Christians
sense there is something radically wrong in trying to put Christ into
strange molds, where long-held Christian beliefs about Christ are
attacked from all sides. As Benedict stated in his Dunwoodie address to
seminarians, to see Christ’s face ” … is a discovery of the One who
never fails us; the One whom we can always trust…”
The past century was characterized by ideologies about human nature
and society, some of which are now collecting in the dustbins of
history. Even in Christian circles, there were attempts to recast Christ
as someone reflecting the scholarship, ideology, or mood of the times.
Perhaps, this arose out of a kind of boredom with traditional depictions
of Christ, perhaps from pride, or just plain delusion. In a work by
Romano Guardini, entitled
The Humanity of Christ: Contributions to a Psychology of Jesus (1963), Guardini stated:
Our minds, dulled by everything said and written on the
subject, can no longer comprehend the passion with which for centuries
the early Christians fought out the issues of Christology. 1
Guardini saw that Christological distortions would be an especial
problem in his times, an attempt to revolutionize our understanding of
Christ, a kind of myth-making in keeping with the ideologies at hand.
Some post-Enlightenment, Christological illusions depict Jesus as a
social prophet, Jewish rabbi, movement founder, healer, revolutionary,
meek friend, psychotherapist, not to mention the pre- and post- Easter
Jesus, among many others. One particularly harmful depiction was the one
commonly known as the “Jesus of History.” Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI
made it his special mission to be a mythbuster here
—to engage in a determined deconstruction of this particular false depiction of Christ.
The “Jesus of History“
“Jesus of history” portraits are presented as factual
—a product of the historical-critical method of biblical exegesis
—which
arose in the context of increasing archaeological and scientific
discoveries in the late 18th and 19th centuries. They emphasized the
historically verifiable, the reasonable, in contrast with the Jesus of
living tradition, the “Jesus of faith”
—the
latter seen as imbued with pious and comforting accretions, but with
little basis in historical fact. Some early researchers in the quest for
the “Jesus of history” were:
Romano Guardini, The Humanity of Christ: Contributions to a Psychology of Jesus(
1885-1968),
whose Deism led him to reject the reality of miracles; David Friedrich
Strauss (1808-1874), who asserted that the supernatural elements of the
Gospels could be treated as myth; and Ernest Renan (1823-1892), who
asserted that the biography of Jesus ought to be open to historical
investigation just as is the biography of
any other man.
In
Jesus of Nazareth (2007), Benedict prefaces his critique
of the historical critical method by acknowledging that it is a useful
first step, which “remains an indispensable dimension of exegetical
work” because “it is of the very essence of biblical faith to be about
real historical-critical events.”
2 In fact, the encyclicals
Providentissimus Deus (1893),
Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943),
and Pontifical Biblical Commission documents had encouraged historical
research. Without recognizing Christianity’s historical dimension,
Benedict says, there is a danger of gnosticism, stressing personal
enlightenment alone. Christianity, Benedict stresses, lies on the
factum historicum, not symbolic ciphers, or concepts alone:
“Et incarnatus est”—When we say these words, we acknowledge God’s actual entry into real history. 3
That having been said, Benedict goes on to critique the views
of ”Jesus as history” scholars, such as: Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930),
Martin Dibelius (1883-1947), and Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976). They
viewed the probable and measurable as solely of value, relegating
miracles to the realm of doubt or myth.
4 Benedict explains that even outstanding biblical scholars, such as Schnackenberg, can end up constrained by its methods.
5
The historical-critical method fueled hermeneutical suspicion about
everything in some quarters, and sparked ‘‘anti-Christologies,” leaving
genuine seekers for Christ submerged in endless scholarly conflicts and
questioning, wondering if the Gospels themselves were genuine. The
shifting hypotheses of exegetes, as Avery Dulles noted, led to neglect
of tradition, and historical research became “the highest doctrinal
authority of the Church.”
6
Some of the damaging legacy which undermined traditional Christological portraits, can be seen in this website account:
Jesus is not the only-begotten Son of God sent to earth
to die for our sins. Rather, he is one of us who, as a man, simply had
an unusual degree of experiential contact with God. He says remarkably
little about himself. Having found freedom himself, his only goal is to
help us find it. 7
Another “Jesus of History” came from Father John Meier, professor of
New Testament at Washington, D.C.’s Catholic University of America, who
declared in
A Marginal Jew (1991), that
—“on
painstaking deductions from the New Testament” and “other knowledge
about the Graeco-Roman cultures in which Jesus and his followers moved”
—that Jesus was probably married, had four brothers and sisters (not cousins), and that he was born in Nazareth not Bethlehem.
8
Most Christological portraits—especially those
à la
Bultmann—deconstruct Jesus to be an ordinary, first century, Jewish
rabbi, about whom little can be said, except that Jesus is not the
“person” the reader thought he was, that is, the Son of God, as
proclaimed in Scripture and tradition for millennia. After perpetual
deconstruction, Benedict notes, scholars often are then obliged to
resort to novel reconstructions in order to explain how everything came
about, their “sheer fantasy” based on their philosophical proclivities.
9
Obfuscating theologians
The historical-critical method thus becomes a meta-method, a broad
funnel through which continual Christological deconstruction and
reconstruction flows, blind to its own philosophical assumptions,
breaking the
memoria ecclesiae, ensnaring the innocent.
Benedict interprets the passage: “Whoever causes one of these little
ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great
millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea”
(Mark. 9:42), as not only referring to sexual abuse victims, but also to
victims of obfuscating theologians and exegetes, who deconstruct and
obscure Christ’s face.
10
Similarly, Benedict has quoted Joseph Gnilka’s view that “The devil
presents himself as a theologian,” especially one involved in biblical
exegesis.
