Ratzinger's Jesus of Nazareth: A review by Lode Wostyn

Review Article: 
Jesus of Nazareth

Pope Benedict XVI and Joseph Ratzinger.
Jesus of Nazareth. NY: Doubleday, 2007.

by Lode Wostyn

Book reviews of Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth are written with caution and reverence. This is a book written by the Pope! Yet, Pope Benedict himself tells his readers, “This book is in no way an exercise of magisterium, but solely an expression of my personal search ‘for the face of the Lord.’ Everyone is free, then, to contradict me. I would only ask my readers for that initial goodwill without which there can be no understanding” (xxiii-xxiv). My goodwill made me buy and read the book. In this same spirit, I do not intend to contradict the book, but to situate it within the development of Christology after Vatican II. I have described this development in other studies; hence, I decided to work with a broad outline, without repeating the references mentioned in them.1 In my review, I will use the name Ratzinger because it is suggested in the way we have to treat the book: “not as an exercise of magisterium but as a personal search.”

Christology developed in three different historical and cultural contexts. A first stage can be found in the New Testament, which was written in the Jewish-Christian context. The experience of salvation in Israel was historical and theocentric. Salvation meant a piece of land, a happy family, health, wisdom, long life, life in the beyond—all given by Yahweh the compassionate Father who was present in their history, offering them these gifts of life and happiness. Jesus lived in a period of suffering and oppression in which the coming of a Messiah and the end time was a prevailing perspective. The disciples, experiencing the gifts of salvation in Jesus’ ministry and preaching, identified him as a prophet, perhaps, the prophet of the end time. This process of identification went on in the early Church, using the many metaphors of their religious culture that expressed the ongoing experience of salvation in Jesus, now recognized in faith as being present in their communities through the Spirit. We find a plurality of images and paradigmatic figures of their ancestry: Jesus as the New Moses or Elijah, the Son of David, the Son of Man, the Son of God, the Lord, Word, Wisdom, Spirit, and so on. All these figures and metaphors attempted to express how God brought definitive, final salvation to human beings in Jesus. Hence, Jesus was the Son, the Lord, the Word, God’s final salvific gift to us. Moreover, these images were framed within the cosmology of that time: Jesus, the Word, was descending, entering into the netherworld, ascending, enthroned, and expected to appear in the end time, which was very near.

When Christianity conquered the Greco-Roman world, we enter into a second stage. Jesus, the Christ, could only be meaningful if he addressed the search for salvation of the Greeks and Romans, living in a society that was disintegrating. The understanding of salvation remained theocentric, but was now strongly influenced by Neo-Platonic philosophical thinking. Salvation meant to distance oneself from the passing world and enter into the world of wisdom, the world of the Divine. Christians believed that the true way towards divinization was not philosophy, but faith in Jesus Christ. The Fathers of the Church developed the famous exchange theory: God became human in order to deify us. Jesus was divine; hence, he could divinize. He was human so he could divinize human beings. Jesus was now identified, not in metaphors, but in the philosophical terms of ousia, hypostasis, physis, and prosopon. The struggle of minds among the Church Fathers led to the definitions of the Christological councils that became normative for the Church in subsequent centuries. The key term became homoousios, Jesus is consubstantial, “one in being with the Father,” a creedal affirmation that made it difficult to affirm at the same time Jesus’ full humanity. The Nicene Creed, using biblical language but also the philosophical language of being, was furthermore formulated in the same cosmology that we find in the Bible: an above and a below, a God descending and ascending.

The Enlightenment, Modernism, followed by Post-Modernism in our present-day global village, brought along a radical change in our understanding of salvation. We returned to a historical understanding of salvation, but now in anthropocentric terms. Salvation was something brought about by human beings in their struggle for emancipation and in their conquest to become masters of the earth through science and technology. The reaction of the Christian churches against this secular understanding of salvation was a counter-offensive: a defense against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Liberalism, Marxism, Modernism, evolutionary thinking, and so on. The Nicene understanding of Jesus Christ, a divine being becoming human and leading us to the supernatural, to divinization, remained the rule. The world of the Church and the supernatural, and the world of human societies and nature, became two separate entities.

