Demystifying the Incarnation

I. The Demystifying Role of Chalcedon

   There are two realities in question. One is fleshly: the life and death of the historical figure, Jesus of Nazareth. The other is spiritual: an encounter with the living God, in judgement and salvation, grace and glory. The first is a matter of fact, the second a self-authenticating phenomenon, attested again and again in Christian experience. The christological problem is to articulate the relation between the two.

   Classically the relation has been expressed in paradoxical juxtapositions: ‘There is one physician, fleshly and spiritual, born and unborn, in the flesh become God, in death eternal life, both from Mary and from God, first suffering and then beyond suffering, Jesus Christ our Lord’ (Ignatius of Antioch, To the Ephesians 7.2). This is quite close to the Pauline dynamic of the crucified and risen Jesus. In Tertullian, the paradox has a more doctrinaire thrust, marking that the union of divine and human in Christ is unsearchable to human intellect. His language builds on the Pauline ‘folly of the cross’ (1 Cor. 1:18-24): ‘Crucifixus est dei filius; non pudet quia pudendum est. Et mortuus est dei filius: credibile est quia ineptum est. Et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile’ (God’s son is crucified; it is not to be blushed for for it is shameful. God’s son has dies; it is credible because it is absurd. And being buried he rose agains; it is certain because it is impossible; De Carne Christi 5.4). Later, this tradition of paradox builds more on dogma than on Paul, and can seem rather mechanical, rooted more in triumphant definition of truth than in the dynamic of its biblical unfolding: ‘Invisibilis in suis, visibilis est factus in nostris, incomprehensibilis voluit comprehendi; ante tempora manens esse coepit ex tempore; universitatis Dominus servilem formam obumbrata maiestatis suae immensitate suscepit; impassibilis Deus non dedignatus est homo esse passibilis et immortalis mortis legibus subiacere’ (Invisible in his own he became visible in ours; incomprehensible he willed to be comprehended; remaining before times he began to be in time; the Lord of the universe took a servile form, the immensity of his majesty obscured; the impassible God did not disdain to be passible man and, immortal, to be subject to mortal laws; the Tome of Leo, accepted at Chalcedon). [On all these developments see Raniero Cantalamessa, Dal Kerygma al Dogma, Milan, 2006, he sees Ignatius and Tertullian as exegetes of Romans 1.3-4 and Tertullian as aware of Ignatius. An ontologization of the kerygma proceeds with the replaces of the narrative sequence flesh-spirit by an ontological one, spirit-flesh.]

Chalcedon (451) perceives in Christ is the union of two natures in one person: ‘One and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, made known in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation (asynchutôs, atreptôs, adiairetôs, achôristôs), the difference of the natures having in no wise been 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’. What strikes one immediately is that the two realities, the human and the divine, are here brought back to an underlying objective basis: the two natures. The relation between the two realities is similarly recalled to an objective foundation: their common hypostasis. Today this clarification is likely to be seen as an estrangement. Our search to articulate the relation of the human and divine dimensions of the Christ-event has to overcome the Chalcedonian perspective through a lucid critique of its limitations.

[Cantalamessa notes the narrowing of Christological teaching to the dogmatic core, and the post-Chalcedonian formalism that developed a fetischistic and divisive cult of formulae at the expense of what they were intended to point to. 'The dogmatic contraction and reduction of the kerygma consists in the progressive restriction of reflection to some contents that the process of ontologization privileged over others... Nothing of the New Testament variety of Christological themes is openly rejected, but theological reflection henceforth only illuminates a certain region of them that is ever more restricted... marginalizing and leaving inactive the contents less harmonizable with the dogmatic synthesis and shaping a pyramidal configuration of the Christological edifice in which the base is the biblical datum and the apex, ever more rarefied, the dogmatic definition' (p. 36). He notes the legitimate pluralism of Christological thought (holding up Athanasius Tomus ad Antiochenos of 362 as a model of tolerance) and the contingent aspect of dogmas, which were formulated in response to heresies with a largely apophatic purpose, not imposing a static frame but keeping free the dynamic stream of tradition. The Heideggerian sense of 'overcoming' could further enrich Cantalamessa's lucid and erudite vision. To overcome in Heidegger's sense is not to declare false but to set in movement anew, by a retrieval of more originary vision. However, though Cantalamessa has well learned the lessons of Harnack at the level of critical historical analysis of the formation of dogma, his proposals for the contemporary appropriation of dogma fall far behind the level of hermeneutical sophistication required of theology today. Making an analogy with Scripture, he treats the critical understanding of the history of dogma as belonging to the level of "the literal sense", to be supplemented by a grasp of the "spiritual sense" in the manner taught by medieval exegesis as analyzed by Henri de Lubac. Since dogmas, like Scripture, are inspired by the Holy Spirit, he argues, such a spiritual sense will inevitably unfold, in organic continuity. The example he gives is the mariological and ecclesiological developments issuing from the Creed's presentation of the Incarnation. That there are any incommensurabilities between ancient and contemporary horizons, such that one may speak with Michel Foucault of different regimes of truth, different dispositions of the world of knowledge, is something Cantalamessa would seem to deny. Renewal of Christology by a deeper understanding of the Johannine tradition, beyond the blockages of Origen and the fourth century, or by critical study of the historical Jesus and his Jewish context, or by consultation of other religious perspectives such as that of Buddhism, or by reading Christ in relation to the signs of the times as attempted in liberation theology or in feminist theology, is an idea that does not enter his ken. It is significant that his finest analyses date to the 1960s and his less imaginative proposals come from the 1980s, when he became a preacher for John Paul II. His career seems to reflect the turn inwards and the closure and paralysis that have marked Roman theology in recent decades. For his view on the historical Jesus, see http://www.catholic.net/global_catholic_news/template_news.phtml?news_id=20129&channel_id=2.]

   Most of the waves of criticism that have washed against the rock of Chalcedon have been ineffectual; see especially, A. von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte (Tubingen, 1931), pp. 397-8; corrected by R. Seeberg, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte II (Darmstadt, 1965), and A. Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition (London, 1975). If we could pinpoint where exactly they have fallen short, this would be a good preparation for a critical hermeneutical retrieval of the truth of Chalcedon. One reason for the failure is that the critics have been unable to bring into view the nature of the Greek metaphysical horizon within which the classical doctrine developed; here Heidegger offers resources for a critical genealogy which theology has yet to exploit. Another reason is that the critics did not do justice to the necessity and truth of Chalcedon on its own terms, nor appreciate how well this rule of faith had served classical theology, holding in check the monophysite tendencies recurring throughout the tradition.

   If we linger for a moment over some past episodes in christology, we may see that blind spots and distortions came chiefly from neglect of Chalcedon’s insistence on the integral humanity of Christ. The twelfth-century ‘nihilianists’ claimed that Christ’s humanity has no reality in itself, that insofar as he is a man he is nothing, that his human nature is less real than his divine; see M. Colish, Peter Lombard (Leiden, 1994), and ‘Christological nihilianism in the second half of the twelfth century’, RTAM 63 (1996), pp. 146-55. Some Thomists, such as Capreolus, Cajetan, and Billot, saw Christ’s human nature as having its being in the being of the Logos, with no existence of its own; see E. Gutwenger, Bewusstsein und Wissen Christi (Innsbruck, 1959), pp. 178-84; M. Nieden, Organum Deitatis: Die Christologie des Thomas de Vio Cajetan (Leiden, 1997). In Thomas himself, however, there is a development toward a fully Chalcedonian viewpoint which respects the integrity and autonomy of Christ’s humanity: ‘Christ has no human personhood not because he lacks something positive but on the contrary because something positive is added to his human nature’ (namely, the personhood of the Logos’ (Gutwenger, p. 177).

   Monophysites tended to attribute omniscience to Christ’s human soul. Fulgentius of Ruspe argued that Christ’s soul must have had full knowledge of his divinity: ‘Durum est, et a sanitate fidei penitus alienum, ut dicamus animam Christi non plenam suae divinitatis habere notitiam, cum qua naturaliter unam creditur habere personam’ (PL 65:416). The schools of Laon and Saint Victor, misled by a pseudo-Ambrosian slogan: ‘The soul of Christ has by grace all that God has by nature’, attributed divine knowledge to the soul of Christ, some going so far as to claim that ‘the soul of Christ is equal to the Father’: see H. Santiago-Otero, El conocimiento de Cristo en cuanto hombre en la teologia de la primera mitad del siglo XII (Pamplona, 1970), p. 46. Again Aquinas corrects this in Chalcedonian style, distinguishing between Christ’s divine, uncreated knowledge and his human, created knowledge, which is twofold: a natural knowledge based on the senses and on receptive learning, and a supernaturally infused vision of things in the divine Word and of the Word itself; the latter is not immediate, but is conferred by a superadded habit ‘through which a created intellect is elevated to what is above it’ (De Veritate q. 20, a. 2). The application of Chalcedon is scrupulously thorough: ‘Oportet in ipso ponere omnia quae ad naturam divinam pertinent; et iterum seorsum secundum rationem naturae in eadem persona omnia quae speciem hominis constituunt’ (q. 20, a. 1).

   As we ponder these past utterances, with their various orthodox or unorthodox implications, we discover that they have an oblique relation to present concerns and that they exercise us in an art of discrimination that can help us strike the right christological emphases today. Even today, Chalcedon can be effective in correcting speculative distortions in Christology, such as the popular theories of a ‘suffering God’ which undermine not only divine transcendence but also the integrity of Christ’s human nature.

   But Chalcedon can be applied still more radically than its defenders have done. Within scholastic perspectives, reinforced by Aristotelean conceptuality, it is hard to do justice to the link with biblical vision which Chalcedon had retained. Thus Aquinas takes the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ preternatural insight and miraculous powers to warrant ascription to him of the greatest knowledge and power possible in a creature, including the capacity to see in the Word all that the Word sees. Only historical scholarship has allowed us to recover Jesus as a human being sharing the cognitive limitations of his culture. But this recovery is not in conflict with the Chalcedonian tradition; rather Chalcedon kept the stage clear for it and has allowed the Church to take aboard the findings of scholarship as a welcome confirmation of the doctrine that Christ is truly man. It helps us take in our stride the possibility that the human Jesus may have erred, due to the limitations of the framework of his eschatological thinking; such errors could include not only the Naherwartung (Mk 9:1; Mt. 10:23), but the elements in his teaching that gave rise to anti-Jewish supersessionist doctrine (Mk 12:9) and notions of eternal punishment. ‘Verus homo’ must include the errancy intrinsic to the human condition. It consigns the fleshly Christ to the processes of reinterpretation and correction to which all historical figures are subject. This is the task of reappropriation and supplementation in which the interpreting Spirit leads the church (Jn 16:13).

