History, Hermeneutics, and the Historical Jesus

Editorial Board Roger W. Ireson, Chair General Board of Higher Education and Ministry The United Methodist Church Ted A. Campbell Wesley Theological Seminary Jimmy Carr General Board of Higher Education and Ministry The United Methodist Church JackA.KellerJr. The United Methodist Publishing House Thomas W. Ogletree The Divinity School Yale University Rebecca Chopp Candler School of Theology Emory University Duane A. Ewers General Board of Higher Education and Ministry The United Methodist Church Patricia Farris District Superintendent San Diego United Methodist Church Grant Hagiya Centenary United Methodist Church Los Angeles, CA Harriett Jane Olson The United Methodist Publishing House Russell E. Richey Duke Divinity School Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki Claremont School of Theology Linda Thomas IlifT School of Theology Traci West The Theological School Drew University John E. Hamish General Board of Higher Education and Ministry The United Methodist Church Gary L. Ball-Kilbourne, Interim Editor Sylvia Street, Production Manager Tracey Evans, Production Coordinator Vol. 19, No. 2 SUMMER 1999 Contents Introduction Gary L. Ball-Kilboume 113 Articles Historicity, Hermeneutics, and the Historical Jesus: Minding What We Say: Rhetoric in Christian Conference Millicent C. Feske 115 The Mary and Martha Story: Who Learns What Lesson about Women and Ministry? Traci West 135 Generation X: The First Post-Christendom Generation Stanley J. Menking 153 The Burning Bush in the Shadows of Auschwitz: A Post-Shoah Return to Holy Ground Henry F. Knight 167 QR Lectionary Study See the Salvation of YHWH: Lectionary Studies in Exodus Nancy R. Bowen 195 Millicent C. Feske Historicity, Hermeneutics, and the Historical Jesus: A Peculiarly Christian Praxis The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. —^Borges^ Life is a struggle to evolve, not an attempt to avoid wounds. —William James^ O ne of the most perplexing puzzles I encountered as a seminary student in the 1970s was the claim that Christianity was inextricably connected to the particular, actual, first-century person Jesus of Nazareth, but that such historical knowledge is nigh-unto impossible to obtain. We need to know the Jesus of history, but he is no more available to us than any other historical figure except through our own interpretive efforts. Biblical scholars and pastors and theologians have been trying to solve this riddle in a variety of creative, thoughtfijl, and faithful ways since the end of the eighteenth century. Yet many Christians find themselves instinctively drawn to Millicent C. Feske is Assistant Professor of Theology at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania. She is an ordained elder in the Louisiana Conference of The United Methodist Church and serves on the Conference Board of Ordained Ministry. know more about Jesus, the historical person—who he was, what he did, what he said. In an intermediate-level Christology course that I teach to undergraduates, my students often sign up for the course expecting—even hoping—^that this will be a class that will give them information about the "real Jesus.'^ Theologians have the same tendency. Much of the most provocative and challenging theological literature of the late twentieth century purports to base itself on historical claims about Jesus' identification with the poor and his egalitarian relationships with those on the social margins.'* In addition to believing Christians, secular culture has a fascination with Jesus as a historical figure, as testified to by the popularity of "Jesus" as cover articles for such mainstream magazines as Time, Life, and The Atlantic Monthly} Feature films that offer interpretations of the first-century Jesus, even when they are interwoven with literature and fiction as The Last Temptation of Christ and Jesus of Montreal are, generate enormous controversy and debate, suggesting the importance of historical claims to people's understandings of both Jesus and the church. Newspapers run coverage of the latest activities of the infamous "Jesus Seminar," careful to headline what appears—at least at first glance—to be particularly egregious or outlandish.^ Public television produces careful documentaries on the latest scholarly findings,' while crowds flock to see the Shroud of Turin. We are not absolutely sure what we are looking for or what to do with what we may find, but we have a sense there is something fundamentally important in the historical evidence about Jesus of Nazareth. In the nineteenth century, a "Quest for the Historical Jesus" emerged as scholars began to apply the tools of scientific historical research to the biblical texts. The discrepancies between the gospel accounts of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus—always a part of the church's awareness, even in the earliest centuries^—revealed the "fingerprints"^ of the individual human author. In an environment where truth was defined as "that which we can prove," these variances provoked the inevitable question, "Will the 'real' Jesus please stand up?" The disastrous, if self-revealing, results of the original Quest were biblical scholarship's attempt to answer that question with finality. As Albert Schweitzer noted with alacrity and no little sarcasm in 1906, these so-called "empirical" portraits of Jesus resembled no one so much as their nineteenth-century authors. The attempt to illuminate