Belief in Jesus Today

...First of all, he was a man--always a man and never a woman--and usually a celibate man...

...Christian faith, then, is essentially an Easter-faith, a response made to God manifest in Jesus Christ, a reaction to the Word of God that comes through him and his Spirit as active in the Christian community today...

...He was all too alien to ambiguity and to the borderline case (not necessarily a rarity) where the moral person has to admit that different and possibly contradictory courses of action are arguably moral, where moral inquiry does not yield one clear "right answer...

...We Christians may differ in the way we express our perception of God and formulate those expressions consensually, but we are one in .the conviction that the God of our theology and of our belief is a real, living God...

...Most of the attempts to analyze him have been nothing more than the asking of anachronistic questions, usually born of the Chalcedonian distinction of person and natures...

...But the Christian of today usually does not use that understanding of "person" and detects in it a time-conditioned mode of thinking that is born of a post-New Testament controversy spawned by a certain type of hellenistic philosophy...

...Liberation has been proclaimed in his name--even revolution...

...The understa0ding of "person" in that definition was something like that of Boethius: "a subsistent individual with a rational nature...

...Consequently, we must beware of so understanding the Jesus of the New Testament as though he were simply identifiable with the Jesus of history...

...For Christian faith is not merely a response to the accosting of man by the historical Jesus who preached in the synagogues, villages and towns of ancient Palestine, or an allegiance to him and his cause, or a personal dedication and commitment to his way of life...

...For the Jesus of Christian faith is indeed Jesus of Nazareth, but precisely as the one "who was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification" (Rein 4:25...

...And little effort is made by most to sort out the impressions that these influences and sources make--the authentic from the imaginative...

...He was linguistically naive and overconfident of his principles...

...The Jesus of the New Testament is an essential element of Christian faith, for in God's providence men of the early Christian community were inspired by his Spirit to record impressions of him, of his person, of his words and actions...

...Faith in Christ Jesus must always be rooted in the person of Jesus yet not merely in the person of the historical Jesus...

...These and other matters such as divorce and remarriage, nonmarital sexual exchange, masturbation, and homosexual love-making were wrapped in taboo...

...Yet what should that mean for a Christian of today...

...Being identified with things biblical, I shall concentrate on the biblical aspects of the problem, realizing full well that there are other aspects that merit serious consideration, either from the traditional or systematic viewpoint...

...For that expression could be understood in a biblicizing, fundamentalistic way that is here not intended...

...It is not that they are not normative for Christian faith because of that...

...However, not every Jesus of dogmatic tradition encounters the same problem, and fundamentally the Jesus of dogmatic tradition must be respected for what it is: an on-going interpretation of him in the Spirit-guided trajectory across the centuries since the apostolic times that of itself feeds Christian faith...

...And, finally, we Christians, and particularly we Catholic Christians, may differ in the way we express our perception of God in those ritual signs and symbols we call sacraments and we may differ in the way we precisely formulate our apprehension of God in those sacred rites, but we are one in the conviction that the God of our theology and of our belief is truly present within and under these signs which serve as climactic points of encounter between God and ourselves...

...But in admitting this, we are putting our finger on still another problematic aspect of the Jesus of the New Testament...

...It is perhaps an inadequate expression of modern personalist thinking to describe a "person" as a human being who shows openness and love toward another...

...indeed, some would even go so far as to say that he was a real, human parson...

...For all its normative character, such a Jesus of dogmatic tradition says little to the twentieth-century Christian...

...and this would have to be said of the Dutch Catechism (intended for adults) as well as of the Baltimore Catechism (intended for children...

...The Jesus of the New Testament, and the normative value that he is for succeeding generations, is likewise only inceptive as a norm...

...Even within the gospel tradition, the Jesus of the parables differs from the Jesus of the miracle stories or the Jesus of the pronouncement stories...

...In reality, there is no other share in that early Christian experience that is not rooted in the New Testament formulation of it...

...There is, for instance, the Jesus of the mass-media, the Jesus of the religious-goods shops, the Jesus of art and fiction...

...He is dead, but with difficulty does he rest in peace...

...In such a Jesus it was not easy to put one's understanding, let alone one's faith...

...Now if one were to do away with the Jesus of the imagination, one would rid us of some of the greatest masterpieces of western art and literature...

