Schillebeeckx locates his consideration of the anthropological constants within a larger discussion of what constitutes salvation in Part Four of his Christ volume. In Part One of that text he articulates a theology of revelation and argues that human experience is always interpreted from within a framework of tradition. Attention to that twofold context highlights the interrelationship of anthropology, Christology, and soteri- ology for Schillebeeckx. As he repeatedly observes, for Christians, Jesus is the paradigm of human life. It is true that Christology and the biblical narrative are not the starting points for his discussion of human life and ethics. But as Walter Kasper has wisely observed, Christology need not be the starting point for an anthropology that is genuinely Christomorphic. Rather, Christology provides a corrective and the lens through which Christians read the human situation.23 For Schillebeeckx, the concrete life
of Jesus provides what Christians view as the most adequate hermeneutical key for how the permanent impulses of human life – the anthropological constants – are to be lived out. The path to human flourishing is, for Christians, the life of Christian discipleship.
This does not undercut Schillebeeckx’s previous claims that there are shared human experiences (contingency, negative contrast experiences) and ethical convictions which one might arrive at from an alternative reading of human life, whether an alternative religious tradition or humanistic philosophical and ethical analysis. Rather, from the perspective of Christian creation faith, all of creation participates in the absolute creative and saving presence of God and bears witness to it, at least in fragmentary ways. The ethical reflection and praxis of human beings are manifestations – and realizations – of that one saving grace.
What then is the contribution of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus – and the ongoing Christian telling of that story in word and deed – to human history and the future of all of creation? Christian faith’s wager is that the story of Jesus is at once the paradigm and norm of what is possible for humanity and the definitive revelation of the God whose cause is the
human cause. In his parabolic preaching and his liberating actions and relationships Jesus enfleshed what it means for human persons to be fully alive and to live in the right relationship with others. The concrete contours of human solidarity – and the grounding of that solidarity in God’s own solidarity with the humanum – are traced and embodied in the narrative accounts of Jesus’ words, deeds, and person. From the Christian perspective, Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom of God reveals the true humanum.24 In and
through his human life lived in solidarity and love, Jesus defines the true meaning of human freedom and the need to challenge religious, political, and social structures that are dehumanizing or destructive of community. At the core of Jesus’ passion for life and his sense of mission, however, was his experience of being sustained by the one he named ‘Abba’, the Living God whom Jesus proclaimed to be in solidarity with humanity and to be the source of an all-inclusive and forgiving compassion. It is from the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus that Christians have come to the belief of creation faith that there is a transcendent mystery of love at work in the world, opposing evil and injustice and fostering the flourishing of life, especially among those who are vulnerable, exploited, or in need.
Yet Jesus’ history, like all human history, took place in the context of finitude and the threat of evil. Hence, Schillebeeckx has interpreted the death of Jesus as a radical experience of negative contrast. When the uncon- ditional love of Abba met definitive resistance and rejection in the cross, Jesus continued to reveal what is possible when human life is lived in the presence of the Spirit by incorporating the failure of his mission into his own surplus of hope. He died in solidarity with all of the innocent victims of history, entrusting the absurdity of his death to God. For Christians, the resurrection becomes the confirmation of Jesus’ life and preaching of the kingdom of God, the transformation of the fiasco of his death, and the promise of final salvation offered to all of God’s creation.
Schillebeeckx proposes that creation faith, limned concretely in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, stands as a radical critique of all other claims to a total vision for human life. Further, Christian faith is not only critical, but also productive. Critical remembrance of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus shapes not only the imagination, but also the action of contemporary Christians. Formation in the Christian story is meant not to remove Christians from the realm of history, but rather to heighten awareness of what constitutes human flourishing and to deepen concern for those who are the concrete faces of the threatened humanum and for the new poor of creation itself. In contrast to many narrative approaches to Christology, Schillebeeckx stresses that the Christian story must be enacted by communities of believers if it is to remain a viable way of reframing the
human story which has the power to interrupt and challenge competing cultural narratives of human life.25
Here we return to the connection between Christology, creation faith, and ethical praxis. Schillebeeckx maintains that the story of the human Jesus makes clear that ‘God entrusts to us the struggle against the powers of chaos’.26 But the other side of God’s radical trust of creation is the
autonomy and responsibility of human beings for human history and for care of the earth. The resurrection confirms God’s immediate saving presence in the most desperate of circumstances, an inexhaustible source of energy and hope, but that presence is always mediated. The story of Jesus – the definitive promise of God for human salvation – continues in history only if his followers mediate that promise in concrete action on behalf of the humanum.
However human mediation, while essential, remains fragmentary and finite, and some of the failures of human history are due to the guilty failures of sin.27 Here, Christian eschatological hope made possible by the
Spirit of Jesus stands as a promise for a future for humankind and the earth which remains beyond our grasp or even beyond our imagination. The contours of that promise are available only in the negative categories of what will not be – no more suffering or death or tears (Rev. 21.4) and in the symbolic language derived from the preaching of Jesus and the Christian scriptures in metaphors such as the ‘kingdom of God’, ‘resurrection of the body’, and ‘new heaven and new earth’.28 Ultimately, Schillebeeckx
suggests that anthropology and soteriology are most adequately considered in the context of Christology. The previous three metaphors are linked to a fourth – the parousia of Jesus Christ – which serves as a critique of all other versions of the definitive meaning of human history and the creation story.29
While Christology is not the starting point for the theological anthro- pology or ethics proposed by Edward Schillebeeckx, his vision of human
25 See: Edward Schillebeeckx, ‘Verzet, engagement en viering’, Nieuwsbrief Stichting
Edward Schillebeeckx no. 5 (October 1992), pp. 1–3 (unpublished translation by
Robert J. Schreiter: ‘Resistance, Engagement and Celebration’). See also: Lieven Boeve, ‘The Sacramental Interruption of Rituals of Life’, Heythrop Journal 44 (2003), pp. 401–17. Boeve argues that more emphasis needs to be placed on the element of discontinuity between the Christian narrative and sacramental praxis and competing cultural narratives, creating a kind of ‘Christian contrast experience’.
26 Edward Schillebeeckx, Interim Report on the Books Jesus & Christ (trans. John
Bowden; New York, NY: Crossroad, 1982) p. 110.
27 Schillebeeckx, Christ, p. 815 regarding the mystical power of faith persisting despite
everything and when one ‘weeps over the fiasco of one’s life’.
28 Schillebeeckx, On Christian Faith, pp. 29–30. For development, see the text ‘I
Believe in the Resurrection of the Body’, included in Schillebeeckx, God Among Us, pp. 128–48.
life and our relationship with the cosmos is distinctly Christomorphic. The narrative of Jesus, remembered, proclaimed, celebrated, and lived by his followers around the globe, is not meant to draw his followers into a separate enclave of salvation. Rather the story of Jesus is meant to turn the faces of those who claim his name towards the little ones whose well-being is threatened in our day.