the first-century Jesus seemed a dismal failure, and the project fell into disrepute. Yet attempts to understand something of Jesus "as he actually was" continued to surface among biblical scholars and theologians through alternating periods of intense interest and scholarly skepticism. At the present time, investigating Jesus of Nazareth as a historical figure is again a respectable, if still disputed, undertaking in the theological academy. However, there is another, more fruitful manner of construing the relation between christology and Jesus in history. In this essay, I will proceed in the following manner: first, I will identify the legacy from modern theology that I take to be of primary importance for christology's engagement with a historical Jesus; second, I will reconstruct, using contemporary theory, what it means to read history in general; and third, I will examine two contemporary christological projects that deal with the issue of Jesus in history. In conclusion, I will claim that christology is not just the explication of the essential identity of Jesus as Christ but a practical activity taking place between the Jesus traditions and the communities that claim his name. Jesus as Kyrios The authoritative power of the name of "Jesus" as "Christ" within almost every Christian community cannot be denied. Throughout most of Christian history, the relationship of Jesus to the church could be summed up in the phrase Jesus is Lord. Although interpreted variously, to say "Jesus is Lord" has meant that Jesus as sovereign is in some way authoritative and definitive for Christian existence. However, christology itself, as a theological discipline, has been besieged in recent years by a variety of critics, both within the faith and without, who are concerned about atrocities—past and present—committed in the name of Christ.^ ^ These scholars raise a radical challenge to many of the ways in which christology has classically been construed. They question emphases not only on the lordship of Christ but also on the maleness of Christ; Jesus' suffering and death as the heart of Christian redemption; and the finality, ultimacy, and uniqueness of Christ. From a variety of perspectives they argue that christology must be radically reconfigured if it is to serve the church in a world of ethnic, political, social, and religious particularities.'2 Even while bearing these searing critiques in mind, however, it is not enough simply to cast off "Jesus is Lord" for some other, less oflFensive phrase. What is at stake here is the recognition of the very real power and authority that the "name of Jesus" does hold within Christian communities and the integrity of the relation between the appeal to that name and the use of power. Furthermore, the manner in which the name Jesus authoritatively functions indicates as much about his identity as any statement about him, either historical or narrative. Refusal to acknowledge either the very existence or the actual manner of this functional authority is, in a sense, a surrender of christology into the hands of those who would abuse its power and a denial of a fundamental relation as Christians. Christians necessarily must ask, then, not "Who was Jesus" but what does it mean to call ourselves followers of Jesus as Christ? What does it mean to be responsible witnesses to this name? This returns us, then, to the question of the historical Jesus. As I have noted above, almost all Christian communities in some way or other acknowledge the centrality of Jesus as Christ (Lord, kyrios) to their identity and practice of the faith. And to recognize Jesus (the first-century individual) as Christ requires attention to his historical life and death. We are only too painfully aware of the (empirical) difficulties and (theological) dangers the conjunction of these two claims entails. However, I want to suggest that the life and actions of Jesus, properly conceived, are vitally important to the liberating witness of Christianity today. The Legacy of Modern Theology I begin, then, by identifying a twofold legacy from modem theology that I consider crucial to carry forward into christological formation in our time and the relation of that legacy to the issue of Jesus in history. First, modem theology teaches us to read critically the received traditions about Jesus. It tells us that we can use the texts to ask the kinds of questions that are being raised here. It teaches us that these texts are themselves part of a traditioning process that addressed the material questions of particular Christian communities to the available narratives about Jesus in an attempt to reconstmct their own vision for living in the world. Thus, for example, Mark writes about a suffering, dying savior who criticizes the twelve disciples and condemns the Jemsalem Temple to his church, which is left leaderless after the horrors of the Roman-Jewish War of 66-72 CE.^^ jQ^n tells Jesus' story as one of darkness and light, outsiders and insiders to his community struggling with rejection by the synagogue and with the task of forming a new non-Jewish Christian identity.^'* And the household codes of the Pastoral Epistles reveal the rifts within early Christian churches debating the inheritance of Jesus' remarkable ministry to and with women.