Identity crisis

Who Do You Say that I Am?

Confessing the Mystery of Christ

Edited by John C. Cavadini and Laura Holt

University of Notre Dame Press, $30, 272 pp.

Essay collections can be notoriously uneven. Not only does the present volume prove a happy exception, it offers several essays of quite superior merit.

The contributors gathered at the Tantur Institute for Ecumenical Studies outside Jerusalem in Spring 2000 to ponder the fundamental Christological question that supplies the volume's title. Though the perspectives are perforce many, a common conviction permeates the whole. In the words of the introduction: "it is, paradoxically, the frank confession of the faith of the church, not its renunciation or dilution, which orients us to the openness inherent in the mystery we confess." This persuasion is all the more relevant in the new context of the dialogue among the world religions which serves as the explicit horizon of the essays. For authentic dialogue demands both respect for the other and fidelity to one's own tradition and its constitutive claims.

Rather than merely enumerate contributors and topics, it may be more suggestive to indicate several themes of the volume that offer particular promise for Christological renewal. George Lindbeck expresses the first theme in his rich essay, "Messiahship and Incarnation." A renewed Christology must be based on "a fully canonical Jesus, one that draws from both Testaments and depicts him in the round both horizontally and vertically."

A clear implication of this is that the particularity of Jesus, within the historical setting of the faith of Israel and the social-political world of the first century, must be both a point of departure and a point of continuing reference. A further implication is that the exhausted opposition of "from above" and "from below" in Christological reflection should receive a dignified and overdue retirement. The canonical New Testament witness proclaims this Jesus to be both Messiah of Israel and only Son of God.

What Lindbeck treats, in somewhat abstract fashion, is echoed with passion by Jon Sobrino in "The Kingdom of God and the Theological Dimension of the Poor." The essay, which could well serve as a splendid introduction to the vision and concerns of the theology of liberation, insists on the need to do justice both to Jesus' divine filiation and to his concrete and constitutive praxis of bringing the healing and redeeming power of God to the plight of the poor, the afflicted, the victim. Indeed, this latter focus is an indispensable safeguard against the oldest and most enduring Christological heresy, Docetism: a Jesus removed from the travails of the flesh and the tragedies of history.

A second theme, present in a number of the essays, but expressed with particular acuity in those of Morna Hooker and David Burrell, concerns the evident, yet often neglected insight that distinctive to Christianity is the person of Jesus the Christ. Hooker's careful analysis of the continuity and discontinuity between the two testaments, "Their Thoughts Are Not as Our Thoughts," stresses the unprecedented experience of the New Testament authors. That newness is focused in Jesus himself. Hence "New Testament theology was bound to be to a large extent Christocentric, simply because it was concerned with trying to comprehend the new."

Burrell, speaking from a decades-long immersion in the thought of Islam, reaches a similar conclusion in "Jesus and the Qur'an: The Word of God among Us." He writes that distinctive to Christianity is that God's Word is itself a person, Jesus the Christ; suggesting, thereby, an illuminating contrast with Islam, for which the Word of God was made flesh in the book, the Qur'an.

A third theme that emerges from the essays also receives lucid articulation in Burrell's essay. Common to the Abrahamic faiths is the crucial importance of the "receiving community": the community that undertakes to accept and allow itself to be transformed by the Word. Because of the fact that in Christianity the Word has itself become person, the community that is shaped by that Word "will be constituted as children of God, brothers and sisters of Jesus." Hence, contrary to the individualism that has often run rampant in the West since the Enlightenment, church precedes, theologically, the individuals who make it up. To opt for "Jesus" and to dismiss "church" is, from the New Testament point of view, both to deprive the Savior of the redeemed people and to "decapitate" the Body of Christ.

Extending the theme, James Buckley's "Lectio Divina and Arguing over Jesus: An Ascetic for Christological Rebukes" underscores that confession of Jesus as Messiah and Son of God is not primarily a notional exercise, but a radical commitment and adventure. On the Christian way, recognizing and confessing the identity of Jesus is inseparable from and coinvolved with recognizing and pursuing one's own calling to discipleship in community. Buckley writes: "Jesus Christ calls the disciples to a confession always exceeded by the One confessed, always ahead of the one confessing, in life and death and resurrection."