   Again, Chalcedon has often been taken to teach a massive ontological amalgamation of divine and human substances, best expressed in such forthright statements as: ‘Jesus is God’, ‘the God-man’, ‘God became man’. But an authentic Chalcedonian understanding of the ‘communication of idioms’ can smooth away some of the unease these statements arouse. ‘Jesus is a man’ and ‘The Logos is God’ are direct predications, but ‘Jesus is God’ is misleading shorthand that needs to be spelled out carefully. Because the man Jesus is hypostatically one with the eternal Logos, we can attribute to this one person all the attributes of the humanity and of the divinity; thus we can say ‘Jesus is God’, ‘Jesus created the world’ or ‘The Logos was born of Mary’, ‘The Logos suffered and died’ as long as we ward off any suggestion that the human nature as such acquires divine qualities or that the divine nature as such is subject to human limitations; see H. Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics (Grand Rapids, MI, 1978), pp. 439-47. We should not traffic too freely in such expressions, however. The Greek patristic idea of a mutual perichoresis of the human and divine natures of Christ, in a total mixture (Stoic krasis di holon), comes near to being an abuse of the communication of idioms, especially if misinterpreted to mean that qualities of the divine nature are attributed to the human nature, as in H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers (Harvard UP, 1970), pp. 418-28; G. L. Prestige, in contrast, plays down the ontological import of the patristic statements, in his God in Patristic Thought (London, 1964), pp. 291-9. An important text is John Damascene, Patrologia Graeca 94:1000A: ‘each nature giving to the other its properties through the sameness of the hypostasis and their perichoresis toward each other’. The ultimate hypostasis of Jesus Christ is God’s eternal Word; but this is not in rivalry with his human personality. The trinitarian modes of being (tropoi tes hyparxeos) of God as Father, Son, Spirit are clearly not ‘persons’ in the ordinary human sense. Chalcedon thus leaves considerable room for manoeuvre in interpreting the sense in which Jesus ‘is’ God’s Word spoken into our history.

   Yet however subtly one expounds Chalcedon - at the risk, indeed, of making it a wax nose -, people will object: Is it not enough to say that in Jesus we encounter the living God? The pursuit of the ontological grounds of this encounter seems epistemologically dubious and has divisive and alienating effects. Moreover, others may experience God’s self-disclosure just as definitively elsewhere. ‘Jesus was and is divine for those who experience in him the manifestation of God... To be human is to live in a as the; to be inhuman is to deny that necessary slippage’, writes J. D. Crossan, in Who Killed Jesus? (San Francisco, 1996), p. 216. To show why Chalcedon may validly make a stronger claim than this today, we need to step back to the biblical sources, showing that they made Chalcedon necessary in the Greek metaphysical context, and that even when this context is overcome they continue to prompt accounts of Jesus which find his ultimate identity in the fact that he is the enfleshment of divine self-disclosure.

II. Rerooting Chalcedon in the Encounter with Christ

  Chalcedon is often spoken of as the foundation of the christological edifice (Seeberg), a beginning not an end (Rahner), but today we need also to register the sense in which Chalcedon is an end. The possibilities of speculation about the hypostatic union, rearranging the ancient categories of nature and person, are exhausted. This is clear in the case of Schoonenberg’s attempt to think of the Trinity as becoming personalized and having I-thou relationships from the moment of the Incarnation, but also in the discourse of his critics who stay in the same rut of Chalcedonian argumentation; see P. Schoonenberg, Der Geist, das Wort und der Sohn (Regensburg, 1992); A. Kaiser, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer Christologie ‘von unten’ (Munster, 1992). One cannot beat the tradition at its own game; the speculations of process theology or kenoticism or tritheistic accounts of the intradivine social life are bad metaphysics that can be chased out by good, as in J. P. Mackey’s critique of Moltmann, ‘The Preacher, the Theologian, and the Trinity’, Theology Today 54 (1997), pp. 347-66. Mackey gives too much credit here to Augustine’s siting of the Trinity as a transcendent, ineffable archetype; for a critique of this Platonizing topography of revelation, see J. S. O’Leary, ‘The Invisible Mission of the Son in Origen and Augustine’, Origeniana VII,, pp. 605-22.

   But good metaphysics is not enough. Whether in classical or modernized form, metaphysical theology has to be problematized and overcome as the thinking of faith finds it proper path. Four trends of hermeneutical awareness converge to impose this overcoming:

   (1) Phenomenality: Modern theology insists that faith is grounded in an encounter with God in Christ and only secondarily in dogmatic formulae. ‘The presence of Christ in the Spirit is the all-encompassing situation of all christological statements’; F. J. van Beeck, Christ Proclaimed (New York, 1979), p. 252. ‘It is not “the Incarnation” that is the basis of dogma, but judgement and conversion worked out through encounter with the tellling of Jesus’ story’; R. Williams, in R. Morgan, ed., The Religion of the Incarnation (Bristol, 1989), p. 87. Dogmas mark certain logical constraints which must be respected in order to guard the integrity of the encounter, but they do not provide a foundation or synthesis superior to or equal to the biblical events themselves. Metaphysical theology is built on a reversal of this priority of revelation over dogma. In the space of thought it projects, the truths of faith are no longer grounded in encounter but in stable definitions and substances. In seeking to clarify the biblical events by asking first and foremost for reasons and grounds and by setting them within a doctrinal system, it overleaps both the pneumatic and the fleshly phenomenality of these events, which are no longer free to deploy their significance in the space opened up by scripture and its ongoing interpretation. Questions framed within a Greek metaphysical horizon, oriented to substantial identity, would not need to, and could not, be formulated in a thinking of revelation oriented to events and processes. Speculative construction would be stymied at the question stage by the impossibility of casting off the narrative vesture of biblical revelation in order to define the event in abstraction from its inexhaustibly pluralistic historical texture.

   (2) Pluralism: The biblical events come to us in a plurality of experiences, languages, literary genres, conceptual frameworks, and cultural contexts. Metaphysical theology proceeds from a falsifying unification of these data under a homogeneous framework. Taking a view from above on the variety of biblical languages, it cannot respect the specificity of each as a distinctive style of understanding. Its ambition is to be the definitive, objective language which integrates all others. But it turns out to be but one more language, equally subject to historical and cultural plurality which cannot be ironed out. Even when the Church has agreed on one dogmatic formula and maintained it through the centuries, the speculative explanations of the formula (even within the schools of Neothomism) have never admitted of reduction to a single framework. Full recognition of this pluralism greatly limits the role that metaphysical speculation can play in the clarification of Christian truth.

   (3) Historicity: All of the cultural frameworks within which Christian truth is articulated belong to limited historical epistemological contexts. They become to a large degree obsolescent and inaccessible when new contexts supervene. The metaphysics which attempts to isolate essential structures and foundations is itself a historically contextualized formation. Critical historical self-positioning has henceforth to be built into every responsible theological discourse. Full recognition of the historicity of theological thought makes us conscious that such notions as ‘nature’ and ‘hypostasis’ or any modern equivalent thereof are culture-bound constructs and provisional conventions. They may be aids to insight in certain contexts, but since they cannot be purged of historical relativity they refer us back to an ongoing activity of understanding that never halts in a definitive systematization.

   (4) Epistemological limits: After the critiques of Kant and Wittgenstein, the construction of a metaphysics has become a highly problematic enterprise. To invoke a metaphysics in expounding Christian faith is to saddle theology with the defence of the inherently dubious. The truth of doctrine has to be retrieved independently of the metaphysical frameworks which provided a stable background at the time the doctrines were formulated. In this postmetaphysical context, dogmas will be rated less as positive breakthroughs in ontological insight than as practical rules of speech of a largely negative cast. Thus, the Nicene prohibition of denial of Christ’s true divinity remains in force, but a positive definition of what this ‘true divinity’ means becomes elusive; at best it becomes another rule of speech: ‘what is said of the Father as God must be said of the Son as God’. Within a certain conceptual horizon, a certain language-game, such rules impose themselves, but the absolute necessity and validity of such a take on the divine may remain open to question. We observe the dogmatic rules of language not for their direct cognitive yield but as safeguards of the ‘divine milieu’ in which we encounter God in Christ. This dogmatic minimalism undercuts the arrogance of a christological discourse that would directly speak of divine and human natures and hypostases, as matters of objective knowledge, obliging it to be rephrased in a tentative and hypothetical mode: ‘if we were to choose to speak in this archaic and rather problematic style, then this is what we would be obliged to say’. This apparent enfeeblement of dogma in fact renders it more functional and effective, recalling it to its role as defender of revelation, and preventing it from becoming the foundation of an alternative system of Christian truth in rivalry with the order of events that unfolds from Scripture.

   Given that metaphysics is now so problematic, and that classical doctrine has relied heavily on a metaphysical background, it is clear that the task of recalling Chalcedon to its roots in the encounter with God in Christ cannot be simply a matter of fleshing out skeletal categories with the richer languages of Scripture. It involves a fundamental overcoming of the Chalcedonian perspective, through subordinating it to the more originary horizon within which Paul and John sought to articulate an intangible and encompassing reality, the Risen Christ. The kind of linguistic performance to which this unmasterable phenomenon drove Paul and John is not reducible to the bare, literal sense of their words - such words as ‘light’ and ‘spirit’ and ‘Logos’ elude definition in any case, and function as meta-phors, leading our thought to a level of pneumatic event which cannot be objectified and set forth as the person and natures of Christ are in classical dogmatic systems. Within this all-encompassing sphere wherein God is encountered as the ‘one who comes’ in Word and Spirit, in judgement and grace, the language of Chalcedon has the status of a kind of legal codicil, to be invoked only when needed; and like law, dogma is less a matter of timeless insights than of slow historical growth in function of particular cases. Dogma builds a barbed fence about the burning bush of revelation, and it has been a common idolatry to venerate the fence instead of the bush or what is encountered therein.

