In the case of statements about God or about ultimate reality, it is not insuperably difficult to square their historical relativity with their claim to objective truth, since they concern what relativises from the start all efforts to conceive or express it. Even claims that associate the transcendent with particular historical events can be softened and relativised by the thought that the transcendent is revealed more generally in all events. But when a single event is designated as the supreme and definitive locus of revelation, a painful logical alternative seems inescapable: we are forced either to de-absolutise this event, or to insist that all other historical vehicles of revelation are subordinate to it a priori. If the ‘Christ-event’ is the site of full revelation and salvation, then non-Christian traditions may serve as providential avenues of approach to it, or may provide some perspectives for its interpretation, or may even be supplementary channels of its grace, but ultimately their significance is decided asymmetrically by this unique event. Thus Christianity seems to claim to understand the other religions, beginning with Judaism, better than they can understand themselves.
This asymmetry is deeply unsatisfactory. It defines the status of other traditions and the meaning of history prior to any acquaintance and concrete study. It contradicts the other traditions’ sense of their own significance. The more we listen to those others on their own terms, the more the claim that God is fully and definitively revealed only in Christ seems in need of revision. Each religion cuts its distinctive path of truth, creates a distinctive style of approach to ultimate gracious reality. Empirically, the revelation in Christ neither absorbs nor discredits the truth-events centred on the Torah, the Quran, the Vedas or the bodhisattva path. Moreover, the frontiers of Christ’s identity are uncertain. The Word of God – the transcendent revelation event in its undisposability (Barth’s Unverfügbarkeit) – has indeed elected to be named Jesus Christ. But the sense of that name emerges only as we relate Jesus to the other worlds of truth.
.
THE ONE SAVIOUR
‘He came to them, walking on the sea’ (Mk 6:48). The encounter with a saviour, who brings the answer to our most unsettling questions – the pardon of sins, the remedy for suffering and mortality – is at the heart of most religious experience. But the saviour’s identity differs from one culture to another, as does the nature of the salvation promised. Krishna’s claims are as universal as those of the Johannine Christ:
"Thou art the Imperishable, the supreme Object of Knowledge; Thou art the ultimate resting-place of this universe;
"Thou art the immortal guardian of the eternal right, Thou art the everlasting Spirit, I hold". (Bhagavad-Gîtâ 11.18, trans. Edgerton)
And the accents are as intimate and as persuasive:
"Further, the highest secret of all, My supreme message, hear.
"Because thou art greatly loved of Me, Therefore I shall tell thee what is good for thee.
"Be Me-minded, devoted to Me; Worshiping Me, revere Me;
"And to Me alone shalt thou go; truly to thee I promise it – (because) thou art dear to Me". (18.64-5)
The promises of Amida Buddha or the other saviour figures of Mahâyâna Buddhism, or those of the gods and goddesses of devotional Hinduism, are equally touching. Nor can one confidently claim that the faith, love, devotion these figures inspire is existentially less real or authentic than that of Christians.
Yet objectively, it might be argued, these saviour-figures are only imaginary personifications, projections in which religious longing fills out the lineaments of its dream, whereas Jesus is a historical human being. They remain docetic amalgams of finite and infinite, whereas he marks the point where finite and infinite meet in their distinctness, not in myth but in mystery. In the higher reaches of religion personal saviours tend to be identified with or dissolved into broader impersonal platforms of salvation: Brahman, Dharma, Buddha-nature, Torah. The apologist will see these as dim participations in the Johannine Logos, which is definitively made known, and decisively related to human, historical reality, only in Jesus Christ.
Some such critique of the claims of other saviours may be an essential component of Christian apologetics. Yet the credibility of the Christian claim depends in turn on honest assessment of what these troubling parallels to it imply. Their continued vigour undermines the self-evidence of the confession of Christ as saviour, making the figure of Jesus enigmatic in an unexpected way. He who is the answer to our existential questions has himself become a question. We go to meet the other religions with the assurance of having a saviour, but also with questions about his place in the interreligious horizon. Moreover, the very notion of salvation has become problematic. Doctrines of salvation seem to reduce the variety of human ills under a single essentialist rubric such as duhkha or sin, in order to provide an equally monolithic antidote to them. In all this we cannot presume to subordinate divine revelation to a more global horizon; rather we must follow the concrete openings towards the other which are inscribed in the revelation itself, both in its transcendent aspect – the illimitable reach of the notion of Logos – and in its empirical aspect – the open-ended, incomplete historical texture of the Christ-event.
The inclusivist claim that whatever salvation seems to come from other traditions in reality comes from Jesus in a hidden or anonymous fashion, or at least converges on him as its fullest embodiment, so that he is the privileged focus of human progress toward divinisation, is suspiciously convenient. Yet it is equally facile to speak of a plurality of saving instances having equal status, or to suppose that the universality of Christianity will emerge in the course of interreligious encounters by a progressive dechristianisation, just as the universality of Western reason is realised as its progressive dewesternisation. We do not know what the slow mutation of Christian identity, in the course of many complex interactions, may bring forth; but the function of Christ, endlessly reinterpreted, must remain central to this identity. As we think more largely of God and of human history, our understanding of Christ is concomitantly released from anachronistic thought-forms, while it remains coterminous with our grasp, or non-grasp, of transcendent reality on the one hand and of historical humanity on the other, as what mediates between them.
It may be objected that this is a wishful predetermination of the outcome, and that it is more likely that Christ will appear in the interreligious horizon as simply one agent of salvation among others, over whom he enjoys no special primacy. Or agnosticism may seem the most honest attitude: we simply do not know whether or not Christ has a primacy as saviour, for we do not understand well enough the upshot of his saving work and its relation to the other kinds of salvation there may be, so that in practice all we can do is to follow the path opened up by the Gospel without worrying about its relation to other paths.
Yet it is not possible to follow Christ without making, explicitly or implicitly, some strong dogmatic claims for him, though one may emphasise these claims more modestly and discreetly than before. Dogma need not be rigid. It develops as an attempt at critical clarification of what faith affirms spontaneously, singling out points which come increasingly to seem crucial while toning down other aspects which had been too naively and massively asserted. No matter what one chooses to believe, agnosticism coexists with the instinct of faith, and assails it with questions to which the answers are never all given together. Yet in regard to the basic conviction of Christ’s status as saviour, the Spirit enables a leap of faith beyond the circle of pressing doubts, and the New Testament witness, however tempered and demythologised in subsequent reflection, firmly sustains these promptings of the Spirit.
Within this conviction, we may seek to distinguish between what faith, led by the Spirit, apprehends as the soteriological primacy of Christ on the one hand, and on the other what is merely a matter of dogged dogmatic assertion or bondage to traditional habit. However, it is hard to mark a clear boundary here. Faith cannot be cleanly differentiated from respect for tradition, or even from an element of indoctrination. Hence any claim to hold something by faith carries a margin of fragility, requiring to be compensated for by the ongoing effort to reground faith-claims in a more existential apprehension of the Christ-event.
Those who respond to the call, ‘Come unto Me’, whether it come from Christ or Krishna or Amida, do indeed find rest unto their souls, grace, peace and joy. If to be devoted is to be duped, to hold back sceptically is a formula for sterility: les non-dupes errent in their refusal of commitment (Lacan). The devotee gravitates to an exclusivist position; the logic of love justifies this investment of absolute trust in a limited human form, this identification of the ultimate in the singularity of a sacred name. Bur a pluralist theology, while respecting such commitment, seeks to open devotion to a wider disinterested questioning which learns from all traditions. Devotion remains an essential strand in the fabric of religion, but blind devotion must be outgrown. And devotion must not idolise itself, but should be constantly interrogated, with a view to clarifying the encounter which is at its core.
An apologetic defence of Christ’s unique status should begin not from the full-blown doctrine of the Incarnation but from a more basic premise: namely, that God was a work in Christ, that the ultimate reality and nothing less or other is encountered across the words and deeds of Jesus and their ongoing interpretation. Here is a bedrock certitude, which has a plausible phenomenological foundation and which involves no immediate tension with the claims of other religions. The foundation in question is not provided by any single experience, however privileged, but by immersion in the entire spectrum of the teachings of Jesus and the Gospel stories, as they are interpreted and lived by Christians today.
At a second stage, one attends to the distinctiveness, in comparative perspective, of this manifestation of the ultimate in the life of Christ. If we recognise comparable encounters with ultimate reality at the core of other religions, then the distinctiveness of Christ may reside less in what he incarnates than in the ‘how’ of that incarnation, less in his divinity than in the mode of the conjunction of that divinity with humanity.
A generous view will see each saving path as a local enactment of a universal process. ‘Salvation’ as an unimaginable, transcendental movement, shading into other such inconceivables as the Good or the True, is not to be read off automatically from the concrete heterogeneous modes of local salvation-traditions, nor resumed in Christ as ‘concrete universal’. The Buddhist and Christian doctrines of salvation attain a very high degree of universality yet each is limited by its distinctive realm of application. Buddhism is as universal as its spiritual analysis is valid for all humans, but the analysis is incomplete, culture-bound, and can be improved on. Christian universality is associated with the decisiveness of the prophetic tradition in its dealing with history the proclamation of God’s saving will at work in history. But this proclamation remains very general and enigmatic. It is given maximum concreteness in the crucified Jesus; yet even the cross is a sign to be interpreted, and its interpreting community the Christian faithful, cannot declare its universal applicability in an automatic way but must seek first to understand empirically its power to save in their own historical struggle.
How does Christ save? Our answer to that question even for ourselves is always shifting, and can be communicated to humanity only to the degree that it acquires concrete lineaments that have a universal power of persuasion. It never in practice acquires an entirely universal form, all that can be done is to present the currently most vital images of Christ as Saviour; and these images too will differ from culture to culture – one that speaks eloquently to Latin America may fall flat in Australia or Japan. Universality thus takes the form of a pluralistic proliferation of Christ-stories.
At a third, more esoteric level of inquiry we attempt to retrieve the truth of the dogmatic claims about the divinity and humanity of Christ. These came first in the past; but this may have been a short-circuit generating intolerance and violence. Now, rather than a first datum, the divinity of Christ becomes a delicate naming of what the story of Jesus ultimately means. Our traditional language has been massive and overwhelming, like similar language about the Buddha in the Mahâyâna sûtras. When such language is recalled to its basis, it is seen as attesting the transcendent scope of the founding events, the impossibility of confining them within the categories of finite existence, an impossibility perhaps better indicated today by the use of negative language.
In what does the distinctiveness, or the primacy, of Christ’s saving role consist? Five possible answers are: his ontological constitution; the fulness of the revelation he brings; his role as the one who reconciles us with God; the event of his resurrection; his eschatological role. Classically, one would say that his ontological status as true God and true man is what grounds all other aspects of his primacy. But one could try to invert these relations. One could found ontology on revelation: Jesus is identified with the Logos insofar as his life bears the imprint of the reality of God and opens a space within human history for the encounter with that reality. Soteriology too could be reduced to revelational terms: it is by revealing the inner nature of death that Christ’s death frees us from it, and his resurrection is the pneumatic revelation of the sense of his existence as opening human life to divine transcendence; we share in this risen life less by a physical causality than by the opening up of vision. Again, Christ’s eschatological role lies in his revealing the meaning which human history has before God. Such a revelational reduction can easily go too far, undermining any objective primacy of Christ. Thus Gordon Kaufman sees Christ as:
that figure from human history who is believed by Christians to reveal or define, on the one hand, who or what God really is, and, on the other hand, what true humanity consists in. The historical figure of Jesus Christ thus gives concreteness and specificity to the understanding of both God and humanity. (in Gavin D’Costa, ed, Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered, Maryknoll: Orbis, 1990, p. 11)
But a richer concept of revelation could retain the full weight of the ontological claims. If the being of God is light, the revelation of God is conversely a divine event; thus the claim that ‘Jesus is God’ could be rephrased in revelational terms without loss: Jesus is the event of God’s self-revelation’.
Again, one might try to focus the distinctiveness of the Christ-event on the basis of its eschatological character. If one sees the divinity of Christ as residing in the revelational impact of his life, this in turn could be located in the way his life brings into view the eschatological upshot of history: that is, in the historical significance of his life as carrying the Jewish prophetic tradition to its supreme pitch. To speak of his divinity would then be a shorthand for the integral grasp of the conjunction of divine truth and human hope effected through his life. From beginning to end of the Bible God is one who comes to save, who enters history to bring all things to fulfilment. In Christ this process attains a universal sweep, and there is no going back on this; henceforth, God’s eschatological promise is explicitly extended to all humanity, the Messianic invitation has gone forth to the ends to the earth.
Such a reduction of the ‘divinity of Christ’ to its phenomenal base would not necessarily imply a dissolution of classical doctrine. From the basic phenomenon, the Christ-event, there emanate successive layers of christological language, as ever more elusive overtones, up to the loftiest reaches of the Logos-theology. We validate these languages by regrounding them in the event, and invalidate them to the degree that they obscure it. John 1:14,’The Word became flesh’, is a hinge text, representing the high-point of New Testament Christology and the foundation of later dogma. The movement of validation and critique can be roughly divided into two phases: the testing of dogma against the Johannine vision, and the testing of John’s understanding of Christ against the entire New Testament experience which it attempts to encapsulate.
It is only within the context of such ongoing critical sifting that the doctrinal claims can be persuasively enunciated. Since dogma in any case plays the indispensable initial role of pointing back to the phenomenon it defends, and since the phenomenon can never be completely extracted from the dogmatic pre-understanding which brings it into view, the effort to think the Christ-event should never simply undercut the claims of orthodoxy. These claims are best satisfied by identifying those aspects of the meaning of Christ which originally gave rise to them. The doctrinal claims will never succeed in entirely silencing their critics, but imaginative rehearsal of the pre-dogmatic significance of Christ, like a superb performance of some contested piece of music or theatre, is the best strategy for making those claims seem worth defending. But before going any farther, we need to query the fragile and contingent status of any language we use, attending first to the term ‘Logos’ and then to the term ‘flesh’.
.
THE STATUS OF ‘LOGOS’
The question of the ontological status of Christ should not emerge prematurely in interreligious dialogue, where the first concern is to focus the significance of Jesus (or of the Buddha or Muhammad) phenomenologically and historically. This lesser emphasis on dogma comes from the fact that the religions present themselves as vital forces, whose impact is a concrete, empirical matter, whereas their dogmatic claims concern invisible realities, scarcely verifiable. Perhaps the concrete aspects that come to the fore on the interreligious plane will react on the internal debate of each religion, reducing their insistence on what they take to be their pillars and allowing them to become more aware of the problematic character of these ancient claims. The question of the ultimate identity of Christ, and matters of comparable import in other religions, will be interpreted more flexibly as attention is concentrated on the task of understanding the phenomenon of Christ’s saving action as more immediately grasped in the language of faith. Dogmatic claims and questions are implicit even in this first-level language, but their explicit discussion must come after a full exploration of what is nearest to hand phenomenologically and historically. One proceeds to the level of doctrinal reflection only with great hesitation and with a sense of the delicate and problematic nature of the language one is now forced to employ.