...Yet something like that is meant when one hears the current phrase, "He/she is a real person...

...However, I have deliberately spoken of the early Christian community as inspired by God to record its portraits of Jesus rather than of the Church...

...Louis :B...

...The Christian must manifest in his/her very physical life (kata sarka) that he/she is a Christian, that he/she is motivated by faith in Christ Jesus, and that the fascination of the Risen Jesus can captivate a man or woman of the twentieth century as well as it did Paul of Tarsus...

...And that is why the root of Christian faith is the tandem: the Jesus of history as presented by the New Testament...

...What is operative here is a restored emphasis on his humanity, counteracting a misplaced, but oft repeated Catholic monophysitism ("Well he is God, isn't he...

...And the question is why...

...The faith of a Christian today means not only an allegiance of personal commitment to the Palestinian Jew of over nineteen hundred years ago, but also an acceptance of the normative understanding of him with which the early Christian community was destined by God to endow us...

...Nevertheless, they might provide a tangible and meaningful context within which we can make sense of, and apply, three key principles which the Second Vatican Council bequeathed to us: (1) Not all beliefs are of equal importance...

...The modern study of the gospel tradition, keenly aware of the Synoptic Problem, the thrust of form criticism and redaction criticism, as well as the complication of the Johannine question, along with the diverse Pauline interpretations of the Christ-event, have taught us that we have in the New Testament picture of Jesus a varied and diverse series of interpretations of Jesus himself...

...We stressed above the need to keep in tandem the Jesus of history and the Jesus of the New Testament for the proper understanding of the object of Christian faith...

...Since what we have in the New Testament is an interpretation of Jesus written down not less than a generation after the events themselves, these records for all they attribute to him or put on his lips--2-'remain precisely that, interpretations of him...

...It might have simplified matters for us, since we would never have had to cope with the differences and discrepancies either within the Synoptic tradition or between the Synoptics and John...

...With all, he was ingenious...

...For instance, during the student demonstrations of yesteryear against the draft a picture appeared in newspapers of a young man carrying a poster that read: "Would Jesus Carry a Draftcard...

...This would be the Jesus of Nicea, of Chalcedon, of Constantinople, and so on: that he was not a mere creature, that he was a divine person, with a human nature and a divine nature, etc...

...yet they cannot simply be equated with the latter...

...Moreover, there is a diversity in the portraits that the New Testament presents: the Jesus of Paul (the earliest) is different from that of the gospel tradition or of the Apocalypse...

...they are indeed, but in their own way...

...Take the latter away, and you know practically nothing about him...

...This had to lend a primordial partiality to his probes into the mysteries of the humanum...

...There is a genuine paradox here...

...Yet we implicitly admitted that they were not the same and were not to be simply identified...

...Because of this he could not even consider cases where abortion, sterilization, or mercy death can be morally justified...

...On the one hand, we perceive a widespread and real captivation, especially among young people, with the person of Jesus of Nazareth...

...and that is why both aspects of Jesus must be kept together at this point in our discussion...

...The Jesus of such forms is presented as interpretations of the Jesus of faith and have a certain normative value...

...I do not suggest that we get rid of the Jesus of the imagination, but that we recognize it for what it is...

...and that record has become the privileged norm of Christian faith...

...For the Jesus of the New Testament is likewise a norm for the Church itself in its faith and conduct...

...Two Difficulties There are two obvious difficulties with such an understanding of Christian faith that call for some clarification...

...But it is precisely the diversity of the portraits of Jesus in the New Testament, with all their time-conditioned conception and formulation, that accosts Christians across the centuries, generation after generation, and response of Christian faith must accordingly be diverse...

...But to admit that there is a time-conditioned element in the New Testament and that the Jesus of the New Testament is not simply identifiable with the Jesus of history would seem to admit that there is some bit (at least) of the Jesus of the imagination in the New Testament portrait of him itself...

...It is just another way of expressing the old distinction between the indicative and the imperative: Be what you are...

...Though we do not know whether Jesus would have or not, it was imagined that he would not have--and this Jesus of the imagination was used to fire others to the obviously liberating position of taking action against the draft...

...He was further an Apollonian man, confident of his abilities to draw lines...