Some Protestant exegetes and theologians took an alternative road and went in search to meet the critical reason of Modernity and of the secular world. They developed, among others, the tools to read the Bible in a new way—as God’s word expressed in human, historical, and cultural words. Christology entered into a third stage, often called “a Christology-from-below.” With the tools of historical-critical exegesis, they went in search of the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth who, in their view, totally disappeared in scholastic theological treatises. The Roman Catholic Church declared this Jesus search off-limits for Catholic theologians. Its position, however, changed at the time of Vatican II, which decided to meet the modern secular world in its most daring document, Gaudium et spes. After the Council, new “Christologies-from-below” were written,2 relying on the work of historical-critical exegesis.3 In these christologies, we meet again the man of Nazareth, a Jewish mystic who, in his ministry of healing and exorcisms, teaching, political prophecy, and community-building, brought people back to the source of everything, a compassionate Abba (Daddy) who cares for everybody, especially for the poorest of the poor. Jesus’ dream of the coming of God’s Kingdom was brutally interrupted by his execution, but his community carried on and gradually recognized the unique presence of God in the life of their master. The greater God of Israel was the greatest because of his love for the little ones, the poor. He disappeared (kenosis) in the lives of these poor people, being with them, caring, making them whole. This disappearing act of a God of surprises came to its culminating point in the life and ministry of Jesus. God totally disappeared in an ordinary human being, in the prophet of Nazareth who became a unique expression of a God-present-among-us. The underlying cosmology of this Christology sees God present in creation itself. God is the totally Other and yet the God near and within the expanding cosmos in which He/She is the unifying spirit, the unifying nous (Teilhard de Chardin). This nearness was fully revealed in the man of Nazareth whom Christians now honor as the Cosmic Christ.

I need this short sketch of the three Christological projects in the history of Christianity—the Jewish-Christian, the Greco-Roman-Scholastic, and the contemporary historical-experiential christologies—to place Ratzinger’s “personal search for the face of the Lord” in the wider context of the history of theology. Ratzinger’s reflection is clearly situated within the Greco-Roman and Scholastic world, with a great love of the allegorical  and anagogical4  meditations of the Church Fathers. His doctrinal reference point is the history of the Christological Councils, with a predilection for Nicea (A.D. 325). His search results in some inspiring meditations on particular aspects of Jesus’ ministry: the temptations, the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord’s Prayer, the Parables, and others. The reader is, however, already told in the foreword, and then in the succeeding chapters with constantly increasing energy, that Jesus was not an ordinary human being. There is only one right way to read the New Testament: we have to take as starting point the conviction of faith “that, as man, he [Jesus] truly was God [read, in being], and that he communicated his real identity as a divine Being, first veiled in parables, but then with increasing clarity” (xxiii). In what follows, I quote a few more passages from Ratzinger’s Jesus of Nazareth to illustrate the basic faith option that determines his approach to Christology.

“Critical scholarship rightly asks the question: What happened during those twenty years after Jesus’ crucifixion? Where did this Christology come from? … Isn’t it more logical, even historically speaking, to assume that the greatness came at the beginning, and that the figure of Jesus really did explode all existing categories and could only be understood in the light of the mystery of God?” (xxii) “Jesus’ teaching is not product of human learning, of whatever kind. It is originally from immediate contact with the Father. … It is the Son’s word” (7). At Jesus’ baptism, “the mystery of the Trinitarian God is beginning to emerge” (23). “God is always at the center of the discussions yet precisely because Jesus himself is God—the Son—his entire preaching (about the Kingdom) is a message about the mystery of his person” (63). “The Beatitudes present a sort of veiled interior biography of Jesus, a kind of portrait of his figure” (74). “The Sermon of the Mount is a hidden Christology … behind it stands the figure of Christ, the man who is God” (99). Jesus’ preaching of the Torah in the Synoptics and the Johannine recognition that Jesus is the Word say nothing different. “The Jesus of the fourth Gospel and the Jesus of the Synoptics is one and the same: the true ‘historical’ Jesus” (111). The Our Father uses “the word our. Jesus alone was fully entitled to say ‘my Father’” (140). “We have, then, good grounds for interpreting all the parables as hidden and multilayered invitations of faith in Jesus as ‘the Kingdom of God in person’” (188). They depict Jesus’ “own path, the outcome of which he already knows” (189). Jesus’ condemnation is only understandable if “something dramatic must have been said and done. … This dramatic element [was] the magnitude of Jesus’ claim … he himself is God’s primordial Word” (324-325; see also 331). “Of course, Jesus’ prayer is different from the prayer of a creature: it is the dialogue of love within God himself—the dialogue that God is” (344). In the “I am” statements, “we have a clear statement of Jesus’ claim to a totally unique mode of being which transcends human categories” (350). This “I am” saying led to the First Council of Nicea (A.D. 325), which “adopted the word consubstantial (in Greekhomoousios). This term did not Hellenize the faith … it captured in a stable formula exactly what had emerged as incomparably new and different in Jesus’ way of speaking with the Father” (355).

