The Pope’s
book on Jesus (Joseph Ratzinger/Benedikt XVI, Jesus von Nazareth,
Freiburg: Herder, 2007) is elegantly written (as to be expected from one whose
favorite author is Theodor Storm), rich in original argument and edifying
reflection. It will bring its readers to a refreshed and deepened knowledge of
Christ. Indeed, more than most of the books by liberal or radical theologians
that I shall be referring to below, the Pope’s book projects a rich and
comprehensive vision of the Christ of the Church’s faith, set in his total
biblical context, with specific attention to the Jewish heritage. The book has
drawn criticism for its attitude to historical critical exegesis, and I believe
that most of that criticism is justified. Yet Benedict, as a German theologian
with a sound scholarly foundation in patristics, often shows more sober respect
for historical facts and the methods by which they are ascertained than do many
of the purveyors of modernizing or postmodern images of Jesus. Exegetes may
feel that he ‘cheats’ by drawing so liberally on church tradition to fill out
the biblical image of Jesus. But if one places the book alongside classics in
the spiritual and theological portrayal of Jesus, such as Romano Guardini’s The
Lord, one may find that it is better nourished by serious scriptural study
and more alert to the questions posed by historical criticism even if its
answers to those questions leave one unsatisfied.
.
THE HISTORICAL JESUS AND THE CHRIST
OF FAITH
‘This book
is in no way a magisterial act. Everyone is free to contradict me,’ the author
declares (p. 22, and dust jacket). This invitation has been taken up in a great
number of reviews, including book-length studies. What has emerged as the most controversial feature of the book is its
apparent ambition to close the gap between the Jesus of history and the Christ
of the Church’s post-Easter faith. Benedict begins his book by deploring the
efforts to recover a historical Jesus lying behind the gospel accounts,
pointing out that they have produced only a heap of contradictory and
subjective portraits. It might be argued that a relative stability attaches to
the notion of Jesus as ‘eschatological prophet’ and that Benedict’s treatment
of the quests for the historical Jesus here is a rather precipitous polemic.
The idea that the gospel image of Jesus is based on a later faith in his
divinity seems to Benedict to void faith. In what is probably a suspiciously
neat schema, students of theology have often been taught that insight into
Christ`s divinity developed gradually: at an early stage, it is at the
Resurrection that Jesus is ‘established Son of God’ (Rom 1.4) and that ‘God
made him Lord and Christ’ (Acts 2.36); then this is projected back to the
Baptism, then to his conception (in the Infancy Narratives) and finally to his
pre-existence. In line with some recent scholarship, Benedict contexts this
chronology, and insists that Philippians 2.6, ‘some twenty years after the
Resurrection,’ already proclaims a pre-existent divine Christ and has ‘a fully
developed Christology’ (p. 21). He does not advert to the alternative exegesis
of this hymn, according to which the kenosis of Jesus has less to do with a
pre-existent divine status than with the fact that, unlike Adam, he did not
snatch at equality with God; in which case the reference to his being ‘in the
form of God,’ even if it has the suggestion of some pre-existent status (the
Philonic heavenly man, for example, as Thomas H. Tobin SJ suggests), would
precisely not entail equality with God (though to be sure this reading seems to
downplay the force of en morphê theou). The exegesis in terms of Adam
typology goes back to the 16th century Reformers, I believe, and is often cited
by advocates of a Christology from below. Origen applies the kenosis not to the
divine Logos but to the pre-existence soul of Christ.
It is true that Paul transfers to Christ language that
the Old Testament uses of God (see H.-J. Schoeps, Paulus, Darmstadt,
1972, p. 158). Larry Hurtado and others have recently pointed to the explosion
of worship of Jesus in the very earliest years of the Christian movement (see
T. Tilley, ‘Remembering the Historic Jesus – A New Research Program?,’ Theological
Studies 68, 2007, pp. 3-35). However, the fact that in the Philippians hymn
the divine name Kyrios is conferred at a given point might suggest that
an adoptionist schema is in play. Paul’s differentiation of one God, the
Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, again suggests that ‘Lord’ does not entail
full divinity.
When talking of a ‘developed Christology’ we should
distinguish between, on the one hand, exalted mythic language, which is
compatible with other mythic apprehensions of a more adoptionist kind – to be
found not only in the Synoptics but even in high Christological writings such
as Hebrews and John – and, on the other hand, the metaphysical exactitude of
later accounts of Christ’s divine status, especially after Nicea. (One may find
some metaphysics in Scripture, as in 1 Cor 8.6, which again has a prima
facie subordinationist cast.) Historical study of Scripture that is guided
by an apologetic purpose cannot take time to enjoy the great variety of the
early Christologies, including the elaborate Jewish apocalyptic frame of the
hymn quoted by Paul, and his own more restrained vision centered on resurrection
rather than exaltation.
Benedict
tends to undercut or whittle down the common view that the paschal experience
shed a new light on the identity of Jesus which was projected back onto the
earthly ministry of Jesus in the Synoptics and especially in John, and that the
original words and deeds of Jesus as they appeared before his death and
resurrection cannot be reconstructed with certitude. He writes rather sharply:
‘This impression has in the meantime pervaded the common consciousness of
Christianity. Such a situation is dramatic for the faith, making its point of
reference insecure. The inner friendship with Jesus, which is what it all comes
down to, risks grasping at the void’ (p. 11). Given that St. Paul already
accepted that ‘knowing Christ according to the flesh’ (2 Cor 5.16) was not what
counted, but knowing the risen Christ as ‘a life-giving Spirit’ (1 Cor 15.45),
it could be argued that it is not necessarily a catastrophe for faith that we
have little certain knowledge of the historical Jesus and that we know him
primarily as he is remembered within the theological horizons of post-paschal
faith. The effort to reconstruct him historically has value as securing the
reality of his humanity and preventing faith from ballooning off into Gnostic
fantasy; but the very opacity that this quest faces is itself a mark of
historical reality; we cannot conjure up from history the Jesus of our dreams.
Benedict
believes that the tensions that the Catholic exegete Rudolf Schnackenburg finds
between the images of Jesus created by the historical-critical method and the
image of Jesus that trust in the Gospels produces are not insurmountable.
Historical-critical exegesis ‘can make the figure of Jesus present to us with a
vividness and depth that we could not have imagined a few decades ago’ (p. 22).
But we must keep in mind how the Bible presents Christ – as a new Moses, one
who speaks from an unparalleled intimacy with God: ‘He lives before the face of
God, not only as a friend but as Son; he lives in most inward unity with the
Father. Only from this standpoint can we really understand the figure of Jesus,
as encountered in the New Testament; everything that is recounted to us of the
words, deeds, sufferings, and glory of Jesus is anchored in this’ (p. 31).
The tensions Schnackenburg found are very mild ones
compared to those which other exegetes register. For Benedict they signal the
limits of the historical-critical method, which is confined, he sometimes seems
to suggest, to the literal sense, even to a dead letter, and needs to be filled
out by a more integrated theological vision, something like the higher moral
and mystical senses of Scripture that Origen sought. Schnackenburg suffers ‘a
certain dividedness’ because of ‘the constraints of the method, which he regards
as both obligatory and unsatisfactory.’ He wants to describe the Gospels’ image
of Christ, but he sees it as ‘built up from manifold layers of tradition,
through which one can perceive only from afar the “real” Jesus’ (12). Pierre
Gibert sees in these remarks a misunderstanding of
the historical study of Scripture; Benedict seems to buy into a confusion about
historical and exegetical research that finds in it only flux and
contradiction, whereas its practitioners are conscious of a steady advance in
the grasp of historical truth – incarnate truth (Recherches de science
religieuse 96, 2008, pp. 228-9). The situation
Benedict describes in a negative way is one in which exegetes find themselves
all the time, indeed one basic to exegesis as such, its very element. Paul
Ricoeur has diagnosed this situation in many ways, though Benedict cites him in
his 1988 speech (see below) only as showing a problem, a problem he hopes to
allay by the methods of the present book. But the ‘dividedness’ cannot be
wished away. It is a feature of ‘the hermeneutic age of reason’ (Jean Greisch).
As Joseph Ratzinger wrote forty years ago: ‘A reference to the ecclesial nature
of exegesis, on the one hand, and to its methodological correctness on the
other, again expresses the inner tension of church exegesis, which can no
longer be removed. but must be simply accepted as tension’ (H. Vorgrimler, ed. Commentary
on the Documents of Vatican II, 3.268). For many, this problem or tension
is, paradoxically, also a blessing.
Benedict calls the debate on the Son of Man sayings a
graveyard of dead hypotheses; yet most historical research produces such
apparent quagmires. History has to do with probabilities far more than with
certitudes. Opting for improbabilities instead brings one no nearer authentic
certitude. For instance, many exegetes consider it improbable that Jesus
actually said to his judges, ‘You shall see the Son of Man seated at the right
hand of God and coming with the clouds of heaven’ (Mk 14.62; quoted by
Benedict, p. 377, apparently as historical). The statement has the hallmarks of
an early Christian creedal utterance, inserted by Mark as part of the
theological design of his Gospel (as argued in the classic study of Wilhelm
Bousset, Kyrios Christos, 1913; 5th ed., Göttingen, 1965; Bousset’s
testamentary lecture on ‘Religion and Theology,’ 1919, remains a timely warning
against impatience with the opacity and indirectness of all scriptural
scholarship and against the delusions of an immediate grasp of the historical
Jesus). Like the other evangelists, Mark was not writing as a historian but as
a theological interpreter of the traditions about Jesus. One can stonewall on
this, asking, ‘How can you prove he didn’t say it?’ But to erect such
defensiveness into a method is to close the door on historical reason, which
deals in probabilities. Despite his guarded approval of historical-critical
research in its more sober forms (e.g. John Meier’s A Marginal Jew),
Benedict’s often seems to invest in an unnecessarily defensive line of argument.