At this second level of reflection, one may reach the conclusion that only the Johannine vision of the Logos made flesh can provide a firm basis for the conviction of Christ’s primacy. A Christology that falls short of it makes Christ the merely human agent of divine purposes. But the dogmatic claim here is credible only if we can trace its emergence from its phenomenological context. Such regrounding of the Logos-Christology in the Christ-event is favoured by John himself, for more than a metaphysical theory of Christ’s origins, the Johannine doctrine is a quasi-phenomenological lighting up of the full significance of that event. For John, the meaning of Christ cannot be circumscribed by the categories of ordinary human understanding, or even by any of the titles previously conferred on Jesus and which are assigned their place in the Johannine spectrum. Only the notion of the divine Wisdom or Word, also received from a rich anterior tradition, is commensurate with the significance of Jesus’ life. His presence was that of a living, penetrating word of judgement and grace, which came from God and imprinted itself in the hearts of its hearers with a pneumatic immediacy. The scope of this word is unlimitably universal, for it is spoken from the unmasterable divine dimension. It is an epiphany of the divine glory particularly in the hour of the cross. Its authority is not lessened by the limitations of its historical form, for these are overcome by the interpreting Spirit (Jn 14:26; 16:7-14).
It might be claimed that this pneumatic phenomenology no less than later church doctrine is a violent occlusion of ‘Jesus the Jew’ (Geza Vermes). To bridge the gap between ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’ the Johannine vision of Jesus as God’s Word needs to be regrounded in the word Jesus actually spoke, the message of the Kingdom. The portraits of Jesus in Matthew and Luke reveal that the Christ of faith can be read into the historical Jesus without scandalous distortion; the light of the resurrection seems rather to bring out new depth and universality in the words of Jesus and to give them a permanent resonance.
In John’s vision, the Word is at work in the world from the beginning. Its enfleshment in the life of Jesus is a novum that classical Christology has hastened to express in ontological terms; but these can be cashed phenomenologically as meaning an unprecedentedly concrete articulation of the divine Word. The truth of God and the truth of humanity are here brought into conjunction across the total reality of a spiritual event, a finite but open-ended and ongoing history, centred on the figure of Jesus; to assert the ontological claim in abstraction from this history is to set up a rival dogmatic event, an idolatrous distraction from the event of revelation. A demythologised retrieval of Johannine contemplation shows up the clumsiness of metaphysical slogans such as ‘Jesus is God’ or ‘God became man’, and replaces such expressions as ‘My Lord and my God’ (Jn 20:28) within an open-ended revelational situation. We should leave the notion of Logos as indeterminate as possible, hewing closely to what this language suggests in John, and seeing it as an upâya to be deployed skilfully in order to do justice first to the phenomenality of the Christ-event. This means that the formulation of some necessary logical consequences – such as the need to mark a distinction between God and God’s Logos without prejudice to the divine status of the Logos or to the unity of God – will not attain the inflated self-sufficient status of trinitarian speculation, but will present no more than a set of modest rules for the usage of a language each of whose terms eludes our grasp.
A definition of this Logos can never be established as an abstract truth outside of time, as has been attempted since the Fathers. That attempt runs aground on the historicity of theological language and the impossibility of constructing a stable account of divine reality (even if with the Fathers one calls it ‘unknowable’ or ‘incomprehensible’). The makeshift nature of mythical and metaphysical languages has become evident. If we translate them into a more existential or subtle language, this too is a clumsy expedient unless it integrates a reflexive awareness of its own historicity and of the fact that religious language has never more than a relative fittingness, in relation to some precise context, as a more or less skilful intervention in the field of the sayable in order to witness to the unsayable. ‘The Son of man has nowhere to lay his head’ (Lk. 9:58): the truth of Christ is mismatched to all historical frameworks – be they Jewish apocalyptic or Greek metaphysics, contemporary existentialism or evolutionism – and it is this very inadequation which witnesses to the non-masterable character of the Logos. The Logos is not captured in our language, nor does it present itself as an objective existence independent of it. It makes itself felt as the yawning gap on which all human speech founders. It is less the total fulness of our speech than that which makes such totality impossible.
To bring Jesus Christ into perspective, or rather to shatter the narrowing perspectives in which he has been imprisoned, one should cultivate insight into the finitude and provisionality of all historical constructions of his significance. As we leave a world in which the horizon of religious truth was determined exclusively by Christianity, we flounder blindly in interreligious space as long as we are content to repeat the christological formulas shaped in the ancient debate with Judaism and Hellenism, and finalised within a narrowly Christian context. The new space imposes an unprecedented awareness of the limits of received historical language. It shows up the idiosyncratic and contingent starus of Johannine Christology and its Nicene and Chalcedonian elaboration. The truth expressed thereby in the past has become archaic and awaits a redescription which will be its dynamic equivalent under present epistemological conditions.
The Logos cannot be spoken of as an object independent of every ‘subjective’ perspective. First, because Christology originates not in the search for intemporal truths but in the conviction of the universal significance of what has taken place in the concrete figure of Jesus; it can never lose sight of its reference to this historical event. If the level of timeless truth is reached, the statements about this level are few in number and of an abstraction that limits their scope. Every construction of God-in-himself is rooted in the phenomenality of God-for-us; in fact it is only the deep structure of God-for-us that we isolate in formulating a description of the Trinity. Father, Logos, Spirit; silence, speech, breath; revealer, revealed, revelation (Barth); divine emptiness, form of this emptiness, immediacy of the two – these efforts to construct a trinitarian topology of the Christ-event have no coherence independent of their rootedness in this event. A Christology from above cannot begin from the Logos-in-itself, but only follow the phenomenological routes from an apprehension of the Logos as fulness of Christ.
Commenting on R. C. Moberly’s question of 1889 – ‘Is it true that he was very God? It is either true or false… If it is not absolutely true, it is absolutely false’ (Robert Morgan, ed. The Religion of the Incarnation, Bristol Classical Press, 1989) – Rowan Williams remarks:
I take it that part of the force of the doctrine of the hypostatic union is precisely to deny that ‘Incarnation’ is an isolable event in or prior to the biography of Jesus, and that ‘divinity’ is some element in that life… A phrase like ‘The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma’ begs a fundamental question by assuming that the fact of God’s taking human flesh is the fundamental theological datum, intelligible (at some level) in abstraction from the realities of truthfulness and finality, encounter and judgement, in the presence of the entirery of Jesus’ story which I have been trying to characterise as the source of the pressure towards dogmatic utterance. That the language of God’s taking flesh remains a crucial part of the exposition of the judgement of Jesus’ history needs to be argued, and argued with conscious attention to the particularity of the ‘flesh’ involved… Moberly is right to see dogma as representing the Christian concern with truth; but this concern is less to do with rationality or comprehensive elucidation, more involved with the need to preserve the possibility of the kind of encounter with the truthtelling Christ that stands at the source of the Church’s identity… (p. 88)
Christian truths are the formulation of a personal encounter, and depend for their utterance on a constant reference to this encounter and an existential correspondence to the one who has thus made himself known (Emil Brunner). As the expression of these truths grows away from this context, it loses its precise meaning and its referential efficacity.
It is this non-objectifiability which dooms every theoretical explication of the meaning of Christ – as of that of the Buddha – to a certain frustration. If it could be fully adequate, such an explication would make superfluous the witness of the Christian life, which gives the Gospel its force and intelligibility. Theoretical explication serves to highlight this witness and the figure of Christ himself in overcoming the interpretative frames of a mythology or piety which have become sources of blindness. Like the Buddha, Jesus represents a perfect (but not exclusive or exhaustive) realisation of a spiritual tradition, whence flows at once a great richness and a great simplicity. When theology loses sight of this central clarity, the witness of the saints brings it back to it, demanding of theology a luminous clarification of the meaning of Christ. Today such a clarification is being sought at the crossing of three paths of thought: the exegetical quest for the biblical Christ, reflection on the liberative social implications of the Gospel, and interreligious questioning. The image of Christ which emerges at this crossroads is no longer a stable presence set before us as an object of adoration, but rather a dynamic process inscribed in the very texture of our life. This process destroys every rigid form, making itself felt on each occasion as a new departure. Every form taken by Christianity in history is relativised, but not the process of creative transformation by which Christianity lives and which it knows as the Christ (see J. B. Cobb, in Leroy S. Rouner, ed. Religious Pluralism, University of Notre Dame Press, 1984, p. 175). Christ is not this or that figure that we project, but the entire process of transformation his name evokes. The meaning of Christ consists entirely in his identity with this universal process, and in the exemplarity with which he realises it and carries it to its perfect form.
The impossibility of objectifying the Logos is also apparent when one considers the texture of christological language, of which the basic terms – Son, Logos, Wisdom – are poetic metaphors, drawn from a certain tradition, and cannot be taken as a conceptually transparent description of that to which they obliquely refer. The use of these provisional designations obeys the art of deploying language as a skilful means in the environment of a given culture; as circumstances change, so must this language. Thus it is a mistake to multiply trinitarian statements in the belief that they give a grip on concrete and substantial entities. However refined the procedure by which one sets about stating truths at this level, even in the Johannine prologue or the Nicene creed, they are expressed in a culture-bound language of which the metaphorical character shows the provisional status. Awareness of this situation may rob the great christological conflicts of much of their drama.
The objectivity of the trinitarian statements of the patristic era depends on the topology of revelation of the Hellenistic world; that world having disappeared, this objectivity is itself menaced. To repeat is to betray. To suppose that one can master the biblical and the contemporary horizons starting from a dogmatic structure set up in patristic times is a double obscurantism. This structure, like all historical constructs, is caught in a movement of perpetual alteration. Certain negative constraints remain in force – the prohibition against denying the divine unity or any distinction between Father, Son and Spirit; these rules are necessary to preserve the integrity of the New Testament revelation. But expressions such as hypostasis and ousia have meaning only in an obsolete framework. Representations of the Trinity-in-itself, such as the ‘eternal generation’ of Origen, the ‘procession of the Word’ and the ‘spiration of the Spirit’ as analysed in medieval theology, and above all the currently popular notion of a ‘community of persons’ are illegitimate projections from the biblical experience of the divine as Father, Logos and spirit. In a different cultural context, if the Gospel had emerged in China for example, this experience might have been expressed by other names which would provide no basis for such representations.
The distinction between Father, Son and spirit belongs in the first place to the phenomenality of revelation; it emerges within the ‘divine milieu’ opened by the New Testament as a basic law which assures the meaning of the propositions there enunciated. The quest to formulate the ontological basis for this law, the transcendental conditions of its possibility, moving from the revealed God to an independent discourse on God-in-himself, is not feasible, and even if it were it would involve a distortion of the phenomenality of God as revealed. Certainly, one must maintain that this God really is, and that the trinitarian distinctions have an objective basis in God’s being; but this is less a question of giving metaphysical foundations to the first-order language of faith than of defending the integrity of that language against scepticism. To elaborate a speculative metaphysics is a poor defence of the objectivity of first-order trinitarian language; a more effective one would retain only the essential, and the best formulation of this would be negative: ‘it is false to deny that God exists that the he is one, it is false to say that the distinction between the three aspects of the phenomenality of God disappears at a deeper level of divine being’.
To keep open the perspectives of the New Testament a trinitarian theorv is required, but it should be confined to a minimum and kept in the background. Some theologians see the mission of Jesus Christ as being primarily to disclose the mystery of the Trinity. This creates a distorted perspective on the event of salvation, of which the trinitarian doctrine is only a kind of syntax. ‘When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth’. The truth referred to is the full eschatological manifestation of Christ, ‘the things that are to come’ (Jn 16:13), and not the immanent Trinity, ‘the eminent historicity of God himself’, as Emilio Brito suggests. To talk of a ‘“hermeneutical circle” between the experience of faith and Trinitology as interpreter of revelation’ (Brito, ‘Schleiermacher et la doctrine de la Trinité’, ETL 23 (1992):145-71; p. 167) invites a speculative idolatry of the immanent Trinity. Trinitology should be no more than logical and linguistic clarification o{ the structure of the revealed:
“The rules of language (one essence, two processions, three persons, four relations), perfectly justified as rules of language, have degenerated into the arithmetics of a transcendent ontology… If one wants to preserve the only intelligible and authentic significance of trinitarian doctrine, that which it has from revelation, one must remember again that ‘significance cannot be separated from the access that leads to it’ (Levinas), that ‘the access is part of the significance itself’”. (Bouillard, in E. Castelli, L’analyse du langage théologique, Paris, Aubier, 1969, p. 338)
Even so refreshing a perspective as that of David Nicholls invites similar caution:
“Paul wrote of the risen Christ as ‘interceding for us’ in heaven (Rom. 8:34). In the Epistle to the Hebrews Christ is the eternal high priest, representing the redeemed, and ‘ever lives to make intercession for them’ (Heb. 7:25). For the Johannine writer, ‘we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous’ (1 John 2:1) What sense can these images make unless they assume that there is within the life of the Godhead a conflict between Father and Son. A conflict of principles and interest whose resolution is only possible in the concrete case?” (‘Trinity and Conflict’, Theology 1993:19-27).
The role of the human Christ before the Father certainly gives access to the immanent Trinity, but that access also limits what can be thought or said about the Trinity. Conflict in the Bible is always between humanity and God, never between God and God. The idea that the risen Christ intercedes with the Father simply means that his atoning death reconciles humanity with God. To imagine the divine Logos as such interceding with God is incompatible with the biblical way of imagining God. The saving role of the human Jesus is an incarnation of this Logos, and such activities as pleading and interceding characterise this human incarnation rather than the Logos in its divine nature. A conflictual model of the relation between Jesus and the Father may be valuable, but its transference to the Trinity-in-itself is a needless doubling of the economy. Ascent from the work of the Trinity in the economy to the immanent Trinity should proceed negatively, shedding all models and conceptions based on human relationships, for the Trinity-in-itself is not human.
In the phenomenality of the Christ-event one recognises the God and the Spirit of the Hebrew scriptures, now associated with the one whom God has sent (the ‘Son’) and who gives the Spirit. The life, death, and post-Easter presence of Jesus Christ are an enfleshment in history of the Logos of God. This Logos, like the Spirit, has a long pre-Christian history, and does not entail, any more than the Spirit does, a breach in the divine unity. Once we surmount the tendency to speculate on the Trinity-in-itself, we see that the New Testament adds little to the Jewish understanding of the nature of God; it is but another chapter in what was always a very dynamic history. Its claims have chiefly to do with the divine action in history and with the dimensions of God’s universal, saving will. In the figure of Jesus Christ, the God of Israel reveals himself fully, as his saving will towards all humanity is declared and as he communicates the fulness of his Spirit. But this does not necessarily mean that God hid or only partially revealed his nature in the Old Testament, or that the Trinity is to be thought of as a secret now at last disclosed.