The reader of these quotations must conclude that Ratzinger opts for a high “Christology-from-above,” starting from an unwavering declaration of faith that Jesus isGod, one-in-being with the Father. This Jesus kept his true identity veiled but gradually, during his ministry, he became the subject of his own teaching. The Law, the Beatitudes, the Kingdom of God, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Parables were in fact messages that revealed his identity as God’s word, God’s Son, “I am.”

I added the qualifier “high” to “Christology-from-above” because Ratzinger’s christology goes beyond the Councils of Nicea-Chalcedon by simply erasing all the disagreements and ambiguities that appeared during these Councils. He presents the homoousios of Nicea as somehow the norm, perfectly expressing what Peter said in his confession. “In the Nicene Creed, the Church joins Peter in confessing to Jesus ever anew: ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God’ (Mt 16:16)” (355). A historical study of the councils of the 4th-5th centuries reveals, however, that the Arian understanding of Jesus as a “minor God” was not the only “heresy” to be eradicated, something that was attempted in the Council of Nicea (A.D. 325) and Constantinople (A.D. 381). Docetism, seeing Jesus-God in “the appearance” of a human, was a more formidable “enemy” to be conquered. Nestorius tried to resist Docetism but the not-so-saintly Cyril of Alexandria got him exiled. In the meanwhile, the Alexandrian defenders of a docetist faith clobbered down some pious Nestorian monks to death during the Robbers’ Council of Ephesus (A.D. 449). In the later tradition, a hidden Docetism was easily accommodated while the statement that “Jesus was a human being like us” caused some discomfort among the defenders of orthodoxy. It apparently continues to cause dismay because some of the theologians who started their Christology-from-below, from the historical man of Nazareth, were recently investigated and/or sanctioned by Rome, among them, Edward Schillebeeckx, Roger Haight, and Jon Sobrino.

My “initial goodwill” disappeared while reading Jesus of Nazareth. The reasons for my uneasiness are of course “subjective.” We all listen and read books using particular “eyeglasses.” Using these eyeglasses is necessary to see, yet we had better be aware that they could partly impair our view. I gradually found my home in a “Christology-from-below,” discovering the fascinating teacher of Nazareth with the tools of critical-historical exegesis. He became the master of my life. I read with these “eyeglasses” Ratzinger’s Jesus of Nazareth. It failed to capture my interest for the following three reasons.

