[2012: Regrettably, many of the links in this article are no longer functioning, a sad reflection on the ephemerality of online texts.]
Writing from the Philippines, Lode Wostyn situates the Pope’s book within the development of Christology after Vatican II (East Asian Pastoral Review 45.1, 2008). “Ratzinger’s Christology goes beyond the Councils of Nicaea-Chalcedon by simply erasing all the disagreements and ambiguities that appeared during these Councils.” “I feel bad because Ratzinger apparently tried to steal my master, Jesus of Nazareth, by sending him to the higher spheres of the Divine.. The Jesus of Ratzinger’s book is a God appearing on the human scene to teach humans the right doctrines about his person, one-in-Being with God.” Wostyn notes Ratzinger’s view that Schnackenburg could say “Without anchoring in God, the person of Jesus remains shadowy, unreal and unexplainable” only by forsaking his faith in historical-critical research. Wostyn points out that Schillebeeckx says the same thing precisely on the basis of such research: “Trying to delete the special ‘relation to God’ from the life of Jesus at once destroys his message and the whole point of his way of living, and turns him into an únhistorical,’ mythical or symbolic being’ (Jesus, New York, 1979, p, 278). “I do not believe,” Wostyn adds, “that it is the arrogance of scholarly erudition that separated the historical Jesus and the Christ-of-faith, but the dualistic a priori of Ratzinger’s ‘Christological hermeneutics.’“ wherein “Exegetes are on the natural-historical level; Ratzinger’s ‘Christological hermeneutic’ is on the supernatural level of faith.” Ratzinger’s book is “docetic, spiritualizing, and traditional.” Wostyn points out that it is through his humanity and his solidarity with human beings in their individual and collective struggles that Jesus reveals the human face of God. Schillebeeckx, by regrounding the truth of Chalcedon in a new full-scale encounter with the human, historical Jesus, bears far more authentic witness to Christ than the nervous, dualistic, pessimistic, one-sided angle of vision adopted by Ratzinger, which wreaks havoc with the biblical texts.
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Reinaldo José Reinaldo Lopes in G1 interviews three Brazilian exegetes, who agree that Benedict’s approach to the Gospels is untenable. ‘You always meet this problem when a dogmatic theologian starts analyzing gospel texts. He will opt to say there is no rupture between the various texts, which all say the same thing’ (Luiz Felipe Coimbra Ribeiro). http://g1.globo.com/Noticias/PapanoBrasil/0,,MUL33217-8524-630,00.html
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Turning to the Italian reception of the book, we recall the charged situation in that country, where the tension between lay and clerical ideologies has been acerbated by the recent activism of the episcopacy and the Vatican. On the biblical front, fierce controversy has been generated by the best-seller, Inchiesta su Gesù, by the exegete Mauro Pesce, interviewed by Corrado Augias. Though panned by Vatican apologists such as Giuseppe De Rosa in Civiltà Cattolica, Raniero Cantalamessa in Avvenire, and Sandro Magister (http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/dettaglio.jsp?id=110941&eng=y), Pesce’s views seem reasonable and well-grounded, and his book appears to fill a huge gap in the scriptural education of the Italian laity. In his reply to Cantalamessa, Pesce sheds light on the reckless and unscrupulous way in which conservative churchmen smear and caricature critical theologians, which lends new weight to the calls for ‘quality control’ in Catholic theology and especially in Vatican circles. See http://www.mauropesce.net/dblog/articolo.asp?articolo=2.
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Deploring the way Cardinal Ruini seeks to discredit the History of Vatican II directed by Giuseppe Alberigo and to deny that the Council brought any substantial innovation, Pesce says that the Council’s achievement of placing the Bible at the center of the Church’s life for the first time in many centuries has been undercut by the marginalization of historico-critical exegesis. ‘Accused of aridity and of not furnishing enough religious nourishment, historical exegesis is often replaced with a “spiritual” exegesis, sometimes inspired by the allegorical interpretation of the Fathers, sometimes simply by moralism and intimism. Postconciliar biblical theology risks being separated from the actual state of scholarly research. I believe that today there is a parlous disconnect from scholarly research in many church circles’ (http://www.mauropesce.net/dblog). De Rosa and Cantalamessa were incensed that Pesce characterized Jesus as a Jew, not a Christian, but Pesce, like Kessler above, points to the neglected 1985 Vatican document on Judaism, which teaches that ‘Jesus was and always remained a Jew.’
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Presenting the book in Paris on May 23, Cardinal Martini lauded its vision of Christ, but struck a mild critical note, clearly pulling his punches, in the classic style of suave cardinaliate criticism. He pointed out how difficult it is for Catholics to dispute this book, despite the author’s foreswearing of magisterial authority. He noted that the merit of a book is not guaranteed by its sales and that, as a theologian, Joseph Ratzinger had not done first-hand study of exegetical matters, such as New Testament text criticism. ‘I think that not all will recognize themselves in his description of the author of the Fourth Gospel when he says : “The actual state of research completely allows us to see in John, son of Zebedee, the witness who responds solemnly with his own ocular testimony, also identifying himself as the true author of the Gospel.”‘ (For French reactions to the book, see the gentle review of Bernard Sesboué SJ in Etudes, Sept. 2007, who objects that Catholic critical historical exegetes are not usually liberals or Bultmannians, and the spirited critique by Elian Cuvillier, Montpellier Faculty of Protestant Theology, in Réforme, 28 June-4 July, who points out that Bultmann and Käsemann were not ‘liberals’. He finds on this point ‘lacunae, misinterpretations, leaps or slides in the argumentation, unspoken presuppositions and above all a tacit reserve in regard to the Enlightenment’ whereby ‘Benedict XVI risks finding himself in consonance with Protestant fundamentalists.’)
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Vittorio Messori, co-author of The Ratzinger Report, attacked Martini’s presentation bitterly in Corriere della Sera, May 25, under the heading: In defence of the Pope. With back-handed praise for the Cardinal’s Jesuit ambiguity, Messori acutely noted how Martini pushed the book onto the shelf marked ‘spirituality’ rather than ‘exegesis,’ praising Benedict for being in touch with the exegesis of his (not our) time. For a panic-stricken rant from Messori against German theology, see http://freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=355041&p=2.
