Primeras aproximaciones a la alquimia

1. THE POSITION OF CHRISTOLOGY TODAY

Theological discussion in the last decade, among Catholics at least, has been largely devoted to the renewal of the Church proposed by the second Vatican Council. The question of the Church, its nature, its unity and its structures, and the problem of the relation of the Church to present-day society, have been at the forefront of interest. Ecumenical theology, the theology of the world, political theology, and theologies of secularization, of development, of revolu-tion, and of liberation have dominated the discussion. The associated problems however are by no means resolved. And they clearly cannot be resolved on the level of ecclesiology.

With its programme of aggiornamento the Church runs the risk of sur-rendering its unambiguousness for the sake of openness. Yet whenever it tries to speak straightforwardly and clearly it risks losing sight of men and their actual problems. If the Church worries about identity, it risks a loss of relevance; if on the other hand it struggles for relevance, it may forfeit its identity. Moltmann has described this identity-involvement dilemma most effectively.¹

If we are to fi nd a way out of this impasse and the related polarizations in the Church we have to refl ect more profoundly on the real basis and meaning of the Church and its task in the modern world. The basis and meaning of the Church is not an idea, a principle, or a programme. It is not comprized in so many dogmas and moral injunctions. It does not amount to specifi c church or social structures. All these things are right and proper in their setting. But the basis and meaning of the Church is a person. And not a vague person, but one with a specifi c name: Jesus Christ. The many churches and communities and groups within the Church, however much they differ among themselves, agree on one thing: their claim to represent the person, word and work of Jesus Christ. Even if their results are controversial, they have one starting-point and one centre. The churches can solve the problems that beset them only from that centrepoint, and only by reference to it.

The question is: Who is Jesus Christ? Who is Jesus Christ for us today?

Jesus Christ is not an ordinary Christian name and surname, like John Smith, for instance, but an acknowledgement and a confession that Jesus is the Christ.² The assertion ‘Jesus is the Christ’ is the basic statement of Christian belief, and Christology is no more than the conscientious elucidation of that proposition. When we say that Jesus is the Christ, we maintain that this unique, irreplaceable Jesus of Nazareth is at one and the same time the

Christ sent by God: that is, the Messiah anointed of the Spirit, the salva-tion of the world, and the eschatological fulfi lment of history. Therefore belief in Jesus Christ is provocatively exact and individual on the one hand, and uniquely universal on the other. A profession of faith in Jesus Christ establishes the exactness, uniqueness and distinctness of all that Christ is about and at the same time its universal openness and global relevance. The unresolved questions of ecclesiology can be answered only within a renewed Christology, and only a renewed Christology can enable the Church to regain its universality and catholicity (in the original sense of the word), without denying the foolishness of the cross and surrendering the unique provocation of Christianity.

The split between faith and life in the contemporary Church has an extensive background in cultural and social history, examined above all by Hegel in his early writings. For Hegel, the dichotomy between faith and life is only a form of the alienation characteristic of the whole modern era. The emancipation in modern times of the (human) subject reduced the external world increasingly to the status of mere object: the dead material for man’s ever more unrelenting domination of the world, a domination achieved with the aid of modern sci-ence and technology. External reality was increasingly demythologized and desacralized. Religion however withdrew more and more into the individual; it became a characterless, empty longing for the infi nite. ‘Religion raises its tem-ples and altars in the heart of the individual, and these sighs and prayers search for the God whose vision is refused because that danger of the understanding is present which would perceive what is envisioned as a thing, and the wood as trees.’³ Ultimately however, there is a yawning gulf on both sides – the objec-tive and the subjecobjec-tive. The outer world turns neutral and banal; the inner world of the individual becomes hollow and empty. A meaningless nothingness arises from both aspects. As Jean Paul, Jacobi, Novalis, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and German Romanticism as a whole suggested, as Nietzsche relentlessly asserted, and as Heidegger has summarily confi rmed, the road travelled by the modern spirit leads to nihilism. The Church’s crisis of identity has as its background the entire crisis of meaning of modern society.