Since no Pope has strayed so deep into exegetical debate before, this is hardly
surprising.
More than any previous Pope, Benedict knows the score
on the exegetical front, but he is understandably chary about the implications,
the inbuilt indeterminacy that emerges at the biblical bases of the faith. Yet
to many this instability brings the blessing of a plurality of perspectives on
Jesus, and they would see Benedict’s own account imposes a single perspective,
which though sublime is incomplete. Theological reflection can supplement
exegesis, but it cannot intrude on it to simplify or streamline its work. The
plurality of the senses of Scripture that exegesis uncovers can feed into the
Church’s uses of Scripture in prayer, the context in which Scripture first
comes fully alive. But it cannot be expected that this church usage should be
directly reinvested in exegesis, even if that was the practice in the time of
Origen. Contemplative listening to Scripture can challenge exegetes to do more
justice to the mystical dimensions of Scripture, in the Johannine writings for
example, but the challenge can be met by exegetes only within the rules of the
exegetical game -- which now disqualify the procedures of allegorical exegesis
and even, to a large extent, the concordism implicit in the idea of ‘canonical
criticism’, which treats the Bible unhistorically as one vast, unified book, a
‘Great Code’ in the words of literary critic Northrop Frye. Theology that
builds on the findings of exegesis often overrides its rules and restraints, as
Karl Barth often did, but the closer one hews to what is warranted by exegesis
the more well-founded and responsible one’s theology is likely to be. Barth, in
his restorationist biblicism, adopted a Panzer-hermeneutics that found the fullness
of doctrine in the scriptural texts. But the methodology represented by
Bultmann has proved more durable and successful, and responsible theologians
accept the realistic discipline that this methodology imposes. Appeal to the
Holy Spirit or to the sensus plenior as an alibi for exegetical
willfulness is no longer acceptable; it leads to transformation of the biblical
record into a docetic fantasy.
Reading Benedict or any of those who complain about
the limits of the historical critical method and the uncertainty of its
results, one has the impression that their real quarrel is not with exegesis,
but with the Gospels themselves, which simply do not provide the historical and
doctrinal transparency that is desiderated. Such writers are tempted to a kind
of brinkmanship, urging that if the Gospels are not historical in the sense
that they claim, then they are not historical at all and are not worthy of any
trust. Surely it is important to educate Christians not to expect history where
that is not what the Gospels provide. Many Christians have reconciled
themselves to the actual historical texture of the early Christian records, and
have found a mature and serene faith in doing so, including the possibility of
maintaining a Johannine and Chalcedonian vision of Christ. Conservative
defenses of biblical historicity pull the mat from under these people, and
encourage an assertive attitude to the texts that can border on fundamentalism
(a pathology that some have detected in parts of the Catechism of the Catholic
Church). The boomerang effect of such a policy could be disastrous
pastorally.
.
THE HISTORICITY OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL
‘The Jesus of the Fourth Gospel and the Jesus of the
Synoptics are one and the same: the true “historical” Jesus’ (p. 143). Most
exegetes will be nervous about this retrojection of the Johannine Prologue into
the Synoptics. Benedict connects the Fourth Gospel closely with John, son of
Zebedee; he is the eye-witness, the Beloved Disciple, claimed as its author in
John 21.24. (Since John 21 is a later addition to the body of the text, I
wonder if much weight can be put on this. The main invocation of the
beloved disciple as witness concerns the Crucifixion, Jn 19, and this is
not necessarily a reference to factual eye-witness but to the general fidelity
of the disciple to Jesus at the hour of Calvary. John lies in the background of
the the Gospel as the venerated founder of the Johannine tradition, but this
does not entail any direct or substantial input into the contents of the
Gospel.) Benedict follows the conservative exegete Martin Hengel in linking the
language of the Fourth Gospel to the culture of the priestly aristocracy of
Jerusalem with which John had close connections (Jn 18.15-16). In the Johannine
school at Ephesus there was another John a presbyter, who presents himself in 2
Jn 1.1 and 3 Jn 1.1; he was the bearer of the tradition after the death of the
Apostle and set it down as the spokesman for the Apostle in the Fourth Gospel.
Benedict quotes another conservative exegete Peter Stuhlmacher, who supposes
that ‘in the Johannine school is continued the style of thinking and teaching
that shaped the internal teaching discussions of Jesus with Peter, James and
John’ (p. 269). A problem with this is that the Johannine language is so very
different from what we find in the Synoptics; and moreover, as Benedict notes,
it is not confined to the inner circle of disciples, but exhibited in public
controversy with the Jewish leaders.
Benedict
expresses disappointment that even Hengel is ‘amazingly negative’ or at least
‘extremely prudent’ about the historicity of the Fourth Gospel (p. 270). Talk
of the Gospel as a literary work or as reflecting the revelations of the
Paraclete, leading the disciples into all truth, makes Benedict nervous: ‘What
faith can it be “witnessing” to, when it has so to speak left history behind
it? How can it strengthen faith, when it presents itself as a historical
witness – and this with great emphasis – and yet is not narrating historically?
I think that here we stand before a false concept of the historical as well as
a false concept of faith and the Paraclete. A faith that lets the historical
drop in this way in reality becomes “Gnosis.” It leaves the flesh, the
Incarnation – the truth of history – behind it’ (p. 270). Benedict declares
that the Johannine discourses must have a historical core: ‘The real claim of
the Gospel is to have correctly reproduced the content of the discourses, of
Jesus’ witness to himself in the great Jerusalem confrontations, so that the
reader can really encounter the decisive contents of this message and in it the
authentic figure of Jesus’ (p. 271). I note that defenders of Benedict on
the historicity of John consistently adopt a bait and switch tactic,. An
example is what Michael P. Foley writes in The Latin Mass: “Benedict
reviews the commonplace contention that while the other three Gospels are more
or less historical, John’s Gospel is a much later product of theological
speculation and hence does not reflect the “real” Jesus. Yet as Benedict points
out, this conjecture presupposes that theological reflection is a hindrance
rather than an aid to knowing who this Man is, and this is absurd: if Christ is
who He says He is, the only way to know him is through faith. Ultimately
undergirding the “historical Jesus” obsession is a remarkably naive
understanding of history as something that can be captured in a series of
transcripts. But as John himself points out in his Gospel through his use of
the concept of memory, “remembering” the story of the Christ can only happen
through an awakening of the Spirit that makes the data of the past intelligible
(231-34). Benedict’s careful exploration of the biblical author’s
self-understanding provides a key to unlocking the text that modern exegetes have
been trying in vain to pick”
(http://pblosser.blogspot.com/2008/03/jesus-of-nazareth.html). That John is a
contemplative anamnesis of the historical Jesus (that is, of a handful of
traditions about him) in light of the Resurrection is a platitude of Johannine
studies; Benedict’s more controversial claims are here elided.
Hengel lists five factors that shape Johannine
composition: ‘“the theological shaping will of the author, his personal
memory,” “church tradition and with it historical reality,” of which Hengel
astonishingly says that the Evangelist “has altered it, indeed, let us calmly
say: has done violence to it”; lastly… it is not “remembrance of the past, but
the interpreting Spirit-Paraclete who leads into the truth, that has the last
word”‘ (pp. 271-2). Benedict is indignant at Hengel’s concession that the
Fourth Gospel does violence to history. But note that the date of Christ’s
death differs in John and the Synoptics. If John changed it for theological
reasons, that is indeed a form of doing violence to history, at least in the
eyes of a historian. (I note that Benedict has recently addressed this
contradiction: http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=105819.)
Benedict creates a seamless progression between Hengel’s five factors: the
Evangelist’s personal memory is the basic historical reality that is taken up
in Church tradition, and the Spirit gives a deeper insight into that reality as
it is remembered.
Of course Benedict is right to stress the importance
of understanding the Fourth Gospel be understood as an anamnesis of the
historical Jesus, rather than a Gnostic fantasy. But the modalities of that
postpaschal remembering and interpreting are a complex field of scholarly
inquiry that notoriously resists simple answers. (For a survey of classic
Anglican labors in this field, see Rowan Williams, Anglican Identities,
London, 2004, pp. 121-37.) In general, the historicity of the Gospels, stressed
by Vatican II, is in each case a fascinating blend between elements of memory
and report on the one hand and the fashioning of a depth-historical grasping of
the significance of the Jesus story on the other.
The historicity of the Fourth Gospel was asserted in a
judgment of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, May 29, 1907, at the height of
the Modernist crisis. This magisterial statement is referenced on the Vatican’s
website, but the text is not given there. The author is declared to be none
other than the Apostle John and it is denied that the events related are
totally or partially invented or are to be taken as symbolical or allegorical.
It is also denied that the discourses of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel are not the
very words of Christ himself: ‘Dubium: Utrum... dici possit... sermones
Domini non proprie et vere esse ipsius Domini sermones, sed compositiones
theologicae scriptoris, licet in ore Domini positas? Responsio: Negative’
(Denzinger, 2112). Benedict wants to uphold whatever part of these claims can
be salvaged today, giving the anti-Modernist quarrel a new twist one hundred
years later.
.