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THE STATUS OF’FLESH’
‘The Word became flesh’ is a statement of the same order as ‘God is Spirit’ or ‘God is light’. As a résumé of the entire Christian vision and experience, it conveys a contemplative insight which one can appropriate only by a continual opening of the mind. Rigid, wooden conceptions of the personal identity between Jesus Christ and the eternal Logos have turned the nondual wisdom of the incarnational vision into a paradox that repels the mind and invites a dangerous investment of blind faith. The ‘true God and true man’ of Chalcedon is a piece of shorthand that risks freezing in a rigid ontological amalgam (Origen’s syntheton ti chrêma’ or ‘God-man’) something that should rather be conceived as a process with delicate and subtle contours. To say that ‘Jesus Christ is God’ is an unskilful expression, unless one understands that ‘is’ in a special sense, integrating layers of reflective mediation. Such reflection will note that’God’ here means not the Father but the Logos. Against the proposals of Arianism, it has to be maintained that the Logos which is manifested in the Christ-event, and which is the inmost truth of that event, is nothing less than God; but it is God in a certain aspect, not as turned to Godself in absolute aseity but as turned to the other as creative Wisdom or Form or ‘Word or Self-Revelation.
Introducing reflective mediations at the level of the ‘flesh’, one might say that the human historical reality centred on the figure of Jesus chimes so well with divine truth that it brings a definitive concretisation of this self-revealing aspect of God for humanity. This could be taken to mean that Jesus marks an evolutionary breakthrough of human reality to the level of Logos; such a breakthrough would be effected not by divine fiat, intervening arbitrarily in history, but as the result of contingent circumstances, a convergence of various factors permitting a quantum leap forward, as in the case of the evolution of the human brain itself. One advantage of thinking in this way is that it envisions the creative power of God as working in the same way in Christ as in all other events of evolution and of history.
If no human being is an island, the Son of man less that any other can be separated from his fellows, as is especially stressed in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Christ emerges from the humanity that we are, and if he is called an incarnation of the divine Logos, this means that the Logos has become incarnate in all human history. The Incarnation cannot be confined to the (non-existent) limits of a single human life. As Rowan Williams puts it:
“That movement of manifold change, the endless variety of imitations of Christ, is where we recognise the divine action as spirit – the same divine action as establishes the form of the incarnate logos, but working now to realise that form in a diversity as wide as the diversity of the human race itself. Thus, in theological terms, human history is the story of the discovery or realization of Jesus Christ in the faces of all women and men. The fulness of Christ is always to be discovered, never there already in a conceptual pattern that explains and predicts everything’ (in Gavin D’Costa, ed. Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered, Maryknoll, Orbis, 1990, p. 8)
Rather than a concord of the human and divine natures at the moment of Jesus’s conception, the Incarnation can be conceived as the dwelling of the Word among us across the entire historical career of Jesus, one of us. His ‘divinity’, like his ‘resurrection’, are better thought of as events or as emergences of meaning than as ontological attributes. Divinity does not attach itself to another thing; it is nor a transferable quantity. The claim that Jesus Christ is ‘true God’ has no clear meaning on its own. Its meaning resides in the entire history in which the figure of Jesus is set.
The ‘flesh’ of John 1:14 is not the physical flesh of a single human being but the entire historical world in which the Logos pitches its tent. This Logos is at work in all history but lodges there in a definitive way through the life, death and resurrection of Christ. The Logos is incarnate in Jesus in the totality of his relationships. Here the distinction between Jesus of Nazareth and the paschal Christ is of crucial import, for it appears that Jesus grows into his role of incarnate Logos and fully assumes it only after Easter (see Rom. 1:3-4; Acts 2:36; Jn 7:39; Heb. 5:8-9):
“The exaltation of the Son of Man, which happens to him because he has glorified God in his own death, is just this: to differ from the Logos no longer but to be the same as the Logos. For if ‘he who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him’ (1 Cor. 6:17), so that it can no longer be said of him and the Spirit, ‘They are two’, how much more must we say that what of Jesus is human has become one with the Logos.” (Origen, Commentary on John 32.325-6)
The paschal Christ is, even less than the pre-paschal Jesus, an isolated individual. He is ‘a life-giving spirit’ (1 Cor. 15:45), the opening up of a pneumatic mode of existence, which is realised as a communal phenomenon: ‘and dwelt among us… from his fulness have we all received’ (Jn 1:14, 16); ‘that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us’ (1 Jn 1:3). The Word is incarnate in a communal movement which extends along historical paths to all humanity and which has already engaged all humanity in principle, by reason of the interdependence of all. All aspects of human life can be ciphers of the divine; Christ emerges at the heart of this universal field of revelation and incarnation, from which he cannot be extracted. This universal revelation is cashed as a patchwork of local and particular revelations, and relates to the Christ-event not by being unilaterally subsumed into it, according to an a priori ontological necessity, but in historical negotiations which are mutually enlightening. Hegel’s effort to link all history, and especially the history of religions, to Christ can be retrieved in more open style as the mapping of connecting-lines in a dialogical network. To ‘take every thought captive to obey Christ’ (2 Cor. 10:5) is then not an imperialistic aim, but the opening up of avenues of communication and communion.
Chalcedon teaches:
“One and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only begotten, made known in two natures (which exist) without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the difference of the natures having been in no wise taken away by reason of the union, but rather the properties of each being preserved, and (both) concurring into one Person (prosopon) and one hypostasis – not parted or divided into two persons”. (Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, I, London, Mowbrays, 1975, p. 544)
To respect the unity and distinction of the natures, it should be stressed that Jesus is called God not in direct identification but in virtue of the communicdtio idiomatam. The fact that the divine Logos is revealed across his human life implies an identification between the Logos and that life, which allows the attributes of the Logos to be conferred on him; a principle which has been abused in Catholic and Lutheran theology. As a human being, Jesus is one of us, in no way sheltered from the contingencies of historical existence. But insofar as his life becomes a vehicle of revelation in some definitive, unsurpassable way, it is seen as the Logos made flesh, and its ultimate meaning, the ultimate identity of Jesus, is henceforth to be sought in that dimension.
The Virgin Birth has functioned as a myth of pure origin enframing retrospectively the figure of Jesus. In Luke, by contrast, it can be seen as placing the figure of Jesus in the historical context of the promises made to Israel. To suppose that Jesus had a purer origin, a more autonomous identity than any other human being is to miss the reality of incarnation as a manifestation of the divine in the very element of the contingent, and the non-originary. ‘We can begin to close the abyss between the idealisations of theological history and the contingencies of real history by recalling the notion of Christ’s ontological divinity from his conception to a subtler apprehension of divinity manifested across the entire event of his life. Just as in the Eucharist, the meal-event is ‘transubstantiated’ into a communion in the paschal mystery, so that its basic reality or ‘substance’ now has no independent existence alongside what it has become, so in the case of Christ, his entire historical life in all its extensions is the Logos incarnate, and it has no independent meaning or significance not absorbed in this. A craving for reassurance prompts us to fix precisely the moment at which occur transitions involving the frontiers of our identity: the moment at which God infuses the human soul in evolution or in the foetus, the moment of death. Analogically, the moment of Christ’s conception or of the eucharistic consecration have acquired a fetishistic status in theology. But the element of undecidability attending the attempt to define such moments forces us to a letting-go of identity and an acceptance of open-ended process as the very medium of our existence.
If Jesus could not become the Christ except in a precise cultural context, can he have been Christ, and Word incarnate, from his very conception, as classical christology teaches? Would this not entail that every contingency that might have cut short his activity – e.g. death in childhood – was a priori impossible? Such predestination of an individual’s life cuts into the flow of history and denatures it. The historical life of Jesus would be protected, as no other human life is, from unforeseeable accidents and the common laws of existence. Instead of fulfilling the Messianic hopes and prophecies by a free creative act, he would obey a destiny fixed in advance and of which no circumstance could disturb the unfolding. With the loss of credibility of such a myth of destiny, the docetic character of such conceptions becomes clear. A special providence may have presided over the life of Jesus, shaping even his death (another contingent event that might have been otherwise) into part of his messianic vocation. But if we say that the success of his mission was inevitable, due to the fact that he was from the start on a different ontological plane from other human beings, are we not in the realm of myth?
It is not easy to square the pursuit of such reflections with the claims of orthodoxy. Theology, indeed, seems condemned to this uneasiness, for orthodoxy is never something automatically guaranteed, but a balance to be kept in view as an ideal aim. To strike, or to sustain, the Chalcedonian note means resisting the attractions of adoptionism and Nestorianism while trying to do justice to their reminders of the contingency of the personal development of Jesus. In negotiating a path between opposed distortions we might do well to recall the traditional insistence that the modality of the union between the divine and the human in Jesus Christ is utterly ineffable (see Aquinas, In 3 Sent., d.1, q.1). This apophatic note is not a bar to thinking the incarnation, but it qualifies our constructions of the meaning of Christ as merely provisional clarifications, which adjust currently usable concepts so that doubts and objections are pacified and the presence of Christ in Scripture and Church can communicate itself freely not only to the simple faithful but to questioning intellects.
Joseph Moingt, rejecting the adoptionist temptation, writes: ‘the person of Jesus, at its foundation, acquires its “subsistence” in the word of love whereby God bestows on this person the gift of existing for God alone and whereby God consents to exist in Jesus in communion of Spirit’(Joseph Moingt, L’homme qui venait de Dieu, Paris, Cerf, 1993, p. 528). The person of Jesus is thus from the start brought into being by the divine word, ‘the word which pre-forms his person from the moment of his coming into the world’ (p. 636) – a word which Moingt conceives as a ‘pro-existent project’ directed from eternity to the figure ofJesus.
Insofar as all these constructions remain speculative and metaphysical they are extremely fragile, and one seeks to ground them securely in a phenomenological comprehension of the Christ-event. The reduction of the eternal logos to a time-directed project, a possibility waiting to be realised, is an unsatisfactory way of going behind the scenes of this event, and entails a phenomenologically unconvincing reconstruction of the life of Jesus. The notion that Jesus’s identity is radically determined by the divine Word which calls him into being could be deployed in the following way: all human beings are called into existence by the Word; and are oriented to an ultimate reditio in Deum mediated by the same Word. Jesus corresponds to that divine call into existence, and call to return to God, in so perfect a way that his human life becomes the presence of the Word in the world; he is the man of the Word (homo assumptus). Thus, with Origen (Contra Celsum 6.47-8) and, Karl Rahner we might interpret the hypostatic union as the perfect realisation of the reality of grace, on the model of the moral union described in 1 Corinthians 6:17: ‘he who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him’. Though Jesus grows in grace, growlng into his role, there is no duality of subjects: the Word is his ultimate identity and the human subject is perfectly at one wit the Word.
This may recall Piet Schoonenberg’s theory that the Logos is first ‘personalised’ in Jesus; but there is no need to deny a distinct hypostatic identity of the Logos independent of the incarnation; such an identity has little to do with personhood in the human sense and is not a rival to Jesus’s human personality. Thus the union between Jesus’s personhood and the hypostasis of the Logos could be described as enhypostatic (Cyril of Alexandria) and we can even adopt the (allegedly) Neo-Chalcedonian anhypostasia, since Jesus has no ultimate identity independent of the Logos. It is important in any case to develop such hunches phenomenologically, not as abstract metaphysical patterns; and the phenomena are not accessible independently of the communal praxis in which they emerge.
One could compare the manifestation of the eternal Word in the life of Jesus with the attainment of a supreme illumination in the life of the Buddha. An absolute truth breaks through in these lives, in function of cultural conditions. Starting from this breakthrough, narratives are constructed which aim to do justice to the incomparable event which has taken place in these lives, but which risk falsifying everything by a docetic short-circuit: mythologies of the birth of the child Jesus or the child Gautama; an ontology of the pre-existence of Jesus (first as pre-designated eschatological Messiah; then as eternal Logos); fables of the anterior lives of the Buddha, also issuing in ontological theories of a fundamental pre-existent Buddha-essence (adhibuddha, dharmakâya).
Jesus is the man who, carrying to perfection the insights of his tradition, discovered the true relation between God and humanity; this quite contingent evolution obeys the pressure of the divine Logos which seeks to make itself known, and which does so with divine power in the teaching of Jesus. The ontological explanations which were constructed beginning from this event must be recalled to it in order to keep their credibility and avoid distorting what they serve to interpret.
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THE ESCHATOLOGICAL PRIMACY OF CHRIST
If the Logos is not incarnate in the sharply-delimited individual figure of Jesus, but in human history as brought into focus by this figure, does this mean that every particular form Christ takes is dissolved in a universal transformative flux? No, for even if the dimensions of the meaning of Christ exceed our grasp, the encounter with the Crucified anchors our thought about him in a concrete event. Christ is not an abstract emblem or symbol of the salvation afoot everywhere, but rather gives it the concrete and historical character it lacked. Salvation enters history not by an arrest of the movement of history its enclosure within a salvation-history centred on the life of Jesus, but rather through events in which the cause of God is revealed as one with the historical struggle of humanity. The uniqueness of the death of Christ lies in the way in which it manifests the radical identity of these two instances. Every effort to live history religiously and religion historically is henceforth summoned and guided by the figure of the Crucified. Christ’s universality as Word made flesh, or as focus of a universal striving of divine truth towards incarnation, is inseparable from this singularity of the cross.
The crucifixion is also a merely contingent event. It is the way that Jesus’s prophetic insight into the identity of divine will and human liberation was acted out under particular circumstances. Yet, just as in Heidegger care, being-unto-death, and resoluteness concentrate and project forward the authentic essence of human existence, so this uniquely eloquent event concentrates the essence of the human struggle and propels it forward to its final goal. Thus we overcome mythical structures that are no longer credible by founding claims about Christ’s uniqueness and his divinity in his eschatological role, and by founding this in turn in the exemplarity of his living-out of the prophetic insight into the nature of history, a living-out that itself is a distinctive historical event – the only event within history that can take the measure of history itself.
What happened on Calvary derives this unique authority not from its historical and cultural particularity – the tenebrous imbroglio of a vanished world – but from the forces it joins together: divine transcendence and the human struggle against oppression. ‘His bodiliness and his passion are the will of God and the salvation of the world’ (Hilary of Poitiers, Commentary on Matthew 4.14). Christianity consists in nothing other than the maintenance of this conjunction. This is less a stupefying paradox than the reconciliation of two realities destined to meet: divine holiness and human freedom. Note the specific modality of this conjunction: Christ is presented as an executed criminal, not as an enlightened prince. The cutting edge of the Incarnation is seen here, at a point where the logic of prophetic monotheism is taken to its extreme. In the Buddha’s peaceful life every phenomenon is ordered in view of the eternal, but Christ’s prophetic career God is at grips with the particular injustices of historical existence. Buddhist doctrine has no fundamental need of individual Buddhas; the basic structure of bondage and liberation would remain the same even without them. But Christian doctrine cannot be disentangled from the concrete, historical role assumed by Jesus. The prophetic tradition culminates in a single man, chosen by God, while the Buddhas are ultimately numerous, all discreetly retiring behind their teaching. The style of interpretation that the memory of Jesus requires is prophetic and engaged, and always concerns concrete cases, whereas Buddhist wisdom focuses on the essential structures of existence, often unmasking the element of illusion in the apparent urgencies of history.