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Church historian Alberto Melloni, in the same issue of Corriere della Sera, reinforces the Cardinal’s implied critique, adding that Benedict’s book will serve as an alibi for the many priests who are profoundly ignorant of Scripture. ‘It would certainly be a precious service if this book opened a very deep and serene discussion on the status of historical critical exegesis, on the reasons for the indifference it is met with in so much Catholic preaching, on the contempt with which a facile and ignorant conservatism treats it, on the reasons why the figure of Jesus lies ever lower on the horizon of Christian live and is abandoned to the sectarian edulcorations or the facile approaches excited by the scent of an anti-Enlightenment reconquest. But we all know that this is a remote hypothesis... The book legitimates with the authority of a refined intellectual a dangerous mistrust of research... in the name of the facticity of the Gospels assumed in an uncritical and concordist fashion.’ Benedict’s imposition of a single transparent sense on the Gospel texts is correlated with an attitude that has blocked all dynamic progress in the Church since the fourth century.
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According to Don Franco Barbero (a turbulent pastor forcibly reduced to the lay state by the Vatican, who claims the support of five thousand priests; http://www.viottoli.it/cdb/140202/intervista_en.html), Benedict has thrown two centuries of historical, biblical and hermeneutical research into the dustbin. ‘I did not expect, obviously, to find writing of the standard of Barbaglio, Ortensio da Spinetoli, Pesce, Knitter, Küng, Molari, Sobrino, Schillebeeckx, E. Johnson, Balasuriya, Vouga, Haight and a thousand others. I fully realized that Ratzinger cannot be placed on the same level as those scholars who are real specialists in the study of Jesus of Nazareth. But sincerely I did not think one could still hammer with such force “dogmatic formulations,” without taking account of the hermeneutic turn pointed out for quite some time by official Catholic theologians such as Meier, Geffré… This dogmatic insistence is a source of banalizations, and Christian radicality is confused with religious radicalism. The final impression is that Christianity has two enemies: the modern world and Christian theologians. Yet this book, which offers us again the catechism of our childhood in peremptory dogmatic tones, seems to me extremely significant for two reasons. First, it gives a clear and candid spiritual-psychological and theological portrait of Pope Benedict XVI. In these pages I found more of him than of Jesus, the master of my faith… Second, these pages show the theological and pastoral horizon that the present pontificate is imposing on the Catholic Church. Whoever goes outside these “lines” finds himself off the page, “extra ecclesiam.” This is the problem... The book may be comforting, reassuring, gratifying to those believers for whom the faith functions as a platform of uncorrodable certitudes. To me and many others these pages savor too much of an ideological manifesto and a moralistic tract. I thank God that I have had quite other teachers, in the long course of my years and my studies, who have given me a passion for the life, person and faith of a quite different Jesus of Nazareth. Almost all of them, on examination, turn out to be among those who in the last thirty years have been defenestrated, disowned, suspected and incriminated by Ratzinger.’ http://www.italialaica.it/cgi-bin/news/view.pl?id=007050
Don Franco gives a fuller treatment of Benedict’s ‘incredibly superficial’ and ‘embarrassingly mediocre’ book in the review MicroMega, which can be found on his outspoken website: http://donfrancobarbero.blogspot.com, July 2, 2007. Some extracts: ‘It does not suffice to recognize the merits and demerits, fruits and limits of historical and critical methods, if one then limits oneself to a research among four or five friends and some dissenting authors. This is a cooked-up theology that is astonishing in an Author like the present one. Looking at the modest list of 2780 expressly Christological works in my personal library, I note that Ratzinger does not confront many of the researches that one is obliged, as I see it, to measure oneself against today.’ Don Franco names Patterson, Barbaglio, Boismard, Ortensio da Spinetoli, Pesce, Destro, Pikaza, Dupuis, Haight, Panikkar, Dotolo, Küng, Queiruga, Knitter, Kuschel, Hick, Schussler Fiorenza, Gilkey, Schillebeeckx, Amaladoss, Ruether, Filoramo, Borg, Crossan, E. Johnson, Wengst, Vouga, Geffré, Tamayo, Tepedino, Duquoc, Gianotto, Sobrino, Balasuriya, Prabhu, Scaccaglia, Wright. ‘This Christology lacks the courage to take up the challenges of recent and contemporary research- At times I found myself closer to catechetical rhetoric than to exegesis’ (example: the interpretation of ‘Son of Man’ as meaning that Jesus comes from God and is God). Our current more functional understanding of Christological titles is ‘a fruit of the dialogue with Judaism that is not limited, as with Ratzinger, to a generic recognition of the Jewishness of Jesus.’ ‘The accusation that biblical scholars drop the historical dimension is completely unfounded... Ratzinger has little appreciation of research, with its labour, its strain, its errors and its fruitfulness. It is the Church of fear and timidity that grasps at dogmas. Real research is always in the realm of risk, without which theology becomes a mausoleum... The Jesus of the dogmas does not interest me when he conflicts with the Jewish Jesus, whom centuries of research help us to approach and to understand a little better. In thorough respect for the Ratzinger interpretation of Jesus, I register my wide dissent and think that it is absolutely normal to have such differences within the same Church.’ Daniele Garrone and Riccardo Calimani also review the book in the same issue. An earlier issue had a long attack on the book by the atheist philosopher Paulo Flores d’Arcais, editor of MicroMega (who had a public debate with Cardinal Ratzinger in September 2000); see http://www.uaar.it/news/2007/04/28/i-pregiudizi-del-laico;
http://paparatzinger-blograffaella.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html; d’Arcais promises to follow it up with a book-length study.