*^ This legacy of interpretation and integration is, in and of itself, a liberating word. Indeed, during my years as a seminarian, my response to all my former pastors was one of unmitigated fury: they had all had the same training I was receiving; why hadn't they shared this wonderful information with me? The problem with the modern project, however, was in thinking that critical reading meant that there was only one way to read the text. Even the early church was not so stringent in its views. Origen (ca. 200 CE) and Augustine (354-430) both developed elegant systems of different "levels" of meaning in scripture. Medieval theologians drew upon these ancient methods of exegesis to seek four meanings in each passage,*^ Although Christianity has always held the early, received traditions recorded in the Bible to be of special significance, it has never agreed upon the exact nature of that significance. The historical Jesus project itself is an example of the wide range of opinion about the use and interpretation of the texts about Jesus' life and death. But the project failed, in a sense, not because of that diversity but because of its attempt to read empirically texts that are not empirical accounts. It asserted that the only way we could be connected to the historical personage of Jesus of Nazareth was by defining history as the attempt to isolate a verifiable (and, it was later discovered, infinitely receding) identity for Jesus that would stand for all time. Most importantly, the quest for the historical Jesus abandoned the essential insight that critical reading of the received traditions about Jesus (that is, reading informed by responsible study and defended by rigorous argument) is, in and of itself, a fundamental act of christological praxis. Thus, I wish to argue that the primary instinct of the modem quest for the historical Jesus was correct: that the critical reading of the received traditions about him is vital to ecclesial formation and practice. But the quest did not recognize that the act of reading the text in the context of the community is itself, as a historical act, the act of christological practice. To assert that this is all we have is not a negative statement about the boundedness of all human enterprises but one affirming the activity of God's revelation in the midst of finite creation. What I wish to do then is to reconfigure the historical Jesus conversation through a revised understanding of what the word history means. That is, I want to suggest that when we say that something is "historical," or we state that such-and-such provides a "history" of a person or events, we are not simply implying an account of impartial, empirical facts; we are describing a process of interpretation and self-critique. To do this, I shall call upon the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer,'' who provides a manner of historical understanding that can, I believe, be appropriately taken over into the discussion of how one uses historical texts for contemporary theological construction. Gadamer's Truth and Method is a massive critique of the modem notion of method in philosophy. By "method," he refers specifically to the scientific paradigm of empirical tmth as the only truth available to us. Even aesthetics has not escaped such a criticism, he makes clear, because aesthetics has taken as its starting point the assumption that the object/subject split is a real one. Gadamer provides a trenchant criticism of what Richard Bemstein calls the "Cartesian anxiety": the need to ground all our knowledge in supposedly empirically verifiable "facts."*^ Gadamer demonstrates that such thinking is fallacious. How we understand is not through the collection of "objective information" but through the projection of worlds of discourse and experience upon texts—^projections which, in the engagement with those texts, disclose particular tmths. These tmths are then subjected to criticism and correction by other worlds and by the texts upon which they are projected. Gadamer's project asserts that we reflect and act necessarily only within these "worlds" of practice and discourse that not only limit our perspective (the negative prejudice that modem theology intended to remove) but also give us a positive locus of operation, a sense of "position" or "location" materially productive for theological reflection. In other words, the very particular and differing places in which we find ourselves in the world make it possible to say something specific and concrete about our experience of God in the world. The purpose of reading historical texts, then, is not to isolate a set of timeless essentials—either concrete or metaphysical—but to bring about the production of ourselves and the constitution of communities of ongoing conversation about our proper relation to others and to God. Jesus for Us There is a second strand of the modern theological project, especially as it has sought to interpret Jesus of Nazareth, that is crucial to retrieve: Rudolf Bultmann's contention that who Jesus is—the primary identity of Jesus—is Christ pro nobis, Christ for us. This, too, is a liberating word. It reminds us that the heart of christology is soteriology—that is, the relation between Jesus who is called Christ and human beings in history is fundamentally one of freedom, salvation, and grace. There were two problems, however, with the way Bultmann's "Christ as salvation for us" was originally conceived. The first has to do with his assumptions about the constitution of the theological "for us." Bultmann's enterprise is one that speaks primarily only to the dominant theological subject. The confrontation by Christ, in