Paul van Buren, limiting the boundless universality automatically claimed for Christ as saviour, centres his significance in a specific historical event: Jesus opens a new chapter in history by prophetically discerning God’s purpose for the Gentiles. This event is ‘God’s radical new expression of his eternal faithfulness to his creation, whereby he has added to his beloved Israel also his beloved Church in the service of his redemptive purpose’ (A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality, Part III – Christ in Context, San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1988, p. 252). The divine Logos is identified as God’s ‘covenantal outgoingness’ revealed in the figure of Jesus:
“He who has looked into the face of this suffering Jew… has seen the Father (John 14:9), not a being of one substance with the Father (Nicea), not a divine creature (Arius), but God the Father of Israel and of Jesus Christ. That is how God makes himself Present to and known by his Church – he addresses them in just this way: they are addressed by that Jew. Consequently their fully appropriate confession, made while looking directly into the face of this crucified Jew, is, ‘My Lord and my God’ (John 20:28)… The move that the Fourth Gospel dares the Church to make is that of risking and trusting the judgment that this man is precisely the way in which the suffering Father of Israel and all creation has chosen to open a radically new chapter in the continuing history of his involvement in human affairs”. (p. 224)
Associating the human Jesus immediately with the eternal God of Israel, van Buren is impatient with the language of the classical trinitarian and christological doctrines. Of the expression ‘the divinity of Christ’ he writes:
“That phrase sounds as if the Church knew something reliable about divinity and so felt it was justified in predicating this of Christ. The fact of the matter, of course, is just the opposite: the Church has learned whatever little it may know about divine matters from the things concerning Jesus of Nazareth. It might well speak of the Christ-likeness of divinity or, more boldly, the Jesusness of God. It has no grounds whatsoever for speaking of the divinity of Christ… The highest possible Christology will be one that sees in the lowly crucified one the very heart of God the Farher… The lowliness of this crucified Jesus is his ‘divinity’, his Godliness, and just this is what is confessed by the Church when it says of this Jew, ‘God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God’”. (pp. 293-4)
The primary phenomenon of the revelation of God in Jesus need not exclude the background implication of the divinity of the Logos, as providing the space in which that primary phenomenon can emerge fully. Instead of telescoping the language of Nicaea onto the figure of the historical Jesus, it is better to respect the distance between the two levels of language, seeing Nicaea as a set of rules for speaking of the Logos. Dogma is not intended as a direct transcription of the New Testament revelation of God in Christ; when it has usurped that role the result has been a forgetfulness not only of the Jewish humanity of Jesus but of the dynamic of revelation in its New Testament forms. That God is from all eternity not only Father, but ‘covenantal outgoingness’ in Word and Spirit, and that this outgoingness of God finds its fullest historical actualisation in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is a version of the classical doctrines that could embrace the language of Nicaea and Chalcedon, with suitable hermeneutical adjustments.
Van Buren never lingers on this eternal Word in any other form than that of its historical manifestations, among which he gives pride of place to the Torah:
“A Church that means to affirm the eternal covenant between God and the Jewish people will have to put the Torah first… The consequence for the Church’s Christology is that the term ‘the Word of God’ will need to be thought through primarily from the perspective of Sinai”. (p. 247)
This reinsertion of Jesus in the Jewish context heals the violent divorce with Judaism created when Jesus is made the absolute and only vehicle of God’s saving presence. Jesus is the occasion of the extension of the covenantal grace at work in Judaism, and it is by this extension that he incarnates God’s outgoingness with a measure of ‘grace and truth’ (Jn 1:17) that is unlimited in principle – ‘it is not by measure that he gives the Spirit’ (Jn 3:34) – though its full realisation remains a matter of eschatological hope. The violent divorce between the Torah-event and the Christ-event is one of the tragic obstacles to the unfolding of grace and truth; another is the violent exclusivism or inclusivism practised by Christians towards the non-Christian religions.
Fuller dimensions of the Incarnation come into view as the calling of the Gentiles is seen to include an opening of the Gospel to the human quest for truth and salvation in its entire reach. As Christians learn from the religious vision of others and from their social and political struggle to create a better world, the Kingdom message of the prophets and of Jesus grows towards the universality that is intrinsic to it. The Kingdom ceases to be a sectarian claim and is seen to be coterminous with the divine Torah or with the divine Logos. Van Buren does expect ‘theological discoveries through interfaith dialogue’ and that ‘the Church will learn better to understand and accept the Lordship of Christ through discovering what Christ’s Spirit has been accomplishing outside the Church’ (p. 271). But the privileged place of covenantal language in his diction might impede the emergence of alternative languages in this dialogue. The ‘Jewish-Christian reality’ may be demystified as it comes into perspective in relation to the other religious paths. Its redescription in an interreligious perspective will not abolish the covenantal character of God (for God cannot contradict himself), but may show the biblical covenant to be but one form of the working of the divine in history – a form that can however claim a certain primacy in virtue of its unsurpassed historical concreteness and eschatological reach. The eschatological dimension of God’s revelation in Torah and Christ cannot be confined to the Jewish or Christian communities, for the revelation is intrinsically destined to all humanity. One might toy with a Joachimite triad: the Jews are the ones through whom God was first made known in history; the Christian community of Jews and Gentiles is based on the fuller explicitation of that knowledge in the life and teaching of Christ; and now the Spirit is leading us to the ultimate all-inclusiveness of the Kingdom community, as we reach out to the entire human family with its traditions, renouncing the sectarian enclosures that have prevailed until now.
Sociologists sometimes caricature Christianity as a religion of pure interiority divorced from political and social reality:
“For his God is so detached from the bonds of this world that it would have no meaning to confront in his name the earthly thrones and dominations. It is in the secret places of the heart that he gives himself, at an infinite distance from what Caesar demands, and which must be rendered to him in the quiet assurance that the true Kingdom is elsewhere. God’s universal omnipotence is not to take shape in a future worldly empire, bur is attested here and now in its radical foreignness to the affairs of this world, a foreignness such that it knows no people but only interior beings who have been elevated to a capacity to understand him by their own detachment from the things of the world”. (Marcel Gauchet, Le désenchantement du monde, Paris, Gallimard, 1985, p. 160)
This deformation of the Christian message may correspond to a spiritualistic or gnostic temptation which has accompanied Christianity throughout its history, but it does not match the reality of evangelical charity either in its biblical charter or as effectively practised. Reading the sayings of Jesus against the background of the prophetic tradition, we see that the coming of the Kingdom has nothing to do with individualistic withdrawal; it explodes at the heart of history as a communitarian, political and social event. To think this out fully requires a practical context in which it is enacted. It may well be that even the New Testament praxis is only a primitive or experimental enactment of Christianity, and that its deficiencies leave a residue of abstraction or vagueness in the accounts of what the Kingdom entails; or it may be that the praxis and the accounts were perfectly adapted to that time but have to be elaborated anew for ours.
If rather than reducing the Incarnation to an invisible event of a spiritual and ontological order and treating its concrete historical effects as inessential, we focus instead on these effects, seeking to interpret them as indicative of an eschatological conjunction of the human struggle and God’s saving purpose, then the distinctiveness of Jesus is seen as residing in the new orientation he brings to human history. The cross desacralises salvation by bringing it into accord with fleshly realities – not only individual suffering and death, but also communal challenges of injustice and violence. In the contemporary economy of meaning and value, which refuses to be governed by great doctrinal principles, the christological faith survives as an empirical apprehension (in a broad sense) of the meaning of Christ. As a figure of justice and solidarity at the human level and of God’s eschatological will, Christ crucified reveals to every generation, in varying presentations, the basic truth about God and humanity – a truth which exists only in relationships between God and humanity as a dynamic interchange from which a pure definition of God or of the creature made in God’s image can never be extracted.
Replaced in this context, ‘justification by faith’ signifies that if we are associated with Christ crucified, we are headed for the future willed by God. So we are free in principle from past bondage and put in contact with the deeper vital movement of history made flesh in the life and death of Jesus; this gives meaning (justification) to our activities and ends the futility of an aimless existence. This event of justification takes place between God and humanity and cannot be formulated in an objectified way; hence the immense confusion of the debate on this topic, in which one appreciates the great voices, those of a Luther or a Newman, which speak from the heart of that ‘between’ – ‘everything… is played out in the entre’ (Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, University of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 222) – even though when they go on to cast their convictions in metaphysical form they become entangled in antinomies.
The primacy of Christ, then, is less a matter of ontological superiority than a precise and irreplaceable function. It is true that the message of the coming of the Kingdom remains quite indeterminate as far as its content goes. It is the messenger himself who gives it a concrete face, enacting in his life and death the principles of the future prepared by his Father and creating a community which is to live in view of the promised end. All the visible historical acts of Christ and of his community are but an inadequate anticipation of the fulness of the eschatological Christ. Nevertheless, the coherence of the witness they constitute renders credible their claim to light up the orientation of history as God has willed it. The eschatological future is proclaimed in universalist terms, as the accomplishment of the hopes of all humanity and as surpassing all particular forms of historical Christianity – which is itself but a prophetic sign serving to keep open the promise of this future; yet there is nevertheless an indissoluble bond between that promised fulfilment and the historical figure of Jesus Christ.
The figure of the Crucified points toward an unknown future, but it indicates the path of life which is most appropriate to the expectation of this future. Dazzlingly simple, but at the same time unfathomably enigmatic, the gap between this historical figure and the eschatological one that exceeds the resources of the imagination leads to a great variety of interpretations. The foundational event of the Gospel withdraws from our grasp, and its eschatological clarification remains of course utterly unimaginable. So we spell out our series of gospels, using well the interval. We settle down in each of these gospels in turn, only to be dislodged each time by the untamed residue of the Gospel’s prophetic thrust.
The Gospel is a wound which the tradition wants to heal. Christianity can be seen as a system which ‘trans-codes its initial conditions by transforming them into inherent moments of its self-development’, repressing ‘the real of a violence founding the system and none the less disawowed once the system reaches the level of its self-reproduction’ (Slavoj Zizek, For they know not what they do, London, Verso, 1991, p. 214-5). Whenthe authentic figure of Christ emerges anew in history the original wound is reopened, and the historical Jesus is rediscovered under a surprising aspect. At the same time the eschatological hope revives, and one realises afresh that the Christ to come is always greater than what we have thought we understood about him up to now. When the Gospel inspiration is most alive, its judgement on the past is most severe: the prophets, Paul, and Luther are unjust to tradition, for they judge it by eschatological standards or in the name of an impossible step back to ‘the beginning’. This injustice is of the essence of prophetic religion, for it lives by a future opened up in divine promise (the promise inscribed in the heart of the Torah or in the teachings ofJesus), and any received formulation or enactment – even the letter of Scripture itself – will seem an alienation and a betrayal of the original opening.
A historical figure can acquire all his significance from his dedication to an absolute. Thus the meaning of the Buddha is nirvana; he is its contingent, fragile, historical vehicle. Such a life discloses the meaning of every human life, as it enacts our deepest and least acknowledged aspirations. The significance of Jesus Christ is resumed in his mission of announcing the coming of the Kingdom; only this gives the contingencies of his life and death their universal, post-paschal, pneumatic meaning. The Gospel texts exhibit a well-focused grasp of the significance of Jesus in their eschewal of biographical curiosity and subordination of every narrative to the essential theme of the Kingdom. One may detect a similar economy in the Buddhist canon, despite its prolixity. The founder of a religion has only one reason for his existence, which the witnesses seek to extract in its purity. Having rediscovered the eschatological meaning of the life of Christ, we can attempt to rethink all the ontological categories of incarnation and redemption in eschatological terms. We could say that Jesus Christ incarnates the divine Word in living a human life entirely open to the Kingdom, and in sharing this mode of life with others and inviting them to live it. The human may be rendered as transparent to the divine in the Buddha as in Christ, but the eschatological character of Jesus’ message and the paschal mystery gives them an extra dimension, making them the incarnation of the Logos specifically in history.
To be sure, this eschatological language is still a Jewish and Christian construction, a contingent and fragile myth permitting a grasp of what is happening in the Christ-process, and whose function is to go much further than its direct content suggests. When we set the figure of Jesus in a cosmos which is not thousands but thousands of millions of years old, and which is headed not towards an imminent end, as Jesus expected, but towards further billions of years of evolution, what becomes of his eschatological claim? In a million years will a vastly transformed human species be able to make anything of the historical figure of Jesus?
The enlargement and transformation of the memory of Christ and of the eschatological horizon he opened up is a project that will leave much of the biblical matrix behind. Yet the New Testament itself, in its basic thrust, calls for this enlargement, in the course of which its central words are renewed again and again, even if the letter of the text shrivels into ever greater obscurity. The presence of Christ as a life-giving spirit outstrips the limits of first-century Palestine or any given stage in humanity’s evolution, for it is a dynamic orientation to the divine fulfilment of the human project and is coterminous with the illimitable openness of the human spirit. ‘My words will not pass away’ (Mk 13:31) because their ultimate source is not human but divine; because their content – love, truth, justice – is of permanent bearing, however primitive its expression; because they are only a beginning, straining proleptically toward the eschatological goal which fulfils them; and because the Spirit continually reinterprets them in the Christian community so that they bear new fruit from year to year.
There is a pluralism of eschatologies even within the New Testament, and the eschatological focus has wavered throughout history in tandem with the shifting fashions of human hope and desire. The ancient eschatological and apocalyptic schemas will have to be rethought when more light comes from interreligious encounters, Every religious message has to ‘pay the price of its existence’ (W. E. Hocking), and cannot surpass the conditions of its historical contingency. To demythologise eschatology, we could try to redefine it in almost tautological terms: it is that toward which the Christ-event points, the full truth of that which has taken place in Christ. This would allow the notion of eschatology to mean that toward which the whole spiritual quest of humanity points, the full truth of the religions, and all else.
To see Christ as the eschatological prophet, however, risks reducing the Incarnation to a genial intuition of Jesus identifying the divine will with human liberation. The titles conferred on him would then be only a retrospective confirmation of the value of his insights and his fidelity in living them out. As the focusing genius of his religious tradition, who himself drew out its deepest consequences, he might well be acclaimed in mythical language as its Messiah. The danger of such a reductive account need not, however, prevent us from saying that all that we designate by the term ‘the Incarnation’ is mediated by the privileged historical role of Jesus Christ as the one who reveals the concrete significance of Jewish monotheism for human history beyond the frontiers of Israel.
