Tradition Has
No Answer and
Apocalypse Is No
Alternative
Hans-Joachim Sander
1. Introduction
Edward Schillebeeckx was a theologian with the size of a century. After his death his theology will continue to surprise. I am especially grateful for two surprises. In 2006, a long interview, given at the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, with the Italian publisher Francesco Strazzari was translated into German.1 At a certain point, Strazzari referred to Schillebeeckx’s famous
enterprise of re-discovering virtually all the topics of systematic theology on the basis of Jesus of Nazareth as a person having lived at a particular moment in history (cf. his trilogy Jesus, Christ and Church). Strazzari subsequently asked Schillebeeckx whether he still holds on to his visionary Jesus-matrix. Schillebeeckx replied as follows:
The German translation of the title Jesus, die Geschichte eines
Lebenden [lit. ‘Jesus, the history of a living one’] no longer satisfies
me. Instead of Geschichte (history) I would rather prefer Erzählung (story), The story of a living one, since the way Mark tells this story is different from the way that Matthew tells it, and this differs as
1 Edward Schillebeeckx, Ich höre nicht auf, an den lebendigen Gott zu glauben (ed.
well from Luke’s version. These three stories are very different from the gospel of John.2 The second book of the trilogy, Christ: The
Christian Experience in the Modern World (1980) deals mainly with
the Pauline view on Jesus of Nazareth. Proto-Christianity therefore contains different and sometimes contradictory views on Jesus. Nevertheless, they were authentic confessions of faith. The result is surprising and seems to suggest the following: there is no unique and homogenous Christology, instead there are many different forms. In other words: Christology is pluralistic.3
For me this answer was a surprise for two reasons. (1) First, it was a surprise since I had misread Schillebeeckx up until this point. I previously thought Schillebeeckx was looking for a Christology related to history, as the New Quest for Jesus had been doing, but with the difference that Schillebeeckx’s vision of a historically based Christology depends instead on those people with real historical experiences of Jesus and the narratives people tell about Jesus.4 Schillebeeckx uses a combination of history and language, of reality
in time and signs about this reality, of what is experienced and of what can be told and/or remembered about this experience. I suppose this combi- nation is undivided and unmixed. His Christology is not simply in search of authentic material of the historical Jesus, nor for authentic experiences
2 It should be noted that this problem only concerns the title of the German version
of Schillebeeckx’s book on Jesus. The title of the Dutch original, Jezus, het verhaal
van een levende (Jesus, the story of a living one), already used the term ‘story’ and
the English translation changed the title into Jesus: An Experiment in Christology.
3 Schillebeeckx, Ich höre nicht auf, pp. 22–23.
4 Schillebeeckx is replying to his critics that he is definitely not looking for a
‘neoliberal’ Christology opposed to the Christological dogmas but for a history enlightening the dogma by the disciples’ real experience of Jesus. See: Edward Schillebeeckx, Interim Report on the Books Jesus & Christ (trans. John Bowden; London: SCM/New York, NY: Crossroad, 1980) pp. 27–35. His critics, among whom Walter Kasper, Leo Scheffczyk and Werner Löser, claim that by reviving a liberal Christology Schillebeeckx is going to relativize Christ’s resurrection in favour of Jesus’ humanity. But Schillebeeckx’s point is the following (Schillebeeckx, Interim
Report, pp. 31–32):
I want to pursue the history of dogma with a historical study; in other words, to join with my readers in following along an itinerarium mentis the first disciples, who came into contact with a fellow-believer, followed him, and after his death experienced him as Christ and Son of God. Furthermore, when Christians confess that in the life of Jesus of Nazareth God himself has achieved decisive and definitive salvation for the liberation of men, then because of their own confession, the historical life of this man cannot vanish in the mist. ... It is for theological and pastoral reasons, therefore, that I am interested in the historically tangible earthly appearance of Jesus of Nazareth, though this can only be demonstrated in a reflection, the reflection which can be found in the first believing community.
with Jesus, but is searching for authentic narratives about those personal experiences with Jesus as a historical event. I am myself responsible for this aspect of the surprise. My reading of Schillebeeckx had been too narrow. I identified his project, to a too large extent, as a sort of exegetical theology. But his theology, in contrast to what I previously thought, belongs to the field of theologies that use biblical narratives founded upon strict exegesis, so as to open the range of present-day experiences for describing Jesus as an event of a living person.5
(2) But there is yet another reason for surprise in Schillebeeckx’s remarks. And this part bears his responsibility. Schillebeeckx says that now he would prefer to subtitle his famous book on the living Jesus with ‘narrative’ instead of ‘history’. There is more behind this than simply exchanging synonyms – a change which could be seen as being almost naturally in the line of his thinking of history as implicit theology.6 In that line, ‘history’ means story-
telling and in this sense ‘history’ and ‘narratives’ are indeed synonyms. But the way Schillebeeckx characterizes this story-telling is turning history into something very challenging. It is story-telling which unavoidably creates differences and one cannot explicitly move beyond these differences even if there is an implicit unity between them. One cannot distil a central core from within the various experiences people share with Jesus and the stories they tell about him, not even from the simple fact that they tell these stories in the first place, because distilling such a kernel in the experience of Jesus would necessarily depend upon an abstraction and this would entail leaving the level of experience, which is, as may be remembered, precisely the core of Schillebeeckx’s theology. All one can get about Jesus is different stories about his history, stories which are told on the basis of experiences people cannot avoid presenting to others. This is a clue to narratives about
5 Cf. Robert Schreiter, ‘Edward Schillebeeckx’, The Modern Theologians: An intro-
duction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century (ed. David F. Ford; Oxford/
Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 152–61 (158):
The three insights, then, depend on one another: Experience is grounded in a God who wishes to communicate, the contrast experiences draw us closer to that God, and the experience of God ‘mindful of humanity’ affirms that act of intuition and faith by making a mediation of the paradoxical experience of the immediate. In doing this, Schillebeeckx achieves a great deal in his hope of making the Christian message of God and the experience of salvation offered in Jesus Christ more available to a secularized society.
6 Cf. Erik Borgman, Edward Schillebeeckx: A Theologian in His History (vol. 1;
London: Continuum, 2003) p. 376:
In particular the lecture notes make clear the implications of the revolution which began with Schillebeeckx’s adaption of De Petter’s philosophical theory of the implicit intuition in the sphere of theology. Finite historical, worldly human existence is the place where God is to be seen in an indirect way, and theological treatment of the tradition is orientated on making visible this existence as such.