Chalcedon, ideally, is at the service of encounter. Its four negative adverbs ward off falsifications of that encounter, urging us to respect the integrity of Jesus’ humanity and of his divinity, neither fusing, altering, dividing nor separating them. Despite the Neoplatonic language (Porphyry uses asunchutôs and Plotinus atreptôs with reference to the soul’s relation to the body), the space of the statement need not be characterised as a cold, neutral one in which the hypostasis and the natures of Christ are objectified and torn out of the context of lived encounter. But Christology after Chalcedon became rigid, building a ‘cordon sanitaire around some irreducible core in Jesus’ (Van Beeck, p. 422), because the dogma was made into an absolute point of departure, instead of being constantly referred back to the encounter with Christ in Scripture and in the Church’s worship. A phobia about speaking naturally of Christ’s humanity undermined incarnational realism: ‘The condemnation of Nestorius was the most fateful event in the history of christology, for it made simple and natural ideas impossible in christology’ (Seeberg, p. 303; similarly Harnack, p. 374). After Chalcedon the world of dogma largely ceased to convey a living link with revelation, which people sought elsewhere, in the mystagogical world mapped by Pseudo-Dionysius.

   Rudolf Bultmann remains an indispensable point of reference in the step back from an objectifying substance-based christology to one based on encounter: “Jesus Christ is the Eschatological Event as the man Jesus of Nazareth and as the Word which resounds in the mouth of those who preach him. The New Testament indeed holds unmistakenly fast to the humanity of Jesus over against all gnostic doctrine, naturally with a naivety for which the problems of ‘very God and very man’ have not yet arisen - those problems which the ancient Church doubtless saw, but sought to solve in an inadequate way by means of Greek thought with its objectivizing nature; a solution which indeed found an expression that is now impossible for our thought, in the Chalcedonian formula... Christ is everything that is asserted of him in so far as he is the Eschatological Event... He is such - indeed, to put it more exactly, he becomes such - in the encounter - when the Word which proclaims him meets with belief; and indeed even when it does not meet with belief, for whoever does not believe is already judged (John 3.18)” (Essays Philosophical and Theological, London, p. 286). Through a nuanced hermeneutics, it may be possible to square this orientation with the claims of orthodoxy. Orthodoxy as regards the Trinity is satisfied with the recognition of some kind of objective distinction in God between God, Word and Spirit, a distinction required if the New Testament evidence is to retain its full meaning. But the elaborate superstructures built on this in speculative trinitarian theology need to be dismantled if the original core of dogma and its necessity are to be brought into view. Orthodoxy as regards the Incarnation is satisfied with the assertion that the final meaning of Jesus is inseparable from the divine Word. The personality of the human Jesus and the personality of the divine Word cannot be one and the same, since an infinite abyss separates human personality from what we project as divine personality. The identity of Jesus and the Word has to be rethought in terms of event and process, as a coincidence of the human historical adventure of Jesus with the revelational activity of God. To encounter the risen Christ in faith is to encounter the divine Word; the two cannot be divided or separated: adiairetôs, achôristôs. But since the divine nature cannot be mingled with the human or subject to change - asunchutôs, atreptôs - Jesus is free to be integrally human, with all that this entails.

   K. Beyschag, who is severely critical of Chalcedon’s play with bloodless categories, reminds us that Christ represents the eschatological inbreaking of God’s grace and judgement, he is its earthly personification, and thus it is precisely insofar as he is fully and entirely man that he is fully and entirely God (Grundriss der Dogmengeschichte II.1 [Darmstadt, 1991], p. 133. But such animadversions need to be set within a fuller account of the metaphysical provenance of Chalcedon’s categories and by a subtler, Heideggerian analysis both of their occulting effect and of the manner in which Chalcedon nonetheless functions as a disclosure event. B. Welte does not criticize Chalcedon but, recognizing its ontological framing of dogma to be historically relative, proposes to reground it in a quasi-Heideggerian language of event: ‘Es ereignete sich, indem sich der ganze Mensch ereignete, der ganze lebendige Gott auf den glaubenden Menschen hin. In dem einen Ereignis, in dem sich der Mensch ereignete, ereignete sich auch der lebendige Gott’ ‘Die Krisis der dogmatischen Christusaussagen’; in: A. Paus, ed., Die Frage nach Jesus (Graz, 1973), p. 177. Heidegger might say, as he did of Bultmann’s TWNT article on ‘faith’: ‘Too Heideggerian for me!’ But though Welte’s proposal needs to be cashed in richer biblical terms, it indicates the hermeneutic task: to clarify the phenomena that gave rise to dogma and to measure against them the limits of the horizon within which the dogma was formulated.

  When we recall Chalcedon to its biblical basis we find that it is no more than a footnote to the incarnational vision expressed in John 1:14. But that text may allow of a subtler and wider exegesis than classical dogma countenanced. ‘The Word became flesh’ may mean: ‘The divinity manifest in the creative Wisdom through which the world was made and in the Torah through which the holy community of Israel was assembled is now manifest in a more fleshly, historical form, in and across the entire career of Jesus’. It is not Jesus as an artificially isolated individual, but Jesus in the entire extent of his connections with Jewish tradition and his ongoing pneumatic presence within the community as the ‘firstborn of many brethren’ (Rom
8:29), who is the enfleshment of God’s creative, revelatory Word. God made Godself known in Israel, dwelling among them (the shekinah). It is not through a radical break with this tradition or some monstruous metaphysical paradox that God once again dwells among us in the warm fleshliness of Jesus, that is, of the total history of Jesus, with its roots in and dependence on the Jewish people and its pneumatic unfolding in the anamnesis of the Christian community.

   What is new about the new Torah, the new Covenant, is thus not the presence of the Word (for it is living and active from the beginning) nor ‘the revelation of the mystery of the Trinity’, but rather the role of the flesh, which permits a more intimate conjunction of human and divine. The prophets had seen God as identifying himself with the victims of oppression and with the human historical struggle for liberation and justice. In the crucified Jesus this identification is sealed. A grandiose theology has lost sight of the first lowly paradigm for making sense of the salvific aspect of Christ’s death, namely that of faith in the God of Israel who upholds the righteous. The fleshly story of Jesus’s life and death fashions a more intimate acquaintance with what the Hebrew scriptures name as God, Word and Spirit, now renamed as Father, Son and Spirit - metaphorical, narrative designations for dimensions or presentations of the divine. In Jesus the divine Word draws near in overwhelming glory as of a Son proceeding from a Father, and the outpouring of the Spirit in conjunction with the drama of his loving death has a new immediacy, given ‘fleshly’ expression in the experience of Christ as ‘risen’ and ‘exalted to God’s right hand’.

   This vision of the Word incarnate is not the most immediate impact of Jesus of Nazareth; the categories of a Spirit-christology capture this more effectively. It is rather the fruit of a long reflection on Jesus and his ongoing impact, the emergence of a background awareness that the entire career of Jesus can be grasped as the work of God. Insofar as Jesus’s life, death and ongoing life are a vehicle of revelation in some definitive, unsurpassable way, they are seen as the Logos made flesh, and their ultimate meaning, the ultimate identity of Jesus, are henceforth to be sought in that dimension.

   If we see ‘the Word became flesh’ as a statement of the same order as ‘God is Spirit’ or ‘God is light’, namely, as a resume of Christian experience, conveying a contemplative insight which one can appropriate only by a continual opening of the mind, then we can go beyond efforts to pin the event down to objective ontological privileges enjoyed by Jesus. Rather than a once-for-all ontological conjunction, somewhat magically and fetishistically located at the moment of Christ’s conception, can we not think of incarnation as the transformation of this human life, in all its extensions, into manifestation of God, 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?

   This more open-textured interpretation of incarnation attenuates the clash between the Christian claims and non-Christian religions, for the incarnation of God in Christ continues to unfold along the paths of historical, fleshly contingency as his Gospel and his pneumatic presence are redeployed in different cultures, and enter into dialogue with other historical apprehensions of divine presence in the world. Christian faith and devotion gravitates to Christ in a spontaneous and instinctive way, conferring on him the high titles which dogma subsequently interprets in a critical clarification. Is this gravitation a brute given, or can we map it as a geodesic within a relativistic interreligious space? Is the Incarnation a massive and unique event, the central reality of history and indeed of being? Or is it a cipher for [better: the central node of] a more subtle, historically textured disclosure process which is intimately linked with the broader web of human evolution, not as dominating that web, but as drawing its sense from it?

III. The Demystifying Role of the Historical Jesus

   The perennial tension between the Christ of dogma and ‘the historical Jesus as he lives hidden in the Gospels’ – A. Schweitzer, Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (Munich, 1966), p. 47 – has been exacerbated by clearer emergence of the historical Jesus thanks to two centuries of scholarship. The ‘God incarnate’ schema seems to impose an alien mythological framework on the eschatological prophet who announced the imminence of God’s Kingdom and gave body to his message through exorcisms and healings, table fellowship with outcasts, and a fresh interpretation of Jewish law and wisdom. Jesus associated acceptance or rejection of his own message with the eschatological judgement to come, and spoke in a way that gave rise to his identification as the Davidic Messiah and the coming eschatological Son of Man For well-grounded accounts of Jesus’s teaching; see John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus II (New York, 1994); Jacques Schlosser, Le règne de Dieu dans les dits de Jésus (Paris, 1980).. But such an expression as ‘I am God incarnate’ would have been unimaginable on his lips. The gap between the wisdom trajectory culminating in John’s vision of Christ as the Logos incarnate and Jesus’s more historical and eschatological claims about himself could be lessened if, as some exegetes suggest, Jesus thought of himself as personified Wisdom; see F. Christ, Jesus Sophia (Zurich, 1970); but this is unconvincing; E. O. Meadors, Jesus the Messianic Herald of Salvation (Tübingen, 1995), pp. 36-71; Meadors also rejects the theory that Jesus saw himself as Wisdom’s eschatological envoy. In order to close the gap a degree of demythologization of the incarnational tradition seems to be required. The step back from Chalcedon to Paul and John has to be followed by a further step back to earlier understandings of Jesus, including his own self-understanding.