One might risk the following proposition: ‘it is because Jesus was such a man at such a moment in history that he became Son of God’. The inverted form of this proposition – ‘it is because he is Son of God that Jesus became man at that moment in history to reveal this truth’ – can have a certain value on the level of hymnic evocation, but it should not blind us to what is afoot on the scene of history before our eyes, namely, that a man shows forth in his teaching and in his life the unity of divine truth and the truth of human existence, and that from the enactment of this unity flows a charge of pneumatic power, the resurrection. The resurrection-event resides less in the phenomena of the appearances or the empty tomb, which witness to it, than in the pneumatic unfolding of the full meaning of Jesus, now known as Christ, in the hearts and in the lives of the first witnesses to him. This spiritualising interpretation is suggested by the one eye-witness account we have (Gal. 1:16; I Cor. 15:8), for we may take it that Paul’s experience was of the same order as that of the other apostles a few years earlier. If the appearance to more than five hundred brethren (I Cor. 15:6) corresponds to Pentecost, then the nature of the resurrection experience may be less inaccessible than is usually thought. The encounter with the risen one is in continuity with the normal pneumatic life of the Church with its bounty of charisms and spiritual insight.
Are these events intrinsically more mysterious than those of the life of the Buddha, who realised, taught and lived the path to a universal liberation from suffering? Jesus opens history to the power of a God who saves. The Buddha opens human existence to the dissolution of its illusions, and to the vision of reality as it is, in the enjoyment of nirvâna. Both established modes of religious life which remain viable and verifiable. Both were human beings, who became the instruments and revealers of a transcendent reality.
It may be that as one draws near to Jesus, Jesus himself disappears and one is with the God of Jesus, just as when one draws near the Buddha, the Buddha himself disappears and one is on the path to nirvâna. The Christ cult and Christ myth of the early Church are then a penetration of the essence of Jesus, as openness to the Father, not the erection of Christ as a screen against his message. But in the case of Christ one must recognise a non-duality between the instrument and the divine action which takes place by its means: ‘I and the Father are one’ (Jn 10:30); ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father’ (Jn 14:9), A unique status: the one who reveals the action of God in human history is also the one through whom God inserts himself in an exemplary way into human history. But need we oppose so rigidly revelation and insertion: is there not also a non-duality between making known the convergence of God and humanity and bringing about this very convergence? The nirvanic transparency of the life of the Buddha has made him a ‘refuge’. Perhaps it is in a similar fashion that the utter obedience to God’s saving will expressed in the life of Jesus makes him saviour and Lord?
It will be objected that the primacy we claim for Christ is merely relative, and the stress on eschatology reflects the bias of a history-oriented culture. The eschatological vision did emerge within such a culture, and it may have to be enlarged greatly for its kernel of universal appeal to become manifest. The enfleshment of the Word is not an abstract lesson in philosophy of history but enactment in human relationships of divine love – the Christmas story with its family comings and goings and its political schemings already shows the Incarnation as steeped in a social and relational web. This fleshly milieu is what we call history, but our present schemes for interpreting the human adventure are as flimsy and provisional as those of any other age or culture. Salvation comes along other paths than this engagement within human historical relationships. If it is measured solely in terms of spiritual liberation, for example, or of upright living or pure worship of God, then one would have to say that there is no reason to claim a primacy of Christian salvation over Buddhist, Jewish or Islamic salvation. But if history can be redeemed, then Christ alone emerges as the historical saviour.
Burton Mack denounces such claims as mythological, pointing out that the myth of pure Christian origins has in reality added to the burden of tragedy in human history: ‘The holocaust was also a gospel event’(A Myth of Innocence, Philadelphia, Fortress, 1988, p. 375). Yet his sociological explanation of the myth seems implausible: we are asked to see Jesus as a Cynic philosopher, his personality in the passion narrative as a product of martyrological narrative convention, the Eucharist as a Hellenistic symposium, Paul as ‘an unstable, authoritarian person’ and his gospel as the production of ‘a brilliant mind’ (p. 98). The Christ of faith was created as a reference for authorising unconventional practice and adjudicating internal conflicts over authority, and his stature (‘the very stupendous claims made for Jesus’) grew through ‘a feedback mechanism whereas once accountability had been transferred to the champion, the champion was there to assume ever greater burden for the new’(353).
A similar account could be given of Buddhist projections back onto the historical Buddha, and it would accord with the constructive, imaginary character of religious conceptions. Yet the founding event in each case has deeper roots than this theory can explain, and it opens up a way of life and a vision of existence which demythologisation of the sources may enhance rather than discredit. The pluralistic texture of the Christ-event, if we can recover it, undermines the destructive myth of innocence, plunging us into a labour of interpretation in which the Jews are our indispensable partners. Even if the figure of Jesus was constructed as a pure logocentric origin, its deconstruction may reveal that in a subtler way something new and powerful did originate within the matrix of the time, in indissoluble connection with the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
It might be objected that eschatology is too murky a topic to allow any firm self-positioning of Christian existence or language. It has always been a field of controversy, full of polarisations – between Church and Kingdom, the hieratic and the prophetic, ideology and utopia, world-affirmation and world-denial, prophetic realism and apocalyptic fantasy, realised and futuristic eschatology, imminent and delayed parousia. All these old polarisations continue in new forms today. But they also indicate the middle way which overcomes them, the incarnate balance between a positive naming of God’s purposes in the present and a sceptical review of this naming in order to prevent any absolutising of human language and insight (see P. D. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic, Philadelphia, Fortress, 1975, p. 210). The unresolved controversies of the eschatological tradition have at least the merit of keeping us from resting easily in any vision of the meaning of historical existence. Faith in God’s saving will goes hand in hand with questioning of the signs of the times in an ongoing effort to discern that will.
To speak of God’s will and purposes is clumsy anthropomorphism, yet it names what faith senses as the centre and foundation of reality, a truth which attests itself powerfully in Scripture and in conscience as well as in the thrust of cosmic evolution. As opposed to Kaufman’s ‘cosmic serendipity’, such primitive expressions as ‘the will of God’ point to that which transcends any order we can grasp. ‘Thy will be done’ is a prayer that leaps beyond cosmic process and consigns all things to the sovereign disposal of the ultimate good. Eschatology reduces to the belief in such ultimate sovereign goodness, beyond all identifiable worldly orders.
This transcendence may make eschatology a vacuous discourse. The content of eschatological hope is not spelled out in Jewish or New Testament apocalyptic. They fade into dream as if deliberately to frustrate the quest for a concrete vision. Yet on the other hand the core of biblical eschatology is the fact that salvation is indissociably tied to the real history of humanity and takes the form of a promise bearing on its future. Even the most unworldly forms of biblical apocalypse retain this preoccupation with the meaning and goal of history, a theme which has secure theological status. Today the entire scaffolding of the biblical eschatologies – including the ideas of election, Messiah, and salvation-history – has to be restructured in the light of the alternative viewpoints of Eastern traditions, which compensate for their reticence about history by a keener insight into the depth-structure of temporal existence. Furthermore, a revision of all religious traditions in the light of current cosmology and sociobiology could broaden the eschatological problematic to fit the dimensions of the known universe.
Yet none of this restructuring is likely to give the eschatological dimension the well-defined contours characteristic of ideological predictions such as those of Marxism. Its biblical emblem is the cloud: ‘they will see the Son of man coming in clouds’ (Mk 13:26). It muddies our coordinates, arising as a disturbing question in the midst of our life and our history in an always unpredictable way. ‘we are tempted to repress this dimension or to put it in its place so that it can no longer upset us. Even in theology it can be felt to be an irritating topic, a distraction from the task of constructing the system of our thoughts or of reconstructing the historical past. But if we permit our language to show its flaws, the law of Babel inscribed in it, then eschatology, far from seeming foreign to the task of theology, appears as the very milieu in which this task is to be pursued. The task of theology is to maintain the eschatological tension of the language of faith, so as to keep it open to the ever-greater God. The labour of construction or reconstruction is entirely subordinate to this task. Forgetting this, theology loses touch with the basic conditions of its existence.
The eschatological future, in which faith will yield to a vision face to face, is ineffable; when we try to speak of it we fall into flat mythologies of full presence. Yet it may be spoken of obliquely, for it is inscribed en creux in a Christian discourse aware of its imperfection and finitude. Such a discourse remarks its own provisoriness and fragmentariness, measuring the extent of its lack so that it is all the more galvanised by eschatological longing. Its emptiness of substantial attainments points to a God who eludes the grasp of every concept and is revealed as dwelling at the very heart of this emptiness. Indeed, we may suppose that the face to face vision will not fill in this empty space, but free us for a more radical experience of emptiness.
Visionaries may imagine apocalyptic glory but the normal life of faith knows the eschatological only by the gaps in its own performance and language. Love lived under the limitations of time, in daily fidelity, is a fragile sowing in view of an inconceivable harvest. To limit its scope to its visible fruits is a formula for despair; hope keeps open a space of promise always exceeding the provisional closure brought by a temporal achievement. Similarly, the language of faith is never more than a temporary figure of a truth which it can never definitively fix. All is passage, and becomes a cul-de-sac if one tries to fix one’s dwelling there.
Beyond myths of inevitable progress or decline, theological realism takes as base the poverty and the possibilities of the present, as the biblical tradition permits them to be grasped. A language steeped in this present and tempered by a long historical experience can confront the tragic aspects of history while keeping open the horizons of hope. It cultivates a discreet and judicious tone, seeking the words called for by the pressure of the kairos, neither in flights of Utopian imagination (Moltmann) nor in totalising speculations on the meaning of history (Pannenberg). Renouncing the ambition of mastering the past and predicting the future it rediscovers a freedom that this ambition inhibited. Instead of trying to complete historical and sociological insight with a theological hyper-insight, or to the contrary losing itself in a cloud of unknowing, eschatological faith is content with knowing what it can and ought to know, namely the Christian meaning of our present.
‘What secures this eschatological middle path is above all the person of Jesus Christ. The cross gives a sharp historical edge that stems the drift into utopia, while at the same time disrupting all ideological recuperation. The constant refocusing of the figure of Christ, in the light both of the tension-ridden Old Testament background and the equally chequered history of the Christian community, provides a graphic correlative for the shifting emphases of eschatological vision. Confidence in the Saviour takes us a step beyond the investment we may have made in any given style of eschatological hope, and even where there is a radical divergence among Christians about the goal to which they strive, they are at least united in naming it Jesus Christ.
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THE PROBLEM OF PRE-EXISTENCE
The position we have arrived at is close to Bultmann’s view that all claims for Christ derive their truth from the fact that he is the Eschatological Event. Bultmann saw pre-existence as a mythical projection from the authority of the kerygma, ‘an idea of which we no longer have any need’ (quoted in Kuschel, 167). He ‘degnosticises’ Paul’s pre-existence language to reveal its existential core: ‘the person and destiny of Christ do not derive their origin and meaning from the network of innerworldly events but only from the fact that therein God has been at work’ (178)’ John’s pre-existence statements mean that ‘the real legitimisation of Jesus is precisely his earthly unlegitimisability’ (188).
Yet faced with a doctrinal tradition which has not hesitated to step ‘behind’ the Christ-event to its ontological foundations, we can refrain from the traditional ontology of Trinity and Incarnation only at the cost of implicitly affirming some form of unitarianism. Karl-Josef Kuschel proposes a rather full-blooded ontology of the pre-existent Christ, but one that is problematic both in what it affirms (a pre-existence of the humanity of Jesus) and in what it denies (a pre-existent eternal Logos). One can defend the Logos-doctrine as providing the space within which the Christ-event can deploy its significance, while rejecting myths of a pre-existence of the human Jesus. These doctrinal points have a phenomenological function, and are subordinate to the event of revelation, from which they cannot be abstracted. They belong to a secondary level of reflection, as spelling out a negative logic that our statements about Christ should not transgress. Doctrine may shed light on the Christ-event, but since that event is its only source and warrant we are moving within a strict hermeneutical circle which leaves little room for a theology from above.
Kuschel loses something of the specificity of Christian revelation from the moment that he sets the christological problematic in the context of an alleged perpetual human quest for ‘the beginning of all beginnings, the ground of all grounds, the origin of all origins of time, history and cosmos’ (p. 20). He conflates under the rubric of pre-existence such heterogeneous phenomena as Barth’s sense of the sovereignty of God and Hofmannsthal’s poetic vision of an originary state of ‘pure magic’ in which self and world are one, ‘a unity before all temporal and spatial differentiation’ (p. 87). Modern painters and dialectical theologians are seen as sharing a quest for ‘the basic structure of being, the depths of creation, the originary ground of the real, which is God’ (p. 95). This language elides what is specific about the world of Barth and Bultmann, falling back into just the religiose rhetoric that they sought to overcome. Barth at his best focused on a biblical and existential paradox: not a pre-existent eternal invading time, but a divine word confronting us in judgement and grace.
Kuschel, like van Buren, is inspired by the later Barth’s notion of God’s ‘self-determination’ in the covenant. Not content with the pre-existent Logos, Barth projected the flesh-and-blood figure of Jesus back into the realm of pre-existence: ‘In free self-determination, God has from eternity chosen to be the bearer of this name (Jesus)’ (p. 124); ‘Since this Jesus Christ - including his earthly fate - already “exists from eternity in the divine decree”, it was not only fitting and worthy, but even “necessary” for God to be the Creator’ (p. 132). This hysteron proteron undercuts the reality of historical contingency and human freedom. It would be enough to say that God is by nature covenantal; any further effort to predetermine how that covenantal love works itself out in creation and salvation history is a metaphysical construction doubling real history with a shadowy transcendental history that undermines its reality.
The metaphysical obsession with pre-existence which would project the human Jesus back into eternity distracts from the concrete phenomenality of what is revealed in Christ. If instead we confine pre-existence language to the Logos, God’s covenantal outgoingness, to be conceived above all in negative terms as resisting our totalising grasp, then we leave Christ free to give this Logos its historical face. The ungraspable, empty Logos is incarnate in a succession of singular forms and in the dialectical tensions between them, and the figure of Jesus Christ focuses this incarnational process distinctively, eschatologically. When theology gives a face to the pre-existent Logos above and beyond these forms, it creates a rival to them, which by its claim to be their metaphysical ground risks eclipsing them.