JESUS PROCLAIMS HIS DIVINITY
Having
secured the historical trustworthiness of the Gospels, Benedict proceeds to
read them in light of the Johannine vision of Christ. He advocates an integral
biblical hermeneutics that reads each book of Scripture in light of the whole
canon. He appeals to the ‘canonical exegesis’ that continues the
historical-critical method organically and raises it to the authentically
theological level. This may allude to the movement launched by Brevard S.
Childs thirty years ago, which has had only a limited influence on the practice
of exegesis. But Origen (about whom Benedict enthused in two weekly audiences
shortly after publishing this book) is an older patron of a spiritual exegesis
that finds the fullness of Christ in every part of Scripture. However, Origen
achieved this tour de force only by the use of allegorical methods that modern
exegesis has forsworn. In the case of the Gospels, Benedict’s method of
spiritual reading detects the tacit presence of the full Johannine (and Nicene)
teaching behind the seemingly modest narratives of the Synoptics.
Like Karl
Rahner, Benedict understands inspiration as a communal matter; each biblical
author is sustained by the entire history of the People of God, and the labor
of composition advances by a process of constant rereading of the traditions. A
biblical author ‘speaks in a living community and thus in a living historical
movement, which he does not create and which is not created by the collectivity
either, but in which a greater guiding power is at work’ (19). That may imply
that whatever limits in vision or expression we may find in some gospel
narrative is amply made up for by the Spirit who has given the Church the
fullness of truth.
Thus the Baptism of Jesus is presented in grandiose
terms as an anticipation of the Passion and the descent into Hell, as in Greek
Orthodox iconography (though Benedict draws back from this and finds his vision
sufficiently warranted in the Baptist’s words, ‘behold the Lamb of God’). Like
the Temptation, the Baptism expresses Jesus’ solidarity with sinners.
What struck me as most distorting in Benedict’s
exegesis is the way he refers everything in the Gospels to the divinity of Christ.
The Temptation concerns God: ‘Is he the real, reality itself, or not? Is he the
Good, or must we invent the Good ourselves? The question of God is the
fundamental question that puts us at the crossroad of human existence’ (p. 57).
The opponents are named as Marxism and blind trust in technology: ‘Western
development aid built on purely technical and material principles, which has
not only left God out but has pushed people away from God in its presumption of
knowing better, is what first made the Third World into the Third World in
today’s sense. It has pushed aside the seasoned religious, moral and social
structures and filled the void with its technicist mentality. It believed it
could change stones into bread, but it has given stones in place of bread. What
is at stake is the primacy of God. What is at stake is to recognize him as
reality, a reality without which nothing else can be good’ (p. 62). Likewise,
all the ethical discussions with the Pharisees really turn on the divine
authority of Christ (as the Johannine discourses reveal).
Benedict presents Jesus’s radicalization of the
decalogue as clear evidence that he places himself on the same level as God.
However, it should be noted that Matthew’s image of Jesus as the new Moses is a
quite late composition. Luke’s presentation of the same material in his ‘sermon
on the plain’ is a less exalted scenario in which Jesus speaks more in the
style of a prophet encouraging the poor and challenging the rich. The quest to
reconstruct the earlier states of the tradition (in the sayings-source Q)
takes us back to still less exalted images of Jesus.
Of Peter’s confession of Christ as the Messiah,
Benedict says: ‘the effort to reconstruct the original words of Peter
historically, and to ascribe everything further to later developments, where
possible to post-Easter faith, leads to dead ends. Where would the post-Easter
faith have come from if Jesus had laid no foundations for it?’ (p. 350). The
usual way of distinguishing between the Jesus of history and the Christ of
faith, Benedict urges, ascribes an amazing creativity to the community and
seems to trust Jesus with very little of his own self-definition. He postulates
that the exceeding greatness of Christ must have been palpable at the very
beginning, and its articulation must go back in essentials to Jesus himself.
Again, little is made of the idea that the Resurrection experience and the
pouring out of the Holy Spirit on the infant church could have brought a rich
new understanding of the historical Jesus, which could be the main source for
the articulation of the Christ of faith.
In discussing the titles of Jesus, ‘Son of Man’ and
‘Son [of God],’ Benedict rejects the exegetes’ questioning of the historicity
of most uses of the former title, which he sees as reflecting ‘the very center
of Jesus’ self-consciousness’ (p. 382) and as expressing ‘the being-one of God
and man’ (pp. 384-5). ‘Son of God,’ too, is not a mere Messianic title, but
‘expresses a special being-one with God’ (p. 389). Given Benedict’s views on
the historicity of the Fourth Gospel, it is no surprise that he regards the
divine ‘I am,’ placed on the lips of Jesus in that Gospel, as used by the
historical Jesus himself. In all three expressions, ‘the originality of Jesus
appears – what is new in him, what is proper only to him, which cannot be
derived from anything further’ (p. 406).
A point Benedict repeatedly makes is that Jesus was
crucified not for any political reason but because of his temerity in declaring
himself equal with God. This could have disturbing implications for
Jewish-Catholic dialogue, which according to one Vatican insider is currently
in reverse gear because of neoconservative predominance in the Curia, are
disturbing; see Edward Kessler, ‘A Deafening Silence,’ The Tablet, April
14, who points to the neglected Vatican document of 1985, ‘Notes on the correct
way to present the Jews and Judaism in preaching and catechesis in the Roman
Catholic Church’ (http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/relations-jews-docs/rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_19820306_jews-judaism_en.html).
(See the reply from Fr Cantalamessa the following week, and the defense of
Benedict’s book as a contribution to Catholic-Jewish dialogue by Filippo Rizzi,
in Avvenire, May 22.)
Indeed, there is no topic in the Gospel that Benedict
cannot show to be concerned basically with the true divinity of Christ. All the
parables are ‘hidden and multi-layered invitations to faith in him as “the
Kingdom of God in person”‘ (p. 227). His Midas-touch changes everything into
high Christology, and it is unsurprising that his book ends with an evocation
of the ‘consubstantial’ of the Council of Nicea: ‘This word did not Hellenize
faith, loading it with an alien philosophy, but to the contrary secured the
incomparably new and other reality that had appeared in Jesus’s dialogues with
his Father’ (p. 407). I agree with this, but it should be noted that this
anti-Hellenistic moment occurred within a deeply Hellenistic and Roman Imperial
context. To articulate the truth of Christ’s divinity today, we must search out
a wider language, attuned to the culture of our own times, with the boldness
that the Nicene fathers showed in their day.
I am told that John Paul II, in the retreat he gave
for Paul VI, preached that Jesus enjoyed the beatific vision while in his
mother’s womb (also stated in Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, 1943).
Benedict has not taken up that tradition here, but one may surmise that he
believes Jesus to have enjoyed the beatific vision throughout his earthly
mission. The question of Christ’s self-consciousness is at the heart of
Benedict’s quarrel with the historico-critical method. The limitations of
Christ’s human knowledge are recognized by most theologians, despite the 1918
ruling of the Holy Office that it should not be taught (1) that Christ in his earthly life did not have the
knowledge that the blessed have; (2) that it is not certain that the human soul
of Christ knew from the start, in the Word, everything past, present and
future, or everything that God knows by seeing. On his knowledge of his own
divinity, Karl Rahner suggests that he had an ‘unthematized’ awareness of it
rather than full and explicit knowledge, which would be incompatible with the
reality of his humanity.
Schillebeeckx espouses the low-level account of the
exegetes: ‘his extraordinarily pronounced consciousness of a prophetic role, on
which is grounded his message of the approaching rule of God, while in and
through his own strangely marvelous ministry he sees clearly that this kingdom
is drawing near. The first thing that strikes us is Jesus’ Jewish
spirituality... What Jesus lived by was the Jewish passion for searching out
God’s will in everything. His God was Israel’s God, the God of the patriarchs
and prophets, Israel’s God who lived still in apocalyptic and in the zeal of
Pharisee and Essene’. His use of Abba shows ‘the unconventional style of
his intercourse with God, its unaffected and natural simplicity... Jesus’s Abba
consciousness was not the immediate ground for calling him.. ‘the Son’.. In the
end that ground... lies in the resurrection’ (Jesus, 1979, 259-62).
Benedict’s discovery in the Gospels and in history of
a Christ who knows and proclaims his divine status is not capable of exegetical
proof but is a postulate of doctrinal faith. If it cannot be proven, can it be
disproven? Can it be imposed on theological grounds, beginning with the
historicity of the Virgin Birth? Or is it inevitable that exegesis will eat
away at theology, forcing it to adopt a more subtle Christology? I would
say that the weight of exegetical probability is against it. If one takes the
Johannine Jesus as historical one has to supplement the utterances of Jesus in
the Synoptics and in Q with a consciousness of being divine that they do
not suggest or that they seem to be in conflict with: ‘Why do you call me
good?’, Mk 10.18, ‘No one knows the day... not even the Son’, Mk 13.32). Let us
be content with the claim that Jesus had a sense of being in intimate, unique
union with the Father; this would provide a respectable basis for continuity
with the Resurrection experience and kergyma. Maybe this could not be ‘proven’
either but it would fit well enough with the historical probabilities.
.
WHAT IS THE KINGDOM?
Benedict’s
‘integral’ reading of the Gospels tends to reduce them to a monotonous
insistence on the reality of God. Benedict asks why God has not revealed his presence
more clearly, and concludes that it is a mystery; yet he does not advert to the
idea that God reveals his presence in the struggle for justice and liberation.
Rather the biblical language of liberation from oppression is totally
interiorized: ‘We live in this world, in which God does not have the
self-evidence of what is graspable, but can only be sought and found through
the freeing (Aufbruch) of the heart, the “exodus” out of “Egypt”‘ (p. 63).