It is here that Christology wins a relevance beyond the narrower theologi-cal context. The doctrine of the Incarnation has to do with the reconciliation of God and the world. Since the oneness of God and man, as it occurred in Jesus Christ, cancels neither the distinction between them nor the autonomy of man, but realizes that oneness and that distinction, reconciliation occurs in Jesus as liberation, and liberation as reconciliation – at one and the same time.

Here God is not, as modern atheistic humanism asserts, a restriction but the condition and basis of human freedom. Christology can approach and tackle the legitimate concern of the modern era and resolve its problem. That, to be sure, is possible only on the basis of a decision: the basic decision between belief and unbelief. Liberating reconciliation, as it occurs in and through Jesus Christ, is primarily a divine gift and only secondarily a human task.

Here precisely is the border line between Christian theology and ideologies or utopias (which nevertheless retain traces of Christian infl uence). The decisive option is the sword or faith (Albert Camus), promise or achievement.

Christianity sees the indicative of a granted liberation and reconciliation as giving rise to the imperative of henceforth devoting oneself wholly to liberation and reconciliation in the world. But the real choice before us can be escaped only at the cost of the Christian identity. And there is no involvement, no rel-evance, without identity.

Christology, in which identity and relevance, existence and meaning, are revealed in a unique and complete manner, is the task of theology today.

Thinking about Christology discloses the help which is needed at the moment and which theologians (who are certainly not the whole Church) can give mod-ern society and the Church in their search for an identity.

2. THE BASIC TRENDS IN CONTEMPORARY CHRISTOLOGY

The first wave of modern Christological thought⁴ in the second half of this century began twenty-five years ago – fifteen centuries after the Council of Chalcedon (451–1951). Karl Rahner’s article on Chalcedon as end or beginning set the tone.⁵ Rahner stated that every conciliar definition signi-fied the end and the result of a discussion, the victory and the unambigu-ousness of truth, but that it was also a beginning for new questions and deeper insights. He spoke of the self-transcendence of all formulas. They must constantly be rethought, not because they are false, but because they are true. They remain alive insofar as they are elucidated. Significant new interpretations of the dogma of Chalcedon were offered by (to name only leading writers) Rahner himself, Bernhard Welte, F. Malmberg and Edward Schillebeeckx.⁷ Piet Schoonenberg also belong to this group,⁸ even though his interpretation led to a reversal of the Chalcedonian formula and con-sequently (as I shall show later) to a departure from its context.

The main concern of all those efforts was to show how the dogma ‘true God and true man in one person’ was to be understood in faith today, and how it could be interpreted and adapted with the aid of modern philosophical methods and categories (which at that time meant existential philosophy). The ques-tion, therefore, was how a unique man could also be God and consequently lay a claim to universal, absolute and henceforth insurpassable signifi cance.

That can be demonstrated in various ways. There are at present three major Christological approaches.

The oldest but constantly recurrent approach sees belief in Christ in a cosmological perspective. This view was already present in the Logos-Christology of the second-century apologists. They found logoi spermatikoi, fragments of the one Logos, at work everywhere in the world. Nature and history manifested particles of the one Logos who appeared in his fulness in Jesus Christ. The main exponent of that cosmological interpretation of faith in Christ in our own century was Teilhard de Chardin,⁹ who offered a

particularly inspired version of the approach. Of course Teilhard does not start from a static but from an evolutionary world-view, and tries to show how cosmo-genesis and anthropocosmo-genesis fi nd fulfi lment in Christocosmo-genesis. In that view Jesus Christ would be evolution fully (self-) realized.

A second approach is not cosmological but anthropological. It tries to con-front the challenge of modern atheistic humanism: namely, that God must be dead if man is to be truly free. The appropriate Christological viewpoint is that man is the being who is open for and to reality as a whole. He is an impover-ished reference to a mystery of fulness. From this starting-point Karl Rahner¹⁰ (principally) sees the Incarnation of God as the unique and highest instance of the essential completion of human reality. For him Christology is the absolute expression of anthropology, the study of man. Rahner maintains the once-for-all nature and underivability of the Christ-event. Other commentators, how-ever, take this anthropological interpretation to the point of an anthropological reductionism. Then Jesus Christ becomes a mere cypher and just a model for an authentic human existence (F. Buri, S. Ogden, D. Sölle, P.M. van Buren);

Christology is yet another reading of anthropology.