Bultmann, is the crisis that calls for a decision for or against authentic existence before God. Authentic existence can, and I contend must, be interpreted to refer to the full conditions necessary for human flourishing. But unfortunately, for Bultmann and his interpreters, it came to be correlated instead with the inner life of the middle-class individual searching for ultimate meaning in a world infected with anomie and for distinctive identity in a world of encroaching pluralism. These are important questions. But they become secondary if the basic requirements for survival and growth remain unmet: nutritious food, adequate shelter and clothing, personal and communal safety, education, access to genuine political participation. Thus, while Bultmann attempts to speak of freedom, his perspective on the nature of that freedom is severely limited by the subject he assumes and addresses. In our own time, however, it is inadequate for the "for us" of christology to be limited to this dominant theological subject. Rather, it must be expanded so that "Christ for us" is Christ for and from the perspective of the whole world, and in particular of those who have suffered history rather than written it. A second problem in Bultmann's reading emerges from his struggle with the failure of the historical Jesus quest. In Jesus and the Word,^^ Buhmann makes clear his interest in the flesh-and-blood Jesus of history by rendering him in his first-century Palestinian milieu. Yet, in his attempt to avoid the pitfalls of the historical Jesus project as the production of an empirically verifiable persona, Bultmann borders on rendering the soteriological event almost contentless. The lack of specificity about the nature of "authentic existence" as salvific is a direct result of Bultmann's failed attempt to avoid projecting his own persona onto the face of Jesus. Bultmann had the brilliance to see the problem of the historical quest (the impossibility of empirical fact about Jesus), but he did not have the philosophical tools to offer a different sense of historical understanding that would enable us to engage the Jesus of history in another, more productive manner. Two Contemporary Historical Readings Two contemporary christological readings will illustrate my point. Both concern themselves—though in quite different ways—^with the issue of Jesus in history and its relation to christology as soteriology. What I wish to explore in these short descriptions is not whether we can find a "historical Jesus" in the way of the old or new or any other "Quest" but rather whether we can talk with integrity about the "Christ for us" from particular positions in human history and society.2° To this end, I shall explore the work of Jon Sobrino, a Jesuit theologian from El Salvador, and Richard Horsley, a contemporary U.S. biblical scholar. Each has quite different emphases and speaks differently about the "history of Jesus." Both share a clarity about how their particular locations in the world shape and are shaped by the work of interpreting the traditions about Jesus of Nazareth. The world of discourse of Latin American liberation theologies operates in the questions Richard Horsley has brought to the issue of a Jesus not o/history but in history. Horsley's Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: Popular Resistance in Roman Palestine draws on contemporary research on the nature of preindustrial peasant societies to give a fresh reading of Josephus, other fragmentary accounts, and a number of particularly problematic New Testament gospel passages. His aim to consider Jesus in relation to the question of violence/ nonviolence is stated directly in the opening section of the book, which is a discussion of the structural nature of violence in oppressive societies and of the tiered nature of violent retribution. Horsley is not so much interested in the creation of a portrait of Jesus as in the consideration of him as a figure shaped by and shaping the milieu of which he was a part.^' The debate over the advocacy of nonviolence over violence with regard to Jesus is revealed to be a naive differentiation in a society strafed with violence and caught in the grip of hierarchical power politics brutally enforced.^^ '^Violence," as pejorative, is identified by Horsley as a term defined by the ruling class for the maintenance of social boundaries that benefit those who control a hierarchical power base and whose own violent behavior is self-designated as defense or national security.^^ The realm of God preached and enacted by Jesus in this context is not a spiritualized heaven^^ but the use of power to liberate in a social-historical way.^^ It is a power understood to be "already present and active among the people"^^ with whom Jesus associated. Horsley's reading of some of the gospel traditions about Jesus renders him as one who refuses to participate in the politics of violent, hierarchical power and as an instigator of egalitarian social relations^'—relations that threatened the familial structure of first-century Palestinian peasant society.^^ Horsley also appeals to a consideration of "apocalyptic" as a political term offering hope to an oppressed people in history, indicating their belief that God did indeed have the power to intervene and restore a just reign.