...The old moralist was more concerned with private, interpersonal issues of morality than with the social, political, and legal structures that control the inequitable and unjust distribution of goods and bads, of power and impotence on planet earth...

...Such an identification would spring from a naive preoccupation with the words and deeds of Jesus as recorded in the gospel tradition, as if they were all authentic without further ado...

...and as a result the very physical life (kata sarka) has to be lived "by faith...

...If Christian faith has to be normed by the Jesus of the New Testament (with all its diversity), that norm, though rooted in his historical reality and personality, is nonetheless an interpretation of him...

...On the other hand, the Jesus of theology is undoubtedly a far richer explication of that object, for it represents a genuine attempt of the Christian mind, imagination, and heart to plumb the depths of the mystery of Christ--tides quaerens intellectum...

...They answered certain questions posed about him within the framework of such a philosophical construct, but created an image of his humanity that tended to border on the monstrous (How would one get all of those types of knowledge into one finite, created human intellect...

...it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me...

...Consequently, the Jesus of the New Testament plays an essential role in modern Christian faith in him, even for the Christian of the Church today...

...And in this is found the privileged nature of the Jesus of the New Testament and the normative value of its portrait...

...This is why the roots of the Christian faith must be traced ultimately to it...

...And that seems to counter Chalcedon...

...All that such an identification should entail might have to be explained by diverse factors, Commonweal: 137 but the heart of it is a belief in Jesus...

...And, of course, there is the Jesus of history, the living person who crossed man's history in an out-of-the-way corner of the world centuries ago...

...It would represent a fundamental neglect of the earliest interpretation of him in the New Testament, the Pauline interpretation of the Christ-event, with its emphasis not on what Jesus did and said, but on the value of his suffering, death, burial, resurrection and exaltation for mankind...

...The different views of Jesus presented by the massmedia (e.g., Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell), the religious-goods shops (e.g., Sacred Heart statues, the infant Jesus of Prague), diverse works of art through the centuries (from the Byzantine Pantocrator through Fra Angelico to Salvador Dali), the portraits of novelists (e.g., Nikos Kazantakis' Last Temptation o[ Christ), and even some forms of piety (e.g., Devotio modema, the Imitation o[ Christ) have been largely the products of speculation and imagination...

...How different it is from the idea of a person that is current today in ordinary thinking and even in philosophical personalism...

...And it is precisely in the tandem combination of the historical Jesus and the Jesus of the New Testament, proclaimed to all generations as Savior and Risen Lord, that constitutes the mystifying, captivating, enigmatic reality of Jesus today...

...Herder, 1955] 172...

...Which is the Jesus of faith...

...The Church of every generation has to square itself with the Jesus of the New Testament as well as the Jesus of history, if it is to remain faithful to its mission...

...He forged some tools that are of enduring utility, but he became a prisoner of good but overweighted categories like "direct and indirect voluntary...

...but his exercise remains one of the imagination...

...We rarely reflect, however, on how impoverished Christian faith would be, if it were fed by only one testimony of the early community, e.g., by only one gospel...

...For to many people today Jesus means life...

...Christ lives in the Christian (the ontological situation...

...Such questions have been put to scenes of the New Testament, and especially of the gospels, which were really composed with an entirely different purpose, not to mention a different formulation and conception...

...But, in reality, these New Testament interpretations do not bring us immediately into contact with the historical Jesus...

...And to paraphrase an ancient Christian writer, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have heard, what we have looked upon concerns the Word of Life...

...Let there be unity in what is necessary, freedom in what is unsettled, and charity in any case" (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, n. 92...

...Yet how oversimplified it would have been...

...Which is t h e Jesus of f a i t h ? . Lz-F IN JESUS I TODAY , JOSEPH A. FITZMYER N o one who has lived through the last decade and watched the various movements, religious, occult, artistic, or otherwise, associated with the name of Jesus, can fail to realize what that Palestinian Jew of over nineteen hundred years ago has come to mean to modern man...

...The problem is not-new, and better heads than mine have wrestled with it...

...the Jesus of theology, the Jesus of dogmatic tradition, the Jesus of the New Testament...

...To borrow a phrase from Islam, in this sense we are the People of the Book...

