting on the mystery of Jesus. The earliest representations of Jesus in Christian art, found in the catacombs, portrayed him as a shepherd. The Church Fathers saw the pierced side of Christ as the source of the Church and the sacraments. Medieval Christians often saw Jesus as the coming judge who would separate the saved from the damned, a scene frequently represented over the lintels of their churches. But medieval art was also fascinated with the humanity of Jesus. Monastics and mystics meditated on the wounds of Jesus and there was a growing devotion to his heart, precursor to the Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. During the Renaissance many works of art focused on the genitalia of the Christ. Behind this emphasis on the Jesus’ sexuality lies the importance of the Incarnation in Renaissance thought; humanity in all its concreteness was the bearer of the divine. In the last three centuries rationalists, writers, and theologians recreated Jesus largely in their own image; he became an ethical teacher, a noble but human religious ideal (Thomas Jefferson), a loving, misunderstood figure (Renan), or a messianic schemer.
The image of Jesus is infinitely adaptable. In an article based on his 1986 presidential address to the Catholic Biblical Society, Daniel Harrington presents seven different images of Jesus proposed in recent years by scholars, all based on different Jewish backgrounds. They include Jesus as a political revolutionary, magician, Galilean charismatic, rabbi, proto-Pharisee, Essene, or eschatological prophet. Under the influence of liberation theology, Jesus has been portrayed as a social revolutionary, even as a guerrilla clad in military fatigues. Some gay writers have described Jesus as a gay man on the basis of his relationship with the “beloved disciple” of John’s Gospel. Feminists have changed his gender, using a cross with a crucified figure of a woman, “Chresta.” Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza offers a Jesus who saw God, not as “Abba,” despite numerous attestations of this in the tradition, but as Divine Sophia, a female Wisdom figure, and himself as Sophia’s prophet. John Dominic Crossan, a member of Robert Funk’s Jesus Seminar, presents Jesus as a Jewish magician and wandering peasant philosopher in the Cynic tradition whose sayings advocated a radical egalitarianism that challenged established structures and hierarchies. To celebrate the beginning of the Third Millennium, the National Catholic Reporter sponsored a contest called “Jesus 2000,” seeking an artistic representation of Jesus for the new millennium. The winning portrait, chosen by Sister Wendy Beckett, shows a dark skinned, androgynous Jesus, obviously someone from the Third World. The artist explains that though her Jesus was portrayed as a man, the actual model was a woman.
Popular Christianity today has tended to focus on the divinity of Jesus, often at the cost of his humanity. Catholic refer to Jesus as Our Lord or simply as Christ. Many honor him as Christ the King. Those with an Eastern European background often have a devotion to the Infant of Prague, which portrays the child Jesus in the robes and crown of a king. Orthodox Christians honor Jesus as the eternal Logos, and as the Pantocrator, the ruler of the universe who often appears in their iconography. Protestants call on Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior. Many Evangelicals address him as Lord Jesus or even “precious Jesus” in their prayer and look forward to his Second Coming.
Starting Points for Christology
So who is the real Jesus? What is the best starting point for a contemporary Christology? There are various possibilities. Let us consider some of them.
The New Testament
While the New Testament is the most important source for our knowledge of Jesus, the difficulty with using it as a starting point is that it offers not one Christology, but many. The Synoptic Gospels present a very different Jesus than the one that emerges in John. In general, the Synoptic Jesus says very little about himself; he is much more concerned with the coming of God’s kingdom. Furthermore, the three Synoptic authors differ considerably among themselves. Mark’s Gospel identifies Jesus as the “Son of God” (Mark 1:1), but as it begins without the traditional Christmas story, it is difficult to see this as any more than having an adoptionist sense; Jesus is declared God’s son at his baptism (Mark 1:11). Mark generally sees Jesus as Messiah and Son of Man who must suffer, probably based on the suffering Servant of Isaiah 52:13–53:12. Only the evil spirits seem to grasp the true identity of Jesus as the holy one (Mark 1:24) or Son of God (Mark 3:11; 5:7).
The Christology of Matthew and Luke is more developed. Both present Jesus as Son of God from the time of his virginal conception. Luke’s reflection on the mystery of Jesus extends back to the events preceding his birth and includes what is known as the “infancy narratives.” The story of Jesus in the Temple at the age of twelve suggests an effort to pierce the veil of his “hidden life," something that has fascinated Christians from the earliest days of the Church. Luke also represents people addressing Jesus as “Lord” even during his public life, though it is more likely that this title was applied to him only after his death. Matthew’s high Christology is evident in his adding to Peter’s confession, “You are the Messiah” (Mark 8:29) the words, “the Son of the living God” (Matt 16:16) and in his use of the title Emmanuel, “God is with us,” for Jesus (Matt 1:23).