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A doughty defence of Benedict’s attitude to the historical Jesus, perhaps the most convincing to date, comes from Raniero Cantalamessa. http://www.catholic.net/global_catholic_news/template_news.phtml?news_id=20129&channel_id=2
He writes: ‘ I think we can share the opinion of Theissen and Merz: “Christians, after Easter, spoke of Jesus more affirmatively (that is to say, they said greater and more important things) than the historical Jesus would have said about himself. This ‘value plus’ of post-Paschal Christology in respect of Jesus’ pre-Paschal self-awareness, whether on the historical or on the objective level, is based on the actual event of Easter” Theissen and Merz saw that the two phases -- before Easter, and after -- relate to each other in the same way as implicit and explicit Christology do. Among the elements of implicit Christology that they find in the Gospels, not a few correspond with those on which Benedict XVI bases his argument in his book: the expression “Amen” in the particular way Jesus uses it; the self-confidence with which Jesus counterposes the authority of the Torah and of Moses with his “But I say to you …”; his particular way of relating to the Father and above all the distinction between “My Father” and “your father”; his forgiving sins; the superiority Jesus claims over the Baptist whom he defines as “the greatest of the prophets.”‘
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In a militant review, Massimo Introvigne, the controversial expert on cults, embraces and heightens the papal picture of modern exegesis as largely of Satanic inspiration. http://www.cesnur.org/2007/mi_gdn.htm
The comments of some rapturous Italian readers can be found at http://www.db.avvenire.it/pls/avvenire/ne_avv_forum.start_bacheca?id=&id_doc=1
http://magisterobenedettoxvi.blogspot.com/2007/04/raccolta-della-rassegna-stampa-del-14.html
http://www.wikio.it/news/Ges%C3%B9+di+Nazaret
L’Espresso, June 5, has a rather captious list of errors in the book (e.g. location of the binding of Isaac on Mount Horeb rather than Mount Moriah), provided by exegetes under cover of anonymity.
http://espresso.repubblica.it/dettaglio/Cristo-quanti-errori/1635347
Favorable presentations of the book as ‘a battle cry against 200 years of textual criticism’ (Robert Moynihan) can be found in Inside the Vatican, May 2007. Blogger Christian Albini has some astute comments on the unwholesome, sycophantic presentation and reception of the Pope’s book.
http://sperarepertutti.blog.lastampa.it/sperare_per_tutti/2007/05/ognuno_libero_d.html
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RECEPTION OF THE ENGLISH VERSION
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The first voice to greet the English version of the book (Jesus of Nazareth, Doubleday) was that of neocath-in-chief George Weigel. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18629516/site/newsweek
If neoconservative Catholics appropriate this book for their own uses, this will skew its reception by the wider Church. Weigel exaggerates Benedict’s openness to historical critical methods, seeing him as appreciative of the variety of theological perspectives the Evangelists brought to their memory of Jesus; whereas in fact Benedict’s concern with the historicity of the narratives keeps him from a full appreciation of the literary and theological creativity of the authors of the first three Gospels.
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Weigel sees Benedict as issuing ‘a sharp challenge to those Catholics who still seek a confessional state, either along the lines of the old regimes in Europe or according to a more contemporary, liberation theology model.’ No doubt he thinks the participation of priests in the Sandinista government made Nicaragua a confessional state. Yet Benedict’s words in Brazil about the need of ‘a moral consensus in society on fundamental values’ which entails a consensus on ‘God with the human face of Jesus Christ’ suggest an avatar of the confessionalism Weigel deplores. The Brazil trip was a failure on every front, according to La Jornada, Mexico, http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/05/14/index.php?section=opinion&article=002a1edi.
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In the same issue of Newsweek Lisa Miller insinuates that only ‘the non-orthodox—the progressive Protestants and “cafeteria Catholics”‘ (yes, ‘Protestants’ has become a sectarian taunt-word once again) will criticize the book, whereas: ‘Moderates may take Jesus of Nazareth as something of a corrective to fundamentalism because it sees the Bible as “true” without insisting on its being factual. Mostly, though, Jesus of Nazareth will please a small group of Christians who are able simultaneously to hold post-Enlightenment ideas about the value of rationality and scientific inquiry together with the conviction that the events described in the Gospels are real. “This is about things that happened,” explains N. T. Wright, the Anglican Bishop of Durham who is perhaps the world’s leading New Testament scholar. “It’s not just about ideas, or people’s imaginations. These are things that actually happened. If they didn’t happen, you might still have interesting ideas, but it wouldn’t be Christianity at the end of the day.”‘ But the question Weigel and Wright do not address is whether Benedict’s ‘official biography’ of Jesus sufficiently recognizes the contribution of ‘ideas’ and ‘imagination’ on the part of the Evangelists and their sources, and the irreducible plurality of perspectives on the Christ-event that this entails.
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US neocath blogsites vie with one another in adulating the book and shafting its criticshttp://amywelborn.typepad.com/openbook/2007/05/rule_1.html.
There is an interesting comment on Lisa Miller’s report by Lawrence Cunningham of Notre Dame: ‘Readers may be interested in this bit of background to the risible article by Ms Miller. The person who is acknowledged as helping with the article called me a few weeks before this article apeared doing “research.” She wanted the names of famous books on Jesus and a description of their contents beginning with Reimarus. When I told her gently that the history of the “higher” criticism was a tad complicated she soldiered on asking about Schweitzer (the only name she seems to know) and then, jumping ahead nearly a century, something about the Jesus Seminar. When I told her about some sources she might consult she said that she was on “deadline.” Not to put too fine a point on it: she did not have a clue.’ In fairness, journalists have to do this kind of research all the time and it is rather unfair for those who help them to then pour scorn on their efforts. And to know the names Reimarus and Schweitzer is to be on better informed plane than most readers of the book.