A third approach begins with the assumption that there is no such thing as man ‘pure and simple’, ‘as such’, but that man as he actually is confronts us only within a complex of physiological, biological, economic, social, cul-tural and intellectual infl uences; this ensures that every individual human being is involved in human solidarity: he is woven as it were into the whole complex historical fabric of humankind. The question of the meaning and salvation of man then becomes the question of the meaning and salvation of history as a whole. The result is Christology in the perspective of universal history. This approach has been taken up principally by Pannenberg¹¹. He interprets Jesus Christ as the predetermined end of history. Moltmann has adopted the notion but with a new emphasis – that of justice.¹² In his view, the history of human suffering ultimately has to do with justice. In this case, Christology is discussed within the framework of theodicy. This his-torical approach, which I shall shortly examine in greater detail, is able to cite the scriptural stress on salvation history, and that tradition in theology which strongly emphasizes its importance. But it can and must also connect with the Hegelian philosophy of history. Consequently it has to confront the historical ideology of Marxism.

Hans Urs von Balthasar has been prominent in pointing out the immanent danger of all these approaches.¹³ The problem in his view is that in them Jesus Christ is set in a predetermined scheme of reference, and that the eventual result of the consequent cosmological, anthropological or world historical diminution of faith is a mere philosophy or ideology.

The second wave in the modern rethinking of Christology¹⁴ has been infl u-enced by the rediscovery of the ‘quest of the historical Jesus’, with which Bultmann’s pupils (E. Käsemann, E. Fuchs, G. Bornkamm, H. Conzelmann, J. Robinson, and so on) ushered in the post-Bultmannian era. Catholic theology

very soon took up the new problematics and approach (J.R. Geiselmann, A. Vögtle, H. Schürmann, F. Mussner, J. Blank, R. Pesch, H. Küng, and so on). It recognized that a renewed Christology does not consist solely in the interpretation and re-interpretation of traditional kerygmatic or dogmatic for-mulas of belief. That would be no more than scholasticism in the bad sense.

The language of the confession and profession of faith is, like all human dis-course, meaningful language and not ideology only so long as it conceives reality in its words and proves itself against reality. The Christological for-mulas of belief intend nothing other than the expression of the being and signifi cance of the person and work of Jesus Christ. Their practical criterion is to be found in Jesus. If Christological profession had no connexion with the historical Jesus, then belief in Christ would be no more than ideology:

a general world-view without any historical basis. Metz took the rejection of a purely argumentative Christology to the point of a projected narrative theology and Christology.¹⁵

Of course that kind of novel approach is rarely free from cul-de-sacs and banal side issues. One of those dead-end approaches of the last few years is the concentration on ‘Jesus’ cause’.¹⁶ The inherently attractive though essen-tially ambiguous and equivocal idea of ‘Jesus’ cause’ started with W. Marxsen.

But when it is extended as a fundamental programme, it very often leads in practice to a reduction to the earthly Jesus and his ‘cause’, and what can be made of that in terms of contemporary historical methodology. It also ends in a hermeneutics strongly infl uenced by a fashionable neo-Marxism. Belief in the risen and exalted Christ is allowed at best the function of confi rming the existence of the historical Jesus. A fl at-footed theology can justify neither the uniqueness nor the universality of Christian faith. Both the invocation of this Jesus of Nazareth and the affi rmation of his universal and ultimate signifi -cance must in the end appear arbitrary in the perspective of a theology of that kind. In this view Jesus is reduced ultimately to a universally exchangeable symbol and model of certain ideas, or a certain form of practice, which itself can claim only a relative signifi cance. J. Nolte has expressed those conclusions most emphatically.¹⁷