From the
Temptation Benedict turned immediately to Jesus’s teaching. It is to be
regretted that he did not focus on the first impact of Jesus’s ministry, as a
healer of the multitudes who flocked to him – particularly emphasized in Mark,
the oldest of the Gospels. The teaching of Jesus in Matthew also is given in
five chunks that are placed after five chunks describing his actions. The
Messianic signs of the ministry of Jesus, opening the eyes of the blind, etc.,
show clearly that the Gospel is meant to have an impact in the real world.
‘These signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out
demons..., they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover’ (Mk
16.17-18). To be sure, in his short chapter on the Disciples Benedict strongly
emphasizes the healing work of the Church (pp. 212-13). Casting out demons is
presented as conquest of the irrational by reason; exorcism is the restoration
of the light of reason. Here we find a touch of that Eurocentric logocentrism
for which Benedict has often been criticized. He states that ‘Chaos Theory
passes by insight into the rational structure of the world and places men
before obscurities that he cannot dissolve and that put a limit to the rational
side of the world’ (p. 211). But it seems that this theory is distinguished
rather by its discovery of order and pattern in chaos. Perhaps Benedict is
taking a side-glance at evolutionism, which accepts fully the role of
randomness in the cosmos, but also gives a rationale in it.
There is a
disturbing discussion in which Benedict opposes the Isaianic vision of a healed
world, in which swords will become plowshares, to the otherworldly vision of
Jesus. Jesus tells us ‘that no kingdom of this world is the Kingdom of God, the
definitive state of salvation of humanity. Human kingdom is human kingdom, and
anyone who says he can establish a healed or whole (heile) world is
assenting to Satan’s deception and surrendering the world to him’ (p. 73). This
stark opposition of prophetic hopes for justice and peace over against the
message of Jesus could court the danger of a Marcionite rejection of prophetic
hopes as belonging to a lower material order than what the true Messiah brings.
There are many conservative Christians who will orchestrate Benedict’s remarks
in this way.
‘What did
Jesus then really bring, since he did not bring world peace, or good conditions
for all, or a better world?’ Benedict’s answer to this question does not
alleviate our fears of a reduction of the Gospel to abstraction: ‘The answer is
quite simple: God. He brought God… Now we know His face, now we can call on
Him’ (p. 73). I miss the concreteness of Luther, who taught that Jesus brought
a gracious God, a God who is gracious because he is identified by a
concrete action, the forgiveness of sins, and the conferral of freedom. (This
point is well-sighted at the following blogsite: http://estamos-vivo.blogspot.com/2007/04/seeking-kingdom-of-god-on-earth-is-it.html.
The lively discussion in the combox there suggests that the recent CDF
notification on the Jesuit liberation theologian Jon Sobrino and Benedict’s
continued sniping at Liberation Theology are actually having the effect of
reviving the Liberation Theology debate.)
Benedict’s chapter on the Kingdom of God acknowledges
the contrast between the preaching of Jesus in the Synoptics, of which the
overriding theme is the coming kingdom of God, and the preaching of the early
Church, centered on Christology. (Note that the theme of the Kingdom
practically disappears in John, which militates against the claim that the
Johannine discourses represent teachings of the historical Jesus.) Benedict
rejects Bultmann’s view that the teaching of Jesus is a Jewish premise of New
Testament theology, not part of that theology itself, as well as Loisy’s
statement that ‘Jesus preached the Kingdom but it was the Church that came.’ In
the latter he finds a note of irony and lamentation, but this is probably a
misunderstanding; in this early, apologetic work, Loisy was defending the
necessity of the Church against Harnack’s attempt to reduce Christianity to the
preaching of Jesus. Benedict resolves the tension between Jesus and the early
Church here by interpreting the notion of the Kingdom with the aid of the Fathers.
From Origen he draws the idea that Christ is the Kingdom in person (autobasileia)
– an idea also taken up by Karl Barth – and, moreover, that the Kingdom is an
interior, mystical reality. A third dimension of the Kingdom is the
ecclesiastical one; the Fathers bring Church and Kingdom into intimate
conjunction.
This vision of the Kingdom ignores the fresh
perspectives that have had so deep an impact in much twentieth century
theology, ever since Johannes Weiss rediscovered the eschatological character
of the teaching of Jesus (Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes, 1892; ed.
F. Hahn, Göttingen, 1964). The work of Edward Schillebeeckx and of the
liberation theologians marks the full entry of Kingdom awareness into Catholic
theology. Schillebeeckx is not cited by Benedict, nor are any of the liberation
theologians. Though the palette of exegetes he draws on is ecumenical and often
liberal, his specifically theological sources are a tiny handful of
conservative Catholic voices (Karl Adam, Henri de Lubac, Christoph Schönborn,
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Hugo – not Karl – Rahner). Benedict’s presentation of
the twentieth century theological struggle with the notion of the Kingdom is
quite polemical, in contrast to his glowing reception of the patristic interpretations.
He notes that some Catholic theologians have accused Vatican II of being
Church-centered rather than Kingdom centered, but he does not note that a more
common criticism is that the Vatican since Vatican II has lost the Council’s
wholesome tension and equilibrium between Church and Kingdom in an
over-identification of the two. He then notes that recent theology has also
criticized Christocentrism in favor of a Kingdom-oriented theocentrism, and
that some have gone beyond this to replace theocentrism altogether with
Kingdom-centrism. Kingdom, in this perspective, means only a world in which
peace, justice and the stewardship of creation prevails. It is in this
extremely polemic context that Benedict first connects the Kingdom with the
ideas of justice and peace, ideas that not only theologians but most Christians
regard as central to the teaching of Jesus. Vatican II in its insistence on
relating the Gospel to the signs of the times stressed these ideas again and
again, as did the social encyclicals of John XXIII and Paul VI. The skewed
perspective in which Benedict introduces them gives a closed and stifling
atmosphere to his own presentation of the Gospel.
Alarmingly, Benedict scoffs at the ideas of peace and
justice as abstractions: ‘Who can genuinely say what justice is, or what really
serves justice in the concrete situation, or how peace is to be created? On
closer inspection all this shows itself to be utopian chatter without real
content, unless one silently presupposes party doctrines as the content of
these concepts to be accepted by all’ (p. 84). But the New Testament teaching
about justice and peace has been studied by many exegetes and theologians, and
the Church has tried to spell out the contemporary applications of those
teachings quite concretely. Benedict should have begun with a rich, concrete
account before tilting at unnamed theologians (Paul Knitter, perhaps) in a
style that can only recall the most depressing moments of recent church
history, including especially the suppression of liberation theology by a
papacy gravely compromised by its support of the Contras in Nicaragua. For the
unnamed theologians, Benedict declares, ‘God has vanished, it is a question
only of humans. Respect for religious “traditions” is only apparent. In reality
they are seen as a heap of customs that we can leave people keep on to even
though ultimately they do not count for anything. Faith and the religions are
finalized to political goals.’ These straw men frequently appear in the
rhetoric that is used against liberation theology, and indeed against any
Christian anywhere who effectively opposes injustice in the name of the Gospel.
This negative rhetoric reinforces the widespread
impression that Benedict is a classic reactionary thinker, locked in positions
formed in the late 1960s, which have led to no real insight and which have not
been challenged or nourished by any real dialogue. This results in a curbed and
cramped image of Jesus, from which the prophetic dimension has been amputated.
As Michael Westmoreland-White remarks: ‘His Jesus is safe and tame. he does not
challenge, does not provoke, does not upset any current applecarts. Ratzinger’s
Jesus is too meek and mild to have ever been crucified. Thus, his book may
promote the remembrance of Jesus, but not the right kind of dangerous memory.
If the pope remembered Jesus faithfully, he could never be persecuting
liberation theologians like Boff and Sobrino’ (http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/2007/08/remembering-jesus-benedict-xvi-and.html).
Benedict makes no attempt to relate the Kingdom to
evolution or to the human struggle for liberation (though in a 200. What was
the Kingdom Jesus preached? Benedict’s answer is: ‘Quite simply, God, and
indeed God as the living God, who is able to act concretely in the world and in
history, and is doing so even now’ (p. 85). Jesus says to us: ‘God exists. And:
God is truly God, who holds the threads of the world in his hands. In this
sense the message of Jesus is very simple, theocentric through and through. The
new and quite specific quality of his message consists in this, that he says to
us: God is acting now – it is the hour in which God, in a way that surpasses
everything up to now, is showing himself in history as its Lord, as the living
God.’
Turning Benedict’s rhetoric against himself, could one
not say that this message on closer inspection could turn out to be utopian,
without real content, unless some party doctrine fills in the blanks? Al-Qaida
use the same language and fills in its blanks in an oppressive and violent
form. The whole point of the Church’s teaching about justice and peace is to
ensure that God-language is a language of liberation and healing, not of
oppression, that is, that it is truly a language about the living God.
Benedict promises to define the message of the Kingdom
more closely by referring to the kingship of God in the Psalms and the Book of
Daniel, in Temple and synagogue worship and at Qumran, and among the Rabbis.
God’s rule ‘is present as a power that shapes life through the prayer and being
of the believer who carries God’s yoke and thus partakes in advance in the
coming world’ (p. 87). This is still very abstract. Then he notes that Jesus
speaks of the Kingdom as already come (Mk 1.15, Mt 12.28, Lk 17, 21), stating
that ‘it is these words that called up the theses of the imminent expectation
and allowed it to appear as the specific belief of Jesus.’ This is directed
against theologians such as Albert Schweitzer who see Jesus as mistakenly
expecting the imminent end of the world. Benedict accuses them of ignoring a
large part of Jesus’s sayings and forcing others to fit their interpretation,
but it is not clear how Benedict himself explains texts such as Mk 9.1 and Mt
10.23 in which the early Church appears to ascribe expectation of the imminent
eschaton to Jesus.
