DISCERNING WHO JESUS IS

...And here too the church's plunge into the biblical renewal has had a profound impact...

...The great concern of such a Christology "from above" is the union of divine and human in Jesus...

...As Michael B. McGarry notes in Christology After Auschwitz (Paulist Press, 1977), this question is being raised primarily in North America where the Jewish-Christian dialogue is most active, but it is a question every Christian must ultimately ask...

...But the New Testament writings do not support this kind of evolutionary reconstruction...

...Martin Hengel, in the essay we have already cited, rightly questions whether the Christological affirmations of the New Testament were merely functional rather than ontological...

...And repetition of biblical language is considered more loyal than recasting tradition into abstract concepts...

...The reductionist challenge of the empirical world view has made modern theologians reflect on the function and truth value of religious myth in our biblical sources and in our credal formulations...

...The crisis we now face is how to affirm this cosmic dimension of Christ's lordship in the face of a viable religious pluralism...

...One of the unexpected results of this irenic attitude was that the bottom dropped out of the church's missionary enterprise...

...Perhaps equally helpful would be an attempt to isolate some of the major cultural and religious experiences that have sparked a revision in our Christology...

...As soon as the disciples had experienced Jesus as risen from the dead and thereby claimed him as uniquely touched by the life of God, they set about the task of discerning the implications of Jesus's person and mission for the world in which they lived...

...By "thomistic" is meant not simply the theology of Aquinas but even more importantly the ongoing scholastic interpretation of thomistic-aristotelian views on the nature of man and history...

...One of the most important experiences of modern western culture has been the breakdown of metaphysics, the ordered system of concept and language which enables us to reflect on the ultimate meaning of humanity and the world in which it lives...

...But there is a question more crucial than any of these...

...That part of our tradition must be brought into direct connection with the way we speak of the universal role of Jesus...

...The cosmic combat of Revelation is won by the Slain Lamb, the Risen Lord, again an attempt, however limited in language, that wants to go to the farthest borders of reality...

...The document Nostra Aetate spoke warmly of the beauty of such religious traditions as Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and gave special attention to Judaism...

...Thus modern Christology is being forced to take into account more seriously than before the somewhat dormant side of our theology which had always claimed, but in muted volume, that the Spirit has been at work in histories and cultures other than those shaped by Judaeo-Christianity...

...From the beginning, the church has affirmed that God acted decisively in Jesus, not just for Christians but for the world...

...This awareness of diversity within New Testament thought has helped current theology break out of its myopia...

...Traditional Christology had little to say about the earthly ministry of Jesus, or of the inner connection between his life and death...

...New Testament pluralism suggests that a "Christology from above" is not the only way of being faithful to our heritage...

...The same kind of crisis about the universal soteriological claims of our Christology is felt by those engaged in the Jewish-Christian dialogue...

...But the problem of contemporary philosophical pluralism is compounded by a tendency to discount metaphysical questions...

...Perhaps only now the results of a close look at our biblical heritage are beginning to seep into the church's theological consciousness, including its Christology...

...Behind it stands a Christology which has deep roots in the New Testament, is in accord with the great dogmatic formulations of Nicea and Chalcedon, and has sustained Christian life for countless believers...

...Because resurrection speaks of the...

...We can be more sympathetic towards the stammering of modern theologians on this question when we recall that a genuine global consciousness and a deliberate respect for religious pluralism are phenomena never before experienced in Christianity...

...The Evangelists' presentation of the actions of Jesus, his teaching, and the titles applied to him have all been touched by this perspective...

...rosemary radford ruether, Georgia Harkness Professor of Theology, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois, is the author of New Woman/New Earth, (Seabury Press, 1975...

...The scant treatment given to the meaning of Jesus's resurrection in traditional manuals of theology is notorious...

...Theology appeared for a while to almost abandon its metaphysical quest...

...it was something it began with...

...If the "divine" element of Jesus in the Gospels represents a degree of theological interpretation (e.g., his prophetic predictions of his death, certain aspects of the miracle tradition, etc...

...The responsibility to make Christology analytical and not merely descriptive, a deeper commitment to the humanity of Jesus, the challenge to be bolder and more comprehensive in understanding the resurrection, and the struggle to maintain the universal claims of Christology in the face of religious pluralism—these are some of the frontiers that loom up before a church seeking to be faithful in mind, as well as heart, to its Lord...