Kuschel’s reduction of the pre-existent Logos to a pre-existence of Jesus proceeds from the post-paschal insight that ‘the person of Jesus Christ belongs fully to the definition of the essence of God’ (p. 643). He develops this idea in strained metaphysical argumentation on the notions of eternity and time: ‘Jesus Christ is - as Spirit and in the Spirit – present to all times, contemporary with all times, free in regard to all times. Nothing else is meant when we talk of the pre-existence of Christ’ (p. 644). This language needs to be recalled to its phenomenological basis. The classic Logos-doctrine leaves to Jesus all his historical contingency, furnishing a space in which his revelatory significance can unfold, without any need to inflate his humanity so as to have it share divine eternity ‘from always’, ripping it out of the realm of space, time and contingency. Chalcedon’s teaching that the divine and human natures are ‘unmixed’, prevents mythic conflations between God’s eternal nature and God’s self-manifestation in time. That Jesus gives a human historical face to God’s eternal self-determination does not entail that God determines himself further in becoming incarnate. The incarnation is the Logos of God unfolded in our human world, but it does not require any mythic humanisation of God.
For Kuschel, the notion of pre-existence comes from the reflection that ‘If the risen one has such significance for God, must he not always already have been in God’s thoughts?’ (p. 601). The divinity of Christ means simply that ‘God himself has revealed himself in Jesus and that Jesus himself can be understood at the deepest level only from God’ (p. 604). Somewhere along the trajectory of this approach one might retrieve the contemporary sense of Chalcedon, but as it stands it is reductive. Kuschel is happy with Schillebeeckx’s interpretation of the divinity of Christ:
“According to Christian faith Jesus is (a) the decisive and definitive revelation of God, and (b) he shows us therein at the same time what and who we humans can ultimately be and ought actually to be… We cannot separate God’s nature and his revelation’. Therefore the determination of that which the human Jesus is involves in fact the nature of God”. (quoted, p. 616)
He deplores the complex trinitarian language with which Schillebeeckx elsewhere feels compelled to underpin this biblical vision. It may be that both theologians need to undertake the same critical work on the language of classical doctrine as they have consecrated to Scripture, under pain of falling into abstract and implausible constructions whether metaphysical (Schillebeeckx) or mythical (Kuschel).
According to Kuschel, the resurrection is not, as Pannenberg claims, ‘the revelation of a metaphysical duality of Father and Son “always already” given from all eternity’, but rather means that ‘the entire Jesus-event, the preaching, the passion, the cross and the resurrection of Jesus, is to be understood as a revelation of God for the salvation of humankind’ (p. 527). There is a certain ‘identity of nature between Jesus and God” in the sense that ‘in the event “Jesus Christ” God has manifested historically not just one “aspect” of himself but his entire being and nature’ (p. 528). If God has revealed revealed himself fully in this way there is no call to go behind this phenomenon into the ineffable inner life of the divinity: ‘No speculation about an eternal divine Son independent of the human Jesus!’ (p. 586). Here the words ‘speculation’ and ‘independent’-imply a hasty dismissal of the Logos-doctrine. To call the eternal Logos ‘Son’ is misleading theological shorthand, for it projects the human personality of Jesus onto the divine, suggesting either a monophysite conflation or a Nestorian doubling of the Son’s personhood. ‘Born of the Father before time began’ is then mythological expression, licensed only by the communicatio idiomatum. Kuschel thinks it must mean that the human Jesus was in some sense born of the Father before time began. If instead we stress the temporality of Jesus and the eternity of the Logos – using the words ‘temporality’ and ‘eternity’ as counters indicating rules of speech – then we see Jesus as the one through whom the Logos acquires a human, personal, temporal, historical face, or as the incarnation of God’s covenantal outgoingness. The Logos-in-itself is eternal divine wisdom; it is manifested in all things and nothing is independent of it; what is unique about Jesus is the concreteness with which his life, death and resurrection sets humanity in relation to God, becoming the central Logos-event in human history.
Again the objection will be raised: how can we reconcile our insistence on the Logos-doctrine with what we have said about the contextuality and provisoriness of all dogmatic language, its status as human interpretation and construction, as strategic upâya? We recognise a double ccnstraint at work in the mobility of the tradition: on the one hand, the constraint of fidelity to the phenomena of revelation and to the full vital significance of the Christ-event; on the other, the constraint of reason. even if its classical, metaphysical form no longer seems suited to designate the identity of God and of Christ. Those who reject the doctrine of the Councils without submitting it to a probing historical and philosophical examination have not negotiated these constraints and have thus not correctly identified and linked up with the currents of change in the present transmission of the doctrinal heritage.
Yet in the end the status of this entire tradition, with all its logical and phenomenological constraints, remains contingent. It is an interpretation whose relation to the truth of things in themselves eludes us, even if we say that in revelation the truth is no longer noumenal but is given as a phenomenon to be lived, this life takes a variety of forms, and is enacted as a series of finite occasions. Conceptual and doctrinal constructions come second to this lived reality a secondarity keenly sensed in Heidegger, Zen, and Christian mysticism. Thus the doctrinal tradition is worthy of credence, but it points only obscurely to the experience of the real, and this experience itself is different for each epoch so that even poetic or mystical language has but a limited range of evocation.
In both Buddhism and Christianity a powerful rational interpretation has won out over less convincing and coherent ones, while remaining itself full of inconsistencies and awkwardnesses and subject to possible revolutions in light of new ways of understanding. The labour of logic and the concept produces genuine and necessary clarification and effectively validates the claims of the tradition. Yet logic and concept serve to discern also their own limitations and the ways in which the truth they envisage ultimately slips their grasp. Or again, in both traditions certain canonical experiences have been set on a pedestal, and certain styles of apprehending ultimate reality have been inculcated. But these incursions into the real remain particular cultural attainments, and while they may discipline and guide, they cannot forestall the invention of new modes of life that open to the ultimate in unforeseen ways.
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THE UNKNOWN CHRIST
Traditional theology applied the high ontology of Nicaea – ‘God from God, light from light, true God from true God’ – directly to the human Jesus, helped by a short-circuit in the interpretation of Johannine texts such as ‘I and the Father are one’ (Jn 10:30). This may indeed have involved a form of idolatry: ‘from the beginning Jews, and later Moslems, held that Christians, in their extravagant christological claims, were guilty of idolatry; that is, that in their talk about Christ they seriously confused and compromised the most fundamental of the monotheistic categories, God’ (Gordon Kaufman, In Face of Mystery, Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 84). Indeed, even if indefectible in orthodoxy at some deep level, the Christian community seems to have been spared no form of idolatry: idolatry of narrow conceptions of God, idolatry of Christ, of the Bible, of the Church, of church structures, of sacramental rituals – each of these has distracted faith from its supreme concern and become an end rather than a means.
In response to crisis, theology has always sought a return to the sources: from the prophets’ recall to covenant obedience, to the Pauline centering of the Gospel on Christ crucified and risen, to Augustine’s redi in te, to Luther’s recovery of the Word and Schleiermacher’s regrounding of religion in communal experience. Dialectical theology met the crisis of metaphysics with an equivalent of the phenomenologists’ slogan, Zu den Sachen selbst, and the present crisis of pluralism also sends us back to the basic phenomena or founding-events of Christianity. But this time it may be counter-productive to insist on the ‘essence’ of Christianity. It may be that the urgency of such insistence is just what is blocking our path to a demystified apprehension of the meaning of Christ, and a ‘quiescence of fabrications’ (Nâgârjuna). Perhaps we need instead to let go a little more: to draw sustenance from the readily available sources of spiritual insight our world presents in the sciences, in literature, in the modern experience of human solidarity, in a catholic appreciation of all cultural and religious traditions – and leave the Christian claims to look after themselves. A theology which models its tone and tempo on the discretion of Jesus, who emptied himself and did not cling to his own identity, can allow the figure of Jesus to emerge on the new pluralistic landscape in its quiet power – the ‘quite power of the possible’ (Heidegger). Such releasement best allows the meaning of Christ to emerge beyond the accumulation of doctrinal debate and historical investigation. Presuppositionless Buddhist prajnâ, penetrating discernment, should come before the investment of faith, clearing the ground for a demystified apprehension of the phenomenon of Jesus so that this phenomenon in its ‘thusness’ can draw forth the appropriate response of faith, which may no longer be that of biblical or classical Christian times, but something quieter, subtler, more open-ended.
A non-Christian religion may constitute an autonomous wisdom sufficient to make sense of life and to deal with tragedy. The Christian might call it a share in Logos. Nevertheless the preaching of the Gospel will not necessarily communicate immediately with this non-Christian wisdom. The meaning of Christ can be conveyed only by telling the entire story of a covenant between God and humanity, of how it was broken by sin, and how atonement was required. Even with a complete explanation this story will fall idly on the ears of those to whom its basic presuppositions are foreign. Though the biblical way of constructing the human dilemma is equal in consistency to the Buddhist construction, it is not immediately translatable into a horizon in which the notions of God and sin are far less determinate, if they exist at all. Rather, it is perhaps the governing secular horizon of our world that provides the lingua franca in terms of which both the Gospel and the Buddha’s teaching can be reformulated, with their respective challenges to the self-sufficiency of that secularity. Thus it would be by the detour of an opening to the world that the two ancient religious traditions become able to meet one another.
Here a gap has become apparent between the ideal universality of the Logos incarnate and the historical particularity of how the meaning of Christ has unfolded amid the contingencies of Israel’s history, Jesus’s own life, and the Christian enactment of his message. The Christ-event touches the deepest realities of life and death, humanity and God, and these realities are met everywhere, but this universality in principle is slow to become fully manifest. Historical Christianity cannot claim to have mastered the revelation to which it witnesses, and it leaves ample margins for the work of other religious traditions. It finds itself outstripped on every side, but by that very reality which is at the heart of its preaching and which it clumsily calls the Logos incarnate. Its quest, then, is not only for the unknown God – the Deus semper maior – to which every religion points in a fragile and provisional way, but also for the unknown Christ who awaits us in every religion, and indeed in every human being.
If the life of Jesus is throughout a revelation of ultimate reality. this reality manifests itself always and everywhere (Jn 1:4-5). The revelation in Christ unfolds its sense freely only in relation to the countless other fragmentary breakthroughs of divine truth in history, all contingent, limited and to be transcended. By his body Jesus is rooted in the history of the people of Israel and of the Christian community, his ‘mystical body’; but this particular historical enfleshment is not dissociable from history as a whole. Thus the contingency of incarnation rejoins the universalism, and the necessity of the manifestation of ultimate reality. The Logos incarnate is in search of itself in all history; evangelisation or dialogue consists in this encounter of the Logos incarnate in a contingent history with the universal Logos sown in every human heart.
When the Gospel encounters a foreign religious or philosophic horizon, it recognises there things belonging to its own essence, which provokes a partial jettisoning of its previous forms and a restructuring of its content in the perspective thus opened. In these encounters, the kerygma of the cross is freed from the double danger that haunts it: the danger of being reduced to an abstract schematism whose effective meaning slips through our fingers (justification before God, to die in order to be reborn, redemptive suffering); and the danger of its petrification in an empirical history which is both inaccessible in its archaic aspects (the Messiah, the Kingdom) and disturbing in its present resonances (antisemitism). The kerygma of the cross needs the encounter with other religions to be set in a healing perspective.
The ground is everywhere prepared for the Gospel kerygma, though on both sides rigidity of thought-forms and spiritual inertia limit what is possible in the way of creative transformations. This potential universality of the Gospel furnishes the medium in function of which one can speak of a cosmic Christ. Where the terrain is already occupied by another religious vision, it is natural to seek possible correlations between this vision and the Christian one. For instance, in an encounter with Plotinus, one might find a functional equivalent of the Johannine Logos in the domain of the nous. Simiarly, one will note how Krishna identifies himself as a manifestation of the Logos:
“By Me is pervaded all this Universe, by Me in the form of the unmanifest.
“All beings rest in Me, and I do not rest in them.” (Bhagavad-Gîtâ 9.4)
Again, the Buddhist equivalent of the Logos would be the ‘Dharma body’, which is both a manifestation of the absolute and the ultimate truth of the figure of the Buddha (or Buddhas). Yet one cannot make a synthesis of these different constructions, putting them alongside one another in some speculative space, for they belong to complex traditions from which they are inseparable.
Doctrines about the mediation between the absolute and the world cannot be formulated without a permanent concrete reference to this world. In the case of Christology, this reference has a firm historical rooting: Wisdom chooses to dwell among a particular people; then the Incarnation of the Logos takes place in the life of the one who crystallises and raises to a new level the religious wisdom of this people. Confronting this language with analogous constructions in another religion, one notices affinities which suggest progress toward the same universal fulness of meaning, One may even admit that the universality claimed on both sides is at bottom the same, and that in some ultimate clarification, surpassing what we can at present conceive, the Logos will embrace the whole truth of Buddhism and the universality of the Buddhist message will find its full realisation in the Logos. This regulative idea can inspire speculative anticipations. However, these remain desperately abstract, and are to be seen as incidental fabrications, insignificant side-products of the concrete play of traditions, each carrying the density of its historical flesh.
On the ontological plane, it is interesting to note a partial homology between the doctrine of the triple body of the Buddha and the three states of Christ. First, the eternal Logos corresponds to the ‘Dharma body’ of the Buddha; then the ‘body of fruition’, the form in which the Buddha is manifest to bodhisattvas in the Buddha-lands, invites comparison with the spiritual body of the risen Christ; lastly, the ‘transformation body’ which differs for every historical Buddha could be seen as corresponding to the Jesus of history. Christ and the historical Buddha, entirely distinct at the level of the transformation-body, begin to draw near at the spiritual level of the body of fruition (the risen Christ, the heavenly Buddha-figures), and are basically one at the level of the dharma-body. God, in that case, would be one with the ultimate reality, or emptiness, which Wisdom contemplates. Or should one put God, too, on the side of wisdom and see him as transcended in turn by the absolute of ‘the nothingness beyond God?’ But to pursue such questions is to be lost in baseless speculation. The notion of emptiness, like that of Being in Heidegger, has its field of application only in the phenomenality of our world and cannot be applied to God except to the degree that he reveals himself in beings or their emptiness. To project these categories onto the plane of absolute reality is to fall into onto-theology and logocentrism.
Whatever the ontological background of the primacy of Jesus, this primacy unfolds only in historical encounters, that is, in the element of contingency and of the possible. The encounter of the Christ-event with other great events of history – Socrates, the Buddha, Muhammad – unfolds according to the laws of historical existence. Such encounters do not generate an artificial and arbitrary syncretism, but set off a long-term negotiation of which the tension is broken only in breakthroughs of the true. Jesus Christ is not a revelation of God all on his own, but only in relation with a concrete historical interlocutor on every occasion. The relation is asymmetrical in the case, for example, of the encounter between Christ and philosophy, for the result of this encounter is not a contribution to Western philosophy but a new figure of Christ as saviour. In the relation between Christ and the Buddha, in contrast, this asymmetry yields to a parity of the two figures.