A calm explanation of this troubling point would have
been of more value than the polemic. Later (p. 365), Benedict adopts Rudolf
Pesch’s view that Mark 9.1, in the context of the Gospel, refers to the
Transfiguration, which immediately follows. Benedict does not note that Mark is
writing at a time when the expectation of an imminent end (so lively in Paul
and his congregations) has ebbed, and that he is integrating a saying
attributed to Jesus into a context that defuses it. In his discussion of the
parables, Benedict clarifies the matter: ‘All our considerations hitherto have
led us to recognize the immediate expectation of the end-time as an aspect in
the early reception of the message of Jesus, but at the same time it apparent
that one cannot plaster it over every saying of Jesus nor elevate it to the
basic theme of his message’ (pp. 226-7). Quite so, but if the message of Jesus
had been more vividly expounded in its eschatological contours, its dynamic
orientation to a coming Kingdom, these fragments of imminent expectation could
be taken more easily in one’s stride.
In the catechetical chapter on the Lord’s Prayer,
based on the principle that ‘being human consists essentially in relationship
to God’ (162), ‘Thy Kingdom come’ is again referred to an interior reality, in
the heart, which is identical with Christ himself. The prayer for the Kingdom
has less to do with imagining some divinely granted future state of the world,
a state of justice and peace such as the prophets longed for, than with
recognizing ‘the primacy of God’ (p. 179) over against any ‘automatism of a
functioning world such as the utopia of the classless society envisaged’ (p.
180). But many Christians pray these first petitions also as having a social
dimension: ‘Hallowed by Thy name,’ for example, involves a request that God’s
name not be prostituted at the service of war. The other petitions are mostly
given a Christological reading; ‘our daily bread,’ for example, is connected
with the Eucharist. Though, following St. Cyprian (De Oratione Dominica 8),
Benedict mentions that the prayer is spoken by a ‘we’ and not by isolated
individuals, he emphasizes strongly the individual interior dimension, ‘the
silent presence of God at the ground of our thinking, musing, and being,’ which
is the love of God and ‘the innermost condition and driving force of love of
neighbor’ (163-4).
Benedict’s most salient reference to social justice
(picked up in the advance publicity for the book) occurs in the discussion of
the parable of the Good Samaritan: ‘We see how the robbed and plundered people
of Africa call on us; we see how much they are our “neighbors,” and that it is
our lifestyle, our history, in which we are entangled, that has plundered them
and still does so. Above all we have wounded them in their souls. Instead of
giving them God, the God who is near in Christ, thus taking up and bringing to
perfection all that is precious and great in their own traditions, we have
brought them the cynicism of a world without God, concerned only with power and
profit’ (p. 238). Such remarks are homiletic obiter dicta; they do not
have an integrated perspective into which to fit them, such a perspective as
could have been developed on the basis of Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio.
The weakness is the same as was noted in Benedict’s Encyclical Deus Caritas
Est, namely, a tendency to make the social mission of the Church a matter
of charity rather than deeply reflected and consistently enacted thinking on
justice.
.
THE NEW TORAH
Without a strong justice and peace emphasis, it is
very unclear what the Kingdom means. In the chapter on the Sermon on the Mount
we are told that ‘the reality that Jesus calls “the Kingdom of God, the rule of
God,” is extremely complex, and only in the acceptance of the whole can we
approach its message and be led by it’ (p. 89). Benedict returns to Origen’s
idea of the Kingdom as an interior reality, to another discussion of imminent
expectation, and to the idea that the new proximity of the Kingdom resides in
Christ himself, in whom God is ‘acting and ruling – ruling in a divine way,
that means without earthly power, ruling through the love that goes “to the
end” (Jn 13.1), to the Cross’ (p. 90). Only here, he insists, does the message
of the Kingdom find its concrete identity and unity. He promises to spell this
out in the next chapter, on the Sermon on the Mount.
‘Blessed are the poor’ is interpreted by Benedict exclusively
in terms of piety. ‘It is precisely Luke who presents to us the “poor in
spirit” who are so to speak the sociological group in which the earthly Jesus
and his message could take their start. And conversely it is clear that Matthew
remains entirely in the tradition of the piety of the Psalms and thus in the
vision of the true Israel that is therein expressed’ (p. 106). Benedict sees no
need at all to connect the first beatitude with the really existing poor, in
the line of recent church emphasis on a preferential option for the poor When
Benedict finds this preferential option in Luke, along with a sympathy for
women and for the Jews (p. 218), it is probably not in the strong sense that
the phrase has for Latin American theologians. Purely material poverty, he
insists ‘does not save, even if the disadvantaged of this world can surely
reckon with God’s generosity in a quite special way. But the heart of those who
own nothing can be hardened, poisoned, malicious’ (pp. 106-7).
Are we to take it, then, that when Jesus said ‘blessed
are you poor; yours is the kingdom of God... woe to you rich; you have had your
reward’ (Lk 6.20, 24; closer to the Q source than Mt 5.3) he meant only
‘blessed are you pious people’? Even if such utterances are placed in a context
of imminent eschatology, is it not clear that the judgement they announce has a
social dimension, in continuity with the Hebrew prophets? Benedict agrees that
the poverty blessed by Jesus is ‘not a merely spiritual attitude’ (p. 107). It
takes concrete form – in people like Francis of Assisi who choose a life of
poverty! ‘To be the community of the poor Jesus, the Church needs again and
again the great renunciants; she needs the communities who follow them, who
live poverty and simplicity and thus show us the truth of the beatitudes’ (p.
107). The phrase ‘social justice’ now occurs for the first time: ‘It is true
that the Sermon on the Mount is not as such a social program. However, only
when the large orientation that it gives us remains living in our thoughts and
deeds, and when from faith comes the strength for renunciation and
responsibility for the neighbor and for the whole, can social justice grow’ (p.
107).
‘Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice’
is not connected directly with social justice. Rather it concerns ‘people who
are on the look-out, searching for the great, the true justice, the true Good…
who are not satisfied with what is near at hand and do not stifle the unrest of
the heart, who show people the way to greater things… people of an inner
sensitivity that enables their eyes and ears to perceive the gentle signs that
God sends into the world and who thus can break with the dictatorship of the
habitual’ (pp. 121-2). Examples: Zachariah, Elizabeth, Mary, Joseph, Simeon,
Anna, the Apostles, Paul, and all who seek passionately for truth.
Entering into an interesting discussion with Jacob
Neusner’s A Rabbi Talks with Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1993), the
commentary on the Sermon on the Mount that he claims to have found most helpful,
Benedict points out that Neusner does not object to Jesus’ interpretation of
the Law but to the way Jesus insists on his own importance. Neusner recognizes
‘this mysterious identification (Gleichsetzung) of Jesus and God’ (p.
137), though rejecting it. Time reports on the Jewish-Christian dialogue
initiated here: ‘In fact, a close reading of the Pope’s chapter suggests more a
marriage of convenience. Benedict is preoccupied with what he sees as the
Gospel’s overriding message of Jesus’ divinity, even in passages that liberal
Christians read primarily as straightforward injunctions to help the poor and
powerless. Having a rabbi help make that case is novel and convenient.
Regarding one verse, Benedict writes that “Neusner shows us that we are dealing
not with some kind of moralism, but with a highly theological text, or, to put
it more precisely, a Christological one.” He acknowledges the rabbi’s point
that Jesus is offering the Jews a transformation rather than a continuation of
the Torah but maintains that the trade-off is worth it, provided Jesus is not
merely “a liberal reform rabbi” but “the Son.” That Neusner and other Jews
regard that very Sonship as a deal breaker does not bother him much.’ Neusner,
it should be noted, has been criticized for much the same uncritical and
ahistorical approach to the gospel records as Benedict is guilty of. The
dialogue between the two of them is a distraction from the more scholarly
dialogue that has been going on between Christians and Jews for years; see the
remarks at http://estamos-vivo.blogspot.com/2007/06/benedict-vs-neusner-on-jesus.html.
Neusner’s reply to the Pope in Communio, Summer 2007, implicitly
concedes that he was not arguing for the historicity of the Sermon on the
Mount, but simply taking it as the common understanding of Jesus; Neusner calls
for a revival of Jewish-Christian disputation, oblivious of the sinister
historical overtones of this. One should note that the contradicions between
Christianity and Judaism (or Islam or Buddhism) are not so easily identified
and cast in propositional form as is commonly thought.
In the debates about the Sabbath, ‘was Jesus in
reality a liberal rabbi – a precursor of Christian liberalism?’ (p. 139).
Benedict claims that when Jesus says, ‘Come unto me, all ye who are heavy
laden, and I will give you rest’ (Mt 11.28) he is usually taken to be opposing
the severities of Jewish legalism. He points out that Neusner has a deeper interpretation:
Jesus is presenting himself as Lord of the Sabbath and as the true Sabbath of
Israel, or as the Torah in person, that is, as God. But it must be noted that
Neusner, to the extent that he takes the Sermon on the Mount, a late
construction, as a portrait of the historical Jesus, is not reading critically.
Moreover, the authority claimed by Jesus in Matthew’s scenario it that of the
new Moses, not the authority of God; to speak in God’s name is not the same
thing as to speak as God. And is it really such a good thing that
Jewish-Christian dialogue return to the disputation model of the Middle Ages,
in a face-off between the perfection of the Torah on the one hand and the
divinity of Christ on the other? (see http://www.forward.com/articles/the-pope-and-i-a-debate-with-jesus-is-joined-by-b).
