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Schillebeeckx's Soteriological Agnosticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Peter Phillips
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Edward Schillebeeckx’s richly thought-provoking explorations of Christology are focused in his two studies, Jesus and Christ. These works have brought out with considerable force the need to acknowledge differing, yet parallel interpretations of the person of Christ which are embodied in the life and experience of very different communities in contrasting periods of history. The New Testament itself bears ample witness to this diversity in so far as it is marked by a density of imagery and variety of interpretation which is the product of the churches both of the Jewish Diaspora and the Hellenic world which gave it its shape. The limits of this rich diversity are clearly established by discovering an identity between the exalted Christ and the life and ministry of the earthly Jesus: what Jesus said and what he did provides the necessary ground for the developing Christology of those who follow after their master. Schillebeeckx recognises what Donald MacKinnon insists on, in talking about ‘the explosive intellectual force’ of Jesus’ life and ministry, which confronts those scholars who would seek to reduce the earthly reality of the Christ event to ‘an acted parable of intellectual reconciliation’.

Schillebeeckx argues powerfully that the “‘Jesus affair”... is not just a vision born of faith and based solely on the disciples’ Easter experience; it is his self-understanding that creates the possibility and lays the foundation of the subsequent interpretation by the Christians’. (Jesus, pp 311-312) For Schillebeeckx, the fundamental tenets of soteriology are established by developing the implications inherent in the call to follow after Jesus rather than by way of a developing reflection on the saving significance of Jesus’ death as such.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 78 , Issue 912 , February 1997 , pp. 76 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Schillebeeckx, Edward Jesus An Experiment in Christology Collins 1979Google Scholar. Christ the Christian Experience in the Modern World, SCM, 1980Google Scholar.

2 Professor JDG Dunn has developed independently a very similar position in, for example, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament, SCM 1990Google Scholar.

3 MacKinnon, Donald, ‘Faith and Reason in the Philosophy of Religion’, in Philosophy, History and Civilisation, eds Boucher, David, Connelly, James & Modood, Terry. University of Wales Press. 1995. p 86Google Scholar. Some of the implications of this position have already been explored by Robert Butterworth in his important article, ‘Has Chalcedon a Future?’The Month, April, 1977, pp 111–117.

4 Schillebeeckx develops this theme of Jesus' death in a sermon of 1981:

Without Jesus' violent death there would hare been no special seal on his message, his life‐style and his person and nothing would have been known of his Galilean mission. Jesus risked all to the death as did Peter later. Monsignor Romero and many others with him go on risking all today. There are circumstances, like those of Jesus, like those of Bishop Romero, in which one can predict a violent death. These do not call for any extraordinary revelations: what is extraordinary is trust in one's own calling to serve justice in a world of injustice power and slavery. In that case the dramatic dénouement of trust in one's own calling, is obvious. “Christian ‘to the death”’, in Schillebeeckx, , God among us. SCM, 1983, p 202)Google Scholar

5 See Hengel, Martin, The Atonement, SCM, 1981. p 37–39Google Scholar.

6 Schillebeeckx, Edward Interim, Report on the Book Jesus and Christ, SCM. 1980, pp 65ffGoogle Scholar.

7 Dalferth, I. U., ‘Christ died for us’, in Sacrifice and Redemption, ed Sykes, Stephen, Cambridge, 1991, p 302Google Scholar.

8 Scottish Journal of Religious Studies, Spring, 1981; reprinted in MacKinnon, Donald, Themes in Theology, T & T Clark, 1979, pp 208–226Google Scholar,

9 Schürer, Emil, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ revised & edited Vermes, Gem, Millar, Fergus & Black, Matthew, T & T Clark 1979, pp 219ffGoogle Scholar.

10 Bruce, F. F.. New Testament History, Oliphants, 1977 p 191Google Scholar.

11 Jeremias, Joachim, New Testament Theology, vol 1. SCM, 1975, p 284Google Scholar.

12 I owe this point to the kindness of my colleague Bemard Robinson.

13 Dodd, C.H The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, Fontana., 1970, p 78Google Scholar. The Team. under the direction of Dodd, which produced the New English Bible translates Rom 8.3 ‘by sending his own son… as a sacrifice for sin’ reserving ‘to deal with sin’ as an alternative reading. While it is correct that the Greek expression here (peri humartias) was sometimes used in the LXX as a translation of the Hebrew ‘sin‐offering’ (asham), the meaning is much better conveyed by the phrase ‘to deal with sin’. This was acknowledged in the text of The Revised English Bible See also. Barrett, C. K., The Epistle to the Romans. Adam & Charles Black, 1971, pp 77. 156Google Scholar.

14 See Jeremias, New Testament Theology vol 1. p 292ff. where Jeremias argues that we should accept a reading of lytron which does not exclude the notion of substitutionary offering (asham).

15 C. K. Barrett, 'The Background of Mark 10:45′ in New Testament Essays: Studies in Memory of T.W. Manson, ed. A. J. B. Higgins, 1959, pp 1—18 esp p 7.

16 Hooker, Moma, Jesus and the Servant, SPCK, 1959, esp. pp 74–79Google Scholar; The Son of Man in Mark, SPCK 1967, pp 144–147Google Scholar.

17 Moma Hooker, Jesus and the Servant, p 76, 78.

18 Moffat's translation in Charles, R. H., The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, vol 1. Oxford. 1913Google Scholar.

19 Townshend, in Charles, R. H., The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, vol 2, Oxford, 1913, p 654Google Scholar.

20 Ignatius, Ephesians 21: See also Smyrnaeans 10 antipsycon hymon to pneuma mou, Polycarp 2. kata panta sou antipsycon ego.

21 Lightfoot, , The Apostolic Fathers, part 2, Vol 2, Macmillan, 1889, p 87—8Google Scholar.

22 Ignatius, Romans 6.

23 Barrett, C. K. ‘Mark 10—45: A Ransom for Many’, in New Testament Essays. SPCK 1972, pp 20Google Scholar.

24 Barrett, ‘Mark 10—45: A Ransom for Many’, p 24

25 Barrett, ‘Mark 10–45: A Ransom for Many’, p 25.

26 See also Barrett, C. K. Jesus and the Gospel Tradition, SPCK, 1967, pp 45–52, 67Google Scholar.