All religious discourses and the play between them, indeed all the forms of the created world, can be seen as manifesting Logos, in that they serve to give form and expression to the absolute and ineffable truth. Within the whole universe of forms, explicitly religious expressions aim to reproduce the Logos directly under the conditions of a human, mortal word. They are ‘incarnations’ of it, but not in the sense of grasping it substantially. Rather as provisional designations they attest Logos in imitation of the poverty of the cross. This vulnerable enterprise succeeds only as sustained by the revealing grace of that Logos itself. Most religious language dies when the moment of grace has passed. Yet sometimes when a cathedral in stone or writing seems to have outlived its time and to be no longer capable of housing the divine glory, or even an illusory idolatrous counterfeit of it, there may occur a surprise of the Spirit: the water may run in dried canals and a dusty terminology become eloquent anew.
The notion of Logos is a poor abstraction, a makeshift designation of what we glimpse across the entire series of expressions and forms in which meaning or intelligibility is manifest in cosmos and history. If all meaning is dependently co-arisen and in consequence empty of self-identity the Logos underlying this process does not end the intertextual drift, but makes itself known as this intertextuality itself, as the space in which all particular discourses can breathe and deploy a meaning. The figure of Christ and the discourses created in memory of him are a specific incarnation of this universal Logos, giving it a more concrete and personal face. However, we must beware of naive amalgamations between the Logos incarnate in Christ and the Logos as glimpsed in Greek or in Buddhist philosophy. John speaks of the Logos in personal terms in order to ward off such identifications which reduce the divine to an abstract cosmic principle.
If in general Logos, meaning, shows itself to be empty of own-being, dissolving back to ultimate emptiness, in the Christ-event this movement from form to emptiness is concretised as the personal return of the Son to the Father, while the converse movement from emptiness to form becomes the sending of the Son from the Father into the world. The Johannine truth-event resonates with the deepest philosophical insights, both Greek and Indian, into how meaning and truth emerge, yet it transcends these by its distinctive personal naming of the God revealed in Christ. The dialogue, begun by John, between the Christ-event and the versions of Logos apprehended elsewhere, is always marked by that excess of the named, personal God over more general approaches to the absolute. This excess prevents the Christ-event from being reabsorbed into a phenomenological or speculative interpretation of the world.
The non-duality of form and emptiness is exhibited in the way Christ’s lack of self-nature, his being as dependently co-arisen, opens on a gap, an emptiness, which is no longer an abstract Logos but the Word of a personal God: ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father’ (Jn 14:9). The Logos, always condemned to the limitations of its temporal presentations, assumes these limitations fully in the mortal flesh of Jesus. At this depth of finitude the human Jesus is one with the Logos, not by inflating himself, but by an obedience that removes all barriers of human self-assertion that prevent the emergence of Logos in human life. Sacrifice, which lives finite existence as a free gift, confers on mortal existence its meaning and intelligibility, impressing on history and its contingencies the mark of their origin and end. It is because finite existence thus attests to the greatness of God, that its contingencies are transformed into a revealing Logos without ceasing to be contingent. In consigning himself to the risks and the opacity of history Jesus is the paradoxical sign of divine transcendence, his entire life ‘a finger pointing to the moon’ in virtue of its accomplishment of a fundamental accord between the reality of God and human reality.
We have tried to show the mobility of the forms the Logos takes, both on the interreligious level and within the Christian tradition. This mobility may suggest Hegelian dialectic, but we do not see the history of religious language as culminating in a finally adequate conceptual grasp; rather its dialectic remains radically open to and incarnate in finitude and contingency. The incarnate finitude of the language of faith is not compensated for by an infinite which integrates the finite in itself, but by the dynamics according to which all Christic forms tend beyond themselves. This eschatological openness is the counterpart of the incarnate condition of Christian language.
Deconstruction shows that mortality is inscribed in our very language. In metaphysics, a projection of transcendental forms guaranteeing the identity and continuity of the self brought about a repression of differences, of yawning gaps. Those who protect Christian language against such gaps, seeing it as controlled by the eidos of Christ, might well recall that this forma Christi is that of the Crucified, a cipher of human finitude and mortality. The language of faith speaks well of this when it reproduces the fragmentedness and tornness of Christ. God, writing straight with crooked lines, manifests himself in the Bible through human beings who show their mortality and sinfulness; the regime of allegorisation long masked this carnality of revelation. Christian language, similarly, is always exposed to obsolescence and an ‘errance’ of which its numerous errors are a painful reminder. It is perpetually embarrassed, though it hide its poverty through flattering associations with philosophical and political systems equally over-assured of their own stability. To repeat dogmas valid for all time no longer immunises against the anxiety of temporal existence, for we know that the language of dogmas also belongs to time, carrying the hue of the age which fashioned it and traces of decay where more recent time has done its work.
However, Christians cannot wallow in the postmodernist masochism which pushes to its last conclusions the idea that ‘God is dead’. One such conclusion is that the laws of logic being merely human constructions, any security to which our thought or language pretend is but a projection of narcissistic desire. To be sure, the laws of logic in their formulation owe much to human culture and invention. Yet how deny the presence in them of a transcendental rational force? Even if logic is not as inexorable as is usually thought, and even if its constraints do not operate in a single uniform way, still the traditions of reason, however elastic they turn out to be, retain a compelling force.
Theology is more vulnerable than logic to the charge of being a human projection, but it has its own coherence. The Christ-event survives the inevitable obsolescence of every local or epochal account of it. Is it a narcissistic defence to insist on this permanence? It would be, if Christ himself did not again and again attest his pneumatic presence to believers in a way that is always surprising. If one persuades oneself that logic is only a subjective projection, one will hardly credit the objectivity of Christ. But, conversely, if Christ resists our narcissism, somewhat as logic resists it, then it may be that the perpetual play of our discourses tends not to abolish faith in him, but to keep us in touch with his mystery by an adroit tact in the deployment of our upâya.
To be sure, religious language contains so large a contribution from the human imagination that wish-fulfilment must play a large part in its composition, and we cannot securely sift out this element. Historical criticism and logical vigilance whittle it down, but when that process goes too far it is resisted by an upsurge of spiritual awareness and the irrepressible instincts of faith and hope. Authentic religious thinking makes its home in this perpetual systole and diastole between too lofty affirmation and too sweeping negation. It is a practice of assessment and querying, fundamentally sustained by faith, but attended at all its margins by an open-ended agnosticism.
The fact that we have kept the notion of ‘tradition’ as what links together the various narrations of Jesus Christ invites the suspicion of logocentrism, despite our insistence that the only Logos we know is incarnate. The very fact of linking the diverse Christian cultures in single history centred on Christ is an interpretation dictated by faith and therefore suspect to historians. All our characterisations of Christian tradition and the meaning of Christ are in fact methods for handling history and finding a sense in it, which cannot be justified by historical reason alone and which are subject to revision. For some, the continuity of tradition is a narcissistic projection, masking the epistemological breaks and the bricolages which make all tradition a hotchpotch of opportunistic arrangements. Is there a real transmission of an identical faith from the time of the apostles to the present? To deny all continuity is to destroy the meaning of the tradition. But that the tradition stays alive only through perpetual invention, that it disseminates itself in formations too heterogeneous to have any unity other that that of the history which has produced them, and that only this creativity testifies to the permanence of the presence of Christ in it, is a thesis which can resist the hermeneutics of suspicion and discontinuity on one side, and break with myths of continuity on the other.
The incarnate condition of Christian discourse puts it on a footing with the other religious languages of humanity equally incarnated in the cultures and practices of historical peoples. If God is revealed in our tradition, no firm frontier cuts revelation off from what is afoot in neighbouring traditions, which have often mixed their riches with ours in the course of time. Christian language, however pure it wishes to be, belongs to the family of religious languages and shares in the immense travail of imagination and articulation by which humanity seeks to reproduce in its idioms the voice of the absolute. To be sure, Christian language, by its excellence, judges many others as unworthy and inferior; but in turn it is often judged by other languages, such as that of Buddhism or even those of Western modernity. The Barthian claim that such mutual critique belongs to mere religion and leaves unaffected the sovereignty of revelation has to suppose that the vast open-ended world of Scripture, so permeable to dialogue with other traditions, enshrines a revelation which has clear and distinct frontiers against any other emergence of transcendent truth. But is this compatible with the logic of incarnation? A logos which incarnates itself sacrifices its immunity against dialogical contamination; it is incarnate not in one tradition only but in the network of relations onto which this tradition opens.
If the universality of Christ is worked out thus in a series of situations of encounter, then it is no longer an arbitrary or imperialist claim. It is not Christianity as it now exists that is universal, but rather the ongoing deployment of the meaning of its founding event. This event is in search of its interpretation, a search that is as long as history itself. The role of other religions is not to furnish the Gospel with cultural orchestration or supplement of contemplative Wisdom. How they will interact with it cannot be determined in advance. From every encounter will emerge the uniqueness of the cross, but always in an unforeseeable way, in which the kerygma is bound to undergo modification and reinterpretation.
The kerygma of the cross is presented as the last word on life and death; to refuse it this status is to denature it. But does it follow that every other religious and cultural expression can claim only the status, at most, of penultimate word? In that case one would say that these second-last words open the perspectives of human hope, and that only the last word brings divine salvation. Humans are powerless to free themselves from sin and death; but no religion has contented itself with making this powerlessness evident. Every religion lives from the conviction that a saving process is underway in it. May one not then say that salvation comes not from the bare kerygma of the cross but from the encounter between this kerygma and its interpretative context, a context in which God is already at work? The version of the good news which is born of an interreligious encounter is the fruit of two religions. In the New Testament itself the cross is an event of encounter between the Jewish and Gentile worlds. This paradigm can be carried over to every other encounter under the sign of the cross.
The intrinsically dialogical character of the cross undoes any imperialism by exclusion or inclusion. Its universality subsists as does that of a great poem, in the echo that it encounters in the diverse experiences of humanity, There is no question of a sudden arrest of the pluralistic opening; the cross rather carries this to a deeper and more concrete level, undoing the fixated self-identity of the believer and enabling a radical opening to integral pluralism, somewhat as confidence in Western reason frees the thinker to appreciate the intelligibility of every other tradition.
A theory according to which the cross, beyond the forms of its explicit annunciation, is present wherever human beings assume their finitude in hope and love, might block the free emergence of the unpredictable effects produced by the meeting of the cross with a concrete tradition touching on life and death. The cross is an open question, to which every situation gives a new and provisional answer. Jean Ansaldi’s way of underlining the particularity of the cross seems to limit the universal scope of this question:
“a theology of the cross founded on the sola fide has no hypothesis to offer about the relation of its God with the non-Christian religions… There is no other site of christological knowledge than the Incarnation. The dimension of the eternal Logos should certainly be postulated, but (against the recourse to a universal Logos spermatikos) it has no other function than to articulate the Incarnation, the advent of Emmanuel… Faced with the problem of the non-Christian religions, theology must affirm the fulness of the manifestation of God in Christ and also the undecidability of the question as to how this God is related to the various claims to know another revelation”. (L’articulation de la foi, de la théologie et de Écritures, Paris, Cerf, 1991, pp. 83-4)
This point of view underestimates the imperative of universality inscribed in the cross. For if ‘there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved’ (Acts 4:12), this name itself demands translation. It is not the logos spermatikos, but the name of Jesus itself which unfolds its universal meaning in the course of its encounters with particular historical contexts. And like the name of God the name of Jesus seals its transcendent irreducibility to the categories of any given context in a double bind whereby it both must and cannot be fully translated. The universal meaning of his name is of a concrete historical kind: it is the eschatological future of all humanity. As Donald Dawe puts it:
“The ‘name of Jesus’ is the disclosure of the structure of new being. It is the pattern of salvation. So the universality of Christianity is grounded in the translatability of the ‘name of Jesus’, not in the imposition of particular formularies on others. This power of new being operates throughout the world under the names of many religious traditions. It is recognized end celebrated by Christians because they know its pattern or meaning through Jesus of Nazareth”. (D. Dawe and John B. Carman, ed. Christian Faith in a Religiously Plural World, Maryhill, Orbis, 1978, 30)
Christian theology does not offer precise hypotheses a priori about the role of other religions, but it does expect to find in them elements that accord with its own understanding of salvation and that can enrich it. Far from being content with an abstract ‘undecidability’ which consigns its dealings with the religious other to superficiality, it goes to meet the other on the basis of a set of insights summarised in the name of Jesus; as these resonate with comparable insights in other traditions, each such interchange gives a new accentuation to the name of Jesus, whose universality unfolds as this capacity for encounter and reciprocal illumination.
The eschatological temporality that shapes Christian language and doctrine is reinforced by the interreligious encounter and in turn lends new meaning to this encounter. The eschatological figure of Christ lights up the dynamism whereby religions tend beyond themselves toward the goal in function of which they have been constructed. The eschatological vision bears not only on Christian existence, but on the entire cosmos: ‘the creation waits with eager longing’ (Rom. 8:19). The figure of Christ addresses the other traditions with the assurance that they have a special role in the universal travail of the creation of meaning, which is constantly corroded by the nihilating Power of time and contingency. To extend a fraternal hand to struggling humanity while ignoring the immense investment of hope and passion of which the religions are the monument would be an impoverished and unimaginative way of translating the message of the Kingdom.
By viewing other religions in the perspective of its own eschatological hope, Christianity puts pressure on them, bringing to bear the biblical vision of history, a vision confirmed by the unique role of Jesus Christ. But in return Christianity expects the other religions to throw light on its eschatological vision and to give it a more determinate shape. The obscurities of Christian eschatology refer us to the broken lights of the other religions, and the plurality of eschatologies deepens our sense of how enigmatic and opaque is the future envisaged in religious hope. This obliges us to recall eschatology to its ground in the processes of salvation that are afoot in the present and that can be phenomenologically discerned. The path of enlightenment, the Path of the Kingdom, the path of Torah-fidelity each contain their future in their present enactment; the true outline of the promise, stripped of all imaginary projections, lies inscribed in what is nearest to hand. The eschatological primacy of Christ unfolds in dialogue with all other forms of hope and expectation, and can emerge convincingly only as the message of the Kingdom is enacted in present circumstances.
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FOR AN EMPTY CHRISTOLOGY
In determining how traditional Christology, whethe ‘mythic’ or dogmatic, can still function as a ‘skilful means’ for bringing into view the truth revealed in the Christ-event, we must find a middle way between substantialist attachment to traditional conceptions and nihilistic critique which robs them of all authority. This can be done by reflecting on the intrinsically ‘empty’ and provisional character of these conceptions, as makeshift historical constructs marked by all the inadequacies of human language and thought in face of the transcendent. Accepting this emptiness, one may retrieve the traditional language in a modified form, and use it more lightly and adroitly. It is by its lack of a definitive and substantial hold on its object that it witnesses best to the ‘emptiness’ of that object; for Christ is not a substance to be defined, but an event to be interpreted, and the process of interpretation – as the Gospels already show – advances by letting go of definitive understanding in order to open up to a reality which eludes our conceptual clutches.