Neusner objects that Jesus destroys the coherent
social order of Judaism by his attitude to the Sabbath and to family ties.
Benedict replies: ‘The lack of the entire social dimension in the preaching of
Jesus (Das Fehlen der ganzen Sozialdimension in Jesu Predigt [??? What
of the Nazareth address in Luke 4 etc. etc.?]), which Neusner from a Jewish
viewpoint quite insightfully criticizes, at once harbors and conceals a
world-historical happening, which as such has taken place in no other cultural
sphere: The concrete political and social orders are released from immediate
sacrality, from legislation by divine law, and transferred to the freedom of
the person who is grounded through Jesus in the will of God and who thence
learns to see what is right and good’ (p. 151). I wonder about the uniqueness
claimed for this ethical revolution – it would need to be checked against other
achievements of the Axial Age, notably in Buddhism. Benedict claims that this
desacralization of the State is the freedom Christ brings, but it has been
perverted into laicism in the modern world.
Benedict attacks Marcion and the Marcionism of Harnack,
and ‘the widespread temptation to interpret the New Testament in purely
spiritual terms, untying it from any social and political relevance’ (p. 154).
But what concrete proposal has he to make? He talks of defense of the family
and of Sunday as part of the new universalized Torah that the Church
represents. But he has no time for ‘political theologies of every kind,’ for
they are ‘the theologization of a single political path, which contradicts the
newness and breadth of the message of Jesus. Thus it would be false to
designate such tendencies a Judaization of Christianity, since Israel connects
her obedience to the concrete social ordinances of the Torah to the
kinship-community of the “eternal Israel” and does not explain it in terms of a
universal political recipe’ (pp. 154-5). But it may be objected that the
‘Gospel of Justice and Peace’ could indeed be seen as a wholesome rejudaization
of Christianity in that it takes up the prophets’ burning concern for social
justice and for peace and sees it as lying at the heart of the Gospel,
something Benedict seems instinctively to oppose.
Only at the conclusion of this long chapter on the
Sermon on the Mount does Benedict begin to indicate the concrete content of the
new Torah, and in terms that still remain extremely general. Jesus fulfills the
Torah ‘in that he indicates to historically acting reason the space of its
responsibility. So must Christianity ever anew work out and formulate social
ordinances, a “Christian social doctrine.” It will correct previous
arrangements in ever new developments. It finds in the inner structure of the
Torah, in its development through the prophetic critique and in the message of
Jesus that subsumes both at once the breadth for the necessary historical
developments and the solid ground that guarantees human dignity on the basis of
the dignity of God’ (p. 160).
.
THE CONTEXT
Some may have imagined that Benedict’s warm words
about the historical-critical method means that he pursues an integral exegesis
that would unite the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. Schillebeeckx,
practicing a kind of kenosis as a theologian who went back to school with the
exegetes, did attain such a unity, beginning from the Jesus of history and
eventually uncovering his identity with the Christ of faith. But Benedict
scarcely recognizes the distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ
of faith at all.
As John L. Allen writes (http://ncrcafe.org/node/1056): ‘Intellectually,
the aim of Jesus of Nazareth is, in the first place, to defend the
reliability of the gospel accounts; and secondly, to argue that that gospels
present Christ as God Himself, not as a prophet or moral reformer. Over and
over, the pope uses phrases such as “implicit Christology,” “hidden
Christology,” and “indirect Christology,” to argue that even where the gospel
accounts don’t draw out the theological consequences of stories and sayings of
Jesus, their message is nonetheless discernible. On one level, Jesus of
Nazareth reads like a running conversation with exegetes such as Adolf von
Harnack, who argued that the Jesus of the gospels was not yet “the Christ,” and
that turning him into a deity was a work of later Christian theologizing.
(Clearly, Benedict isn’t buying it.)’
In a recent interview Rowan Williams remarked: ‘To
look at the church for quick answers rather than clear and solidly founded
answers is a mistake; you’re expecting the church to give you answers which
come out of a slot machine. I think you’re going to be disappointed.’ By
writing a long and rationally argued book, Benedict is educating the faithful
out of the infantilism of easy answers. But insofar as the answers he himself
strongly affirms appear not to be solidly founded at many points, he has not yet
fully accomplished the educative task of a modern religious leader. In
presenting his arguments as open to discussion, he takes a further step toward
guiding the faithful to intellectual maturity; but again the clash between this
and the clamp-down on open discussion in the Church for the last thirty years
signals a limit to the venture.
Although this book has been presented, in a blaze of
publicity, as a personal writing, without magisterial status, which theologians
can feel free to contradict, in reality its relationship to the Magisterium is
more subtle. Its publication coincides with the Notification rebuking Jon
Sobrino, just as the publication of Dominus Iesus in 2000 corresponded
with the Notification on the writings of another Jesuit, Jacques Dupuis. The
principles of exegesis upheld as normative in the Sobrino Notification are the
very ones that Benedict expounds at length in his book. (The Sobrino
Notification is trounced by Peter Hünermann, editor of the most recent version
of Denzinger, in Herder Korrespondenz 61:184-8, and by Nikolaus Klein in
Orientierung, April 15; Hünermann leads a group of 130 theologians
calling on the CDF to reform itself, by returning to the prescriptions of Paul
VI; http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=815812007;
http://www.temoignagechretien.fr/journal/article.php?num=3253&categ=Croire.
In response, neocath apologists such as Jeff Mirus scoff at ‘the dissident
modernist theologians of Germany and Austria.’)
Another straw in the wind is the rebuke delivered to
Francis Moloney by Paul Mankowski, SJ, of the Biblicum, for his denial of the
historicity of the miracle of Cana. Fr Mankowski judged that such a view is
held by the heterodox (Protestant exegetes) but could not be tolerated in
Catholic exegesis. As Allen notes: ‘Jesus of Nazareth expresses in
an exegetical key the same concern with Christology that drove the interventions
of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under then-Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger with regard to theologians such as Jesuit Frs. Jacques Dupuis and
Roger Haight, as well as the most recent notification on Jesuit Fr. Jon
Sobrino. In each case, the concern was with what Joseph Ratzinger saw as a
faulty Christology in the name of some presumed good – inter-religious
tolerance in the case of Dupuis and Haight, social liberation for Sobrino.’
Quoting a Vatican official: ‘Christology is the key for this pope... And it’s
not over,’ Allen warns: ‘That comment suggests there may be additional
investigations, additional notifications, additional teaching documents and
papal messages, circling around the themes laid out in Jesus of Nazareth.’
The Notification on Sobrino insists that the divinity
of Christ is explicitly taught in the New Testament, implying that if you do
not find the full divinity of Christ clearly taught in the Gospels you are
either a victim of the alleged limits of the historical-critical method or a
bad theologian. ‘To maintain that John 20:28 affirms that Jesus is “of God” is
clearly erroneous, in as much as the passage itself refers to Jesus as “Lord”
and “God.”‘ To which exegetes would reply that ‘Lord’ by no means implies true
divinity; if it did every reference to ‘Lord Jesus’ in the New Testament could
be taken as proving Christ’s divinity, which would certainly have made the work
of the defenders of Nicea in the fourth century much easier. The Notification
continues: ‘Similarly, John 1:1 says that the Word is God.’ No, it says ‘Theos
ên ho Logos.’ Theos has an emphatic place at the beginning of the
sentence, but as Origen pointed out long ago Theos is not the same as ho
Theos. One could translate ‘the Word was divine.’ ‘My God’ (ho theos mou)
might seem to clinch the case, but the same phrase was used as an honorary
address to the Emperor Domitian; if the Johannine author is opposing this cult
here, he is nonetheless not necessarily affirming the full divinity of the
Logos incarnate. The Gospel does not say: ‘Jesus is ho Theos,’ which
would be a stronger assertion of divinity. In any case the divinity of Christ
is not what is at issue in the context of John 20, and Thomas’s acclamation is
only one of a series throughout the Gospel in which Jesus is saluted by an
appropriate title.
‘Many other texts speak of Jesus as Son and as Lord.’
Son of God was a Messianic title, not a declaration of the ontological full
divinity. ‘The divinity of Jesus has been the object of the Church’s faith from
the beginning, long before his consubstantiality with the Father was proclaimed
by the Council of Nicea.’ The articulation of it has not been clear from the
beginning, however; if it were, the stupendous controversy unleashed by Nicea
would be inexplicable. ‘The fact that this term was not used does not mean that
the divinity of Jesus was not affirmed in the strict sense, contrary to what
the Author seems to imply.’ Sobrino says that the New Testament contains the
seed of the later doctrine, which is a perfectly sensible position. Even the
highest Christology in the New Testament is patient of an Arian interpretation;
metaphysical clarification has not even begun; and we have noted that an
adoptionist Christology can appeal to many New Testament texts, which suggests
that Chalcedonian orthodoxy should make space for the adoptionist perspective
to be given as free a range as possible. (Recall that to say ‘Jesus is God’
depends on the communicatio idiomatum, and is a secondary consequence
from the Hypostatic Union, according to which Jesus is – in person, but not in
his human nature as such – the eternal Word of God; what such a union/identity
of a human being and a divine Hypostasis could mean is profoundly inscrutable;
it leaves space for a wide range of interpretation of the Christ event.)