...In order to restore communion and unity or preserve them, one must 'impose no burden beyond what is indispensable' (Acts 15:28)" (Decree on Ecumenism, n. 18...

...To which one would have to reply, "Yes, in the half-truth sense...

...Here Paul puts his finger on the essential role of faith in Christ in modern life: the ontological reality of life in Christ must be brought to the surface of psychological awareness through faith...

...But for many Christians of today the Jesus in whom they think they believe is an amalgam of many of these influences and would-be sources of information about or interpretations of him...

...As a loyal son of Ignatius, I recognize that his booklet has molded the lives of countless Christians over the last four centuries and has produced many sainted members in the Christian Community...

...For example, the classic theological discussions about the forms of human knowledge that Jesus possessed--experiential, infused and beatificmmade use of props borrowed from types of scholastic philosophy...

...think in the categories in which the "person" of Jesus was defined at Chalcedon, that definition remains, and will remain, ever normative for such thinking...

...Or, to cull an example from a hallowed classic of Christian piety, I may be permitted to cite Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises...

...Yet at the same time there is for individual Christians who are identified with various churches having a traditional Christian heritage a real struggle to believe...

...Or the fifth of its Rules for Eating: "Whilst one is eating, let him imagine he sees Christ our Lord and his disciples at table, and consider how He looks, how He speaks, and then strive to imitate Him...

...For this reason we cannot really analyze his messianic consciousness, his growth in knowledge of himself--or of his divinity (as it is often naively so formulated...

...And to the same genre of speculation belong many of the modern fictionalized Jesuses, including those that use episodes in the canonical gospels as springboards for highly imaginative presentations...

...The old moralist had more answers than questions _9 . . a danger signal in any intellectual endeavor...

...and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself to me" (Gal 2:20...

...Is t h e r e a d i s t i n c t l g C a t h o l i c e t h i c ? DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF MORAL THEOLOGY DANIEL C. MAGUIRE p ity the Catholic moralist of the recent past...

...Ironically enough, from an Aristotelian point of view, it defines "person" more in terms of a potency than an act...

...The Jesus of the catechism presents in simple catchword formulae the essence of the Jesus of faith, but few will regard it as the full expression, even verbal, of that object...

...Which Jesus captivates...

...But its usually unnoticed power and secret is the use of the Jesus of the imagination: "Here it will be to see in imagination the synagogues, villages and towns where Jesus preached" (:#:91...

...Nor is it a phenomenon that is restricted to Christians, for who has not heard of "Jews for Jesus...

...This analogy does not walk on all fours, admittedly...

...Tar and feathers were his final portion and jeering cries of "legalist" and "manualist" attended his undignified demise...

...3) One cannot question the integrity of those with whom one chooses to disagree on matters of theology and/or belief...

...We have only what early Christian writers said he said and did, with all the differences and discrepancies known to exist within the Synoptic tradition and between it and John...

...How monolithic...

...Let us begin with a superficial aspect of the problem, "Which Jesus...

...The latter term connotes the structured, organized community of believers that historically developed from Jesus himself and the movement that he initiated and that in God's providence has had the role of shaping the development of the post-New Testament dogmatic tradition about him...

...Such creations of human imagining and speculation are not the object of Christian faith and sometimes do no little harm by posing as such...

...John 8:6 records, indeed, that Jesus "wrote with his finger on the ground," but that is all we know that he ever wrote, and that has disappeared...

...But I should like to record here some reflections about its diverse aspects...

...But the difference lies precisely in the inspired and Spirit-guided character of this interpretat!on of him...

...A few quiet, unbelaboring words about the deceased would appear to be in order if for no other reason than to justify our unseemly lack of grief_9 His features were all too familiar...

...Other Views Perhaps we come closer to that object when we consider the Jesus of the catechism, or the Jesus of theology...

...the Jesus of the catechism, the Jesus of piety, the Jesus of the sacraments and of mysticism...

...It represents the indispensable beginning of the trajectory, rooted in the New Testament and in the historical Jesus, but the fully articulated faith of the twentieth century would have to reckon as well with the developing dogmatic tradition and the contemporary theological expression of it...

...First of all, it may seem to interject the Church between modern man and Christ Jesus...

...And that is why the Jesus of the New Testament is essential to Christian faith even today...