   Thus when we recall dogma to its Johannine basis, and John to his phenomenological foundations in a contemplative post-paschal anamnesis of Jesus, we still have to deal with the articulation between the historical Jesus and the post-paschal Christ of faith. John’s vision is legitimated by reinsertion in the process of reflection whereby the early Christians realized that the significance of Jesus could not be contained within categories less capacious than that of ‘Logos incarnate’, John’s presentation of Jesus is a theological vision, which for all its anti-docetic thrusts recalls the historical ministry of Jesus only as a set of sublime symbolic gestures, sighted within the dazzling blaze of his risen presence. The social concern with liberation from oppression and injustice, a defining trait of Jesus’ teaching, and which we are slowly discovering to be part of the definition of incarnation itself, is obscured by John’s focus on communal love. A Christianity based only on the sublimity of the Fourth Gospel would be ill-defended against blindness to these fleshly historical dimensions of the work of Christ. Theologians dismissive of critical exegesis, such as Von Balthasar, build on John to present idealized accounts of Christ’s life from which historical contingency is banished: ‘From the first act on, the entire drama is constructed in view of the fifth; thus it is portrayed by the witnesses, and only thus is it the divine work of art as which it presents itself’; Kennt uns Jesus - Kennen wir ihn? (Einsiedeln, 1995), p. 90. But it is precisely to the extent that the Gospels are literary works of art that we must suspect them of being false to the murkiness and accidentality of real life. Von Balthasar is right to remind us that ‘the Word was made flesh’ is followed by ‘and we have seen his glory’. Divine glory is the supreme biblical phenomenon, and it is at the heart of the Incarnation. Modern theology, cramped by the grids of dogma, the positivism of historical research, and activist demands for relevance, has had trouble opening up to this phenomenon. But a theologia gloriae which misses the broken, all-too-human texture wherein we are given intimations - ‘hints and guesses’ (Eliot) - of the divine glory, or which stylizes this fleshly texture into a sacralized icon, undermines the reality of the divine assumption of humanity in Christ. The revelation comes from the unmasterable divine dimension, but it does not come in a huge undifferentiated ahistorical lump; ‘it rides time like riding a river’ (Hopkins), espousing all the contingency and historicity of the human condition.

   In a deep and rich synthesis of his thought, Étant donné (Paris, 1997), which will be closely studied by theologians, J.-L. Marion frees phenomenality and eventhood from the tight grasp of the principle of sufficient reason and other metaphysical conditions of possibility, thus making straight the paths to recognition of the possibility of such a phenomenon as ‘the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor. 4:6). Unfortunately, he ends up subordinating the phenomena to a totalizing, originary concept of givenness (donation), which enjoys the same transcendental status as being does in Thomism. Wittgenstein and Derrida, who are also in their way thinkers of eventhood and phenomenality, would object that this concept is a logocentric mystification, and that phenomena are caught in a pluralistic web of language which reduces ‘givenness’ to a moment within a wider context (différance) which itself is not governed by the values of presence, givenness, or phenomenality. The scholastic lucidity and thoroughness of Marion’s arguments leaves their weaker links all the more exposed, particularly in his lame, question-begging solutions to such objections, whose force he underestimates.

   Christian revelation in this perspective, despite the rich differentiation of degrees and modes of givenness, is sighted in a monolithic fashion: we are convoked by a once-for-all event without any trace of pluralistic, historical open-endedness. Revelation as a rupture of the tissue of history prevails over all modern attempts to apprehend Christ in evolutionary and historical perspectives On the tension between these two dimensions of messianic thinking in modern Judaism; see Stéphane Mosès, L’Ange de l’histoire (Paris, 1992). When Marion speaks of Christ’s flesh as ‘affecting itself by itself and thus manifesting itself without having to inscribe itself in any relation, thus in an absolute mode, outside or beyond every horizon’ (Marion, p. 333), the docetist overtones are troubling. To abstract Christ’s flesh from dependency on human relations is untrue to the modalities of incarnation as theology has painfully rediscovered them over the last two hundred and fifty years. The fleshly Christ is ‘the light of the world’ (Jn 8.12) not from a place above and beyond it, but from within it, radiating out to it along historical pathways and interpreted to it differently in successive contexts by the dynamic activity of his Spirit. His flesh is of the same frail ‘dependently co-arisen’ texture as ours (Heb 2:14, 5:7-8), and it is precisely as such an ‘earthen vessel’ that it becomes the vehicle of the ‘eternal weight of glory’ (2 Cor. 4:7, 17) For an application of the Buddhist ontology of dependent co-arising to Christ; see J. P. Keenan, The Meaning of Christ (Maryknoll, NY, 1989). That glory is not given in raw immediacy, but for the most part in the straining of eschatological expectation; the story of the Transfiguration is firmly fixed in this horizon and not allowed to saturate or swamp it (Mk 9; Mt. 17; Lk. 9).

   Reference to the historical reality of Jesus before the post-Easter interpretations provides an invaluable critical resource over against the entire christological tradition, preventing it from ballooning off into vacuous idealism. The very difficulty of such reference, the uncertainty and obscurity of the enterprise, can free our faith from a narrow positivism of facts as much as from a blithe confidence in theological portraits of Jesus. Scientific concern with the facts about Jesus has become part of any responsible christology At present it is being enriched by reconstructions of the social context of Jesus’s career, such as Sean Freyne’s studies of the world of Galilee., in counterpoint to the imaginative unfolding of the significance of Jesus in Christian tradition and its present transformations. We can no longer rest uncritically in our imaginings of Jesus; we realize that they are a ‘skilful means’ (Buddhist upâya) suited to a given epoch and in need of constant readjustment. But neither can we cease these imaginings by a return to the bare facts about Jesus, for these come clothed in religious interpretation from the start, and in any case their painstaking reproduction produces only museum fragments unless linked to the interrogation of Jesus by contemporary believers.

   Even the earliest interpretations of Jesus, by himself and his disciples, are subject to historical contextualization and critical reassessment. There was an abundance of mythic schemata to draw on, and their application to Jesus was a human interpretative activity, however much it may have been led by the Spirit (cf. Mt. 16:17). Since Christology is so much a product of the mythic frameworks then available, the retrieval of its truth for today demands a radical reinterpretation: “In certain Jewish circles, the biblical story of Melchizedek expanded into a sort of mythical biography: Melchizedek became a pre-existent and immortal being; he was thought of as having been begotten in his mother’s womb by the Word of God, and there were those who expected him to be the judge of the Latter Days… The example of Melchizedek proves, therefore, that the time was ripe for the birth of Christianity, not in the Hellenistic world and surely not in the pagan world, but in the Land of Israel, where Jesus and his first disciples lived”; thus David Flusser, Judaism and the Origins of Christianity (Jerusalem, 1988), p. 192. Flusser comments that Jesus: “felt he was united with God as a son with his heavenly father and his unique tie of divine sonship became one of the main notions of Christianity, after having been interpreted with the help of Jewish theological motifs, mostly of hypostatic nature... Does Christ’s divine sonship belong strictly to Christology or already to Messianology?... Many aspects of Christian theology and dogmatics appear in Judaism, where they are autonomous, Jewish and not Christian” (p. 263). For more on these Messianic hypostases, see J. J. Collins, The Scepter and the Star (New York, 1995).

   Jesus’ own messianological notions, thus, must in turn be interpreted against the background of Jewish religion and culture, in yet another step back. H.-J. Kraus, Systematische Theologie im Kontext biblischer Geschichte und Eschatologie (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1983), F.-W. Marquardt, Das christliche Bekenntnis zu Jesus, dem Juden (Munich, 1991), P. M. van Buren, Christ in Context (San Francisco, 1988), and M. Wyschogrod, ‘A Jewish Perspective on Incarnation’, Modern Theology 12 (1996), pp. 195-209, are some of the works that propose a Christian theology of Jesus using only Jewish categories. But under pain of a naive biblicism we must recognize that these Jewish categories also need to be demythologized. This applies even to the ruling idea of Israel’s election, which cannot really mean that God binds himself to the physical descendents of Abraham; rather, Israel is the people of the Torah, and the Covenant is centered on that. Israel’s identity is not secured by literal obedience to the Mosaic Law or to its Rabbinic reinterpretation, but more largely by its spirit of Torah fidelity; against B. D. Marshall, ‘Christ and the cultures: The Jewish people and Christian theology’, in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, 1997, pp. 81-100.

   The obsolescence of Hellenistic myth does not entail any rejuvenation of Hebrew myth. The task of rearticulating in contemporary categories what the ancients envisaged in mythic terms is even more daunting in this case, for however refreshing we may find the older biblical representations by contrast with stale Hellenistic notions, it is the latter that harmonize with the tracks of thought most familiar in Western culture. The repertoire of Jewish eschatological thought-forms came to appear alien and inadequate as the Church spread, and though the notion of Messiah was crucial in controversy with Judaism, the Hellenistic mind was more engaged by representations of the pre-existent Son of God (Paul) and Logos (John). A reappropriation of the Jewish mythical categories in an existential translation, helped by thinkers such as Rosenzweig, Scholem and Buber, may challenge theology to break out of its Hellenistic rut, but it will also cut a swath through the over-abundance of mythological motifs in the Gospels.

   Slowly, the actual phenomenological and interpretative structure of how faith encounters the living God in and across the human Jesus is coming into sharper focus. We begin to see that the historical, Jewish fleshly existence of Jesus is the locus of his unique revelatory and salvific status, and that it is a bridge rather than an obstacle as our tradition opens out to other major loci of divine disclosure, especially the Jewish and Buddhist traditions.

  (from Archivio di Filosofia, vol.. 67, 1999)

Comments

[Spirit of Vatican II]

The lengthiest commentary this article has received comes from Philip Blosser, http://pblosser.blogspot.com/2005_08_01_pblosser_archive.html#112351348588701428.

Unfortunately, Blosser's essay is playing to his own neocath gallery, and freely caricatures his target. For instance, he says: "he tends to describe formulations like those of Chalcedon derisively as "cold," "logical," and "bloodless." In fact I denied that Chalcedon is "cold": "Chalcedon, ideally, is at the service of encounter. Its four negative adverbs ward off falsifications of that encounter, urging us to respect the integrity of Jesus' humanity and of his divinity, neither fusing, altering, dividing nor separating them. Despite the Neoplatonic language (Porphyry uses asunchutos and Plotinus atreptos with reference to the soul's relation to the body), the space of the statement need not be characterised as a COLD, neutral one in which the hypostasis and the natures of Christ are objectified and torn out of the context of lived encounter. But Christology after Chalcedon became rigid, building a `cordon sanitaire around some irreducible core in Jesus' (Van Beeck, p. 422)., because the dogma was made into an absolute point of departure, instead of being constantly referred back to the encounter with Christ in Scripture and in the Church's worship."

As to "logical" I so say that "Dogmas mark certain logical constraints which must be respected in order to guard the integrity of the encounter, but they do not provide a foundation or synthesis superior to or equal to the biblical events themselves." But I do not have the childish aversion to logic that Blosser imagines, and I also stress that the horos of Chalcedon goes beyond logic in freeing a horizon of contemplation, an opening for further thought on the Incarnation.