^^ He does so in order to interpret Jesus' limiting of his manifestations of God's reign to the social realm. And in so doing, he shifts the primary locus of salvation away from either Jesus' execution on the cross or a realm hereafter to within God's created order. Jesus, then, is considered primarily in relationship to and in continuity with his own people's worldview and situation as a colonized and oppressed peasantry, trapped in a web of escalating violence. Although Horsley's essay does not lack substantive content and opinion regarding Jesus, I would argue that its methods and conclusions are a fundamental diversion from the former "Quest" projects. In his rereading of both Josephus and some of the gospel passages, Horsley seems particularly sensitive to what feminists already have learned via the work of Elizabeth Schlissler Fiorenza and others^^—that written records are the deposit of a literate middle- or upper-class social strata and that canonized collections represent more often the views of the victors of a political battle than any theological consensus. Thus, Horsley reads for the underside of texts, surfacing possible power struggles and class conflicts. What emerges as primary positive features of Horsley's venture, then, is not just his substantive portrait of Jesus' social relations and their political repercussions but also his methodology. Invoking the perspective of the suffering subject of human history and projecting their world upon the received texts, Horsley's project functions for us after the manner of Gadamer's description of the act of interpretive history by asking and answering the question, When we look at the gospel traditions from their underside, from the viewpoint of those who have suffered history, what do we see? Sobrino's Jesus as a New Kind of History Jon Sobrino may be regarded as a transition figure. His early book, Christology at the Crossroads: A Latin American Approach,^^ is heavily influenced by the modem theology and provides a survey of many of the prominent christologies produced within this paradigm. Yet, Sobrino's work is important to a postmodem discussion because of his powerful rhetorical appeal to those for whom the "for us" of christological construction must be.^^ Sobrino's appeal to an "actual history" of Jesus, and in particular to the cmcifixion, is his attempt to call into question the use of the power of Jesus' name to justify ideology, even the ideology of the church.^^ Yet this is not what is different or remarkable about his project. Rather, Sobrino recasts from the particular perspective of those on the underside of the contemporary social order in Latin America those who must be the "for us" in our formulation of Christ savior pro nobis. Because his guiding principle is the liberation of the Latin American poor, Sobrino's work is a sometimes odd and sometimes glorious conglomeration of points from the modern "historical" quests and from social-historical readings. He remains preoccupied with Jesus' self-consciousness and works with the modem dialectical dichotomy between the "Jesus of history" and the "Christ of faith."^'* Yet his situatedness on the margins of traditional history continually pushes him to acknowledge the idolatry incumbent in any attempt to name Jesus totally or to discem the full reality of God. Sobrino compares his christological method with that of the New Testament writers. Christology is "elaborated from two poles,"^^ one being Jesus of Nazareth and the other being the situatedness of the particular community in question. This understanding of history to which Sobrino appeals is more holistic than that of modem quests, reintegrating the polifical and social with the religious.^^ Sobrino uses the theological concept of incamation to his advantage,^' appealing to history as the medium and source of the "situated demand" of God-in-Christ-cmcified, a recognition of the contextual nature of all theological ethics.^^ He argues persuasively for a historical christology by shifting the categories with which christology will be done from the ontic (traditionally the categories of dogmatic theology) to historical ones such as "conflict, temptation, and ignorance."^^ Yet if we are to accept Sobrino's presentation as a historical reading of the Jesus traditions, we must do so with a fundamentally different sense of the word history. His historical reading of the Jesus tradition is more narrative than it is exegetical argument. Words of the post-Easter Jesus appear frequently in the mouth of his supposedly "historical" Lord."*^ Some of his most compelling passages are his readings of redactions of the gospel writers (which reflect Jesus in relation to historical concerns of their own times) rather than attempts to speak about Jesus in relation to the historical parameters of his (that is, Jesus') own time. Sobrino himself, however, does locate a critical nexus for Jesus' historicity—at the cross. Here Sobrino makes his fundamental epistemological break with modem theology. The cross of Jesus and the cmcifixion of Latin America's poor become, for Sobrino, a location from which ''to reformulate all the important problems of theology . . .'"^^ from the vantage point of the underside of received histories.'*^ Sobrino rejects the dichotomy between theory or systematic theology on the one hand and praxis or practical theology on the other. 'The particular symbol [of the cross] forces us to change our way of living as well as our way of thinking," he writes.