...As Gregory Baum suggests in Religion and Alienation (Paulist Press, 1975), the mad rush to embrace the secularist View of the world on the part of some modern theologians may well have been a poor reading of the evidence and too hasty an alliance with a passing cultural trend...

...Secularization Another basic experience of modern western culture —and therefore a factor to be reckoned with in charting the frontiers of Christology—is the impact of "secularization...

...Christmas is not only the focal point of popular piety but reflects a "theological position...

...Through a deeper knowledge of Semitic culture and Jewish religious tradition, we are now in a position to appreciate the scope of "resurrection...

...In recent decades the philosophical Babel has been erected inside the church...

...To speak of resurrection as a lingering memory of Jesus which liberated the energies of his frightened followers is not claiming what the early Christians claimed—no matter how subtly we attempt to recast their language...

...While incarnation, "enfleshment," is key, nevertheless the starting point is from God's side, the pre-existent Son of God descends and assumes a human nature...

...Until very recently modern thought has turned its energies in a more subjective direction...

...Thus modern theology has been brought back to the starkest of Christian questions: what precisely is the connection between the person and history of that first century Jew and our belief in him as the Risen and present Lord...

...And as the secrets of creation give way to the inevitable progress of human knowledge and scientific technology, the world can be understood and controlled without the need for the supernaturalEmpiricism becomes the kiss of death for the mythical world view...

...Classical Christology sometimes spoke of the "events" of Jesus's life such as his virginal conception, his miracles, his crucifixion and his ascension, as if they were all of the same order of reality...

...The fact that the population of China, practically one-quarter of the population of the world, has no real connection with Christianity and yet may be achieving some significant societal reforms should be a Christological problem for us and not just a question of pastoral strategy...

...The Gospels cannot be taken as literal reportings of Jesus's earthly history...

...The hymn Paul incorporates into the second chapter of his letter to the Philippians (2:6-11) makes robust claims about the identity and mission of Jesus and climaxes in the declaration that he bears the divine name...

...One symptom of the crisis is a bewildering philosophical pluralism...

...The late nineteenth and early twentieth century History of Religions school of thought, represented by such men as F.C...

...or the social and political influences on Jesus and his ministry (e.g., Was he a "revolutionary...

...Modern Christology turns freely to such quest Did he kno the future...

...This reconstruction has substantial implications for ecclesiology, but it also effects Christology...

...And if the future brings contact with intelligent life on another planet, this great frontier of Christology will explode beyond recognition...

...In other words, the New Testament offers the basis for pluralism in Christology...

...all other events of Jesus's life were subordinated to that central perspective...

...Any at must turn plunge int impact...

...This has been the pattern from the very beginning of the church's existence...

...The welcome revival of popular piety also played a part here...

...The devaluation of metaphysical questions and metaphysical language can be traced as far back as Descartes and Kant, or even further into the poverty of late scholasticism...

...What we might label the "classical" view of Christ emphasized the incarnation...

...No longer do seminaries form future preachers and teachers on the basis of the "unshakable teachings" of the Angelic Doctor...

...Classical Catholicism presumed there was no real difference between the New Testament affirmations about Christ and the literal history of Jesus...

...A number of Christological frontiers loom up as this aspect of the Gospels became clear...

...17), Gerald O'Collins concluded, after a survey of modern Christology, that our attempts to interpret the resurrection are too timid...

...Technical philosophical terms which had a key role in classical Catholic Christology have become as baffling or indifferent to many Catholic thinkers as they have been for some time to the rest of the world...

...Secularism is too western in its origin, too narrow in its viewpoint, too heady about the possibilities of human achievement, and too timid in its assessment of the richness of reality...

...The problem was that it came to limit its metaphysical inquiry to a single area of Christology, the hypostatic union, and began to rely too exclusively on a philosophical tradition which lost touch with most of the modern world...

...In his brilliant essay, Son of God (Fortress Press, 1976), Martin Hengel challenges the scenario of only a gradual evolution in early Christology...

...It urged Christians to enter into respectful dialogue with...

...Evidence of early and vigorous Christological speculation can be traced in many other New Testament traditions...

...R ture and 1 The scant resurrectic 16 June 1978: 366 such questions as the consciousness of Jesus (e.g., Did he know he was divine...