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In the absence of any serious American theological review of the book, five weeks after its German publication, the neocaths made the hapless Lisa Miller a target of their usual reactive rhetoric and argument; see http://insightscoop.typepad.com/2004/2007/05/excerpt_from_b1.html
http://www.getreligion.org/?p=2418
http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/05/invincible_ignorance.php
Carl Olson of Ignatius Press indulged in the usual caricaturing of liberal theology: ‘Why, oh why, do we have to care what “liberal Catholics” think? After all, it’s not as though they don’t have a couple of hundred books about a Jesus who is (pick one or two) a cat-friendly vegan, a registered Democrat, a social worker, a Jewish pen pal, a warm feeling in the tummy, a personal guru, a personal trainer, an inspirational man who didn’t actually exist, a neo-Marxist, an old-fashioned Marxist, a John Lennon fan, etc., etc.’ But Lisa Miller hurt the neocath sensitivities most when she touched on the truth: ‘As for the statement, “This interpretation may be profound and in keeping with Benedict’s Christ-centered message; it is not, many scholars would say, historically accurate,” Miller would do well to catch up a bit on the world of biblical scholarship, a field—dare I point out the obvious?—that a certain Joseph Ratzinger has been following closely (and has often been involved in, in various ways) for a number of years now, probably more years than Miller has been alive.’ Yet Miller is correct in saying that Benedict’s interpretation of Jesus’s Kingdom-preaching would be contested by many scholars. Olson’s petulance and ridicule are unnecessary; his best argument is his appeal to N. T. Wright, who cannot, however, be treated as representing a definitive consensus position. Wright is similar to Benedict in some ways; his vast The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003) makes a goodish case for the historicity of the empty tomb and a certain phenomenological truth in the gospel descriptions of the risen Christ, though written 50-70 years after the event. However he attempts to prove too much by dismissing perceptions that such narratives as those of Emmaus or of doubting Thomas are theological constructions and by ignoring tell-tale textual clues that if pursued in an open-minded way might revolutionize our understanding. He treats Schillebeeckx’s view that resurrection faith was grounded in conversion experiences – ineffable, like Paul’s – as ‘mocking God.’ But if the resurrection appearances were as concrete as Wright wants to maintain, why does the risen Christ merely speak the characteristic theological language of Matthew, Luke and John? Surely his words, if really spoken, would have been preserved with special care? See http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/04/the_resurrectio.html.
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Some admirers of Benedict’s book are adopting the strategy of treating it as a sacred mystery, any criticism of which would be blasphemous. The polemic notes in Benedict’s own texts are vastly amplified by these groupies, in a way that must be embarrassing to the author. Leopold Spasovski, customer reviewer at amazon.de, recounts: ‘My reviews of two previous books of Joseph Ratzinger drew numerous emails from incensed Christians who warned me that my “presumption” in criticizing the “Holy Father” would close the doors of heaven to me.’ Such rhetoric is in evidence in amazon.com and at Amy Welborn’s site, http://amywelborn.typepad.com/openbook/2007/05/book_awards.html.
Those who criticize the treatment of justice and peace in the book are described as ‘disordered, malicious, invincibly ignorant souls’ who ‘don’t have the courage to fully renounce Christ, thus they keep him around as an accessory, as a sort of good luck charm in the eternal quest for “Justice and Peace” rather than as the Logos, the ground of being... Underneath their masks, they’re about raw power, benign tyranny (think Brave New World), wretched contentment in a Godless world. I hate to say it: they’re in league with the diabolical... I’d have you and your cancerous horde silenced.’ A very common theme is that Benedict has saved Christ and the Bible from vain academics and intellectuals who are bereft of spiritual vision. The debate is pitched, thus, as a clash between Church and Academy rather than as one between a restorationist and a progressive vision of the Church. A streak of populist anti-intellectualism lies close to the surface. Many of the debaters show no sign of having read the book they are defending so vociferously, hence their desperate recourse to uninformed ad hominems. However, the general tenor of discussion on the book, outside this circle, is rather encouraging; it seems that people are being stimulated to debate the issues, albeit sometimes in a naive way that gives excessive credence to caricatures of contemporary exegesis. See http://liberalcatholicnews.blogspot.com ; http://wheatandweeds.blogspot.com/2007/05/advantage-benedict.html ; http://www.ntgateway.com/weblog/2007/05/vermes-on-ratzinger-and-quest.html
http://ambassadorwatch.blogspot.com/2007/05/ratzinger-jesus.html
http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2007/04/jesus-of-nazareth-by-ratzinger-benedict.html
http://www.bombaxo.com/blog/?p=355
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week1037/exclusive.html
http://www.jesuscreed.org/?p=2373
http://thursdaynightgumbo.blogspot.com/search/label/Benedict%20XVI:%20Jesus%20of%20Nazareth
The Catholic popular press is of course uniformly enthusiastic; see http://www.wcr.ab.ca/columns/editorials/2007/editorial061107.shtml.
Most of the prominent US neocath bloggers have been strangely silent about the book. As Michael Joseph remarks: ‘I’ve noticed that those who wear their “orthodoxy” on their sleeves and who declare unequivocal loyalty to Pope Benedict have read very little by him. I read a number of Catholic posts celebrating the impending release of Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth, yet now that it’s out the silence over its contents is deafening. Could it be that many “orthodox” or “Catholic Right” bloggers actually do not read the right books...or any books at all for that matter?’ (Homepage). Papa Ratzinger Forum has a round-up that includes the one exception to the exegetical silence I mentioned: a favorable comment from Albert Vanhoye, whom we met above, and who was created a Cardinal by Benedict two years ago at age 82. There is also an attack on Melloni and Hünermann as ‘rebels’ from one Fr Baget Bozzo, and rather pugnacious defences of the Pope by novelist Philippe Sollers and philosopher Jean-Luc Marion from Le Figaro, May 24. Marion subscribes blindly to Benedict’s treatment of the death of Christ: ‘What they couldn’t accept is that he could be the Son of God…. He assumed the only name that God gives himself. Here is the reason why he was put to death by those who say that God is too great to incarnate himself in a man, without imagining for an instant that God has perhaps another vision of transcendence than ours, so human. Perhaps, indeed, from God’s point of view there is nothing greater than to incarnate oneself. This is what is intolerable for certain Jews, and, in a certain way, for every human being.’ This site http://freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=354496&p=7&#Last
descends into ad hominems, as in the claim that Martini and Melloni are motivated by envy; such is the reward of responsible, scholarly criticism in today’s church.