As to "bloodless", like "ossified" which Blosser also attributes to me, it is not in my vocabulary at all! It is true that I say that another author sees Chalcedon as bloodless. A basic rule of reponsible hermeneutics, however, is to distinguish between the author you are criticizing and other authors that he quotes, particularly if he criticizes those authors. "K. Beyschag, who is severely critical of Chalcedon's play with bloodless categories, reminds us that Christ represents the eschatological inbreaking of God's grace and judgement, he is its earthly personification, and thus it is precisely insofar as he is fully and entirely man that he is fully and entirely God (Grundriss der Dogmengeschichte II.1 [Darmstadt, 1991], p. 133. But such animadversions need to be set within a fuller account of the metaphysical provenance of Chalcedon's categories and by a subtler, Heideggerian analysis both of their occulting effect and of the manner in which Chalcedon nonetheless functions as a disclosure event. B. Welte does not criticize Chalcedon but, recognizing its ontological framing of dogma to be historically relative, proposes to reground it in a quasi-Heideggerian language of event: `Es ereignete sich, indem sich der ganze Mensch ereignete, der ganze lebendige Gott auf den glaubenden Menschen hin. In dem einen Ereignis, in dem sich der Mensch ereignete, ereignete sich auch der lebendige Gott' `Die Krisis der dogmatischen Christusaussagen'; in: A. Paus, ed., Die Frage nach Jesus (Graz, 1973), p. 177. Heidegger might say, as he did of Bultmann's TWNT article on `faith': `Too Heideggerian for me!' But though Welte's proposal needs to be cashed in richer biblical terms, it indicates the hermeneutic task: to clarify the phenomena that gave rise to dogma and to measure against them the limits of the horizon within which the dogma was formulated." Read in context, it is clear that I do not consider Chalcedon "a ballet of bloodless categories"!

Blosser's next substantive criticism is this: "he describes what he calls the "two realities" at issue in the Chalcedonian formulation as follows: "One is fleshly: the life and death of a historical figure, Jesus of Nazareth. The other is spiritual: an encounter with the living God ...." The first, he says, is a "matter of fact"; the second, a "self-authenticating" matter of "Christian experience." Notice that the matter of fact here includes the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. Not His resurrection. The resurrection, of course, is consigned to the "self-authenticating" realm of "Christian experience," which, please note, is beyond the realm of fact." Blosser should note that I speak of two REALITIES. The contrast of Jesus Son of David and Jesus established as Son of God by the resurrection of the dead goes back to Paul, Romans 1.

"The distinction O'Leary is assuming here comes from that tired, old dichotomy of the biblical historical-critics, which severs the "Christ of Faith" (the resurrected Christ) from the "Jesus of History" (the historical man who lived and died)." Tired, old, but not necessarily invalid, especially when one stress the intimate identity of the two.

" This dichotomy is simply a transposed, religious version of the "value/fact" dichotomy that runs back through Kant's "noumenal/phenomenal" dualism to still earlier versions of that bifurcation." This is quite incorrect. The noumenal is beyond experience, whereas the risen Christ is a reality of experience. Again, the postulation of value, merely projected onto the facts, is certainly a totally anemic conception of what resurrection and incarnation mean, and one that is completely alien to me.

"This dichotomy, long defended by logical empiricists and other positivists of yesteryear, has been soundly exposed for the piffle it is. The problem is that the dichotomy is utterly contrived and collapses the moment it meets with reality. For values are facts too; and facts are permeated with values." This would undermine Blosser's critique above; but in any case it would never occur to me to see resurrection and incarnation as merely valuations; the notion of value has no place whatever here.

[Spirit of Vatican II]

Blosser quotes the following statement: "Today this clarification is likely to be seen as an estrangement. Our search to articulate the relation of the human and divine dimensions of the Christ-event has to overcome the Chalcedonian perspective through a lucid critique of its limitations."

Note that such a critique would be quite in accord with John XXIII's distinction between the truth of doctrine and the limits of its historical formulations.

Blosser comments: "One hears the echoes of Martin Heidegger's existentialism, as one does in the demythologizing theology of Rudolf Bultmann. Expressions such as "Christ-event," "overcoming" (usually "overcoming of metaphysics"), and "retrieval" (usually retrieval of something long hidden, like Heidegger's "Being," or Paul Tillich's "Ground of Being") are nuts-and-bolts trade jargon in the industry of theological existentialism." Again, why does this make these categories invalid? The term "Christ-event" is used by many very "orthodox" theologians, including Joseph Ratzinger.

"It would be helpful to know why this presumably hidden truth of Chalcedon has been overlooked for so many centuries. Why weren't earlier attempts at uncovering this truth more effective? One reason, O'Leary says, is that "[earlier] critics have been unable to bring into view the nature of the Greek metaphysical horizon within which the classical doctrine developed; here Heidegger offers resources for a critical genealogy which theology has yet to exploit." (p. 2)"

"Indeed! Just as fish don't know what it means to be wet, earlier theologians didn't know what it was to be immersed in a "Greek metaphysical horizon," because they lacked sufficient critical distance." Actually, there is at least one major exception -- Luther. Heidegger's project of overcoming was initially inspired by Luther, and he brings refinements that were not available to Luther or to Lutheran theologians.

" And it is none other than Heidegger, according to O'Leary, who provides this critical distance through his genealogical deconstruction (or "destruction," as Heidegger sometimes calls it) of the western metaphysical and "onto-theological" tradition." Quite.

Now how does Blosser refute this claim? "Heidegger translated the categories of his erstwhile Christian faith into secular, existential equivalents, so that his philosophy is in many ways a secularized substitute for his erstwhile faith. ... Similar patterns in secularized existential theology can be found, for example, in John Macquarrie's Principles of Christian Theology and Paul Tillich's three-volume Systematic Theology." I have not objection to Heidegger's formation of an existential phenomenology based on secularized Christian categories, and I agree that Macquarrie and Tillich are questionable when they seem to introduce such secularization into theology itself, something Heidegger would not have been happy with.

"For the Nazi theologians -- Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanuel Hirsch -- "Christ" was reinterpreted to mean the "spirit of National Socialism." In fact, dring the Nazi regime in Germany, Hedegger himself affiliated his vision, which John D. Caputo, following Emmanuel Levinas, describes as a "totalizing ontology," with the totalitarian vision of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich." This shows "how disconnected any such secularized existential theology can become from the historical realities of the Judeo-Christian tradition." True, but irrelevant.

"So what is existentialism, exactly? What animates it? Can this question be answered without distinguishing atheistic from Christian existentialism?" Again, this is rather irrelevant. The categories of "Being and Time" have been recycled in both Christian and atheist philosophies. My own overcoming of metaphysics in theology is based ont he later Heidegger, more a thinker of being than an existentialist, and it does not draw directly on any Heideggerian category but follows the "analogy of proportion" recommended to theologians by Heidegger -- that is, the dynamics of forgetting and its overcoming apply in theology not to being but to the event of revelation, for which the categories of being are not a suitable language.

"Existential theologians tend to view the world in terms of two levels -- the objective and the subjective. On the objective level, like their atheistic counterparts, they tend to accept the account offered by a naturalistic world view, which excludes the supernatural, shutting the lid on the universe, as it were. Hence, the meaningful dimensions of the Christian Faith are nowhere to be found on that level. On that level, the Bible is viewed as an entirely human book, full of errors and subject to ineluctable skepticism. If the essence of existentialism lies in the attempt to transcend nihilism, then how do Christian existentialists propose this be done? The answer, again, is through subjectivity. In other words, the only meaning available is going to be that encountered on the level of subjective experience. Hence, while denying that the miracles mentioned in the Bible ever objectively happened, existential theologians affirm that miracles may happen as part of the "phenomena" of our personal experience. The "Jesus of History" may be a rotted corpse somewhere in Palestine. But the "Christ of Faith" is alive in our hearts and in the life-changing experiences within the believing "kairos" community. Existentialist theologians such as Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Barth (if we read him carefully) are replete with such suggestions." Blosser correctly identifies my phenomenology of Christian experience as Barthian, and I can only suggest he reread the first volume of the Church Dogmatics for a defence of the objectivity of the encounter with the Word of God, which cannot be reduced to mere subjectivism.

"What he wants is a Christ of Faith who is freed from the constraints of the Jesus of History -- a Christ who lives in our subjective personal experience in a rich and meaningfully-felt way in the collective experience of the community of believers -- not a Christ who is dogmatically linked to the Jesus of history by "fundamentalist literalism" about such things as the Incarnation ("Jesus is God") or the Resurrection ("Jesus was bodily raised in space and time") or His claims about everlasting punishment and about nobody being able to come to the Father "but by me" (Jn 14:6)." The dissociation of the Christ of Faith from the Jesus of History is a heresy for which I have no sympathy whatever. Blosser wants to smuggle in a literalism about the Jesus of history here and to make this the criterion of recognizing the integrity of the Incarnation.

"His immediate strategy is to exploit the Chalcedonian opposition to docetic and monophysite heresies (which denied the full humanity of Jesus) in order to assert that our obligation to embrace the full humanity of Jesus requires us to think of Him as something less than fully God, or, more precisely, of His human nature as not fully informed by His divine nature." It is true that I attempt to do justice to the adoptionistic language of some New Testament texts, but ultimately I hold, based on John 1.14, that the historical Jesus is nothing less than the entry of the Logos into human history and that it would be futile to seek any aspect of that history that is not informed by this.

"O'Leary cites Aquinas as an example of a scholastic who, he thinks, fails to do justice to the full humanity of Jesus. This can be seen, according to O'Leary, in Aquinas ascribing to Jesus the "the capacity to see in the Word all that the Word sees." It's interesting that O'Leary refers to "Jesus" (= Historical Jesus) here, and not "Christ" (= "Christ of Faith"), although I suspect that, if pressed, he would accommodate some flexibility in language here, if not of conceptualization. It's also interesting that he describes Aquinas as ascribing to Jesus "the greatest knowledge and power possible in a creature" (emphasis added). I suppose this is only carelessness, as I would hope O'Leary would not go so far as to suggest that the Jesus of History was a "creature," in Arian fashion; but the slip, if it is a slip, is an interesting one." Here Blosser seems to commit a howler. The human nature of Jesus is of course created, and Aquinas speaks of it in this way.