...Pluralism is, of course, not necessarily an evil...

...And even though the New Testament writers do not employ speculative philosophical language, the use of such titles as "Lord" and "Son of God," and reflection on Christ as Wisdom, as revealer, as preexistent and exalted, imply a probing of Jesus's identity and not simply a description of his function in salvation history...

...His death is a preordained act of sacrifice whereby he atones for our sins...

...The very act of God becoming man was seen as the redemptive event...

...But, at the same time, the experience of metaphysical crisis reminds us that the scope of Christology demands nothing less than rigorous philosophical inquiry...

...The first commandment of the secularist creed is that the human person has responsibility for his own destiny...

...Thus the emphasis on the incarnation tended paradoxically to relativise the cultural and political influences on Jesus's life, the very things the modern mind considers crucial for worldly existence...

...Functionalism and pragmatism gave more satisfaction than the classical philosophical questions of being and truth...

...The same creativity has not yet surfaced in theological reflection on bodiliness or time...

...The first Christians' experience of Jesus as risen from the dead impelled them to look back at the history of Jesus and see it in a new light...

...Thus the resurrection of Jesus has become the most telling litmus test for modern Christologies...

...Another result of recent biblical scholarship was to document the role of the Christian community and its experience in the construction of the New Testament image of Jesus...

...And in the western church Christology became increasingly dependent on a single philosophical tradition for the concepts and language it needed to articulate its belief about the person and nature of Jesus...

...It is not surprising that the very issue where some modern theology threatens to break faith with the tradition is right here...

...What I want to describe is not the variety of ways theologians themselves have detailed our basic beliefs about the person and and nature of Jesus, but to outline the general view held by most Catholics...

...For these reasons some of the most radical questions about our understanding of Jesus are being asked not by university-based theologians but by missionaries in the field, many of whom are strung out between a deep commitment to their Christian faith and a profound respect for the religion and culture of non-Christian peoples...

...In Judaism and early Christian thought, resurrection was fitted into the broader network of religious hopes about how God would ultimately vindicate Israel and creation itself...

...This view was built up not ojily by their faith experience as Christians but by the content and emphases of catechetics, preaching, and even church art...

...The secular view of the world may not be a final answer, but it has left a profound imprint on theology...

...Bj fore on tl Christolog The savinj history...

...It is not simply a case of lacking the tools for metaphysics, but of not having the interest or the heart to take them up...

...By focusing on the hypostatic union and therefore on the incarnation as its starting point, classical Christology in a sense did not "need" the resurrection...

...It is aware of the role of political and cultural dynamics even within religious experience...

...First of all we have come to appreciate the fact that the New Testament contains not one way of reflecting on Jesus but many...

...The very existence of Judaism triggers a Christological question: in what way does Jesus represent God's decisive act in the history of world salvation if Judaism continues (as it does) to be a viable religious entity...

...An awareness of the difference between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith—an awareness pressed on theology by a critical evaluation of the biblical evidence—lays bare the issue of what is the connection between the earthly life of Jesus and the claims made about him in faith...

...And some liberal proponents of the late 19th and early 20th century presumed there was no similarity...

...The Biblical Renewal One of the most astounding facts of church history in recent decades has been the relative ease with which the official Catholic church has accepted the methods and much of the results of modern biblical criticism...

...Thus neither camp struggled with the issue...

...Just for this reason I may not abandon it...

...Although Catholicism itself never really had an absolutely homogeneous metaphysical world view, it was for a time shielded from philosophical pluralism by the church's tenacious use of thomistic categories and 16 June 1978: 364 thomistic language in its theological discourse...

...Since 1974 there have been at least three major books on Christology by Roman Catholics (Hans Kiing's On Being a Christian, Walter Rasper's Jesus the Christ and Edward Schillebeeckx's Jesus, which is now being translated into English), and the volume of periodical literature on Christological themes has swelled enormously...

...His resurrection, body and soul, is the final clinching proof of his divine nature...

...In principle, a variety of ways of reflecting on reality should be enriching...

...But recen Schillebeec siderable t ledged asj piety, his of his kin points for modern th of Christia between tl Jew and < Lord...

...Jesus and the Borders of Our Faith One of the innovations of Vatican II was a newfound respect for non-Christian religions...