First, on the level of meaning, I felt bad because Ratzinger apparently tried to steal my master, Jesus of Nazareth, by sending him to the higher spheres of the Divine. Nobody of us can follow an angel. It becomes still more difficult if we are supposed to follow the second Person of the Trinity. The Jesus of Ratzinger’s book is a God appearing on the human scene to teach humans the right doctrines about his person, one-in-Being with God. It may be dogmatically correct, but I am more interested in the “glutton and drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners” (Mt 11:19), a compassionate teacher caring for the poor and the nobodies in his society, telling them that God cares for them. I already briefly described the historical reconstruction of the teacher and miracle worker of Nazareth in today’s “Christology-from-below.” Exegetes have done the patient work of bringing out the historical remembrances of Jesus, embedded in the faith proclamation (kerygma) of the New Testament. Among these studies is the three-volume work of John Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (1991, 1994, 2001). Joseph Ratzinger has apparently little trust in this work of “liberal scholarship” (23), which is “to be seen as more akin to a ‘Jesus novel’ than as an actual interpretation of texts” (24). A historical-critical scholarship only succeeds in giving us an “obscured and blurred” figure of Christ in reconstructions that are “much more like photographs of their authors and the ideals they hold” (xii). I did not know that this critique formulated by Albert Schweitzer in 1906 also applies to post-Vatican II scholarship. Ratzinger does not quote Schweitzer. He refers to Schnackenburg, who “does clearly throw into relief the decisive point, which he regards as the genuinely historical insight: Jesus’ relatedness to God and his closeness to God. Without anchoring in God, the person of Jesus remains shadowy, unreal, and unexplainable” (xiii-xiv). According to Ratzinger, Schnackenburg had to lose his faith in scientific historical research to make such a statement. Schillebeeckx, however, makes exactly the same statement, but based on historical research: “Trying to delete the special ‘relation to God’ from the life of Jesus at once destroys his message and the whole point of his way of living: it amounts to denying the historical reality, ‘Jesus of Nazareth,’ and turns him into an ‘unhistorical,’ mythical or symbolic being, a ‘non-Jesus’.”5 Theologians, following the hermeneutical methodology of critical-historical scholarship, are not exactly unbelievers. They rediscovered the historical figure, Jesus of Nazareth, in a patient search that lasted two centuries. Ratzinger, however, is not convinced. Critical-historical scholarship only offers “a blurred and obscured picture of Jesus.” Nevertheless, what has Ratzinger’s “Christological hermeneutic” to offer? He states that “he applies new methodological insights that allow us to offer a properly theological interpretation of the Bible” (xxiii). What these hermeneutical insights are is not clear and the resulting picture of Jesus is also rather “obscured and blurred.” He offers to the reader the mysterious dogmatic “picture,” produced by the Christological Councils that were held three hundred and more years after Jesus’ death. How did Ratzinger arrive at such a picture? He refers to “American scholars” who developed a project of “canonical exegesis” (xviii). Who they are and what this implies is not explained but we are told to search for “a deeper value” (xvii), “for dimensions of the word that the old doctrine of the fourfold sense of Scripture pinpointed with remarkable accuracy” (xx).6 I am afraid that the three “spiritual senses” of Scripture mentioned in the CCC will remain obscure and mysterious without the “literal sense,” disclosed to us “by following the rules of sound interpretation.”7

My second critique is exactly this loss of the “literal sense” of the New Testament texts. Ratzinger proposes a “Christological hermeneutic” which de facto means that he constantly reads “the one-in-being” of Nicea into the ministry and teachings of Jesus (xix). This magic of “the Christological hermeneutic” constantly robs the texts of its riches, expressed with the linguistic tools of Jewish-religious culture. The temptations, the preaching of the Kingdom of God, the Lord’s Prayer, and the message of the parables are stories and teachings that are situated and get their meaning within the challenges of the ordinary life of the peasant people of Galilee. Ratzinger reduces this story-telling faith to proofs of Jesus’ divine nature. The baptism of Jesus ultimately becomes a Jesus who “loaded the burden of all mankind’s guilt upon his shoulders; he bore it into the depths of the Jordan” (18). The temptations answer the question: “What has he [Jesus] brought? The answer is simple: God” (44). This is “the great question that will be with us throughout the entire book” (44). My question is a different one: What kind of God did Jesus bring? Jesus answered this question in healings, parables, prophetic-political actions, community experiences, and dealing with the poor, women, and children. The rich scriptural painting of my master-story-teller Jesus gets lost, however, because of Ratzinger’s only focus. Only one question has to be answered: Jesus is God, and Jesus answered this question for us.