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The first theological review of the book in English comes from Geza Vermes, famous for his stimulating and instructive studies of the Jewish Jesus. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article1807640.ece
Vermes makes the obvious objection: ‘We are told that the Pope obeyed the rules of historical criticism. However, he was prepared to abide by those rules only if they confirmed his traditional convictions. Otherwise, he discarded them without further consideration. As he refuses to examine various possibilities of meaning, he must take it for granted that he has the correct understanding. But how can this be if no critical questions are asked about the original significance of words?’ ‘I must protest against the reiterated papal claim that the divine Christ of faith – the product of his musings – and the historical Jesus – the Galilean itinerant healer, exorcist and preacher – are one and the same. In the absence of a stringent linguistic, literary and historical analysis of the Gospels, especially of their many contradictory statements, the identification is without foundation. One must declare groundless Benedict’s appeal to “canonical exegesis,” an exercise in biblical theology whereby any text from the Old or the New Testament can serve to explain any other biblical text. Such an approach to biblical studies would force back Catholic Bible experts, already the objects of frequent papal disapproval in Jesus of Nazareth, to a preCopernican stage of history.’
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A. N. Wilson writes: ‘Most controversially, post Mel Gibson, the Pope gives no attention to those Jewish scholars who question the likelihood of a blasphemy trial before the Sanhedrin. (“The fact that Jesus’ trial was... presented to the Romans as the trial of a political Messiah reflects the pragmatism of the Sadducees” is not a sentence that answers these difficulties).’ ‘This reader at least felt that he had repeatedly identified what was haunting, indeed frightening about the Gospels. No amount of reasonable liberal “explanation” can evade the voice that comes through them – calling the reader not to a set of propositions, nor to a theory, but to a Person, who is at one with God’ http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article1798127.ece.
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An unsigned review in The Economist, June 30-July 6, asks how one can dialogue with Islam if one shows such total distrust of liberal scholarship and insists on drawing dogmatic lines in the sand; it misidentifies the crux issue as the tension between the mystical vision John and the historical Jesus of the Synoptics; in fact even the Gospel of Mark projects a theological vision and is far from giving the naked facts about the historical Jesus.
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Notre Dame theologian Lawrence Cunningham writes on the Commonweal blog that those (like Hermann Häring) who think Benedict’s approach to the scriptures is retrograde are mistaken. ‘One should read this work from the perspective of Joseph Ratzinger the theologian. The following points might prove helpful: (1) Ratzinger writes as a theologian in the honorable tradition of the Anselmian “faith seeking understanding” which is to say, he writes as a believer seeking understanding; as a consequence, he writes from the angle of the hermeneutics of trust and not of suspicion.’ Unfortunately, exegesis for the last 250 years has advanced by overcoming an initial trust in direct historicity to view the texts as complex theological and literary constructs; Benedict certainly marks a regression on this front. ‘(2) He understands the competence of the exegete but he refuses to allow the exegete to have the final say and, further, he appreciates that biblical exegesis did not begin for Catholics in the twentieth century.... [He] does not find it out of court to call on Cyprian when discussing the Lord’s Prayer or Origen on the same subject.’ He writes from within ‘the household of faith’ and will not be appreciated by the unbelieving. Actually, however, many Catholic and non-Catholic exegetes draw on patristic contributions to exegesis; but when these are invoked to interpret ‘thy Kingdom come’ in the way I noted above, it is not helpful. Spiritual reading of Scripture may draw on the Fathers freely, but it should not claim to thereby override exegesis on its own terrain.
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Benedict’s ‘real antagonists are those who would reduce Jesus down to a genteel liberal Protestant or a political revolutionary or a philosopher (pick your reductionist category).’ Such straw-man argumentation is itself reductionist, and it leads Benedict to downplay the justice-and-peace component of Jesus’ Kingdom-preaching, while imposing the Johannine image of Jesus as historical, at the expense of any rediscovery of the pre-Paschal Jesus as eschatological prophet, and even at the expense of the Synoptics’ vision. This is very ineffective and counter-productive argument against the liberal distortions of the Jesus Seminar or against Marxist distortions. As someone remarked, it represents the very illness it claims to cure, that is, a failure to connect integrally the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith.
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Two leading Catholic theologians have briefly reviewed the book: Fergus Kerr OP in The Tablet, May 26, greets it as Ratzinger’s best book, forgetting perhaps his thesis on Augustine, Volk und Haus Gottes, 1954, the incisive and quite liberal Das Problem der Dogmengeschichte in der Sicht der katholischen Theologie, 1966, and two books co-authored with Rahner: Revelation and Tradition and Episcopacy and Primacy. He writes: ‘Like such maverick scholars as François Dreyfus and John C. O’Neill the Pope holds that “scientific” exegesis of the New Testament does not necessarily show that Jesus did not know his own identity.’ Actually, the Pope makes a stronger claim than that. Kerr seems to understate the importance of Bultmann even for British exegetes. Kerr finds ‘not much to contradict’ in the book. Gerald O’Collins SJ in America, June 4-11, more ominously declares: ‘Contradicting him would be totally unjustified, but a few respectful quibbles may be in place.’ Accepting that ‘we have, in and through the Gospels, the credible and reliable testimony of eyewitness and their associates,’ O’Collins lists those he considers good exegetes faithful to this insight: Bauckham, Brown, Dunn, Fitzmyer, Harrington, L. T. Johnson, Meier, N. T. Wright. Let us hope that we are not seeing the formation of a new canon of approved exegetes, with rosettes for those who hold the party line and refrain from the kind of innovative suggestions that advance a discipline over new thresholds of insight, such suggestions as L. T. Johnson has powerfully put forward on another front: http://commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=1957.
O’Collins praises the homiletic virtues of the book, which are scarcely in doubt, and stresses its ‘sound, apologetic purpose,’ of which the upshot is: ‘Only God can demand of us what Jesus asks. The divine identity of Jesus is no optional extra.’ Unfortunately, this seems a rather thin argument.
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One wondered if any full-length scholarly reviews of Benedict’s book would appear. It seems that since about 1981 his writings are no longer considered as contributions to theological scholarship, but as devotional or ideological productions. Seven weeks after the publication of the book, I found no Catholic exegete rising to defend it against the generally dismissive reception among Scripture scholars. Now, in November 1987, full-length scholarly reviews are not lacking, but they are on the whole very critical, and those that are not savor of the diplomatic.