As long ago
as 1988 the then Cardinal Ratzinger questioned the basic premises of critical
exegesis of the Gospels in a New York lecture
(http://www.tcrnews2.com/RatzingerExegesis88.html). As Stephen Hand reports: ‘Surrounded by both friends and foes (including the
American exegete Raymond Brown) the Cardinal delivered the most trenchant
critique of the erring philosophical and theological presuppositions which lay
behind the historical-critical method since the early days of the Pontifical
Biblical Institute founded by Pope Leo XIII. What was just as interesting
perhaps, was that Ratzinger, in what may have been more than a tongue-in-cheek
literary device, opened the lecture by recalling the Church’s eschatological
awareness, quoting Wladimir Solojews’s History of the Antichrist, in
which the Arch-enemy of Christ is said to have earned his doctorate in theology
at Tübingen and was renowned for his pioneering exegetical works’ (http://tcrnews2.com/RatzingerBible.html).
The same Soloviev passage occurs in the present book (p. 64). The reader may
well fear that Benedict is demonizing critical biblical scholarship as usually
practiced, particularly when it implies a method of literary or ideological
suspicion toward the text (as probably all critical exegesis does in one degree
or another). Incidentally, it is incorrect to call Raymond Brown an enemy of
Ratzinger, who declared that he ‘would be
very happy if we had many exegetes like Father Brown’ (Origins, February
11, 1988, p. 595). Nonetheless, American neocaths, led by Brian W. Harrison and
Robert Sungenis, still pursue Brown like a relentless plague of gnats. Joseph
A. Komonchak reports on the Commonweal blog: ‘Cardinal Ratzinger’s 1988
talk, along with talks/essays by Raymond Brown, William H. Lazareth, and George
Lindbeck, and an accurate and full account of the two-day colloquium in which
the Cardinal participated, has been published as Biblical Interpretation in
Crisis: The Ratzinger Conference on Bible and Church, ed. R.J. Neuhaus
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989). Raymond Brown’s talk is followed by an
addendum in which he sets out, on the basis of the two talks given and the
give-and-take of the conversations that followed, the agreements and
differences between him and the Cardinal over the historical critical method.’
Hand’s
report continues: ‘While Ratzinger did not
question the validity of the historical method per se, he clearly
attempted to undermine much of it (at least to the extent that it has been practised
for over two hundred years) by summoning orthodox Catholic theologians and
exegetes to “get beyond disputes over details and press on to [a critique
of] the foundations,” calling for “the work of a whole generation” which he
referred to as a “criticism of criticism.” The Cardinal suggested that only now
could such a thorough “criticism of the criticism” be undertaken, precisely
because the method has been around so long; indeed almost to the point of exhausting
itself in variations on its central theses. The kind of criticism that the
former theology professor called for is one that would aim at and be able to
expose the “appearance of quasi-clinical-scientific certainty” which posed as
the method for so long.’
The ‘critique of the critique,’ like ‘the reform of
the reform,’ are ideas characteristic of Benedict’s frame of mind. Always a
theologian who listened to novel or liberal ideas and then pointed out their
dangers or limits, he became increasingly a theologian who disqualified ideas,
preemptively, in view of their perceived dangers. Liberation Theology was the
major victim of this hermeneutics of suspicion. As an exasperated Sobrino wrote
to Fr. Kolvenbach: ‘It seems that the Congregation is obsessed
with finding limitations or errors of all kinds, or with branding as such
whatever presents itself as a different conceptualization of some truth of
faith. In my opinion, this is based to a large extent on ignorance, prejudice,
and an obsession with finishing off the Theology of Liberation. Sincerely, it
is not easy to dialogue with this type of mentality’ (http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/dettaglio.jsp?id=127601).
But this hermeneutics of suspicion has also been
invoked to lame the impact of Vatican II. The alleged naive optimism of Gaudium
et Spes, and the novel emphases in the ecclesiology and ecumenical openings
of Vatican II and Paul VI received similar treatment. The authority of
episcopal councils was undercut in his Theologische Prinzipienlehre (Munich,
1982), perhaps in view of the reception of Humanae Vitae by so many of
them; however, the Roman Synod, happily, is to have some of its collegial
authority boosted in changes Benedict has recently announced. Benedict’s
correction of suspect tendencies becomes a highly reflective dialectic. But its
upshot is not to produce a strong and simple thought of the kind that engages
people in dialogue and thus moves history forward; rather it is systematically
restorationist and can be upheld only by curtailing debate (as his heavy claims
for the historicity of the Johannine discourses curtail open-minded questioning
after the historical Jesus and a more subtle understanding of the Johannine
text and Johannine theology).
Hand adds this comment: ‘Interestingly, the reaction
and fallout to Cardinal Ratzinger came some five years later in 1993 when the
Pontifical Biblical Commission, headed by none other than Ratzinger himself,
published a document entitled The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church.
It turned out to be far less than an enthusiastic response to the Cardinal’s
call to foundational criticism of the criticism. Instead the Commission simply
reaffirmed the legitimacy and centrality of the historical-critical method with
precious little that echoed the Cardinal Prefect’s core concerns. Father
Albert Vanhoye, who not long after the lecture began his second five-year term
as Secretary of the PBC, said in an interview: “In that talk [Ratzinger]
strongly criticized form criticism as practiced by Rudolph Bultmann and Martin
Dibelius, and he argued that form criticism had been built upon philosophical
presuppositions contrary to the faith of the Church... We responded to [Ratzinger’s
lecture] by indicating that, in its essence, the historical-critical method is
not tied to the a priori assumptions of Bultmann and Dibelius, and that it is
necessary to employ this method in a manner that liberates it from any a priori
assumption that would be contrary to the Church” (First Things, June/July
1997, p. 35). Thus the bang was morphed with a shrug into a whimper. Fr.
Vanhoye appears to gloss over the Cardinal’s particular criticisms of
the a priori assumptions of the method; the methodological assumptions, it
should be noted, accepted not only by Bultmann and Dibelius, but by not a few
Catholic theologians, with dire effects for Catholic theology. He said,
“Cardinal Ratzinger was always present in our discussions except when he had a
conflicting commitment, but he was admirably discreet, not insisting on his
criticism” (emphasis mine). Cardinal Ratzinger is discreet indeed. Prophets
know when to speak and when to remain silent – and how to wait. So the call to
“critique of the foundations” relative to biblical studies may still belong to
the future, to future theologians who will soon replace their teachers…The bomb
only awaits detonation. In God’s good time.’ Yes, it looks as if this prophecy
is coming true!
For an insider account of the preparation of The
Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, see Brendan Byrne in Australian
EJournal of Theology 1 (August 2003): ‘On the one hand, older scholars such as Joseph Fitzmyer were determined
not to yield an inch of the hard-won high ground in regard to the primacy,
almost the exclusivity, of the historical-critical method; on the other hand,
there were those who felt it was time to recognise that the historical critical
method had its limitations, that it had limited appeal in many pastoral and homiletic
contexts, and needed to be supplemented by other approaches and methods of
interpretation. At one stage, too, it had more or less been agreed upon to omit
the virtually compulsory salute in church documents on Scripture to the
“treasure-house” of Patristic interpretation. Then, not without some
encouragement from the Cardinal President, back came a “patristic paragraph”
(III, B, 2), albeit, to my mind, very well composed by one of the French
members of the Commission. So the document emerged, with the
historical-critical method still enjoying a certain primacy but having to make
room on its perch for several other methods and approaches—literary and
structuralist, canonical, social scientific, liberative (liberation theology
and feminist theology)—all critically reviewed, to be sure, but none rejected
or regarded as totally without merit.’
Byrne makes a dramatic statement: ‘I think, too, it
has to be said that the task of promoting the kind of biblical literacy asked
for at Vatican II has received little help and no small degree of hindrance
from prevailing tendencies in the Roman Curia. The 1993 document of the
Biblical Commission stands on a lonely eminence in this regard—and even it
could have been negative in tone had not several of the members of the
Commission fought long and hard to exclude gratuitous judgements in many areas.
The handling of scripture in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994)
is simply disgraceful and in many respects regresses not merely behind Vatican
II but Divino Affante Spiritu itself. When I asked at a session of the
Biblical Commission why that Commission was not being employed or at least
consulted during the preparation of the Catechism, my question was received in
sullen silence; I had ventured upon some inter-Curial turf war. When one
teaches New Testament within the Catholic tradition, with complete loyalty and
appreciation of that tradition, including such things as the primacy, the
distinct presbyteral and episcopal ministry, a high christology and deep sacramentality,
one can only become more and more aware of the gap between the Gospel as Jesus
appears to have proclaimed it and required it to be lived in the community, and
the policies, edicts, appointments and decisions that have emanated from Rome
in recent years… Let me simply say that, having resisted for years the
application of the strictures of Jesus against the scribes and Pharisees in
Matthew 23 to my own Church, I find myself unable to do so any longer.’
Perhaps the most alarming contextual aspect of
Benedict’s book is what it augurs for the next Roman Synod on Scripture in the
Church. The Synod will be dominated by the liturgical use of Scripture, with
emphasis on canonical exegesis, typological and allegorical reading of the Old
Testament – in the line of Henri de Lubac’s hollow restorationism, incisively
criticized by Richard Hanson in Allegory and Event (SCM, 1959) – and
probably with little participation of critical exegetes. Preachers will not be
encouraged to distinguish the voice of Jesus in the Gospels from the words of
the historical pre-paschal Jesus. The problems that Scripture poses to the
faithful – such as the difficulty of reconciling the divinely sanctioned
genocides with the notion of Inerrancy – will be brushed under the carpet as usual.
Probably we will have more than what Byrne calls ‘the virtually compulsory salute in church documents on Scripture to the
“treasure-house” of Patristic interpretation.’ A primacy of patristic over
contemporary exegesis may be affirmed.