The holder of the Petrine ministry cannot resist adding some apologetics, adapting scripture texts to fit his purpose. The reading of Mk 3:13-19 leads to the conclusion that “he made Twelve,” which means that “the Evangelist takes up the Old Testament terminology for appointment to the priesthood (cf. Kings 12:31; 13:33) and thus characterizes the apostolic office as a priestly ministry” (171). Ratzinger does not mention that the word “apostle” is a Lucan creation that does not appear in the oldest manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel. “Women were also disciples of Jesus but they cannot have the tasks of the Twelve. The tasks assigned to each group are quite different” (181).8 In the same way, Ratzinger uses the Matthean text, reporting the Confession of Peter (Mt 16:13-20), as a text proving the primacy, “attested by the whole spectrum of the tradition in all of its diverse strands” (297). What renders this confession so special, Ratzinger contends, is that Peter makes, not a salvation-historical confession, but an ontological one. Exegetes who think that the Biblical language of metaphors must be read in a salvation-historical perspective must be wrong. The Nicene Creed does nothing else than “to join Peter in his confession of Jesus’ Godhead, already formulated in ontological terms” (355). The text of Matthew 18:15-20, entrusting “the power to bind and to loose” not only to Peter, but also to the whole “assembly” (Church) is not under consideration. The long speeches of John, creations of the Johannine community, become in the exegesis of Ratzinger an exact report of Jesus’ words in which he “ontologically” identifies with the Father. Ratzinger quotes the “I am” (Jn 8:58), but fails to continue to read John’s Gospel. The one who said, “The Father and I are one” (10:30) also stated, “The Father is greater than I” (14:28). A salvation-historical language, using metaphors, can explain such contradictory statements. John 14:28 is heresy from an ontological perspective; hence, it does not appear in Ratzinger’s “Christological hermeneutics.”

More examples of apologetics can be found. They go hand and hand with Ratzinger’s critique of “the adversary,” initially the exegetes, but in final instance the whole Western world. This is the third point where I disagree with Jesus of Nazareth. Ratzinger develops his “apologetics” by depicting the “adversary” in his own terms. This is a normal apologetic procedure, so often used by the Roman-Catholic Church. An apologist draws up a picture of an author or doctrine under scrutiny, and then slaughters “the infidel.” We are no longer in the time of the Inquisition, so nobody gets slaughtered. But the way exegetes, “liberal” theologians, and the modern Western world as a whole are depicted in Ratzinger’s book is rather unfair.

We start with the exegetes and the liberal theologians-historians. How can somebody state that “the historical-critical method remains indispensable” (xv) and yet, blame it at the same time for letting the “historical Jesus and the Christ-of-faith fall apart” (xi)? We already quoted some texts describing the result of “scholarly erudition” as a “Jesus novel” (24). I do not believe that it is the arrogance of scholarly erudition that separated the historical Jesus and the Christ-of-faith, but the dualistic a priori of Ratzinger’s “Christological hermeneutics.” The historical Jesus and the Christ-of-faith must fall apart because they belong to two different domains which traditional Scholastic theology called the natural and the supernatural. “Because it is a historical method, it presupposes the uniformity of the context within which the events of history unfold. It must [sic] therefore treat the biblical words it investigates as human words. On painstaking reflection, it can intuit something of the ‘deeper value,’ … ‘a higher dimension’ and open up the method to self-transcendence. But its specific object is the human word as human” (xvii). Exegetes are on the natural-historical level; Ratzinger’s “Christological hermeneutic” is on the supernatural level of faith. “It is not the scripture experts, those who are professionally concerned with God, who recognize him (Jesus); they are too caught up in the intricacies of their detailed knowledge” (342). What is needed is the foolishness of faith, “by becoming a fool, by being ‘a little one,’ through which we are opened up for the will, and so for the knowledge, of God” (342). It is certainly not astonishing that erudite Scripture scholars and Christological-hermeneutical foolish believers do not meet, but could it not be that erudite exegetes are also believers, and that they believe that God’s word is to be found in human, historical words? At the time of Vatican II, guided by the work of Teilhard de Chardin, Karl Rahner, and Henri de Lubac, theologians abandoned the dualistic scheme of the natural and the supernatural and took a more optimistic view of the world and the human condition. As humans, we are part of an “original blessing”—God’s creation and our world which is entrusted to us. We are challenged and have the task to make it into a home good to live in. Our caring and passionate God is present in this world for all those who are able to read the “signs of the times” in our world of humans, for all those who reach out to the neighbor in loving kindness.