...Closer to the heart of the question is the Jesus of dogmatic tradition, by which I mean the Jesus as proposed for Christian belicf in the post-New Testament centuries, when the Christian community saw fit to reaffirm its corporate faith through various conciliar definitions as a reaction to misconceptions of him that cropped up from time to time...

...For they may well cease in time to speak to Christians who employ a different philosophy or a different mode of thinking...

...For the essence of the Jesus of the New Testament is not in the historicity of this or that word or deed, but in the proclamation of him as the Christ and the Lord...

...When it comes to a lull expression of what Christian faith should mean in the twentieth century, other factors must indeed be considered...

...When we keep this in mind, we understand why the often-tried attempt to psychoanalyze Jesus is doomed to failure...

...To pick up the New Testament and attempt to read it today in a literal-minded, fundamentalistic way is to miss the real Jesus of the New Testament...

...As is the way with taboo, which is the classical escape from doing ethics, no circumstance could justify them...

...the dogmatic tradition would act as its amendments...

...Perhaps one could introduce an analogy at this point...

...Moreover, to identify the Jesus of the New Testament with the Jesus of history is in reality to miss the real meaning of the Jesus of the New Testament and the pertinence of that Jesus for twentieth-century Christian faith...

...For the diversity, one might well consult here the book 15 November 1974:140 of E. Trocm6, lesus as Seen by His Contemporaries...

...But by the same token, since conciliar definitions were not merely reformulations of what the New Testament or the primitive revelation of him had affirmed--they did not simply put it in other words, but reconceived the primitive data with the aid of a differing philosophy--these definitions, too, carry with them a time-conditioned element...

...It may also seem to extol the Jesus of the New Testament above the real historical person of Jesus of Nazareth...

...For what are the Jesus of tradition, the Jesus of mystical experience, the Jesus of sacramental life, the Commonweal: 139 Jesus of the experience of communal Christian life (monastic, religious, or otherwise) without the Jesus of the New Testament...

...Here we obviously encounter the Jesus of faith more than the Jesus of theology...

...Yet they find it so difficult to articulate that Christian identification, to express to themselves or to their neighbors what that really means or should mean...

...In a sense, the New Testament serves as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the Christian Church...

...The struggle to believe is not necessarily made any easier by the mere enumeration of these abiding elements of Christian faith...

...We might call them diverse "theologies," were we to attempt to synthesize the teachings about him given by a Paul, a Mark, a Luke, or a John...

...He rushed in to systematize neatly where the more modest hesitated to tread...

...For the Christian of today must realize that he has no channel or pipeline back to the historical Jesus--or even, more importantly, to the risen Jesus (an aspect to which I shall return below)--that is independent of the Jesus of the New Testament...

...on the other, a no less real inability to explain what that captivation should mean as Christian belief...

...And in this sense Christians of today would tend to say that Jesus was "a real person...

...It would be to treat the time-conditioned aspects as absolutes, to read firstcentury prose as if it were written with the sophistication of modern nuanced prose, and eventually to fail to see the forest for the trees...

...Many of them readily identify themselves as Christians and would not have it otherwise...

...However, because of this diverse, time-conditioned character of the Jesus of the New Testament, one has L to learn to cope with it in a sophisticated manner that is consonant with the world in which we live...

...It is a multifaceted problem, and the question is where to begin...

...But the heritage of that early community, especially in the New Testament portraits of Jesus, is privileged and takes precedence over and has an incomparable normative value for Christian life and faith, and even of the Church...

...Differently from Paul, whose authentic letters might, with reasonable cautions, be analyzed or used to scrutinize Paul's consciousness or awareness of his apostolic mission, we have nothing similar from Jesus...

...The second difficulty is the obvious time-conditioned character of the New Testament portrait of Jesus itself...

...This question may seem facetious, but it is not so meant...

...In this way, his mind will be occupied principally with our Lord, and less with the provision for the body" ( # 2 1 4 ) . In the last sentence, Ignatius' motive is noble indeed...

...He avoided the untidy avenues to moral truth such as feeling and affectivity and he did not acknowledge the primacy of creative imagination as a moral faculty...

...This is not a phenomenon that is restricted to North America, for areas in Europe, Asia and South America have been caught up in it...