We have seen that Christology is always a culturally determined construction, which can never yield a final understanding of the meaning of Christ, for this meaning is constantly renewed according to the responses of the cultures which receive and interpret it. The Incarnation implies an accommodation without reserve to the heterogeneous possibilities of history and culture. This mystery cannot, and does not want to, be expressed in terminology other than inadequate, and at the same time it pushes us to surpass the inadequacy of each of the successive interpretations. The meaning of Christ, as a breakthrough of divine freedom in human life, carries all the marks of the places and times in which this breakthrough happens. If one seeks to resume in a general ontological structure the sequence of events in which Christ is known, the resultant statements will themselves bear the marks of a particular cultural site; an archaic metaphysical language will have been imposed on the vital unfolding of the Christ-event across our history.
In the interreligious horizon the figure of Jesus can emerge anew in its attractive force. No longer as the Christ-king of Christendom, nor as the remote depersonalised figure which the language of dogma unwittingly projects, but as a concentration of enlightened, compassionate wisdom, as one who is saviour not by acting on the world from the outside in some inconceivable mythical or metaphysical process, but by the prophetic truth of the cross which transforms the world according to the laws of its own inmost aspirations.
Neither Buddha nor Christ are conceivable without the culture which permits their discourse and its continuing interpretation. The luminous innovation they bring makes sense only by reference to a prior religious tradition which it transcends. It is only under the limiting conditions entailed by this inevitable historicity that they are bearers of a revelation of the absolute. Moreover, the absolute element at the heart of the narratives and discourses through which their message comes can scarcely be sifted out; it is a perfume which pervades the entire Christian or Buddhist tradition, an intangible melody suggested everywhere. The basic inspiration which underlies all the variations of the melody can never entirely lose its original Indian or Hellenistic Jewish character, but it communicates itself along the paths of history by creative interactions with the cultures it successively meets. When philosophies meet, the aim is to ‘open the concept without destroying it’ (Merleau-Ponty). In the same way, Christology is opened up, through listening to its distant resonances in other traditions, and there is no need to destroy it as a myth that allegedly obstructs dialogical listening. Its structural resistance to closure positively favours this opening to the other.
It is clear that such a point of view implies a fundamental criticism of the Johannine schemas of pre-existence and of the ontology of Nicaea. Unless they are reinterpreted in depth, transferred from the direct to the oblique, these pillars of traditional Christology are in contradiction with the contingency of history. One cannot erect a historical figure, carrying the mark of all the contingencies of human existence, and subject to the play of interpretations to which everything historical lends itself, into a transcendental signifier, pure sign of the ultimate transcendental signified, God. Such an autonomous and fully adequate revelation never takes place; the meaning of Jesus Christ, as of any historical event, is always on the way to being defined. Against the Derridian critique of the status of transcendental signifier accorded the phallus by Lacan, it has been claimed that for Lacan this signifier signifies only ‘difference’ (Barbara Johnson). Christ, too, can be seen as a mobile signifier, marking the diffference and forming a link between the divine and the human in a great variety of ways, and having himself no fixed form outside this function. If the name of Jesus functions as transcendental signifier, it is as marking the site of a whole process of signification which has no end, other than an eschatological one. This signifier, like the divine names, serves to protect the signified from any definitive grasp.
Two expressions have emerged as central to our reflections in this book: ‘emptiness’, an abstract philosophical word, the key theme of the Perfection of Wisdom sûtras, which sums up centuries of Buddhist analysis, and ‘Jesus Christ’, a concrete proper name, the centre of the New Testament, which is the most pregnant cipher of the actualisation of God’s Word in human history. Each of these words provides a field of application for the modern philosophical insights rehearsed in our opening chapters: the pluralism and relativity of historical meaning, its Quinean indeterminacy or Derridean dissemination, and the resulting situatededness and provisionality of any statement of truth. From Buddhism we learned that the fragility and conventionality of thought and language does not exclude, but rather enables, their use as a soteriological ‘skilful means’, and does not render otiose a concern with rationality and truth. We saw that the biblical naming of God assumes this fragility and conventionality into a dynamics of incarnation, whereby God is manifested across the tangled historical dialectic of our efforts to name him, a process marked at every step by the kind of constricting double binds that delight Derrida.
Is a final synthesis possible between these two paths? Can we make ‘emptiness’ rhyme with ‘Jesus Christ’? ‘Rhyme’ is the right word here, with its suggestion of creative artifice, for it would be a mistake to expect that the two traditions can neatly dovetail. Rather we have to construct a bitonal counterpoint in which powerful affinities continue to co-exist with pungent clashes in a give and take that is likely to nourish religious thought for a long time.
The most powerful effort to rethink Christ in terms of emptiness is John Keenan’s. His groundbreaking intuitions can be consolidated by close study of particular Christian texts, wherein one may identify places at which substantialist ontological presuppositions can profitably be wedged open to the Buddhist sense of emptiness. His account of Christ as ‘empty of any essence and engaged in the dependently co-arisen world in all its radical contingency’ (The Meaning of Christ, Maryknoll, Orbis, 1989, p. 225) tries to do justice to the teaching of Chalcedon, while contesting the use of rigid metaphysical categories:
“Jesus as empty of any essence whatsoever is an ineffable outflow from the ultimate realm. But as emptiness is identical with dependent co-arising, so Jesus is enmeshed in the web of the constantly flowing and changing events of his time. He is ultimate and absolute inasmuch as he is totally empty, and human and relative inasmuch as he is totally interrelated with the world”. (p. 237)
As empty, Jesus exists as openness to God, in direct awareness of ultimate meaning; as dependently co-arising he is engaged in this world in the preaching of the Kingdom. Perhaps Keenan associates these two indissociable aspects of Jesus’s humanity too quickly with his divinity and his humanity respectively: ‘Whereas the pair of terms, divine and human, function as opposites in the traditional account, emptiness and dependent co-arising are convertible, complementary each fully interpenetrating the other’ (p. 238). The ultimacy of Jesus is not merely his transparency to the Father in the Abba experience; it is the constitution of his entire human life as the enfleshment of the eternal Word. On the ontological level, the divinity and humanity of Jesus are certainly not convertible, however far the ‘communication of idioms’ is pushed.
Yet though the Word infinitely transcends its fleshly vehicle, it is concretely known and felt only through this enfleshment, so that on the gnoseological level there is a convertibility between the limited contingent figure of Jesus Christ crucified and the infinite divine Word (see 1 Cor.1:23-4). Though we may say that the divine Word is above and beyond the realm of dependent co-arising, we have no access to that Word independently of the incarnational unfolding which occurs in the most salient and concentrated way in the story of Jesus. Just as one cannot set samsâra and nirvâna in opposition (Nâgârjuna, MMK, 25.19-20), so one cannot set the being of Christ in his dependent co-arising over against his being as Logos. To know him in his dependently co-arisen humanity is to know him as Logos; nor can one be known without the other; they are in this sense coterminous. Though we can imagine the Word as eternal and unchanging, this becomes a barren projection if we do not at the same time seek to hear that Word in the mobile variations of its historical unfolding. The attempt to think the Word apart from its incarnation results in an image of God modelled on the human mind, as in the Augustinian and Thomist presentations of the Trinity. Such projections exist only to be shattered by the concrete manifestation of the Word in history, which has to be sought again and again.
Keenan correlates the two truths, ultimate and conventional, with ‘the transcendent dimension of Jesus, expressed through his experience of Abba’ and ‘the incarnational dimension… expressible in a host of languages and cultural philosophies’. But the incarnational dimension is itself the happening of transcendence, just as dependent co-arising is itself emptiness. Should not the two truths correspond rather to two ways of apprehending this total event, a conceptual way and a transconceptual one? Keenan suggests as much when he writes: ‘The resurrection was presented by these early communities as a doctrinally empty, vertical experience of ultimate meaning in Jesus alive as Christ and enunciated horizontally in the kerygma’ (p. 234). Thus there is no privileged a-historical discourse of Jesus’s Abba-experience as opposed to the preaching of the Kingdom, but there can be a contemplative apprehension of the entire event in both its protological and eschatological reach, through a union with the risen Christ which is qualitatively other than the conventional representations of the kerygma. However, since faith in the Word of God is more central in the Christian economy than contemplative insight into the divine presence, a conventional discourse which closely engages with historical contingencies can have a higher profile there than in Buddhism. For the Christian to understand Christ as ‘the worldly and conventional speaking of God’ is not something less than to understand ‘the naked Logos’ as Origen imagined, nor need one itch to transcend this conventional level to attain the ultimacy of immediate gnosis.
In any case it seems clear that from the point of view of Buddhist ontology there can be no fixed substance of the humanity, divinity, person, or nature of Jesus Christ. Chalcedon can be brought into accord with this, for it is not part of the intent of the dogma to attribute either to the human Jesus or to the divine Word a substantial self-contained self; their hypostatic union can be interpreted rather as the mutual openness of two dynamic processes. In Jesus the Word is incarnate in history, in a world textured as universal co-referentiality. To say that ‘Jesus is God’ or that ‘Jesus is the Saviour’ makes sense in this context only as a twitch in this universal web, a pointer to the place where divinity or salvation emerge. This place is not a fixed point: it is the network of relations in which Christ unfolds his being.
Jesus is empty of own-being in virtue of his interdependence with all other humans, fully assumed and expressed in his cross. In principle, then, to return to that human, historical Jesus, or to find Christ in one’s concrete historical neighbour, is not to leave the Christ of faith but to pass freely from the emptiness-dimension to the form-dimension of the one Christ. The emptiness of the risen Christ is one with the emptiness of the eternal Logos, the emptiness of God himself. Yet this does not abolish the ontological gulf between the human and the divine. Since Buddhist emptiness does not transcend dependently co-arising form in anything like as clear a way as God transcends creatures, the application of the Mahâyâna language here stumbles on discords and resistances which must be carefully negotiated and which cannot be brushed away.
We have sought a middle path between abstraction and particularity, between dissolution of Christ in a process of general revelation and sectarian fixation on limited images of Christ. This chimes with the central intuition of Mahâyâna Buddhism: ‘form is itself emptiness, emptiness is itself form’ (Heart Sûtra). The relation is the same as the one in Christian teaching between divine ‘emptiness’ and the particular form of Christ crucified, or between the ‘emptiness’ of Christ as universal, pneumatic Lord, and the particular forms that he takes in the practical reinventions of the Gospel, that is, in every local community which is able to give body to the commandment of love. There is no simple identity here: the relation is kenotic in both directions. God is emptied of his abstraction when recognised in Christ; Christ is emptied of his particularity when acknowledged as divine. Again, Christ is emptied of his abstraction when Christians make him incarnate in particular styles of life, born of the encounters between Gospel and culture; but in referring all established embodiments of Christ to the eschatological ‘Lord’, always other, always greater, which is ‘Spirit’ (2 Cor. 3:17), they prevent these formations from becoming rigid. The form of Jesus in its relation of interdependences with all other human beings is fully opened to the divine emptiness, and this is what legitimates the identification of the life of Jesus – in its widest historical, pneumatic and cosmic extensions – with the Logos of God.
Jesus crucified assumes fully the manque-à-être (want of being) which is constitutive of human existence, just as the Buddha unflinchingly gazed on the texture of existence as suffering, impermanence and non-self. The obverse of this recognition is the discovery of the eternal life or nirvâna, human existence broken open to ultimate reality.
But the dynamic equivalence between these two versions of ultimate bliss cannot elide the heterogeneity between the different ways of focusing the ultimate in each religion. One is constructed on the basis of the biblical separation of finite and infinite, the other ignores this distinction and bases its economy of meaning on the perception of reality as such. One crystallises in a personal language which places the creature before a Thou; the other dissolves such personal language by its fidelity to the ultimate real which no caregory can express. One is a harmonious movement back and forth between two registers, which become one to the Buddha-eye; the other is a constant discovery of an infinite Other, to be rejoined across the uneven, chequered Calvary-path of history.
Thus, even as the Buddhist analogies crowd in on us, we must retain a sense of the irreducibility to Buddhist categories of the incarnational covenant between a transcendent God and human finitude. While admitting that the ontological vision of the world as dependently co-arisen opens existence onto the nirvanic dimension underlying it, which is that of the Logos and divine transcendence, one must avoid saying that this structure of finitude, even as lit up by the cross, is itself the presence of the infinite, just as dependent co-arising is itself emptiness according to Nâgârjuna. To escape monism, it is better to say that the finite world is broken open to the divine emptiness which infinitely surpasses it. As an event of grace, this breakthrough cannot be reduced to a perception of the ontological texture of the world. Similarly, one should not simply identify the revelation of God in Jesus Christ with the discovery of emptiness in Buddhist meditation. God is incarnate in Jesus not in any arbitrarily chosen form or in a general fashion in all forms as such, but in a very particular narration addressed, through precise historical mediations, to the problems of sin, death and ultimate human liberation. Buddhist thought opens new paths to the understanding of this narration, but at a certain point it sends us back to the perpetual task of theology, that of thinking the meaning of Christ in the terms suggested by Christ himself. The Christian narrations are not a conventional language indicating an absolute reality better grasped by a leap beyond them. If God allows himself to be ‘entangled in stories’ (in the sense of Wilhelm Schapp’s narrative phenomenology), it is because the concrete meaning of our finite lives cannot be fully revealed in more abstract languages and because God himself is known only abstractly as long as he has not introduced himself into our stories and our history.
Thus from the Christian vantage point the Buddhist to-and-fro between form and emptiness is to be regrounded in the more concrete coming and going between God and human stories. Buddhist thought stops us from conceiving this in a naive or anthropomorphic way, but conversely the powerful Christian story makes impossible any forgetting of the suffering flesh of real humanity. It is here that the biblical God writes his revelation, in forms not destined to effacement in some mystical subtilisation, and which can rejoin ‘emptiness’ only via a real transformation of their being, or what we call the resurrection of the body.
Thus the breaking-open of the dependently co-arisen world to ultimate divine reality which is effected in Christ is mediated by the eschatological aspect Christ’s existence, as always transcending itself toward the future of the Kingdom. The step back from Christ to God is less a mystical quest for the beginning than a prophetic anticipation of the end (1 Cor. 15:24-8). Economy opens onto theology not by a blurring of its historical contours but through pursuing to the end the consequences of this historical enfleshment. The event of salvation, historical and fleshly, in which we are caught up, according to the Gospel, cannot be reabsorbed into any general philosophical vision, even that of Buddhism. Every philosophical or religious encounter throws new light on it, but does not muddy or replace its essential references to the God of Israel and the figure of Jesus.
The continuation of this adventure, in fuller awareness of its historical particularity and with greater freedom towards the languages in which it has sought to grasp itself, is assured by no general philosophical or religious ideal, but only by the vivid memory of Jesus Christ. This would be a fragile foundation if this memory belonged only to the past, but the Christian trust is that this Jesus ‘is going before us’ (Mt. 28:7) and is always ahead of us ‘to the close of the age’ (Mt. 28:20).