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An excellent review by Jack Miles appears in Commonweal, July 13. He writes that sympathetic readers ‘may be disappointed that in this book, Ratzinger has so little to say about God, other than that he became incarnate as Jesus. There is, in the plainest sense of the word, rather little theology here; the word God remains largely an unexamined term... Once Ratzinger begins to engage the actual text, he seems unable to relinquish a cripplingly precritical understanding of the relationship between history and literature. Because Joseph Ratzinger is now Benedict XVI, none of these reservations may matter much to the sales of his book. It may even be that they will matter positively rather than negatively to some segments of the book’s critical reception. A remote, impersonal pope offering an exegesis built on the conviction that, behind all the exegetical folderol, yes, it all really happened-this is surely what some want to hear.’ http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/print_format.php?id_article=1974.
Peter Steinfels reviews the book in Commonweal, August 17, http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=1980.
Despite several critical remarks, he finds the Pope’s view of Jesus as one for whom communion with the Father was the true center of his personality to be ‘persuasive and deeply helpful.’
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A superb review in First Things (August-September, 2007), by Richard Hays of Duke Divinity School, was quite critical: ‘this is a book in need of a good editor who could help the author sort out the two or three different books that seem to have been struggling together in the womb during the book’s “long gestation period.” As it stands, readers not interested in the history of historical-Jesus scholarship are likely to find the intermittent surveys of critical opinion distracting, while readers like me who are interested in these matters are likely to find them sketchy and unsatisfying.’
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‘It is symptomatic that Benedict does not even comment on the fact that the Matthean version of the Lord’s Prayer teaches the disciples to pray “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Benedict treats this petition, without explanation, as a prayer about forgiveness of sins. There is a complex history of interpretation here, but the economic dimension of Jesus’ teaching on prayer does not appear in Benedict’s account. Likewise, the programmatic account of the beginning of Jesus’ public proclamation in the synagogue at Nazareth in Luke 4:16-21—in which Jesus declares, in Isaiah’s words, that the Spirit of the Lord has anointed him to proclaim good news to the poor and release to the captives—plays no structural role at all in Jesus of Nazareth. In sum, Benedict’s portrait of Jesus is strongly Johannine: grounded in high-christological claims that Jesus was one with God, claiming a universalism that breaks the boundaries of Judaism, proclaiming a realized eschatology, and sketching a Jesus whose kingdom is not of this world and whose teaching contains minimal social ethics.’
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‘On the one hand, Benedict seems generally content to allow New Testament critics to operate within the field of history, and he readily acknowledges that the claim of Jesus’ divinity “exceeds the scope of the historical method.” On the other hand, he wants to “take this conviction of faith as our starting point for reading the texts with the help of historical methodology.” But many historical critics would protest that such a starting point compromises historical methodology. The total portrait of Jesus that Benedict draws stands in serious tension with the findings of historical criticism. I am sympathetic with many of his readings, but surely if “the aim unequivocally is not . . . to give up serious engagement with history,” he owes us a more careful explanation of how he proposes to reconceive the practice of historical criticism to allow for the historical claims he wants to make.’
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‘Jesus of Nazareth does not seem to be informed at all by the more recent, and now much more influential, work of even such great Catholic scholars as Raymond Brown and John Meier. It is perhaps not surprising that an eighty-year-old scholar would continue to focus on the categories and questions that were current in the German academy during the era of his own training and more active scholarly career. But it is regrettable that Benedict did not bring his discussion up to date.’
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‘The de-emphasis on apocalyptic elements in Jesus’ thought is one particularly unfortunate feature of Benedict’s account. A more resolutely historical approach would situate Jesus firmly in the apocalyptically oriented Judaism of his day. Such a finding hardly compels us to follow Schweitzer’s conclusion that Jesus was deluded and disappointed, but it does require us to take seriously Jesus’ identification with—and redefinition of—Israel’s national hope, his formation of a countercultural Israel symbolized by the Twelve, and his orientation toward future eschatological judgment and vindication in the resurrection of the dead. Such motifs remain disappointingly peripheral in Benedict’s treatment.’ http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6006
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In his October editorial, the editor of First Things Richard Neuhaus seems anxious to soothe worried readers by supplementing Hays’ review with theological reflections of his own (http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6053). There was an outcry against Hays in the letters column of the December issue. (My own brief review in National Catholic Reporter, Sept. 21, also generated a mini-outcry from some correspondents.) Hays, in reply, denied that he was out of sympathy with the Pope’s vision and aims: ‘In my judgment he unfortunately fails to achieve the goals he sets for himself. He insists that “the historical-critical method... is and remains an indispensable dimension of exegetical work,” and he wants to accept what “modern exegesis” tells us about the historical setting and composition of the gospels. Yet, recognizing the limits of the historical method, he also wants to integrate these historical findings into a trusting, synthetic reading of the gospels. The problem is simply that he fails to achieve real integration: His use of historical methodology is selective and inconsistent.’
