From "JESUS: An Experiment in Christology"
submitted to Mabiala Kenzo, Ph.D.
QUESTION OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS
Edward Schillebeeckx, OP (henceforward ES) states from the outset (44) that "an individual human being is the focal point of a series of interactive relations to the past, the future and his or her own present… All this is true of Jesus as well – which is why the starting-point for any Christology or Christian interpretation of Jesus is not simply Jesus of Nazareth, still less the Church's kerygma or creed. Rather it is the movement which Jesus himself started in the first century of our era; more particularly because this Jesus is known to us, historically speaking, only via that movement." This is the gist of ES's introduction to his study of how it is that people can know Jesus today.
"These Christian congregations put the emphasis not on 'Christ died', but on '… died for our sins', nay, more 'died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures' (1 Cor. 15:3); or again 'died, but was raised' (Rom. 8:34; 1 Cor. 15:3-4). To speak of Jesus in the language of faith is to express what the (indeed) historical Jesus had come to signify for his disciples and how this is anchored in Jesus himself. History and empirical knowledge (information, therefore) are present here – but present as interpreted in the language of faith (44).
ES states that the historical record left to us of Jesus is a record of an experience that was fundamentally one of faith; the early Church describes relations with Jesus as relations that changed lives radically and in fact transformed personal as well as social realities.
The only knowledge we possess of the Christ event reaches us via the concrete experience of the first local communities of Christians, who were sensible of a new life present in them, which they regarded as a gift of the Pneuma, the Spirit; an experience of new life in the embrace of the Spirit, but in remembrance of Jesus. That is why I said that the proto-Christian movement centred around Jesus is the inescapable and historically reliable point of departure. We cannot in isolation ask 'Who was Jesus of Nazareth?'… (45)
ES builds his study of Jesus around the experience of the proto-Christian community and attempts to avoid grasping on to ideas about Jesus that were to develop at later stages in the Church's history. This is an interesting approach and one that captures my attention immediately because it challenges me to, in a sense, see Jesus for who his contemporaries saw him to be. I have never been invited to such a reflection upon Jesus that really considers the man and his personal impact on those in direct personal encounter with him walking among us in the flesh.
…Even a historian, asking himself this question, cannot ignore the actual effect of the man – itself part and parcel of a historical process of tradition or a religious and cultural situation-context – on the one hand upon a group of contemporaries who became his disciples, and on the other hand on those who saw him in quite a different light, while evincing just as extraordinary a reaction – one that cost him his life… So the historian is bound to ask: What manner of man must this have been who could trigger such extreme reactions: on the one hand, unconditional faith, and on the other, aggressive disbelief? That the Romans, faced with the possibility of political agitation in an occupied territory, should have him crucified says much about our human record of injustice. That the Jewish authorities should hand him over is only explicable (leaving human passions aside) if from a Jewish viewpoint and by conventional standards Jesus had somehow acted in a fundamentally un-Jewish fashion where religion is concerned (giving himself out to be 'messiah' is not enough to account for this: there were a number of other messianic pretenders in those days, and yet they were not put to death for it)...(45)
ES here sets the stage for the reader's consideration of Jesus as a social figure who simply does not fit, and his not fitting in with the social order of the day created a certain political and religious necessity for his murder. Schillebeeckx is laying the groundwork for establishing how peculiar a character this Jesus is and how we need to take hold, today, of what his peculiarity really meant on the ground so to speak, and why/how it is that Jesus continues today to have some level of social impact around the world.
…On the other hand there were the disciples, who believed in Jesus, responded unreservedly and positively to him and did so in such a way that after his execution they could not articulate the experience that underlay their response except by reaching out for the most varied, most evocative, most lofty religious ideas and codewords available in the Jewish and Gentile worlds: son of man, eschatological prophet, messiah or Christ, 'son of God' (in both Jewish and its Hellenistic meaning), 'lord' (the Jewish mar and Hellenistic kyrios), and so forth – evocative titles, some of which were full of meaning for Jewish Christians but were simply unintelligible to Christians from the Gentile world (for instance 'son of man; messiah), reason enough for them to disappear from the Greek-speaking churches (son of man, for example) or lose all depth of meaning (45-46).
The early Christians' common faith experience prompted them to choose the most lofty terms by which to refer to Jesus "to be able to some degree express in words their past and present experience with Jesus and arising from him (46)." A real encounter with Jesus persists in the lives of individuals in the community from generation to generation although it is an experience of this same Jesus with new 'particulars' personal to each individual who has this encounter in his or her own cultural/historical context. This is what would likely be deemed today 'contextual theology'.