Ratzinger places the exegetes at the wrong side of the divide, in the realm of history and the “natural” world. This world does not make it in his hermeneutics. In Chapter Two (the Temptations of Jesus and some other passages), he also gives a description of the modern Western world. This world does not make it either! “The Marxist experiment” to arrive at a more just world “came to nothing” (33). But the West did not do better. The aid it gave to the Third World are “stones in place of bread.” The issue is the primacy of God, “but the West not only has left God out of the picture, but has driven men away from God” (33). “A secularist interpretation of the idea of the Kingdom gained considerable ground … ‘Kingdom,’ in this interpretation, is simply the name for a world governed by peace, justice, and the conservation of creation. … This is supposedly the real task of the religions: to work together for the ‘Kingdom.’ … On close examination, though, it seems suspicious. Who is to say what justice is? … This whole project proves the utopian dreaming without real content. … The main thing that leaps out is that God has disappeared; man is the only actor on the stage. … When Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of God, he is quite simply proclaiming God. … He is telling us: ‘God exists’ and ‘God is really God’” (53-55). A right idea of the Kingdom and salvation is only possible for those who know Christ (see 92). The people of the West think that they brought the charity and justice of the Kingdom to the peoples of Africa. We have to see that “our lifestyle … has plundered them and continue to do so. This is true above all in the sense that we have wounded their souls. Instead of giving them God, the God who has come close to us in Christ, which would have integrated and brought to completion all that is precious and great in their tradition, we give them the cynicism of a world without God” (198). The reader of this diatribe against the West may be confused. Who are caught in “utopian dreaming without content?” Are they those from the West who bring aid, peace, and justice, or those who simply proclaim God? The missionary proclamation of God (in Africa) has apparently not been successful. Why? Is it because the missionaries only offered charity? And was their charity accompanied “by the cynicism of a world without God”?

“The common practice today is to measure the Bible against the so-called modern worldview, whose fundamental dogma is that God cannot act in history—that everything to do with God is to be relegated to the domain of subjectivity” (35). “The debate about valid biblical interpretation is decided by the picture we form of Christ: Is he, who remained without worldly power, really the Son of God?” (36). Ratzinger has already decided. But is his “dogmatic” decision the only one that avoids subjectivity? What about the different pictures of the authors of the four Gospels? Why are they different? Are they also subjective? And do we not have to add another question: are these pictures salvific and liberating? For Ratzinger, the picture of Jesus will only escape subjectivity and will remain salvific and liberating if it transcends politics. Christology has nothing to do with worldly politics. Exegetes contend that the issue of the condemnation of Jesus by the Sanhedrin was his critique of the Law and the Temple, two institutions that were in Jesus’ time not only religious, but also political institutions and hence the power base of the priest-rulers of the people. No! These exegetes did not get it. The issue for the Jews was: is Jesus God, yes or no? Such a claim of Jesus, that he was God, was unacceptable for the Jews. They opted for “Jesus Barabbas,” the man who would offer freedom through armed struggle, and hence they failed to recognize in faith the real message of Jesus: revealing himself as the one to come, knowing already the outcome. Jesus’ mystery was being God, a God who “suffered outside the walls” (Heb 13:12) and, stretched naked on the cross, was delivered over for our redemption (see 40-41, 189, 216-217). God’s sign for man [sic] is the Son of Man; it is Jesus himself and his Paschal mystery, but the modern world has refused to recognize our savior. By focusing on the historical Jesus and the so-called offer of human liberation, our Western world failed to see that there is only one Jesus: “the Christ of faith,” God himself (see xi, xxii-xxiii, 217).

We have to come to a conclusion. The reading of Ratzinger’s Jesus of Nazareth, a book that should have carried the title Jesus Christ, was for me a disappointing experience. What are the reasons? First, my teacher and master, the man of Nazareth, disappears; second, the rich tapestry of miracle stories, healings, parables, community experiences, meals, reaching out to the poor and so on in the Synoptic Gospels and John get reduced to a doctrinal teaching about Jesus’ true identity as one-in-being with the Father. Third, my world, with its light and shadow, in which I am challenged to become fully human with others, becomes a paradise of unbelievers, doomed to absolute failure. Its scholars are so secularized that they can no longer “intuit something of the ‘deeper value’ the word contains” (xvii).