...It could well be that a renewed interest in mysticism and in the truth value of metaphorical and poetic language will eventually come to the rescue of western Christology...

...Thus secularization has turned our attention to the more secularly attractive and empirically defensible aspects of the gospel tradition, such as Jesus's parables, his social justice ministry, his human solidarity...

...What did Jesus think about the future...

...But the church's serious attention to the bible has done more than move resurrection to the head of the Christological agenda...

...Joseph Spae, who has written extensively on Christianity in Japan, is now asking Catholic theologians to think of the theological issues posed by modern China...

...His predictions of death display his divine consciousness...

...Questions seldom, if ever, treated in previous Christological speculation...

...And even though most Catholics had little or no philosophical training, such technical terms as "person," "hypostasis," "substance," and "nature" worked their way even into elementary catechisms...

...In some circles, religious experience is set over against theological speculation...

...The richness of liturgical prayer and popular piety moved more deeply and widely into the meaning of Jesus, but the concerns and language of standard Christology became very fixed and limited...

...The church's philosophical bulwark reached its strongest point in the late nineteenth century under Leo XIII...

...The goal of this article is not to catalogue the various methods and conclusions of this growing list of Christological studies, as helpful (and as formidable) as that might be...

...But the issue has not been totally neglected by modern theologians...

...However, a careful look at the New Testament shows that the resurrection of Jesus was not an appendage to early Christology but its very starting point...

...The saving event was the Son of God's entry into human history...

...Missionary efforts and the number of mission personnel began a steep decline almost immediately and only now are beginning to level off...

...But this is not the only possible way of reflecting on the meaning of Jesus...

...The very fact of the Son of God becoming man was seen as adequately significant...

...The Breakdown of Metaphysics Let us now turn to some of the experiences of our modern world which not only have brought crisis to this traditional Christology but have given us the chance to revitalize it...

...In a famous essay Martin Buber tells of a noble atheist who challenged Buber's right to use the word God...

...Convulsive cultural and sociological changes are forcing our generation of Christians to continue the process...

...Any attempt to answer that question responsibly must turn to the resurrection...

...Nor do I mean to ignore the anxieties of many pastors, teachers and people who still consider biblical scholarship a veiled attack on Christian faith...

...Jesus's teaching about God and about the central values of authentic human existence are claimed as revelatory for all...

...Here again a profound Christological issue stood beneath what could appear on the surface as organizational fatigue or a lack of zeal...

...Some Christological studies in the sixties seemed content with a "functional" approach, limiting their concern to the relevance of what Jesus did, taught, or modeled rather than facing the question of his constitutive identity...

...That is the cost, if you will, for what we believe...

...In a strange way, liberal Protestantism and classical Catholicism took a common stance on this question...

...Teilhard de Chardin attempted a cosmic Christology which saw Christ as the pattern and goal of all historical and material development...

...Hebrews' description of Jesus's role as exalted Lord through the metaphor of Temple liturgy says different things about Christ than the Apocalypse's cosmic combat imagery...

...But none of them deals concretely with non-Christian religious systems and in the rare cases where this is attempted, as in Hans Kiing's On Being a Christian, it is done without full expertise and with decided western bias...

...These men would be the last to say their efforts have tamed the frontier...

...Resurrection merely confirmed his divine nature and became a pledge of immortality to believers...

...But the biblical renewal taking place in Catholicism is resulting in changes more far-reaching than official statements scholars can live with and the welcome sight of Catholics reading the scriptures...

...But the church could not remain insulated from the contemporary philosophical crisis forever...

...The Risen Jesus establishes his church and sends out his disciples to bring the whole world to redemption...

...It has thrown classical Christology into disarray by stripping it of its standardized language and framework...

...The early Christians immediately began to draw out the universal implications of their faith in Jesus...

...But the persistence of religion even in industrial societies and recent experience of the limits of technology have left many people wondering if the socalled secularist view of reality will not itself be quickly ushered into the mythical boneyard...

...But as Walter Kasper insists in Jesus the Christ (p...

...Nor is resurrection simply an elaborate metaphor for human aspirations...

...The way the evangelist Luke describes the significance of Jesus as the Spirit-filled Son of God is not the same as John's portrayal of Jesus as Wisdom Revealer...

...The bible is rooted in religious experience and has a trust in the power of metaphor and symbol to express truth...

