Abstract
This is a book with a brilliant title, and curiosity is further aroused by its being jointly dedicated to the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Chicago and the organisation, Evangelicals and Catholics Together. However, having said that, Oakes’ treatment includes no reference to any Evangelical theologian. He probably assumes he has covered this particular base with his observation that little divides Evangelicals from Catholics in Christology.
The book begins with a survey of the New Testament data, first with a synchronic review (covering the surface data, mainly via the Christological titles), and then with a diachronic review, covering the history of the formation of New Testament Christology. This survey is short in comparison with the book as a whole, and contains little that is remarkable, apart from reminding us that the church’s Christology was already settled before the gospels began to be written, and that the telling of the story is shaped by its ending (the resurrection). Few will quarrel with any of this, but the reader is left with the impression that by the time the New Testament section is completed one has still not met up with Jesus, possibly because key revelatory events such as Gethsemane and the Transfiguration are not discussed. Apart from the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection the only event that does receive extended treatment (in a thoughtful 12-page Appendix to the Christology of Joseph Ratzinger) is Christ’s descent into Hell.
The following chapters are devoted to a review of Patristic, Mediaeval and Reformation Christologies. The Patristic is notable for its uncompromising animus against Nestorius, leaving no room for the possibility that he was not a Nestorian at all; and even less for the possibility that while the theotokos (to adapt a distinction offered by Karl Rahner in another connection) was objectively true it was not kerygmatically correct. The treatment of Reformation Christology is notable for three things: first, the attention devoted to the Christology of Ignatius Loyola; secondly, its openness to the extra Calvinisticum (the Reformed insistence against the Lutherans that the incarnate Logos was active beyond the confines of his human nature); and, thirdly, its criticism of Martin Luther. Having alleged that the defects in Anselm were due to his lack of acquaintance with Aristotle, Oakes then argues that Luther was imprisoned within Nominalism and that this ‘hobbled’ his attempts to become a consistent Chalcedonian, since to a Nominalist there are no such things as essences or natures. The result is that Luther’s Christology is riddled with philosophical confusion, and this becomes particularly apparent in his famous comment that in being made ‘a curse for us’ Christ ‘bore the person of a sinner and a thief’. Oakes, linking this to Luther’s Nominalism, seems to understand him as meaning that Christ was ‘personally’ a sinner. It is far more likely, however, that the instinctive Evangelical reading of Luther is correct, and that what he meant was simply that Christ bore this legal persona as the one who carried the sin of the world. In fact, Oakes ascribes to Balthasar an almost identical sentiment: ‘the Redeemer so identifies himself with sinners that, like a lightning rod, he draws the judgement of God onto himself.’
It is precisely in its review of Balthasar and other modern Catholic theologians that this book is most valuable. Treated under the heading, ‘Christianity and Pluralism; Catholic Theologians’, the selection itself is interesting: Rahner, Sobrino, Balthasar and Ratzinger; but no Hans Kung, Schillebeeckx or Yves Congar. It is interesting to see Rahner compared to Schleiermacher in his concern for the ‘cultured despisers’ of religion, and his resulting commitment to making Christ credible within the framework of ‘general criteria of religious and moral meaningfulness’. The problem lies in identifying these criteria in the first place, especially in the light of the central paradoxes highlighted by Oakes in his Introduction: ‘an infinite God who is a finite man, a virgin who is a mother, a God who dies, a dead man who lives, a baby born into the very world it made, a prince who is a pauper, in short, Infinity dwindled to infancy.’ It is hard to fit such a package into the framework of what is ‘generally acceptable’. Christology must create its own plausibility structure.
Linked to this is the inescapable ‘scandal of particularity’, brilliantly captured in Balthasar’s image of the wave and the river. How can one wave in the river of truth, which flowed for millions of years before the wave came and may flow for millions afterwards, be the river?
Jon Sobrino, once cited by Joseph Ratzinger as an example of ‘dangerous thinkers’, insists that Christology can be done only among the poor, which means that we must break with patristic Christology since there is an epistemological fissure between the church of today’s poor and the church of the early councils. Oakes points out that this allegation is rooted in the more fundamental one of a break between the councils and the New Testament, and hints that the continuity Sobrino seeks might be provided by Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. It might also be provided by the Westminster principle of ‘good and necessary consequence’.
Special interest attaches to the Christology of Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Ratzinger will always be remembered for his role as Head of his church’s theological watch-dog, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, but he is also a formidable theologian in his own right. As might be expected, he insists (with Rahner in mind?) that there are limits to ‘accommodationalism’: no amount of ‘costume-changing’ can disguise the fact that the church’s message is inherently incredible. She has to proclaim that it is precisely the crucified criminal of Pilate’s titulus who is the King of the Jews and the Saviour of the world.
Ratzinger attributes the failure of Vatican II to a ‘weak and less than full-bodied Christology’; warns of the danger in divorcing theology from philosophy (faith cannot ignore Aristotle); and insists that the problem of religious pluralism cannot be resolved by dialogue. It can be resolved only from an eschatological point of view: what do we mean by eternal life? For Ratzinger it can mean nothing short of union with Jesus Christ, the incarnate Logos, in whom God and man are one, and on whom the very coherence of the universe depends. This makes dialogue difficult.
The final section of the book deals with recent magisterial theology. Oakes marks the transition with the comment that we now move from ‘the private voices of professional theologians’ to the teaching of the Church. There is a fascinating glimpse into the way the magisterium operates, but its infallibility is simply presupposed: ‘the very concept of revelation directly entails an infallible interpreter of that revelation’. We are offered no rationale which would help non-Catholics understand how the private Christology of the professional theologian, Joseph Ratzinger, has now given way to the infallible and binding Christology of Pope Benedict (should he choose to speak ex cathedra).
It is hard not to envy the depth of professional theological talent available to the Vatican, but no less hard to avoid the impression that the magisterium exists more for control than for creativity, intervening only when there are ‘turbulent developments’ in Catholic Christology. Such turbulence there may have been, but developments? The discourses which have taken place within Catholicism are not significantly different from those which have taken place within Protestantism; and while, thanks to the magisterium, allegedly toxic elements may have been repelled, no new dogmas have been erected. Nor are they likely to be.
What might Oakes have said had he been as free to criticise Ratzinger and the magisterium as he was to criticise Luther and Calvin? We shall never know, any more than we shall know what Ratzinger might have achieved had he not been called to serve as Chief Theological Censor. It seems such a waste, having to devote his life to circumscribing the creativity of others rather than to giving European Christianity the benefit of his own.
Overall, however, Oakes’s wide-ranging work is informative and stimulating; sometimes irritating, but always worthwhile.