It is interesting to notice the structure of this community experience, which itself links the 'new life' of the local congregation, present in virtue of the Spirit, with Jesus of Nazareth. Pneuma and anamnesis, Spirit and recollection of Jesus, are experienced as a single reality… John's gospel thematizes the link between Pneuma and anamnesis (recollection or remembrance)… when it makes the Lord say that the Spirit when he comes will bring all things to their remembrance (Jn. 14:26; 15:26; 16:13-14). The local congregation's pneumatic experiences are intrinsically bound up with the memoria Jesu. There is an organic connection between the present, the here-and-now of the communal experiences (Pneuma), and the Jesus 'past' (recollection) (46-47).
ES suggests that it is Scripture that today in fact mediates to us the clearest image of who Jesus was to his contemporaries because of its varied and multifaceted accounts of the man, but that too creates a problem. The problem faced by the Christian today when reading Scripture is that clearly the Jesus there represented is Jesus as interpreted by the writer. There are in Scripture as many faces of Jesus as there are authors, notwithstanding the inherent correspondences between the various accounts given of his life and works.
The experience of the first Christian congregations, inseparably associated with first-hand contact with Jesus and later, through the memoria Jesu, with a continuing fellowship with the Lord, is therefore the matrix of the New Testament as a written text. And thanks to that, the earliest Christian congregations, with their experience, are historically accessible to us; they afford, at the historical level, the most reliable access to Jesus of Nazareth. What the historical Jesus has left us is not in the first instance a kind of résumé or bits and pieces of preaching about God's approaching dominion, nor a kerygma or string of verba et facta ipsissima, that is, a pure record of precisely what he did as a historical individual or a number of directives and wise sayings that can fairly certainly be picked out from the Gospels. What he did leave – only through what he was, did and had said, simply through his activities as this particular human being – was a movement, a living fellowship of believers who had become conscious of being the new people of God, the eschatological 'gathering' of God – not a 'sacred remnant' but the firstborn of the gathering together of all Israel, and eventually of all human kind: an eschatological liberation movement for bringing together all people, bringing them together in unity. Universal shalom שָׁלוֹם (47-48).
Historical context and culture are today acknowledged as bearing significant influence upon individual and/or communal understanding of events and experiences. Certainly then the first followers of Jesus and their perceptions of him were affected by their own cultural and historical contexts;
"Awareness of this fact that every religion, the Christian one included, is conditioned by cultural-cum-historical factors substantially relativises the absolute character of values as currently apprehended… So the Christian's response to the question of Christian identity can never be a total identification with the culture – even the religious culture – which surrounds him and in which he participates; nor indeed can the faith of the Christian be identified completely with the most official articulations of it, although the mystery of faith which they enshrine is validly and truly expressed in them. Because of this tension between the mystery of faith and its articulation, conditioned by the religious culture, there is need not only for a historical approach to dogma and a hermeneutic evaluation of primitive Christianity and its subsequent development, but also for sociological enquiry that will size up ideologies in a critical spirit… Every religious movement is ipso facto something inextricably involved in a historical and cultural process. The recurrent question here is: Does it preserve a critical, creative tension vis-à-vis this, its own socio-cultural world? This may be ascertained by tracking down the particular Christian variant through which it participates in the movements of the whole culture, or else from the absence of such a variant" (49)…
"We can see this tension present in the earliest belief- and creed-structure of the New Testament. From all the complexes of tradition merging together there, however diverse their origins might be, it becomes evident that the first Christians found salvation in Jesus – salvation that was conclusive and was imparted by God. In the light of this experience they named that saving reality the Christ, the son of man, the Lord, and so forth. Thus they applied certain key concepts already current in their religious culture to Jesus, concepts which were 'vacant', so to speak, and acquired their Christian meaning only when applied to him (49-50)…".
Jesus being understood as the "very essence of final salvation" was given these already existent titles but the Christian community now attributed new meaning to these names "filling them out with recollections of his life and death here on earth" (50)…
It must be said, therefore, that the criterion for the designation or identification of Jesus in the New Testament was not the meaning already attached to the existing title, but Jesus himself" [within the context of peoples' daily lived experience of Him]. "It is the disciples' way of expressing their conviction that in him they had found their final salvation; and they do it in rather strange conceptual terms so as to put into words the peculiar nature of it (50)."
Jesus as a man lived in a particular social, cultural, religious, linguistic, political, etc. context and the record of his life that we have in the Gospels, even the words chosen to communicate these stories about his life are charged with the reality of the context in which the authors wrote; take note of the fact that there are as many Christologies in the New Testament as there are authors who gave an account of Jesus' life. This fact cannot under any circumstances be ignored by the modern reader or theologian which begs the question, what is a reliable account of the life of Jesus if there exists such a thing (51)? There is a tension, who is the actual historical figure of Christ as compared with the figure described to us in various ways in the Scriptures? The answer to this question of the plurality of Christ images we have received is twofold:
a) On the one hand [they derive from] the various religious and cultural circumstances of those who became Christians and
b) on the other hand, the amazing fascination exerted in all sorts of ways upon his disciples by Jesus' person, life, message, and death (51)."