I am disappointed, but does Ratzinger’s “Christological faith hermeneutics, which sees Jesus Christ as the key to the whole and learns from him to understand the Bible as a unity” (xix) also not open some new perspectives? I mentioned earlier some inspiring meditations. They may attract Christians who are still at home in the world of allegories and divine miraculous interventions. They did not captivate me because I feel that the dogmatic conclusions in each chapter kill the few sparks of imagination contained in these meditations and allegorical elaborations. In my textbook on Jesus of Nazareth, I describe the Scholastic Christology of the past as docetic, spiritualizing, and traditional.9 These three characteristics also apply to Ratzinger’s book. It is docetic. The humanity of Jesus is, of course, not denied, but can hardly be taken seriously. What human being is expected to teach that he is God? It is spiritualizing. The author is not interested in Jesus being a historical person. He is the teacher belonging to another realm, the realm of God, inviting his disciples to discover in faith the mystery of his Trinitarian life. It is finally traditional. Ratzinger’s main concern seems to be affirming the only ultimate norm of all Christology, the homoousios of Nicea.

I learned to meet another Jesus, the prophet of Nazareth who belonged to the human community and struggled to set people free from the many sins that enslaved them, personal and structural. I would like to hear Jesus’ prophetic words again, with all their untamed incisiveness, challenging Christians to become people in the world of today, bringing hope and loving kindness to their families, communities, societies, and Church. This may be a way through which Jesus may become interesting once more. I believe that Jesus can still be interesting and challenging in our secularized global world when we meet Christian disciples, living Jesus’ liberating message of the coming Kingdom, a Kingdom that is already happening now. It is only in the context of discipleship, of a liberating praxis, that something “more” can be said: as Christians, we believe that Jesus’ humanity reveals a most humane God. In Jesus’ full humanity, we experience God’s very being, we can intuit what divinity is really like. Jesus belongs to God. Ratzinger invites us to faith in Jesus, the Christ, within a Scholastic framework that is indeed still a home for many Roman Catholic Christians. Schillebeeckx and others try to express that same faith in other words, making sure that Jesus’ full humanity remains the reference point, leading to this other dimension: Jesus is the parable of God. Because he belongs to us, he is the paradigm of humanity. Jesus is not a Scholastic theologian who taught us the existence and characteristics of his divine nature, three-in-one. Jesus is a parable-teller, pointing to the greatest story-teller of all, his Abba, the great pedagogue of creation and incarnation, who gave us a beautiful planet, many wise men and women, prophets and kings, and finally the man of Nazareth, as teachers leading us into the mystery. It is in the paradigm of the humanity of these holy men and women, and finally of Jesus’ humanity, that we can discover in faith a caring, forgiving, and compassionate God, present on our beautiful planet, traveling with us, surrounded and encompassed by an ever-expanding universe.

Lode L. Wostyn, cicm



NOTES

1.   Doing Christology (Quezon City: Claretian Publications, 1989), with José M. De Mesa; Believing Unto Discipleship: Jesus of Nazareth, Workbook 2, St. Louis University, Baguio City (Quezon City: Claretian Publications, 2004); “Doing Christology: A Pilgrimage,” Hapag 1 (2004) 2: 3-14.

2.   The main authors were Edward Schillebeeckx, Hans Küng, Leonardo Boff, Jon Sobrino, Albert Nolan, Roger Haight, James P. Mackey, John Shelby Spong, and many others. A good summary of this “Christology-from-below” can be found in the books of Marcus J. Borg.

3.   In the long list of exegetes, we find the names of Raymond Brown, Joseph Fitzmeyer, Daniel Harrington, John Meier, Luke Timothy Johnson, James D. Dunn, Gerd Theissen, Gerd Lüdemann, and many others.

4.   “Interpretation of events in terms of their eternal significance” Catechism of the Catholic Church (Manila: ECCCE, 1994), 117. Hereinafter referred to as CCC.

5.   Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus. An Experiment in Christology (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979), 268.

6.   See also CCC, 115-117.

7.   CCC, 116.

8.   See Ordinatio sacerdotalis of John Paul II in 1994: “I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women.”

9.   Believing Unto Discipleship, 45.

Note: Please read the original book review of Father Lode Wostyn. Thanks--jsalvador