...20-21): "The universal claim of Christological belief can be represented appropriately only against the most extensive horizon conceivable...

...Modern Christology must attempt to say more than that...

...Modern man has no common language, much less common conclusions, when we come to discuss ultimate realities...

...Buber replies by acknowledging that indeed this is the most soiled and mutilated of all human words...

...But for all Christians, the secularist atmosphere of our day has forced a needed revision of how we speak about Jesus and what things in his history kindle our interest...

...Thus Christology was not something the church fell into...

...Throughout its history the church, either through its own initiative or, more frequently, under the gun of cultural and historical changes, has had to re-think and re-articulate its most fundamental beliefs...

...The New Testament writings were not gifts from above but the end products of the early church's reflection on Jesus and his history...

...Our Christian and Catholic tradition had managed to keep faith with this mandate, even from the beginning...

...Classical Christology certainly pursued this ontological question...

...Before beginning a rundown of some of these experiences, we should recall the classical notion of Christology that we claim to be under stress...

...Generations of men have laid the burden of their anxious lives upon this word and weighed'it to the ground...

...Too many evil deeds have been done "in God's name" to allow this word to be other than blasphemy...

...In what way is Jesus's life, death and resurrection truly salvific for the millions of human beings who have never heard of him and for the millions who, for the foreseeable future, never will...

...Christology inquires not just into this or that existent, but into existence in general...

...To a great extent, these experiences have determined the kinds of frontiers now opening up before us...

...An Jesus of hi pressed on biblical evi connection claims ma liberal Pro common si presumed 1 Testament tory of Jes 19th and similarity...

...But the modern mind is much more conscious of how human initiative shapes our world...

...A Christian is so to speak compelled to become a metaphysician on account of his faith...

...But here again, the issue is deeper than religious civility or atonement for Christian anti-semitism...

...And yet the scope of resurrection impels us to do so...

...Questions that were little discussed or never formulated bubbled to the surface: What do we mean by proclaiming Jesus as the source of revelation to a world in which significant numbers seem to find deep satisfaction in their own, non-Christian, religious traditions...

...For some modern thinkers a secularist view of the world has thoroughly discredited—even made imposible—the basic tenets of traditional Christian assertions about Jesus...

...Once the church, however cautiously, began to look at world religions as integral systems capable of leading to "a way of life that is imbued with a deep religious sense" (Nostra Aetate, #2), then many Christians instinctively recognized that the church's universal claims about Jesus were in jeopardy...

...In Vatican II's Declaration on Non-Christian Religions and in the 1974 Guidelines on Religious Relations with the Jews, the official church acknowledged a special relationship must exist between Christianity and Judaism...

...To use "ease" in this context is not to discount the agonies of many Catholic biblical scholars and theologians who were hounded, silenced and suspect because they espoused biblical criticism in the first half of this century...

...Thus the ecumenical thrust of modern church life has opened up another vast Christological frontier...

...Paul carries his vision of the Lordship of Jesus to the outreaches of his universe...

...Some of the most awesome Christological statements of the New Testament are found in hymns and ecstatic utterances preserved in Paul's letters and other New Testament books...

...ultimate destiny not only of Jesus but of all humankind, it makes metaphysics a necessary part of any serious Christology...

...these religious groups...

...Moltmann, Pannenberg, and Kasper all devote significant portions of their Christologies (and not simply their writings on ecclesiology) to this question...

...As a result classical Christology gave relatively little attention to the political, cultural and psychological dynamics of Jesus's life...

...It has forced modern theology to be more careful about its language...

...Missionaries were experiencing first hand what theologians only occasionally speculate about...

...Judaism itself had nibbled on the ontological implications of the Torah, seeing it as the pattern for creation and all human existence...

...And because resurrection is inconceivable without the possibility of the transcendent, it directly challenges modern empiricism...

...In these and in many other symbols and metaphors the early Christians—and Christian theology since then—have tried to say it all about Jesus...

...Yet by almost every scholar's assessment, this hymn was composed less than two decades after the death of Jesus...

...Therefore, if Jesus were truly human, then these dimensions of reality were at work in him...

...The Gospels look at that history through the lens of their post-Easter faith and experience...

...One cannot be faithful to our tradition by suggesting that the New Testament writers meant something less or were simply prisoners of a sectarian viewpoint...