.
FURTHER IMPLICATIONS
There is a close connection between Benedict’s book
along with the Sobrino Notification on the one hand and Dominus Iesus
(2001) along with the Dupuis Notification on the other. As Benedict closes, one
by one, the perceived gaps between the Jesus of history and the Christ of
faith, as he seals off one by one possible leaks through which a Christology
from below might gain entrance, he seeks to establish that Christ is from the
start the fullness of divine revelation and that there is thus no basis for a
‘theocentric’ or ‘regnocentric’ reading of his mission that would in any way be
in rivalry with the Christocentric view.
Benedict’s effort to close the gap between the
Church’s Christ and the historical origins, the gap that first traumatized
Catholics when Loisy published L’Évangile et l’Église in 1902, is to my
mind a lost cause. We are living in the age of what I call ‘the withdrawal of
origins’ and this requires of us a new art of judgment in theology.
Psychoanalyst Daniel Sibony (Les trois monothéismes, Éditions du Seuil)
argues that Judaism, Islam and Christianity suffer from an unacknowledged flaw
in their historical origins, which they always wish to characterize as pure,
full, and perfect. This clinging to pure origins is a principal source of
inter-religious violence. Analogously, clinging to the purity of the Greek
metaphysical tradition, identified with Reason as such, and clinging to
mythological representations of cosmic and human origins, is a form of denial
that can close the mind.
Even to argue on a Johannine basis that the Logos
incarnate in Christ goes in search of itself in the other great religious
traditions of humanity (as I did in Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth,
Edinburgh University Press, 1996) would probably be seen in Benedict’s
perspective as implying a too low Christology. The Logos is so fully manifested
in Jesus – in the historical Jesus – that there is nothing more to be added
from outside, and that any radiance found in other religions is very dim indeed
in comparison with the glory of God revealed in Christ.
However, it must be admitted that a dissolution of the
concrete identity of Jesus, such as Benedict warns against, is characteristic
of much recent theological and sub-theological production, which might go under
the rubric of ‘the Jesus I want.’ Reading Diarmuid O’Murchu’s Catching up
with Jesus (New York: Crossroad, 2005), one appreciates the need for a
defense of the historicity of the Gospels and the validity of Nicea and
Chalcedon. O’Murchu gives a hyper-Crossanized account of the historical Jesus,
or rather a fantastic reimagining of the Gospel in the form of a ‘story’ told
by Christ (‘Joshua’), who claims not to recognize himself at all in the
canonical Gospels. The procedure is reminiscent of the Gnostics, yet much of
what O’Murchu has Jesus say would be quite compatible with a theology based on
a more sober approach to the historical Jesus. Such a theology could follow
O’Murchu in imagining the significance of Christ in relation to the evolution
of the cosmos and of humankind and in relation to human struggles for justice
and liberation. These perspectives have indeed become indispensable for a
meaningful Christology today. O’Murchu sees God as revealing himself to all
people since the beginning, and he sets Jesus in a ‘relational matrix’ that
forbids us to isolate him as a kingly figure to be venerated. Again, this need
not be incompatible with a Christology that upholds the Johannine vision of the
Logos/Wisdom of God dwelling in history in a special way through and across the
Christ-event and that accepts Nicea and Chalcedon as important footnotes to
that vision. But the modality of the Incarnation is subtler than classical
Christology envisaged, and this subtlety leaves space for opening up to the findings
of historical Jesus research, the cosmic and liberationist perspectives, and
the problems of epistemology, hermeneutics, and articulation facing
Christological faith in today’s context.
O’Murchu has some scathing remarks about the
dragooning of Christology by Johannine piety: ‘Spiritual literature tends to
adopt John’s Gospel with excess fervor, claiming that Jesus was continually in
a deep prayerful relationship with the God he addressed and honored as Father.
Therefore the Christian life is considered to be first and foremost about the
spiritual, “personal” relationship with God, making engagement with the social,
political, or even interpersonal spheres largely redundant and irrelevant…
Respectfully, I acknowledge that this kind of spiritualized hope is what
sustains and nourishes millions of people in the poorer parts of the planet. It
helps them to retain some semblance of meaning and hope in the face of the
horrendous odds of oppression and injustice. The cruel irony is that it offers
no solution to their plight’ (p. 38).
On a more seasoned and sophisticated plane, James P.
Mackey’s Christianity and Creation (Crossroad, 2006) invokes John as an
authority for his account of the historical Jesus as a prophet of creation.
Mackey sees creation as the sole medium of revelation and like O’Murchu he
tends to see the Church’s excessive concern with the ‘divinity of Christ’ as
reflecting a human lust for power and control. Against this, I would accept
that the Easter experience to which the whole New Testament testifies provides
the basis for the high Christology of the Johannine Prologue, which in turn is
what is being defended in the conciliar doctrines. But this certainly needs to
be credibly contextualized, not only in reference to its sources in the experiences
underlying Scripture, but in the wider historical and evolutional context as we
currently read it. I fear that neither Mackey nor O’Murchu take anything like
due account of the exegetical and historical arguments. Indeed, I know no of no
systematic theologians who has followed through on the work begun so
promisingly by Schillebeeckx in 1974. The task of writing a Christology on the
basis of a thoroughly critical study of the historical Jesus, the New Testament
and the early development of dogma is too vast for a single individual and
would have to be a collective enterprise, something unimaginable in the current
fear-ridden culture of Catholic theology.
Sociologist Peter
Berger, in Questions of Faith: A Skeptical Affirmation of Christianity (Blackwell,
2003), represents the average liberal understanding of the theologically
literate Christian, in the wake of Schleiermacher and Bultmann. Accepting that
Jesus did not know or say he was God, Berger interprets subsequent church
doctrine in a mild and dehellenized way, leaving the identity of Jesus with the
Word of God rather obscure and ineffable. Zealots will dismiss this as a jaded
and out-of-date liberalism, but it seems to me that the effort to banish it
totally from the Church in the name of a full-shilling orthodoxy is
counter-productive. A revisioning of the Incarnation is needed for many
reasons: the results of historical scholarship, the problematization of
doctrine as expressed in the language of metaphysics, and the need to set
Christ in relation to the religions of humankind. If we take John 1.14 to mean
that the divine Word/Wisdom is revealed or enters our history in, through and
across the totality of the Christ-event, then the ultimate identity of Jesus
would indeed be ‘Word incarnate,’ but in a sense that could integrate much that
is valid in the naturalistic adoptionist or Nestorian perspectives while not
denying the mystery of the Incarnation. The phrase ‘Christ-event,’ though sometimes used in the writings of
Joseph Ratzinger, is regarded with suspicion by those who fear it allows a
Nestorian gap to emerge between the struggling and suffering Jesus (cf. Heb
2.10) and the divine Word that dwells in our midst through and across the total
unfolding of the story of Jesus; yet somehow or other the biblical
event-character of the Incarnation needs to be reinstated over against the
substance-language of classical dogma, though preserving the dynamic truth to
which dogma points. As theologians have pondered with fascination the
development from the lowly Jesus of Q to the exalted Christ of John,
they have been tempted to reopen negotiations with Adoptionism and Nestorianism
in order to demystify the Johannine picture and reroot it in a Christology from
below, in which Jesus is seen as growing into his role, or at least as growing
in awareness of his role. One would
then say that the Word is enfleshed primarily in the Paschal Mystery rather
than at the conception of Jesus.
We are fortunate that Benedict’s book does not have
magisterial status (though its central claims may later be spelt out in a
magisterial document). Even as a personal work it will provide an arsenal to
conservative students who are already inclined to resist the methods and
presuppositions of their professors of Scripture. Reading this book I had the
feeling that if Benedict was right, a whole century of New Testament
scholarship would have to be radically corrected and largely jettisoned. But it
would probably be more correct to see Benedict as respectful of
historical-critical exegesis, only emphasizing its inbuilt limits, as Raymond
Brown also did (though not, of course, with the same consequences). Catholic
exegetes are urged to be watchful in preserving a sense of these limits, and
not to deny truths or events which their methods cannot prove. As for
theologians, they must not be excessively bound by the constraints of exegesis.
They have access to Christ through the Church’s life and doctrine and must not
hesitate to recognize that this same Christ is speaking in Scripture. For most
readers the Pope’s strategy will be received as an immense liberation, a
recovery of the fullness of Christ in every page of Scripture. But for most
critical exegetes and theologians it is more likely to induce gnashing of teeth
and the sense of doors being locked.
I feel honored that you used my paper as a reference. This may be the first time it was actually used in a positive light :-) Thanks. How did you know about the site?
Posted by: HungerTruth | June 21, 2007 at 09:52 AM
Here is a review by Thomas Weinandy: http://www.nvjournal.net/images/stories/SampleArticles/7.1.pdf
"Benedict is rejecting the oblique Marcionism contained in some contemporary biblical scholarship, which limits the meaning of a particular Old Testament book solely to its historical context." His dismissal of Isaiah's hopes for world peace suggest rather that a spiritualizing and allegorizing take on the OT conduces to Marcionism.
"Benedict is not afraid to interweave passages from a variety of biblical books, after the manner of the Fathers of the Church, so as to develop a theological point, particularly concerning the person and work of Christ." I notice that many German theologians think they are doing a favor to Jews when they say, "we do not reject your scriptures as Marcion did, we recognize them as foretelling Christ, when suitably interpreted."
"It is precisely because Jesus’ divinity is so evident in John’s Gospel that many scholars have rejected its historicity." That is an outrageous claim.
Posted by: Spirit of Vatican II | December 04, 2012 at 10:32 PM