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The Fall 2007 issue of Communio has two articles by Dallas-based Cistercians that attempt to defend the global theological vision of the Pope’s book, making light of the niggling objections of exegetes. Denis Farkasfalvy actually concedes the most serious points disputed by exegetes, noting that the Pope refrained from mentioning Q or Markan priority and claiming he would have done better to remain equally aloof from the thorny issues of Johannine composition. This article contains rather dismissive remarks about the greats of biblical scholarship. We hear yet again of Loisy’s “sarcastic quip” about the Kingdom and the Church -- revealing only ignorance of Loisy’s book. We hear that “Bultmann’s fame has outlived the usefulness of his ideas. Especially, his commentary on John has exercised an influence far beyond its merits” (p. 448). It would be truer to say the Bultmann’s ideas have become the coin of the realm, and the Bultmann as an individual is rather forgotten. In any case, the author continues, “Hengel’s case is very different. In taking issue with his book The Johannine Question, the Pope goes far too deep into a territory of specialists and he does so without tools sufficient for the journey” Benedict “concedes too much to his opponents and then has a hard time disproving his opponents’ conclusions”. His acceptance of Eusebius’s view on the two Johns is seen as uncritical adherence to a long German tradition. A misdating of Papias (230 instead of 130) is noted. Farkasfalvy seems to think that spiritual exegesis is the answer, and defends a Christological interpretation of the parables (the Good Samaritan as Christ etc.): ‘In Jesus’s mouth the parable is a tool for expressing the ineffable mystery of his own being as the only Son sent into the world by the Father’ (p. 447). Even as a claim about the parables as found in the Synoptics this is wildly unconvincing; as a claim about the historical Jesus’s uses of parables it is even more baseless. It is a claim based on presuppositions about Jesus’s consciousness if he was all that church doctrine claims. The eschatological Naherwartung is described in a way that dilutes all its contours, much as the Pope’s book does: it means “the hidden but real Spirit in man’s inmost realm and, at the same time, a new closeness of God to man in all dimensions of his existence, a closeness found in Jesus himself”. The Pope’s discussion of the title “Son of Man” “contains the book’s most brilliant pages” -- transcending the “graveyard of mutually contradictory hypotheses” the Pope proves by collating Lk 12.8 and 17.24 with Mk 8.38 and 10.32 that Jesus indeed identified himself as the Son of Man. Farkasfalvy does not note what is lost in variety and interest when all the Son of Man sayings are put on the same level and treated as ipsissima verba Jesu, nor does he fault the lame and monochrome explanation of the title given by Benedict.
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Roch Kereszty praises the Pope’s book to the heights, comparing it with the Bible and the works of Saint Augustine. Quests for the historical Jesus are futile and can never bring unbelievers to the grace of faith, as the Gospel portrait of Jesus can. Theologians must embrace an integral vision of Christ, along with the Pope, or the gospels will turn to dust in their hands. This might be more convincing if the author showed a more serene willingness to study the questions of critical exegesis and inquiry into the historical Jesus, and a less phobic attitude to admitting any gap between the Gospel portraits of Jesus and the historical data behind them. He takes issue with my NCR review, in which he finds the “remarkable ambivalence of those contemporary scholars who sense the liberating effect of this book on the average educated Catholic, but are unable to see the truth of a theological interpretation of Scripture which does not discard but rather transcends the historical method” (p. 473). In reply, I would say that I am well aware of the power of the Johannine and Synoptic presentation of Jesus, and that I have not found that the extra insight brought by critical scholarship takes away from this. The impact of the book on Catholics who are educated, but not educated in biblical scholarship, will be to instill the belief that critical exegesis is confused and at war with the true nature of the biblical Christ -- a belief already implicit in the Catechism’s treatment of the biblical sources, which, as Cardinal Martini is now warning, may be enshrined in the October Synod, reversing the vision of Vatican II.
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RESPONSE TO MY REVIEW
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I reviewed the book for the National Catholic Reporter http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1141/is_38_43/ai_n21027166/pg_3
and The Japan Mission Journal http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/06/benedict_xvi_on.html
as well as here http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/06/benedict_xvi_on_1.html. Stephen Hand responded http://tcrnewscom.blogspot.com:
‘To suggest that with respect to Christology modern exegetes have greater access to the true “history” behind or underneath the Gospel accounts than the apostolic witness “some twenty years after the Resurrection,” is an exhausted notion, one that scholars have never come close to proving.’ I reply that the earliest historical account we have of Jesus is Mark’s Gospel, usually dated around 65-70. Like all the Gospels this is a theological document, and its critical investigation for purposes of historical research is a complex task first undertaken in recent times. Hand reads my remarks on the Philippians hymn rather oddly: ‘To posit later interpretations which were novelties rejected by the fathers, or to read back later heretical or gnostic notions into the texts makes Benedict’s point precisely.’ None of the exegesis of the hymn I referred to does any of these things. ‘These early hymns... are decisive and tradition follows in a straight line from them; and these earliest hymns followed an even earlier tradition which takes us to the saving events themselves. And this brings the whole skeptical edifice crashing down.’ True; worship of Jesus (‘every knee shall bow’) begins very soon after Easter, as noted above; but this does not mean that Jesus was adored as God, rather he was confessed as Lord, to the glory of God the Father, who had made him Lord.
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Hand thinks I underestimate the degree to which Benedict recognizes that the Gospels give a post-Easter portrayal of Jesus. But ‘the paschal experience firmed up and completed what was had already been powerfully dawning, implicit in everything Jesus said and did. The Baptismal formula at the end of Matthew, which can only be arbitrarily dismissed by skeptical critics (who I understand must try), shows such completion in profound eloquence.’ Again, this begs the question of historicity. The formula in Matthew probably reflects liturgical usage of Matthew’s church, some fifty years after Easter, and of course it does no entail the later full-fledged trinitarian doctrine; the true divinity of the Holy Spirit, for example, was in serious doubt until 381 AD.
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‘There is no reason to go into the matter of the ipsissima verba of Jesus here since the pope as Cardinal Ratzinger had already shown [in 1988] how arbitrary are the presuppositions which would dismiss the substantial witness of the Gospels in this regard.’ I agree that a fetishism of the ipsissima verba is not the most helpful way toward assessing what the Gospels can tell us of the teaching of the historical Jesus. In many cases, however, we can discern with a high degree of probability which parts of the Gospel tradition are closer to what Jesus actually taught. And of course one must not claim for the more historical part, even for ipsissima verba, an authority higher than or in rivalry with the Gospels themselves, which remain our primary access to Jesus.
