March 22, 2010 - Second Thought for the Day

The topic of the unity of Christ in the larger field of Christology was a preoccupation for the early Church Fathers. They were trying to understand the nature of Christ, bringing together (or separating out) the human factor and the divine factor. Doctrinally, this came to a head in the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon, but as the centuries passed, this focus on the mechanism of incarnation dispersed. It did not reappear with any real force until the discussions beginning in the 19th century of the historicity of Jesus Christ. Then, it was framed as an issue of the universality and the particularity of Christ, and as the kerygmatic (proclaimed) Christ versus the historical Jesus. While not explicitly stated as an issue of incarnation, the question of the degree to which Christ was a historical figure was a restatement of the old argument of the degree to which he was human. In emphasizing the ahistoricity of Christ, the contemporary Christ of proclamation, the divinity and universality of Christ was elevated. The correlative sacrifice was the historical Jesus, as the particularly embedded Jew of Palestine. The connections here to the development of an anti-Jewish theology are obvious: the more universal/divine Jesus Christ becomes, the less human/particular/Jewish he becomes.
Oddly, the turn to the subject in the 20th century, and the emphasis on a Christology from below and the historical existence of Christ did not emphasize his Jewish context until after the Holocaust (and even then not completely). However, moving into the 21st century, Christological exploration that seeks to recontextualize Jesus sometimes acknowledges his Jewishness, while simultaneously replacing that Jewishness with something else: Jesus as Asian, Jesus as Oppressed Minority, Jesus as Woman, Jesus as Transvestite. While all of these Christologies rightfully challenge the previous 20 centuries' worth of images of Jesus as a reflection of the dominant, majority Christian (ie. male, and usually white), their relocation of Jesus dehistoricizes him and risks dispensing with his Jewishness. Again.
So how can a Christology hold onto a contextual Jesus, who is universal and divine in his relation to all human situations, while at the same time recognizing his particular uniqueness as a human Jew? This is where we turn to ideas of interstiality, multiplicity, hybridity (although not a dualistic hybridity that sets itself up in opposition to "purity"), and diversity, where unity is not cast aside, but neither does it uphold uniformity. In these new attempts to deconstruct and reconstruct the incarnation (although they do not describe themselves as such), it might be possible to understand how Jesus can be both/and: divine/human, universal/particular, Jewish/Asian/African/Indigenous, male/female/transexual, etc.
So who might be the central figure around which to set these two now-related parts? Jurgen Moltmann has been suggested, and he is certainly a post-Holocaust theologian, attempting to incorporate the horrors of the Jewish genocide into his theology. His famous passage equates the crucifixion with the death camps, borrowing Elie Wiesel's story of God hanging on the gallows to draw a new image of the suffering God dying on the cross. But some have accused Moltmann of appropriating, rather than borrowing, Wiesel's material and using the Holocaust as a contextual tool for structuring his own theology, rather than allowing it to really influence his understanding of Christ. He has also been criticized by feminists for creating a theology of suffering that can be used to glorify suffering.
I wonder if going in a different direction might be useful here. I am thinking more of someone like David Tracy. To begin with, his acknowledgement that language is problematic, divisive rather than unifying because of the plurality of meanings within words, and that history is ambiguous, always interpreted (with bias) by those in the present, offer a way to question the doctrinal certainties of the earlier Christological controversies. Second, his emphasis on the hermeneutical task of all theologians, and their subservience to the religious classic is appropriate for framing the dialogue between Jews and Christians who do, indeed, share a classic, with wildly differing hermeneutical procedures and goals. And thirdly, his idea of similarity-in-difference, where things may be similar but are never identical, may offer a tool for a theology of difference that still attempts to hold things together. His use of analogy relies on difference, as well as the possibility of what may be possible, and could work here. As far as I know, he doesn't address issues of incarnation, but he could. Plus, this born-Protestant could use a Catholic.