...This is, of course, not to be denied...

...Discussion served only to rationalize the prohibition...

...But it creates a problem, for it is just what it purports to be: a picture of Jesus created by a Christian imagination seeking to exert psychological influence on people for some purpose (usually not ignoble...

...Moreover, a given theological view may prove to be more unacceptable to modern man, not because of the Jesus of faith that it seeks to render intelligible, but because of the philosophical construct that is employed...

...Paul, if he ever did know the historical Jesus, considered it naught in comparison with his faith experience of him: "even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view (kata sarka), we regard him thus no longer" (2 Cor 5:16...

...For the twentieth century adolescent or adult Christian has eventually to sort out the Jesus in whom he believes...

...One need not take too pejorative a view of this Jesus, for it has been a powerful factor in Christian life, especially in Christian education...

...But there is a problem here that concerns the relation of the Book to the Church...

...In one sense, we must treat those two aspects of Jesus together...

...His respect for life was uneven, absolutely opposed to all abortion and mercy death, too permissive in practice regarding military 15 November 1974:142...

...The Christian Church of these latter days, as well as individual Christians, in seeking to square itself/themselves with the historical Jesus and the Jesus of the New Testament, is confronted precisely by this diversity and its time-conditioned aspect...

...It also involves an acceptance of him that the New Testament writers or the early Christian community passed on to the generations of followers to come...

...But at the root of the tradition lies the Jesus of the New Testament, and ultimately the person of the historical Jesus of Nazareth...

...It may be a powerful emotional and psychological aid to the understanding of the Jesus of faith, but it is not the latter...

...Commonweal: 141 When Paul wrote to the Galatians who had been enticed to listen to "another gospel" (1:6), he made it clear to them that through Christ and faith in him they had found not only justification and freedom, but also a new life...

...For the Christian of today is like Paul: one who encounters the Risen Lord only in faith...

...And, as the first theologian of the Christian church, he formulated the thesis of the integration of Christian life: "I have been crucified with Christ...

...For the Jesus of the New Testament is presented to us in Greek (not in twentieth-century American English), in a second-rate form of Greek literary tradition (scarcely comparable with the masterpieces of fifth-century Athens), and in literary forms that are strange (scarcely readily intelligible to twentieth-century man...

...the extent to which we contact the historical Jesus through them is at best indirect, and problematic at that...

...It is, of course, true that the early community experienced Jesus and existed prior to the composition of the New Testament writings, and in this sense the latter are in a secondary situation...

...As a result, the Christian of today finds the Boethian definition scarcely expressive of the captivating reality of Jesus of Nazareth...

...In which Jesus should the Christian of today put his faith...

...In Catholic teaching there exists an order or 'hierarchy' of truths, since they vary in their relationship to the foundation of Christian faith" (Decree on Ecumenism, n. 11 ). (2) There are very few beliefs indeed which one must accept in order to remain in good standing within the Christian community...

...It is, however, not so intended...

...We Christians may differ in the way we express our perception of God in Jesus Christ and in the way we formulate those perceptions officially, but we are one in the conviction that the God of our theology and of our belief is truly present in Jesus of Nazareth to the extent that it can be said of Jesus alone that he is indeed the Lord of history (Phil 2:5-11...

...The point is: If one wants to...

...But it is usually proposed with the aid of philosophical props, which may have to be 15 November 1974:138 recognized as time-conditioned...

...We Christians, and particularly we Catholic Christians, may differ in the way we express our perception of God in the community of faith called the Church and we may differ, too, in the way we dogmatize that perception of God in the Church, but we are one in the conviction that there is indeed more to the Church than meets the eye, that God is present there in such wise that we can call it the Body of Christ, the Temple of the Holy Spirit, the People of God of the New Covenant...

...But the basic thrust of it seems to be valid...

...For instance, Chalcedon defined that Jesus was not only "consubstantial with the Father in his divinity, consubstantial with us in his humanity," but that "the one selfsame Christ, only-begotten Son and Lord, must be acknowledged in two natures without any commingling or change or division or separation," and that "they are united in one person . . ." (The Church Teaches [St...

...This may seem to interject between the Christian of today and the person of Jesus himself an extraneous elementwa book inherited from early Christianity...