...But recent Christological studies, such as those of Schillebeeckx, Kasper, Kiing and others, spend considerable time in charting how the generally acknowledged aspects of the history of Jesus, such as his piety, his sense of authority, and the peculiar thrust of his kingdom ministry form the implicit grounding points for later explicit Christological affirmations...

...Resurrection as a general concept or expectation did not mean mere physical resuscitation nor even personal survival beyond death...

...And it was the conviction of resurrection that gave fuel to their interpretation of the universe and its destiny...

...To cite this reflection on the life of Jesus as "under stress" is not meant to suggest that it is false or valueless...

...In a thoughtful essay in The Way (April, 1977, Vol...

...The secularist denial of the transcendent may have been premature, but it has effectively challenged Christology in another important area...

...And the quest to legitimize pluralism prompted a closer look at Chalcedon's dogmatic statement on the person and nature of Jesus and the discovery that Chalcedon permits more latitude than classical Christology seemed to concede...

...The development of a Catholic Christology that can really explore the implications of resurrection may well have to be more bold and more cross-cultural...

...Thus the events of Jesus's life and ministry were a playing out of the God-man drama...

...The memory of a lovely Jewish rabbi and charismatic social reformer was dogmatized beyond recognition...

...That brings Christology into encounter and confrontation with philosophy and, more exactly, with metaphysics...

...It has, for example, helped pick our questions for us, Classical Christology presumed an unquestioned and comprehensive supernatural viewpoint...

...The Son of God took human flesh and became man...

...Bauer, Adolph Harnack and Rudolph Bultmann, asserted that speculation on the cosmic significance of Jesus took place only as Christianity fell under the spell of (and, by implication, was compromised by) Greco-Roman philosophical and religious traditions...

...The resurrection of Jesus is the paradigm of all human destiny...

...Concretely, it means that Bultmann and others had something when they suggested that there is a difference between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith...

...But the fact remains that the Catholic Church has digested and even endorsed modern methods of biblical study to a degree that leaves many of my Protestant colleagues amazed and, at times, even envious...

...And, in fact, some of its assumptions and some of its emphases are being called into question today...

...The description of experience and the exploration of the psychological and social dimensions of the human person became more attractive...

...This experience, too, can trace its roots to the breakdown of the medieval world view and to the social philosophies of such men as Comte and Marx...

...This is precisely the major concern of such modern Christologies proposed by W. Pannenberg, Karl Rahner, and now Walter Kasper...

...In what way did Judaism influence Jesus's perception of sexuality...

...For example, this sort of Christology tends to emphasize the divinity of Jesus at the expense of his humanity...

...And "more" does not mean speaking only in biblical language or repeating New Testament credal formulas, as evangelical theology is content to do...

...Many African and Asian cultures look indulgently at western assumptions that only abstract language and empirical criteria are adequate for probing reality...

...For example, the spotlight turns again to the humanity of Jesus...

...then our prime sources do not stand in the way of serious reflection on the humanity of Jesus...

...However resurrection is to be interpreted, the biblical evidence testifies that it was here that the history of Jesus and the church's faith in him as Lord first intersected...

...In other words, the Christologies of the New Testament are not mutually incompatible, but neither are they identical in language or scope...

...Resurrection was necessarily tied into eschatology, how one projected the final destiny of the community of Israel and the universe it peopled...

...To keep faith with the interpretive process which began with the New Testament and stretches through the conciliar period and down to our own day, theology must attempt to link up our contemporary understanding of the ultimate values and structures of our world with our repeated claims about the resurrection of Jesus as a pattern for human existence...

...Even the first Christians could not escape it: Paul struggles with the role of Israel in Romans 9 to 11, the very epistle in which he makes unequivocal claims about salvation in Christ...

...The staggering richness of empirical data has prodded science itself to make imaginative leaps into new ways of defining matter and energy...

...His miracles prove his divine power...

...But today every major Christological study is forced to take Jesus's humanity much more seriously...

...Thus a great deal of energy, not only in theology but in preaching and catechetics, was spent on explaining the how (the hypostatic union of two natures in one person) and in defending the fact of Jesus's divinity...

...In Catholic circles, too, the problem is not one of mere philosophical pluralism...

...Thus the breakdown of metaphysics becomes one important signpost on the Christological frontier...

...Jesus and 1 In what w of sexualit previous C But thei these...