The Fourth Gospel begins by presenting Jesus as the incarnate Word of God (John 1:14) and ends with Thomas’s Easter confession, “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). The Johannine Jesus speaks in long discourses, not parables. He proclaims himself as the Messiah (John 4:26) and only-begotten Son coming from the Father (John 3:18), existing before Abraham (John 8:58). He frequently speaks of himself using the formula, “I AM” (John 6:35; 8:28; 10:11, 14; 11:25), used in the Old Testament and rabbinic tradition for the divine name of Yahweh. And these examples only scratch the surface; there are yet other Christologies in the epistles.
Thus the New Testament gives us a number of different Christologies, and raises a number of questions. Should we start methodologically with those Christologies which emerged by the end of the New Testament period, or with those in the earliest books, or with those even earlier that may lie behind the written texts? Was belief in Jesus’ preexistence a late development, or can it be found earlier in the tradition? Were the first disciples aware of what the later Church would call his divinity? Should John’s view of Jesus be considered more accurate than Mark’s, or do we need to make room for both? And is it enough to base a Christology simply on the Christian confession of the inspired nature of the New Testament texts?
The Creeds and Dogmas of the Church
A second possible starting point could be the creeds and dogmas of the Church. The so-called Nicene Creed, actually a revision of the creed of Nicaea (325) by the First Council of Constantinople (381), still recited at Mass every Sunday, affirms the following:
I believe ... in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God. Born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God. Begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father: through whom all things were made. Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven. And was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary: and was made man.
The creed is an official statement of the belief of the Church. It is normative for the Church’s faith. Joseph (now Cardinal) Ratzinger chooses the Apostles’ Creed as the basis for his approach to christology in his Introduction to Christianity, as it mediates between two extremes, one the one hand, the reduction of Christology to history and on the other, abandoning history as irrelevant to faith. The first approach, symbolized by Harnack, purifies the faith of doctrine and creed, making the reconstruction of the historical Jesus determinative for Christology. The other, symbolized by Bultmann, makes faith in the Christ alone important. We will consider these approaches below.
But there are methodological problems with using the creeds as a starting point for Christology. Such an approach does Christology “from above.” It presumes precisely what needs to be established, namely, that the Church’s christological faith, including its profession of the divinity of Jesus, is rooted in some way in the actual Jesus of history. In other words, the Church’s christological faith needs a critical foundation. Christology needs to be established “from below,” to be grounded in the words and deeds of the Jesus of history. Short of this, it remains vulnerable to the often heard charge that it represents a later “Hellenization” of Christian faith, that Christians of a later generation turned their savior into a god, divinizing the figure of the carpenter of Nazareth.
The Faith of Christian People
A third possible starting point could be the faith of Christian people. What do contemporary Christians say and believe about Jesus? How do they apprehend him in faith? That faith is an important but insufficient source. Contemporary Christians are often divided as to their christological faith. Some no longer accept the divinity of Jesus. Others, particularly conservative Christians, believe in a Jesus who knew he was God’s only begotten Son from his earliest days. They confess without hesitation the divinity of Jesus. Occasionally this emphasis on the divinity of Jesus overshadows the distinction between the Son and the Father. For others, the theology implicit in their faith leaves little room for the humanity of Jesus.
The idea that Jesus had been confronted with the same struggles faced by each of us is for many Christians difficult to grasp. They find it hard to believe that he had to face real temptation, that he had to struggle to integrate his sexuality, discern God’s will for himself, and discover his own vocation. They have been accustomed to imagining Jesus primarily from the standpoint of his divinity. Such an approach suggests that Jesus has only a divine nature. Thus it has been characterized as a “practical Monophysitism,” a functional version of the early heresy of Monophysitism which maintained that Jesus had only one nature, a divine rather than a human one. For contemporary Christians, it is very difficult to relate to such a Jesus as an exemplar or to practice the imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ which has always been at the center of Christian life.
Historical-Critical Approach
A fourth possibility would be to follow a strictly historical-critical approach, perhaps best symbolized by John P. Meier at the beginning of his massive three-volume work on the historical Jesus:
Suppose that a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew, and an agnostic—all honest historians cognizant of 1st century religious movements—were locked up in the bowels of the Harvard Divinity School library, put on a spartan diet, and not allowed to emerge until they had hammered out a consensus document on who Jesus of Nazareth was and what he intended in his own time and place. An essential requirement of this document would be that it be based on purely historical sources and arguments.