" Third, O'Leary says that "historical scholarship," by which he means the secularized protestant historical-critical tradition of biblical studies, "has allowed us to recover Jesus as a human being sharing the cognitive limitations of his culture." " It is false to call this secularized and protestant; the historical-critical method is also embraced by Catholic exegesis; see the Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, 1994.

"It helps us take in our stride the possibility that the human Jesus may have erred, due to the limitations of the framework of his eschatological thinking; such errors could include not only the Naherwartung [the expectation of an imminent return of Christ] (Mk 9:1; Mt 10:23), but the elements in his teaching that gave rise to anti-Jewish supersessionist doctrine (Mk 12:9) and notions of eternal punishment. (p. 4)
So whatever may be said of the pre-incarnate Word, the Jesus of History is a fallible human being, whose possible errors may have included not only errors in judgment about the timing of His second coming, but theological errors in his teachings concerning the relation of His Gospel to Judaism and the doctrine of hell." Such suggestions are excluded by the "communicatio idiomatum" Blosser says. But the communicatio idiomatum cannot override the limits of Jesus's human nature. Jesus is, say, omniscient as God not as man. The medieval slogan that what the Word has by nature the human mind of Jesus has by grace, erroneously attribute to St Ambrose, must be questioned.

[Spirit of Vatican II]

The next substantial criticism of Blosser is based on attributing to me the views of Dominic Crossan:

I wrote: "Yet however subtly one expounds Chalcedon -- at the risk, indeed, of making it a wax nose --, people will object: Is it not enough to say that in Jesus we encounter the living God? The pursuit of the ontological grounds of this encounter seems epistemologically dubious and has divisive and alienating effects. Moreover, others may experience God's self-disclosure just as definitively elsewhere. 'Jesus was and is divine for those who experience in him the manifestation of God ...' writes J.D. Crossan, in Who Killed Jesus (San Francisco, 1996), p. 216."

Blosser comments: "Note what is being asserted here [by CROSSAN, not by me] -- (1) the limitations of Chalcedon; (2) the supplanting of those limitations via the objection raised in preference for a personal "encounter" with the living God (here the existential primacy of subjective experience surfaces); (3) the negative judgment on the Chalcedonian-inspired pursuit of the (objective metaphysical) "ontological grounds" of this (subjective) "encounter" as "epistemologically dubious" and having "divisive and alienating effects." What O'Leary has in mind here is the "divisive and alienating effects" of asserting that the living God is encountered in His fullness solely in the unique person of Jesus of Nazareth. (4) this is confirmed by his assertion [no, CROSSAN's] that God's self-disclosure is "experienced" by others (non-Christians) "just as definitively elsewhere," and by the quotation from Crossan, which asserts the subjectivistic sophomorism that "Jesus was and is divine for those who experience in him the manifestation of God." Thus, the classic existential patter of disconnection between subjectivity and objectivity becomes apparent -- the disconnection between (a) the experienced subjective Christ encountered in non-rational, personal faith and (b) the objective Christ defined by dogmatic tradition so as to link Him ineluctably to the empirical Jesus of history, who is open to rational investigation." OF COURSE I do not subscribe to the idea that the divinity of Christ means only that "Christ is divine for me". This blithe ascription to me of Crossan's views shows how carelessly Blosser has read me.

Indeed, I go on immediately to REJECT Crossan's reductionist view: "To show why Chalcedon may validly make a stronger claim than this today, we need to step back to the biblical sources, showing that they made Chalcedon necessary in the Greek metaphysical context, and that even when this context is overcome they continue to prompt accounts of Jesus which find his ultimate identity in the fact that he is the enfleshment of divine self-disclosure." Blosser does not even bother to quote this. Perhaps my style of writing is too soft-spoken for him. He misses the fact that the entire essay is intended to overcome such dismissals of Chalcedon as Crossan represents.

[Spirit of Vatican II]

"When O'Leary speaks of rerooting Chalcedon in the "encounter with Christ," then, it is pertinent to ask what he means. Perhaps it is even pertinent to ask why he uses such an emotionally charged expression as "encounter with Christ," with all of its predictable nuances and pavlovian responses. The answer is not hard to guess. His readers will be principally of two types, those who are ignorant of his existentialist theological presuppositions and those who are not. He knows that the former may very well be unwittingly swayed by their conditioned responses to think that they are here being guided by a good shepherd out of the wasteland of frigid and barren dogma back to a warm and living relationship with J-e-s-u-s! Thus he may hope that they will be won over to the view that his revisionist Christology is simply a more biblically faithful Christology, one that will yield a racheted-up "for real" relationship with Christ such as Kierkegaard described under the rubric of existential "contemporaneity." As to those who know where O'Leary is coming from, either they will find themselves in agreement with his pretheoretical commitments, or they will not. In the former case, such expressions as "encounter" are simply code for a revisionist reinterpretation of Christianity at work here, which O'Leary knows will be readily embraced. In the latter case, as in our own, where the reader knows where O'Leary is coming from but is unsympathetic, O'Leary realizes he has no hope of making his case, and he has little recourse but to respond, if he so chooses, with ad hominem attacks on his opponent's character, or bias, or the like. But let us see for ourselves how O'Leary endeavors to execute his proposed task of "rerooting" Chalcedon in an existential "encounter with Christ.""

Encounter is a category much used in theology -- Emil Brunner for example -- and even in the philosophy of truth -- Karl Jaspers for example. It is leveled against the positivist notion of truth and of revelation that Blosser also rejects. The point that there is no secure knowledge of God or of Christ without the dimension of encounter is not just a pious idea but one of fundamental theological significance.

"Metaphysics must be "overcome," he says [and get this] "as the thinking of faith finds its proper path." (p. 6) [Ever the master of subterfuge, O'Leary will find every possible opportunity to couch his denaturing revisionism in the pious language of an ever more authentic recovery of faith.]" Perhaps the word "proper", which I use in the Latin sense of "own", is misleading here. Theology is all about the purification and clarification of faith, so I fail to see why such heavy sarcasm is necessary.

" He distinguishes four trends of "hermeneutical awareness that converge to impose this overcoming" -- (1) phenomenality, (2) pluralism, (3) historicity, and (4) epistemological limits. Translated into what they actually mean, as I will show, these become: (a) subjectivism, (b) relativism, (c) historicism, and (d) skepticism." Four realities are replaced here by four caricatures.

"faith is grounded in an encounter with God in Christ and only secondarily in dogmatic formulae." Notice the subjectivism implied in this statement. The existential "encounter" (something by definition subjective) is what grounds faith. And what it then means to say that dogmatic formulae are "secondary," if anything at all, is thrown into radical question by the decided subjectivity of the existential encounter."

No, an encounter is not merely subjective, as Barth and Heidegger among others have very persuasively shown.

Blosser now "fisks" one paragraph as follows; I place my own counter-fisking in BLOCK CAPITALS:

"Dogmas mark certain logical constraints which must be respected in order to guard the integrity of the encounter [Careful here! It looks like the subjectivism of the encounter is being protected by the logical constraints of dogma here, but watch!], but they do not provide a foundation or synthesis superior to or equal to the biblical events themselves. [Caution! Dogma is said to guard the subjective encounter, but isn't more fundamental than the biblical events themselves. Well, of course. Vatican II states that the Magisterium is a servant rather than a master of the Word of God, but take care to note what is meant here by O'Leary, who is no friend of the Magisterium and considers his own interpretation of the Word of God a viable, if not preferable, alternative to Rome's. SO FAR NO CRITICISM EXCEPT A SWEEPING DECLARATION ABOUT MY ALLEGED ATTITUDE TO THE MAGISTERIUM] Metaphysical theology is built on a reversal of this priority of revelation over dogma. [OK, so does O'Leary mean metaphysics sees itself as sitting in judgment on Revelation in contradiction to the declaration of the Fathers of Vatican II? Keep an eye on the expression "metaphysical theology" in his essay, because this is what O'Leary hates, and it's thoroughly Roman Catholic!] In the space of thought it projects, the truths of faith are no longer grounded in encounter but in stable definitions and substances. [N.B. -- What emerges here is that O'Leary is contrasting (1) logic and dogma to (2) Revelation and encounter. This means that the concept of "Revelation" operative here is a distinctively existential concept of non-propositional, and therefore non-logical and non-rational, just as Revelation is subjective, personal, non-rational, non-logical, occurring as an event in an existential encounter. He does not explicitly point this out, but he does not need to. The contrast is clear: dogma, in his view, is logical and rigid, ossified, cold, and frigid, just as Revelation is warm, personal, and emotional -- the kind of thing that evokes hot tub imagery. AGAIN THIS IS CARICATURE: the priority of revelation over dogma is a priority of thinking based on encounter over propositional dogmatic formulations; but I do not contest the truth and necessity of the latter, I UPHOLD THEM; it is a matter of establishing a lucid perspective] In seeking to clarify the biblical events by asking first and foremost for reasons and grounds and by setting them within a doctrinal system, it overleaps both the pneumatic and the fleshly phenomenality of these events, which are no longer free to deploy their significance in the space opened up by scripture and its ongoing interpretation. (emphasis added) [And here we have it, folks -- the dream of dissident Catholic Bible scholars since Vatican II has been that the open horizon of endless possible new ways of interpreting and requisitioning Scripture could provide them with an authority alongside and independent -- if not superior -- to that of the official Magisterium, by virtue of the fact that the latter is bound to a single irreformable apostolic tradition. [THE BIBLE IS THE PRIMARY SOURCE OF CHRISTIAN TRUTH, BUT THIS DOES NOT AT ALL UNDERMINE THE LEGITIMATE AND NECESSARY ROLE OF THE MAGISTERIUM; Blosser takes the establishment of priorities as the negation of what is placed in a secondary position; this is bad logic.] Regardless of how this apostolic tradition may be deepend by the growing understanding of the Church through time, by what Cardinal Newman called the organic "development" of doctrine, to be distinguished from heretical deformations of innovations by seven "notes" (or tests) that he specified, this tradition of understanding is not amenable to the radical revisibility of the kind O'Leary would like to see. [NO ARGUMENT IS PROVIDED!] As Peter Kreeft says, "The Catholic Church claims less authority than any other Christian church in the world; that is why she is so conservative. Protestant churches feel free to change 'the deposit of faith' (e.g., by denying Mary's assumption, which was believed from the beginning [NOT QUITE]) or of morals (e.g., by allowing divorce, even though Christ forbade it [NOT QUITE -- see the Matthean exception and the Pauline privilege and the Petrine privilege]), or worship (e.g., by denying the Real Presence and the centrality of the Eucharist, which was constant throughout the Church's first 1,500 years)." Questions framed within a Greek metaphysical horizon, oriented to substantial identity, would not need to, and could not, be formulated in a thinking of revelation oriented to events and processes. [Note the contrast here between "substantial identity" -- the former negative, the latter positive, in O'Leary's world of paternalistic revisionism.] Speculative construction would be stymied at the question stage by the impossibility of casting off the narrative vesture of biblical revelation in order to define the event in abstraction from its inexhaustibly pluralistic historical texture. [In this florid declamation, whose postmodern fluidity is surpassed only by its textured impenetrability of Derridada, O'Leary suggests the non sequitor that the "event" revealed in Scripture, because of its "inexhaustibly pluralistic historical texture," is incapable of yielding a "speculative construction" that can do justice to the "narrative vasture of biblical revelation." But this is nonsense. While it is true that a picture is worth a thousand words and that reality is always inexhaustably more complex than any propositional account of it, it is nonsense to suggest that a proposition or a "speculative construction" cannot render an intelligible account of it or that metaphysical or dogmatic theology cannot render an intelligible and faithful account of the event disclosed in biblical Revelation. That has been the task of dogmatic theology since St. Paul exemplified it in I Corinthians 15.] SPECULATIVE CONSTRUCTION ALWAYS FALLS BEHIND THE RICH TEXTURE OF NARRATED EVENT AND CANNOT TOTALLY RECUPERATE IT. THAT IS NOT TO SAY THAT SUCH CONSTRUCTION DOES NOT HAVE A NECESSARY AND LEGITIMATE FUNCTION.