If we exclude both a unilateral kerygma- and dogma-Christology, and a Christology exclusively orientated to the historical Jesus, the right way of re-establishing Christology can only be to take both elements of Christian faith with equal seriousness, and to ask how, why and with what justice the proclaimed and believed-in Christ developed from the Jesus who proclaimed; and how that historically unique Jesus of Nazareth relates to the universal claim of belief in Christ. In the present century the Tübingen dogmatic theologian J.R. Geiselmann has already tried to reestablish Christology along those, lines in his book Jesus the Christ.¹⁸ Even though the detailed exegeses of his approach have been outdated since then, his fundamental perspective is still valid. Today, though on other prem-isses, W. Pannenberg, J. Moltmann, and E. Jüngel try to construct Christology from the correlation of the historical Jesus and the proclaimed Christ.

3. THE TASKS OF CHRISTOLOGY TODAY

The approach consistent with the profession that ‘Jesus is the Christ’ and our summary account of the contemporary Christological debate, reveal three major fundamental tasks for Christology at the present time.

1. An historically determined Christology. The approach accordant with the belief that ‘Jesus is the Christ’ is a Christology orientated to a quite specifi c history and a unique life and destiny. It is derivable neither from human nor social needs; neither anthropologically nor sociologically. Instead it has to preserve a real and actual unique memory, and to represent it here and now.

It has to narrate a real and actual story – history – and to bear testimony to it.

It has to ask, in other words: Who was this Jesus of Nazareth? What did he want? What was his mission and message, his behaviour, his destiny? What was (despite the dangers of the term) his ‘cause’? How did this Jesus, who proclaimed not himself but the imminent Rule of God, become the proclaimed and believed-in Christ?

This kind of historically-orientated Christology has a respectable tradition behind it. Until the era of baroque scholasticism, the theology of the mysteries of Jesus’ life played a major rôle in Christology.¹⁹ But if we wish to approach and answer these questions in accordance with a modern problematics today, we must face problems that are complex and thorny, and at fi rst even scandal-ous for many Christians. They are the problems of modern historical research:

the quest for the historical Jesus, the quest for the origins of the Easter faith, and the quest for the earliest Christological formulation of belief. These ques-tions raised by H.S. Reimarus, D.F. Strauss, W. Wrede, A. Schweitzer, and R.

Bultmann are neither mere sophistries of unbelief, nor wholly external and irrelevant to belief in Jesus Christ and systematic Christology. The histori-cal questions have to be answered if the scandalous reality of faith in Christ is to be taken seriously. As soon as one tries to do that, there is no such thing as a trouble-free area – some kind of belief pure and simple, or a ‘sim-ple’ Christian faith. It is not enough to examine these questions purely from an historical angle. We have to inquire into the theological relevance of the historical aspect.

2. A universally responsible Christology. Even though Christology cannot be derived from human or social needs, its universal claim demands that it is considered and represented in the light of human questions and needs, and in accordance (analogy) with the problems of the age. Remembrance of Jesus and the Christological tradition must be understood as a living tradition, and must be preserved in creative loyalty. That is the only way in which a living faith can arise. The Christian should be able to give account of his hope (cf 1 Pet 3. 15).

For that reason we cannot pit a narrative Christology against an argumentative Christology, even though Metz has recently tried to do just that.

The universal claim of Christological belief can be represented appro-priately only against the most extensive horizon conceivable. That brings

Christology into encounter and confrontation with philosophy and, more exactly, with metaphysics. Christology inquires not just into this or that existent, but into existence in general. A Christian is so to speak com-pelled to become a metaphysician on account of his faith. He cannot escape that compulsion by recourse to the social sciences, sociology itself for instance, even though the importance of such assistance is not to be underestimated. That does not mean that he must follow some particular version of metaphysics, for instance the Aristotelian-Thomistic variety. A

Christology into encounter and confrontation with philosophy and, more exactly, with metaphysics. Christology inquires not just into this or that existent, but into existence in general. A Christian is so to speak com-pelled to become a metaphysician on account of his faith. He cannot escape that compulsion by recourse to the social sciences, sociology itself for instance, even though the importance of such assistance is not to be underestimated. That does not mean that he must follow some particular version of metaphysics, for instance the Aristotelian-Thomistic variety. A