The kicker here is the phrase, “based on purely historical sources and arguments.” The Gospel and other New Testament documents are written in the light of the Resurrection and of the disciples’ Easter experience of new life in Jesus; they are products of Christian faith. Though there is considerable historical memory enshrined in the texts, as we shall see later, they do not count as historical writings in the modern sense. They were written to proclaim faith in the risen Jesus present in the Christian community and in the lives of his disciples, not to document the story of his life as a modern historian might do.
On the one hand, a critical Christology must be based on historical-critical scholarship. As Walter Kasper argues, “church belief has in the earthly Jesus, as he is made accessible to us through historical research, a relatively autonomous criterion, a once-and-for-all yardstick by which it must continually measure itself.” The Church needs always to check its doctrine against the historical events on which it is based. Otherwise it remains ungrounded, disconnected, with the risk of being a mythological or ideological construction.
On the other hand, historical-critical research by itself is not sufficient. First, some elements at the center of the Jesus story, for example, his resurrection, are not accessible to historical research, or are only obliquely so. A purely historical approach can tell us a great deal about the Jesus of history. It cannot, however, “prove” the resurrection, nor can it establish the truth of the miracle stories, though it can say whether or not these accounts are deeply rooted in the Jesus tradition or are later additions.
Second, a “strictly historical” approach does not necessarily exclude the presuppositions of those who claim to follow it. They may reject what they consider the “mythological” or “supernatural” in their sources, while remaining blissfully ignorant of how their own supposedly objective historical scholarship is conditioned by their own unrecognized “secular,” “modernist,” or “postmodern” biases. We will see this approach in looking at nineteenth-century historical Jesus research or the work of the Jesus Seminar at the end of the twentieth.
Finally and most importantly, the “historical Jesus” reconstructed by scholars is not and can never be the living Jesus of Christian faith. What theologians like John P. Meier and Luke Timothy Johnson call “the real Jesus” is the glorified Jesus reigning at the right hand of the Father, present to his people in the Spirit, mediated by Scripture and tradition, encountered in Christian service, discipleship, and liturgy.
A Dialectical Christology
If Christology is to be both critical (using historical and literary disciplines) and at the same time theological (i.e., a reflection on faith), it must do its historical-critical investigation within the parameters of the historic Christian tradition. Walter Kasper speaks of this as a Christology of “complementarity,” that is, one that takes fully into account two criteria, “the earthly Jesus and the risen, exalted Christ.”[xix] The earthly Jesus is to a considerable extent accessible through a critical reading of the Christian texts. But revelation in Christ Jesus is not completely given in his historical life. The mystery of the risen, exalted Christ is an essential part of the Jesus story. But this is accessible only to those who are able to see with the eyes of faith.
Our primary access to the mystery of Jesus the Christ, and hence the starting point for Christology, is the Church, through its Scriptures, its creeds, its faith experienced, proclaimed, and handed on though the centuries. New life in Christ and access to him in the Spirit continue to be mediated through the Christian community. We have no story of Jesus without the Gospels, no sense of what his life and death meant for the earliest Christians apart from their Scriptures.
But the Scriptures by themselves are not sufficient. They must be read and interpreted within the community of faith from which they came if they are to remain alive. In the Church of the first millennium, Scripture was always read and understood within the context of the Church’s liturgy. In the modern period, too often historical criticism has replaced biblical theology. For Catholic theology, the French ressourcement sought to bring the earlier tradition into harmony with more critical, modern approaches. Protestant theology, with its elevation of the Scripture principle, and particularly evangelical theology with its doctrine of biblical inerrancy, has too often isolated the Bible from the historical worshipping community and allowed it to stand alone. The result has been either the loss of the Scripture principle itself on the liberal side, and on the more conservative, a biblical literalism or fundamentalism.
However, christological faith cannot stand solely on the Scriptures and teachings of the Church. Catholic Christianity has historically rejected the “sola scriptura” approach. It emphasizes the compatibility of faith and reason. A Christology not grounded in historical reality could easily become an ideology or myth, a idolatrous divinization of the man Jesus. This is not to suggest that reason establishes faith, but it can and should show that the act of faith is itself reasonable.
Therefore a critical Christology must take as its second criterion the earthly Jesus, the Jesus made accessible through historical research which Kasper calls “a relatively autonomous criterion” through which the Church must continue to measure itself and its teaching. In order to be faithful both to history and to Christian faith, we will follow such a bipolar or dialectical Christology.
We will take seriously the work of historical-critical scholarship, motivated by the conviction that a Christology not rooted in the Jesus of history cannot be the basis for the christological faith of the Church. At the same time, Christology can never be an autonomous discipline, nor can the Scriptures stand by themselves, orphaned from the faith and life of the church. Both make sense only within the context of the Christian community that continues to confess Jesus as Messiah, Lord, and Son of God, which recognizes his presence in the community gathered in his name, in the Word proclaimed, and in the breaking of the bread.