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‘Suffice it to say that it seems to me professor O’Leary’s largely negative judgement on the pope’s latest book is based on the former’s subscribing to certain discredited presuppositions which belong to a particular world view and philosophy congenial to positivism, even if postmodernists have inconsistently retained parts of that world view despite themselves. O’Leary’s calling for a “new art of judgement” is, like all art, subjective, born in the eye and prejudice of the particular beholder.’ I disagree that art or judgment are merely subjective; the exercise of judgment is essential not only to the freedom of theology but to its chances of abiding in truth. I may indeed be under the sway of modernist and postmodernist ways of thinking – how can any contemporary avoid them? – and the art of judgment in theology is, among other things, an imperative to negotiate a critical relationship with and against these tendencies. ‘Against that stands the high Christology of the earliest Christian witnesses.’ But to access, appropriate, and articulate that Christology today is a matter demanding the most subtle judgment. Chalcedon refined the Christological vision of earlier periods in a revolutionary way, banishing the recurrent pressures toward modalist understandings of Christ’s divinity and monophysite understandings of the Incarnation. Today, to retrieve the subtlety of the Chalcedonian horizon, we need more of that spirit. We cannot go back to a pre-modernist or pre-postmodernist or what Vermes calls pre-Copernican world.
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Stephen Hand responds that the trinitarian baptismal formula in Matthew 28.19 is ‘already prefigured in the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. We see there that the Holy Spirit descends on the Christ, the Anointed One, while the Father’s Voice confirms that Anointing. The Trinitarian structure of this event is unmistakable and implicitly anticipates the more explicit Trinitarian baptismal formula (though not yet creedal) of the great commission... We see in the texts that Jesus was “worshiped,” we see that some doubted, and we see the Trinitarian structure (one “name,” three persons) of what may very well have become baptismal “liturgical usage” in the early church. But that liturgical usage did not come out of nowhere, but hearkens back to the Christ Event itself. I am 54 years old and can tell you that I still remember most of the critical moments of my early life. We would surely expect the same for the church 50 years after Jesus’ resurrection even without the inspiration of the Spirit which was promised to assist them. As for the divinity of the Holy Spirit it is already seen in the distinctions within Jesus’ baptismal formula; also... the Gospel of John already refers to the Holy Spirit as a divine Person at one with but differentiated from the Father and the Son.... Many other texts could be adduced to further show the Spirit’s Personal nature, his omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and his mentioning with the Father and the Son in the Pauline and later epistles, even if precise creedal formulation would only comes as needed later.’
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In reply I say: This takes me back to my days studying at the Gregorian University. I followed Ratzinger’s course on the Eucharist (with much reference to Luke’s Gospel) and Anton Vögtle’s on Mark. I exegeted the Baptism passage much as Hand does, and got a near-failing grade! Reading the NT language about Father, Son, Spirit within the grid of fourth century dogmas leads to many falsifications of the text (for instance, when ‘I and the Father are one’ in John 10.30 is read as a reference to Nicene consubstantiality). Of course the NT witness is the nucleus whence the dogmas originate; but the dogmas are not necessarily exhaustive explanations of that nucleus; they are there to protect certain aspects of it from attack. The scene at the end of Matthew’s Gospel is not something remembered as an ordinary empirical event fifty years later. It is a theological composition. The mountain, for example, is one of a series of symbolic mountains in Matthew, in line with his presentation of Jesus as the new Moses.
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If the divinity of the Spirit were so obvious, it would not have to be proven laboriously by Athanasius and Basil in the Fourth Century. In the Nicene Creed of 325 the divinity of the Spirit is not mentioned at all; it is only in 381 that it becomes a credal matter, and even then quite shyly (to the disappointment of Gregory Nazianzen, less shy than Basil about talking of a divine and consubstantial Spirit). Rather than say ‘true God of true God, proceeding from the Father, consubstantial with the Father’ the 381 creed discreetly says ‘with the Father and the Son adored and glorified.’ Sobrino is right that the NT shows Jesus to be ‘from God’ (and the Paraclete is likewise ‘from God’) but the full divinity of the second hypostasis of the Trinity not to mention the third was present only in germ in the NT texts.
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Beware of saying ‘Christ is the deity’ as if it were a plain and obvious matter. Karl Rahner says that we can say ‘Jesus is God’ only by reason of the communication of idioms, that is, the rule that what belongs to the humanity of Jesus can be ascribed to the Word (‘the Word died on the cross’) and vice versa (‘Jesus created the world’), thus the divinity of the Word can be ascribed to Jesus – all of this by reason of the hypostatic union of Jesus and the Word. See http://hungertruth.com/uploads/Jesus_relation_to_YHWH.pdf
I do not accept the anti-trinitarian upshot of this essay, but it sights well the difficulties. The Trinity concerns the status of the divine Logos mentioned in John 1.1-18, which was discussed at Nicea; the manner in which the ultimate identity of Jesus Christ is one with that of the Logos is a distinct question, discussed at Chalcedon; there is a trinitarian structure to the New Testament revelation, God, Jesus, Spirit, but the ontology of the intra-divine Trinity-in-itself, the immanent Trinity, is a secondary or derivative question in respect to the New Testament events; see http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/04/questioning_bac.html
http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/06/demystifying_th_1.html
http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/06/demystifying_th_1.html
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The idea that Jesus really said ‘I am’ (as in the trial scene in Mark or at many places in the Fourth Gospel) signifying his divinity seems to me historically improbable. All the texts one can invoke for that have the hallmark of later theological composition. Q, insofar as it can be reconstructed, has nothing of the sort. Historical study of the Gospels strongly suggests that the further back one goes the less such explicit high Christology is in evidence. Did the Jews crucify Jesus for saying he was God? No, the Romans crucified Jesus and some Jewish authorities had a role in denouncing him; it is not very clear why; it probably had something to do with his behavior in the Temple. Compare the differences between the trial of Jesus in Luke and Mark/Matthew – I think Luke has no involvement of the Pharisees, indeed they give friendly warnings to Jesus against Herod at one point.
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Another response to the present review comes from Michael Liccione’s blog, July 18, 2007: ‘I still find O’Leary’s stuff useful because it is an almost perfect negative illustration of how intelligent Catholics should think and argue. For that reason, I intend to use his mega-review of the Pope’s new book as the foil for my own, more modest review’ (http://mliccione.blogspot.com/2007/07/kicking-against-goad.html). The promised review never appeared and it is not even clear if Michael Liccione has actually read the book, which in itself suggests how ephemeral the impact of Benedict’s flawed work is likely to remain.