… If we ask what is meant by the 'eschatological salvation' given us by the crucified-and-risen One, to give substance and content to this we have to point to Jesus of Nazareth himself, his person and his whole career and course of action up to and including his death (52)."
That having been stated, ES asserts that in all of the New Testament there is "no trace… of a non-dogmatic representation of Jesus anywhere… Jesus is to be found there only as the subject of confession on the part of Christians" thus, in the face of such a diversity of interpretations of the person of Jesus ES asks "What is the constant factor that will create unity within this variegated whole?" The New Testament presents diverse Christologies; the 'gospel within the gospel' concept does not work due to confessional/denominationally based interpretations, etc.; there's no certainty that relying upon 'the oldest tradition' to come down to us regarding Jesus' life is the most accurate source of witness because, amongst other things, there is no way to ascertain which traditions are, in fact, oldest let alone their reliability; we can derive very little from the Gospels about Jesus' inner life and psychology so that is not a reliable source of information; Jesus' sayings and acts in Scripture are the result of selective choice on the part of authors so that is not a complete image of him; finally, "No constant unitive factor is provided by credal statements and homologues in the Bible [either]. How quickly [for example] the expression 'son of man' disappears, does it not? It does not turn up in a credal affirmation anywhere (55)."
Schillebeeckx's final assertion regarding the best representation of Jesus with which we are left in the world today is "the Christian movement itself" (56):
In other words a Christian oneness of experience which does indeed take its unity from its pointing to the one figure of Jesus, while nonetheless being pluriform in its verbal expressions or articulation. 'You yourselves', Paul writes to the Christians at Corinth, 'are… an open letter from Christ – written not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts' (2 Cor. 3:2-3). By unity of experience I mean not an individual or individualistic religious experience of Jesus… but a community experience, in the sense of an ecclesial or collective experience which obliges people to define the ultimate meaning and purport of their lives by reference to Jesus of Nazareth or, to put it in traditional and equally proper terms, which causes people to interpret Jesus' life as the definitive or eschatological activity of God in history for the salvation or deliverance of men and women. The constant factor here is that particular groups of people find final salvation imparted by God in Jesus of Nazareth (56).
As Canadian Christian philosopher and media expert Marshall McLuhan[1] put it, "The medium is the message", and that could not be more true according to Edward Schillebeeckx; who Jesus was then is who Jesus is now and we see the reality of who He is in the life of the people of God in the context in which they live out that relationship with Him today:
That is to say, one cannot formalize a kerygma, for instance, 'Jesus is Lord'. One has to make Jesus the prescriptive, determining factor in one's life in accordance with changing situations, cultural, social, ecclesial; and in that context one will proceed to live out, experience and put into words what 'making Jesus the determining factor' really entails in this precise moment (56).
In other words the Scriptural teaching that "Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever", seems to suggest to Schillebeeckx that clinging to ideas or expressions of who and what He was to past generations and in specific cultural/social circumstances does not necessarily communicate the reality of who Jesus IS for us now, in this moment, in our own personal context/cultural circumstances. The People of God need room to move and breathe, so to speak, in order to be able to articulate their own encounter with the Living Jesus today. The Christian person's encounter with Jesus in ancient Israel was concrete, real, and true to his/her context, the Christian's encounter with Jesus today must be equally concrete, real, and true to his/her context. Ultimately ES seems to be arguing that there is no 'historical Jesus' to hold on to, and that the Jesus who matters is the Jesus we can know in the here and now while looking to what our brothers and sisters in Christ have left us as a valuable, but not in all cases 'normative', experience of Jesus. This view, by extension, leads to questions regarding the authority or usefulness of Scripture across generations of believers. To this ES responds that the New Testament provides norms for Christian life because it remains the constant witness the Church has to the experience of Jesus by the first believers and represents a very wide range of encounters that give us examples today of the breadth of experience there can be amongst believers in their various contexts (58-59). By this Schillebeeckx seems to be suggesting that the New Testament is authoritative as God's Word for the guidance of the Church, BUT the New Testament being a text written by the first believers is a text from the believing community and thus has its authority not over the people of God, but from within the people of God thus making the Church's experience of Jesus almost as authoritative a revelation of who Jesus is as the Bible; this sounds like the Catholic juxtaposition of "Scripture and Sacred Tradition".
[1] Please see: Marshall McLuhan Biography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#Life_and_career .