[Spirit of Vatican II]

2. Pluralism (i.e., relativism): "The biblical events come to us in a plurality of experiences, languages, literary genres, conceptual frameworks, and cultural contexts," notes O'Leary. However, "Metaphysical theolgy proceeds from a falsifying unification of these data under a homogeneous framework. Taking a view from above on the variety of biblical languages … [its] ambition is to be the definitive, objective language which integrates all others. But it turns out to be but one more language, equally subject to historical and cultural plurality which cannot be ironed out." Therefore: "Even when the Church hs agreed on one dogmatic formula and maintained it through the centuries, the specific explanations of the formula … have never admitted of reduction to a single framework. Full recognition of this pluralism greatly limits the role that metaphysical speculation can play in the clarification of Christian truth."

Blosser comments: "This reminds me of the sophomoric student who in his introductory philosophy class raised his hand eagerly in the midst of a class debate about moral relativism and declared with all the satisfaction of having offered a sublimely conclusive rebuttal, "But professor, that's just your opinion!" Whether we're talking about languages or doctrinal formulations, such a view takes no account of any differences between opinions that may be wise or stupid, or between views proclaimed by lawfully ordained successors of Peter or by mere ideologues." ON THE CONTRARY, the validity of classical doctrinal refutations is fully taken aboard in my theology; I very often say that it is futile to seek to contradict any classical doctrine on its own terrain. My point is rather to reveal the prior context of dogma and thus free the terrain for rethinking it in contemporary terms.

3. Historicity (i.e., historicism): "All of the cultural frameworks within which Christian truth is articulated belong to limited historical epistemological contexts. They become to a large degree obsolescent and inaccessible when new contexts supervene. The metaphysics which attempts to isolate essential structures and foundations is itself a historically contextualized formation…. Full recognition of the historicity of theological thought makes us conscious that such notions as 'nature' and 'hypostasis' or any modern equivalent thereof are culture-bound constructs and provisional conventions. They may be aids to insight in certain contexts, but since they cannot be purged of historical relativity they refer us back to an ongoing activity of understanding that never halts in a definitive systematization."

Blosser comments: "This is both true and false, depending on what one means. Everything O'Leary says here is true in the sense that anything said or written in any language is a historical-cultural artifact relative to a time and place in history. It is also true that our human efforts at understanding are always provisional and piecemeal and never exhaustive or comprehensive. But it is not true that nothing said or written in human language cannot be absolutely true and known to be so. The Chalcedonean formulation may never allow us with any certainty to specify the positive content of what is affirmed in the hypostatic union of divinity and humanity of Christ. Yet,, as with any dogmatic formula, it offers us absolute certainty as to what orthodoxy denies: without a shred of doubt, it allows us to know that a categorial denial of Christ's humanity or divinity is unconditionally false. Is there any part of this that is obsolescent or inaccessible, any part of this that we cannot clearly understand?" I REPLY: The rule is formulated in respect to the understanding of "Christ's humanity" and "Christ's divinity" and of "humanity" and "divinity" current in the fifth century. The validity of the rule certainly stretches across history, but its full realization is not just an automatic matter, it involves constant reflection on the meaning of humanity and divinity and of what the humanity and divinity of Christ signify.

4. Epistemological limits (i.e., skepticism): O'Leary accepts the canard that metaphysics has become untenable since the critiques of Kant and Wittgenstein. UNTENABLE AS THE UNQUESTIONED GOVERNING FRAMEWORK OF ALL THINKING. I THINK METAPHYSICS HAS TO BE KEPT IN ITS DUE PLACE. He therefore believes that the truth of Christianity "has to be retrieved independently of the metaphysical frameworks which provided a stable background at the time the doctrines were formulated." In other words, the Christian Faith must no longer be saddled with the "inherently dubious" and now discredited tradition of western theological metaphysics. I SAY THAT ANY GIVEN METAPHYSICS IS INHERENTLY DUBIOUS AS A GOVERNING FRAMEWORK, AND SHOULD NOT BE MADE INTRINSIC TO THE ARTICULATION OF CHRISTIAN FAITH.

"the Nicene prohibition of denial of Christ's true divinity remains in force, but a positive definition of what this "true divinity" means becomes elusive; at best it becomes another rule of speech: "what is said of the Father as God must be said of the Son as God." Within a certain conceptual horizon, a certain language-game, such rules impose themselves, but the absolute necessity and validity of such a take on the divine may remain open to question.... This dogmatic minimalism undercuts the arrogance of a christological discourse that would directly speak of divine and human natures and hypostases, as matters of objective knowledge, obliging it to be rephrased in a tentative and hypothetical mode: "if we were to choose to speak in this archaic and rather problematic style, then this is what we would be obliged to say." [And this] apparent enfeeblement of dogma in fact renders it more functional and effective, calling it to its role as defender of revelation, and preventing it from becoming the foundation of an alternative system of Christian truth in rivalry with the order of events that unfolds from Scripture." BLOSSER COMMENTS: Note again the irony as well as the presumption: the "enfeeblement" of dogma (i.e., Rome) renders it more effective in defending Revelation (i.e., the existentially encountered "Christ event" experienced in subjective inwardness). I SAID THAT THE APPARENT ENFEEBLEMENT IS IN FACT A STRENGTHENING OF DOGMA.

As an example of my dogmatic minimalism (in the spirit of Newman) Blosser quotes: "Orthodoxy as regards the Trinity is satisfied with the recognition of some kind of objective distinction in God between God, Word and Spirit .... But the elaborate superstructures built on this in speculative trinitarian theology need to be dismantled if the original core of dogma and its necessity are to be brought into view. Ortodoxy as regards the Incarnation is satisfied with the assertion that the final meaning of Jesus is inseparable from the divine Word. The personality of the human Jesus and the personality of the divine Word cannot be one and the same, since an infinite abyss separates human personality from what we project as divine personality. The identity of Jesus and the Word has to be rethought in terms of event and process, as a coincidence of the human historical adventure of Jesus with the revelational activity of God. To encounter the risen Christ in faith is to encounter the divine Word .... But since the divine nature cannot be mingled with the human or subject to change ... Jesus is free to be integrally human, with all that this entails."

Blosser's critique: "What would be the yield of a rich Heideggerian biblical hermeneutical poker game such as O'Leary envisions? Hold on to your wallets my friends, and watch his eyes as he speaks: "When we recall Chalcedon to its biblical basis," he begins . . . [Note carefully the pious-sounding hubris here: an Ecumenical Council whose deliberations the Church holds to have been guided, like those of the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15:28), by the infallible direction of the Holy Spirit, is declared by O'Leary to be "recalled to its biblical basis," as though that God-breathed (GK. theopneustos) product of divine guidance (Holy Scripture) could contradict the decrees of the Ecumenical Council." I ABSOLUTELY NEVER CLAIM THAT SCRIPTURE CONTRADICTS CHALCEDON. I TALK OF REGROUNDING CHALCEDON IN SCRIPTURE, AND RETRIEVING A FULLER SCRIPTURAL VISION THAT CHALCEDON DEFENDS BUT THAT SLAVISH REPETITION OF THE CATEGORIES OF CHALCEDON CAN OCCLUDE.

" There is nothing shocking in the least here for O'Leary, of course, because he does not believe for a moment that either the inscripturated words of the biblical writers or of the authors of conciliar decrees are anything more than a wax nose to be bent (or "nuanced") as he (O'Leary) sees fit. The "authority" of any of these written words is a convenience that may be appealed where they can be used to support his own agenda and ignored where they do not.]" WILD ALLEGATIONS.

[Spirit of Vatican II]

[So what is important about Jesus Christ is no longer the "artificially isolated individual," the historical Jesus who lived and died, and, according to tradition, is also the Christ of faith who rose again for us. No, what is important is that which is distinguishable from this "artificially isolated individual" and historical Jesus, which is incarnate in the whole historical community of Israel -- something much larger than just one man, even the man Jesus Christ. What is larger and more important than this "artifically isolated individual" is the "pneumatic presence" of the Christ of faith, as distinguished from that isolated and relatively unimportant Jesus of history (whoever he was), because this is what is alive and living in the collective spirit of the community in its encounter with the living Word of God (which -- lovely! -- means just about whatever we want it to mean). And by no means should it be supposed that this Christ of faith continues to dwell among us through some sort of "monstrous metaphysical paradox" as, for instance, would be required in supposing that He was really bodily there in the consecration, the Blessed Sacrament, or in the Tabernacle. All that's so much "hocus pocus," really (which, of course, is a protestant corruption of the Latin words of consecration: Hoc est …corpus meum -- "This is my body"), and it's good that we modern or postmodern Catholics are done with such medieval superstitious nonsense. Thus O'Leary suggests here.]