11
The “crisis” Benedict referred to is that of conflicting
historical-critical theories, which instead of unveiling the traditional
Jesus of the Johannine, Synoptic, and Pauline Christologies, have
created biblical cataracts for hapless seekers. Benedict underlines
the method’s unreasonableness in
highlighting the “word” (and its endless interpretations) as opposed to
the unique “event” of endlessly exposing “discontinuities” of text; and
insisting that “simple” accounts are original and believable, while
“complex” accounts are later Hellenic, mythic impositions on earlier
Semitic paradigms—the paradigms and myths selected according to the
writer’s taste. The historical-critical method’s major flaw is that it
is
anti-historical in the sense that it
is not open to revelation of a unique historic event, of God entering time, the basis of any Christology.
Deconstructing the hermeneutic of suspicion
Benedict sees the philosophical roots of historical-criticism (especially in Bultmann) in the Kantian belief that the
noumenon—the
thing-in-itself—cannot be known, and only the methods of natural
science can recreate Christ. This constitutes an unreasonably narrowed
focus, an ostracism of metaphysics, an ontological phobia. In a skillful
volte-face, Benedict applies
a similar hermeneutic of suspicion to the methods of the scholars themselves, saying: “What we need might be called a criticism of criticism.”
12
Praising a doctoral dissertation by Reiner Blank, entitled: “Analysis
and Criticism of the Form-Critical Works of Martin Dibelius and Rudolph
Bultmann,” as a “fine example of a self-critique of the
historical-critical method,” he enlists Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty
Principle” in his attack:
Now, if the natural science model is to be followed
without hesitation, then the importance of the Heisenberg principle
should be applied to the historical-critical method as well. Heisenberg
has shown that the outcome of a given experiment is heavily influenced
by the point of view of the observer. 13
Thus, in the Heisenbergian spirit, Benedict critiques the “Jesus of
history” for its uncertainties! He does so under two main headings in
Jesus of Nazareth.
First, he says that the historico-critical method is restricted to
leaving the biblical word in the past, which contradicts the Gospel’s
claim that Jesus is the eternal Logos who is not confined to time. The
Scriptures reach out to all, beyond the past, the moment “a voice
greater than man’s echoes in Scripture’s human words.”
14
Jesus’ revelation of God “really did explode all existing categories,
and could only be understood in the light of the mystery of God.” The
words and events of Christ’s “life” transcend time and “one must look at
them,” Benedict says, “in light of the total movement of history, and
in light of history’s central event, Jesus Christ.”
15
True, Christology requires openness to divine revelation as a fact in
itself, even if one takes into account Heisenberg’s understanding of
the human predisposition to perceive this reality in a manner suited to
the knower.
Benedict describes the second major limitation of “Jesus of History”
portraits as presupposing “the uniformity of the context within which
the events of history unfold,” therefore treating ”biblical words it
investigates as human words.”
16
This eradicates Jesus’ supra-human claim that he came to do his
Father’s will. Highlighting this in his essay on Guardini’s book,
The Lord, Benedict says:
The figure and mission of Jesus are “forever beyond the
reach of history’s most powerful ray” because “their ultimate
explanations are to be found only in that impenetrable territory which
he calls ‘my Father’s will.’” 17
Benedict goes on to say,”One simply cannot strip ’the Wholly Other,’
the mysterious, the divine, from this Individual. Without this element
the very Person of Jesus himself dissolves.”
18 When, as is recounted in
Jesus of Nazareth,
the rabbinical scholar, Jacob Neusser, reads the Gospels with an open
mind, he concludes that the dramatic, universal, plainly understood
message of the New Testament
is Christ himself, who is
the Son of God, and who invites us into this heavenly family. Benedict,
implicitly asks, if a Jewish scholar can see it, why can’t Christian
exegetes?
Jesus understands himself as the Torah—the word
of God in person … Harnack, and the liberal exegetes, went wrong in
thinking that the Son, Christ, is not really part of the Gospel about
Jesus … The truth is that he is always at the center of it … The vehicle
of universalization is the new family whose only admission requirement
is communion with Jesus, communion in God’s will. 19
So radical is the claim that “Jesus understands himself as the
Torah“—the
center and living unity of the Old and New Testaments—that the Jewish
scholar is so overwhelmed that he can hardly absorb it, recognizing its
extraordinary claim as one that Buddha, Mohammed, or other religious
leaders never made. Benedict uses the rabbi’s fresh observations
to perform myth-busting on historical deconstruction, reminding us that
“humble submission to the word of the sources” dynamically unveils
Jesus—and “he who sees Christ, truly sees the Father; in the visible is
seen the invisible, the invisible one.”
20
The distortions of the “Jesus of History” are now, in fact, becoming “history” for Christ—not
Christophobia—always
arising in eloquent simplicity out of the hazy distortions, and rusting
ideologies, of past and current deceptions. Christians sense there is
something radically wrong in trying to put Christ into strange molds,
where long-held Christian beliefs about Christ are attacked from all
sides. As Benedict stated in his Dunwoodie address to seminarians, to
see Christ’s face ” … is a discovery of the One who never fails us; the
One whom we can always trust. In seeking truth, we come to live by
belief because, ultimately, truth is a person: Jesus Christ.”
21
Re-awakening Christians from their historical-critical hypnosis, in a
very clear way, has relegated the “Jesus of History” to the realm of
mummified theories, unveiling Christ, who always invites our trust
throughout the ages. This relentless and successful myth-busting of a
“learned” but false depiction of Christ will be one of Benedict’s most
profound and lasting legacies, now, and in the time to come.
About Dr. Wanda Skowronska, Ph.D.