Not at all. To say that: "The divinity manifest in the creative Wisdom through which the world was made and in the Torah through which the holy community of Israel was assembled is now manifest in a more fleshly, historical form, in and across the entire career of Jesus." It is not Jesus as an artificially isolated individual, but Jesus in the entire extent of his connections with Jewish tradition and his ongoing pneumatic presence within the community as the "firstborn of many brethren" (Rom. 8:29), who is the enfleshment of God's creative, revelatory Word. God made Godself known in Israel" is not to deny the incarnation and the real presence but to contextualize them and reveal their full force as expressing the dynamics of the biblical "God who comes".

"What is new about the new Covenant, says O'Leary, is not the presence of the Word, which was living and active from the beginning, but rather the role of the flesh in a more intimate presence with us." Which is what John 1.1-18 says.

"Rather than a once-for-all ontological conjunction, somewhat magically and fetishistically located at the moment of Christ's conception, can we not think of incarnation as the transformation of this human life, in all its extensions, into manifestation of God, just as in the Eucharist ...?" he asks. [Why does O'Leary favor understanding the incarnation as transformation of "this human life" of Jesus, analogously to the Eucharist, rather than as understood traditionally in the moment of His conception, which he dismisses as somewhat magical and fetishistic? The answer is that existential theologians cannot wrap their minds around the motion that the Christ of Faith might also be the Jesus of History. In the neo-Kantian tradition, they split off values from facts, the noumenal from the phenomenal; and since the Jesus of History, on their reckoning, is just a fallible human being whose bones are mouldering somewhere in Palestine, he surely cannot be identified as the Christ of Faith. Hence, if there is an Incarnation at all, on their view, it must be a "transformation" -- like the Eucharist -- without residue: the Incarnate Christ is a docetic Christ, a gnostic Christ a divine Christ with no human residue. This answer would seem provide yet another means for O'Leary and Company to pry loose their own dreamy vision of what constitutes divine "Incarnation" within a human community from the orthodox magisterial understanding of what Christ's incarnation means." I THINK MY REMARKS COULD MORE VALIDLY BE SEEN AS ANTI-DOCETIC AND AS MARKING THE TENSE CONJUNCTION OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS AND THE DIVINE LOGOS IN THE HYPOSTATIC UNION.

"This more open-textured interpretation of incarnation attenuates the clash between the Christian claims and non-Christian religions, for the incarnation of God in Christ continues to unfold along the paths of historical, fleshly contingency as his Gospel and his pneumatic presence are redeployed in different cultures, and enter into dialogue with other historical apprehensions of divine presence in the world" (p. 11, emphasis added). [Here is what O'Leary really wants, you see -- for "the incarnation of Christ" to be translatable into "other historical apprehensions of divine presence in the world." Let me simplify: for Christians, there is J-e-s-u-s; for Buddhists, there is B-u-d-d-h-a. Either one is simply another name for what Christians have called the "Incarnation" -- NO, I DID NOT SAY THAT AT ALL. THE INCARNATION IS UNIQUE BUT IT CAN RELATE TO OTEHR APPREHENSIONS OF THE DIVINE PRESENCE -- pretty much the teaching of VATICAN II and of JOHN and JUSTIN MARTYR viz., a culturally relative apprehension of the divine (whatever that really means) by yet another fallible people among the family of multicultural human peoples. To this extent O'Leary is Hegelian: there is no vantage point outside the river of history from which an absolute judgment about any historical "truth" may be rendered. To this extent O'Leary is Feuerbachean: anything we say about God and His truth is only by way of subjective projection. NO, I TALK OF SITUATED TRUTH AND OF CONVENTIONAL RELIGIOUS LANGUAGES AS VEHICLES OF ULTIMACY. I USE HEGEL AND FEUERBACH IN THE SERVICE OF UPHOLDING THE OBJECTIVITY OF DOCTRINAL LANGUAGE -- SEE "RELIGIOUS PLURALISM AND CHRISTIAN TRUTH", CHAPTER 3-4. In short, to put the matter crassly: we're screwed. We're just a bunch of individuals sitting around talking to ourselves. There is no Word of God that has broken through the scrim of heaven to divulge any infallible truth to us. There is only "encounter" with the ineffably "divine," which is usually a touchy-feely way of pretending to know what you're talking about when you're talking nonsense and trying to pull the wool over the eyes of your audience before fleecing them.] ALL THIS IS CAPRICIOUS PROJECTION FROM BLOSSER.

"he believes what historical Christianity offers is only one relative instance of what can be also found among many other religions." NO, I stress the uniqueness of the incarnation and the eschatological primacy of Christ -- see "Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth" ch. 7.

" The Judeo-Christian tradition, whatever its claims to special revelation, has no monopoly on truth." Of course.

" the Incarnation is "a cipher for a more subtle, historically textured disclosure process which is intimately linked with the broader web of human evolution." " OF COURSE the Incarnation can be sighted in evolutionary context as Rahner and Teilhard urge.

"The trick is to eschew the arrogant posture of certitude and remain "vulnerable," "open" to infinite possibilities. In truth, it may not so much be that the Buddhist is an "anonymous Christian," as Karl Rahner once suggested, groping in ignorance towards what is made explicit only in Christ; but rather, that the Christian, bowing before the Incarnation, is an "anonymous Buddhist," groping in ignorance toward the truth of Buddhism that he who knows does not speak and he who speaks does not know, and that all is ultimately empty (Sunyata), since everything is Mind and Mind is no-thing, and the self is no-thing, and there is ultimately no nirvana because there is no self to attain it and because nirvana is, after all, no-thing and therefore nothing to be attained.]" False dualisms here.

"The step back from Chalcedon to Paul and John has to be followed by a further step back to earlier understandings of Jesus, including his own self-understanding." What does this mean? It means that we shouldn't take the Church's word for who Jesus Christ is. We need to step back from the dogmatic Christ of creed and tradition and examine the living faith of Paul and John in their New Testament writings -- a step away from dogmatic definition and towards the living fluidity of subjectively experienced "event" and "process," in O'Leary's paradigm. NO, CHALCEDON ITSELF POINTS BACK TO THE NEW TESTAMEN. ANOTHER FALSE DUALISM HERE.

"But a theologia gloriae which misses the broken, all-too-human texture wherein we are given intimations -- 'hints and guesses' (Eliot) -- of the divine glory, or which stylizes this fleshly texture into a sacralized icon, undermines the reality of the divine assumption of humanity in Christ" "Reference to the historical reality of Jesus before the post-Easter interpretations provides an invaluable critical resource over against the entire christological tradition, preventing it from balooning off into vacuous idealism." Setting aside the implication that the whole Catholic christological tradition has presumably "balooned off into vacuous idealism" in theologies of glory NOT ALWAYS, BUT SOMETIMES and incarnation NO! TRUE THEOLOGIES OF INCARNATION ARE THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT I AM WARNING AGAINST, it may be wondered how "the historical reality of Jesus before the post-Easter interpretations" arose are to be accessed. Conceding the difficulty, O'Leary valiantly endeavors to make a virtue of necessity: "The very difficulty of such a reference, the uncertainty and obscurity of the enterprise, can [note the irony] free our faith from a narrow positivism of facts as much as from a blithe confidence in theological portraits of Jesus" . So ignorance and uncertainty has the virtue of freeing faith from the cumbersome world of facts, as well as from blithe confidence in the post-Easter theological portraits given us by St. Paul and Catholic Tradition. One can't help but be impressed at O'Leary's ebullience over such sublime nonesense. Freedom from fact! Freedom from certainty! Freedom apparently to believe in anything! I AM NOT AGAINST THE FACTS, BUT THEY ARE ELUSIVE, AND THIS IS PROVIDENTIAL AS WE WOULD CLUTCH AT THEM FOR DEAR LIFE AS FUNDAMENTALISTS DO AT THEIR PSEUDO-FACTS.

"But if he wants us to give up our mythical "imaginings of Jesus," O'Leary also understands that we cannot simply cease these imaginings by a return to the "bare facts about Jesus," for as he notes, "these come clothed in religious interpretation from the start ...." Thus, he writes: "Even the earliest interpretations of Jesus, by himself and his disciples, are subject to historical contextualization and critical reassessment. There was an abundance of mythic schemata to draw on, and their application to Jesus was a human interpretive activity, however much it may have been led by the Spirit .... Since Christology is so much a product of the mythic frameworks then available, the retrieval of its truth for today demands a radical reinterpretation". So we can't separate myth from fact or fact from myth, and therefore we must radically reinterpret the "truth" of the Christ myth (whatever that may be) for today. By what canons of veracity and interpretation, he does not say, though it's clear that it can't be the "bare facts about Jesus," because he knows that positivistic ideal is humanly unattainable." Blosser agrees with me here that myth-free facts are largely inaccessible, but does not offer his own hermeneutic alternative.

" So it must lie in some contemporary existentialist criteria O'Leary thinks is available to him and others, though he doesn't spell out what they might be." On the contrary, I spell out quite a lot -- drawing on the biblical repertory as retrieved in the living faith of the Church today in critical overcoming and retrieval of tradition and in openness to Buddhist categories.

"But O'Leary is adamant: all reduces to myth, which must be demythologized. It will not do to substitute Hebrew myth for Hellenistic myth: "The obsolescence of Hellenistic myth does not entail any rejuvenation of Hebrew myth. The task of REARTICULATING IN CONTEMPORARY CATEGORIES what the ancients envisaged in mythic terms is even more daunting in this case, for however refreshing we may find the older biblical representations by contrast with stale Hellenistic notions, it is the latter that harmonize with the tracks of thought most familiar in Western culture.... A reappropriation of the Jewish mythical categories in an existential translation ... may challenge theology to break out of its Hellenistic rut, but it will also cut a swath through the over-abundance of mythological motifs in the Gospels". Myth, myth, everywhere, and not a drop to drink! Where is the thirsting soul to turn? NOTE THE PHRASE IN BLOCK CAPITALS.

O'Leary concludes: "We begin to see that the historical, Jewish fleshly existence of Jesus is the locus of his unique revelatory and salvific status, and that it is a bridge rather than an obstacle as our tradition opens out to other major loci of divine disclosure, especially the Jewish and Buddhist traditions." The thirsting soul must probe beyond the facades of historical mythologies and mine the sources of Revelation itself in the warm hot tub of existential encounter. FACADES, NO; BUT A REPERTORY IN NEED OF CONTEMPORARY TRANSLATION.