^^ Christological theory, then, arises out of the specific praxis of the Latin American poor engaging the narratives of Jesus in history at the tangential point where the received Jesus traditions meet the questions of survival, hope, and justice raised by their context of oppression. What emerges is not an essential identity but a historically rendered construction; a portion, not a totality; an image of Jesus already in the process of being reformulated by a new or nuanced question—^the question of the poor in history. The history of Jesus is, thus, continually resituated both in the context of the whole of the received gospel traditions and that of these new hearers, who "know" this history by attempting to follow him within the parameters of Latin American poverty and repression. Here the distinction between narrative and factual history begins to lose its pressing urgency. If Jesus of Nazareth is never finally or fully reachable, then all our language regarding him is, in a sense, narrative. Sobrino, with his naming of a new theological subject, radically redefines the salvific function of "Christ for us" in our time as the creation of the conditions necessary, as he says, for "human possibilities [to] be realized concretely in oppressive situations.""*"* And he puts forth a suggestion that "history" itself may be something different than what we have, in modernity, considered it to be. Jesus, History, and Social Praxis What do these projects suggest to us about christology as a practice in our time? Eduard Schweizer has argued persuasively regarding Jesus in history that once we say Jesus is Christ, we also acknowledge that Christ is Jesus.'*^ It is out of this faith claim that the details of Jesus' life take on crucial significance. This has been the impetus of the historical Jesus movement since its inception, even at its most mistaken moments. But, at this juncture, I would argue that our discourse about the relationship between a "historical" Jesus and the faith and life of the church must make, indeed is making, a fundamental shift in locus and meaning. Christology, rather than being the explication of a once-for-all identity or a persona of the Jesus of history as Christ, must be recognized as a historically contingent activity taking place in an intricate matrix of the pressing questions of a particular community, the received Jesus-traditions, and contemporary tools of analysis: social, political, and so forth. That is to say christology is shaped by our own questions, because Jesus as Christ is, by that very name of Messiah, Anointed One of God, Savior, the one to whom we direct our concerns, queries, prayers for salvation. It is formed through intimate study of the stories of Jesus that have come down to us, because the church has always recognized the Bible as the primary source of information about the identity and ministry of Jesus, as well as about the early church's proclamations about him. And it is informed by the tools of human understanding available to us—the contemporary version of Wesley's "Reason." Because our questions and our tools for reading and understanding can change and grow, so also our perception of what it means to say "Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ of God" will certainly also change and grow. And while the book that bears his words and stories may seem to be the single fixed entity in this process of interpretation, it is important to remember that biblical scholars continue their work of searching for the most accurate and reliable texts and translations. It is a task that may never be entirely completed. The continual sifting and intertwining of these three elements make christology a process rather than a product. History, then, is also redefined: it is as much an activity as it is a fixed past. Contemporary interpreters ask the question, how is the relation of Jesus to persons and groups in his own time of value to us? This question contains two submerged issues. One is modem theology's search for an objective epistemological base outside the contingencies of history. Traditionally theologians and biblical scholars have used the question of Jesus and history as an answer to this dilemma. With such an agenda it seems perfectly logical that repeated attempts be made to explicate the essence, the central core, the nature and person of this Jesus. What is continually ignored in such ventures, however, is the radical historicity of all human perception and expression, even to the point of recognizing the historical particularity and conditionedness of the very form of that project itself Such an explication of the task of historical Jesus scholarship also implies some further, less obvious assumpfions about the subject of theology, the conception of the self, the nature and practice of the church, and most importantly, I think, the maintenance and use of power. The quest of the historical Jesus fell into disrepute because scholars recognized the impossibility of the objective historical task with respect to Jesus of Nazareth. Many located the difficulties of the project in the limited nature of our sources about Jesus rather than in the nature of subjectivity and language themselves. Thus, their earlier failures might suggest the extraction of a "Christ of faith" as the rejection of a fallacious search for a Jesus of history and an attempt to affirm the ongoing faith and life of ecclesia. This Christ of faith is also problematic, however, for it is the obverse of the Jesus of history. It, too, seeks safety beyond historical contingency and can function also in the service of centralized power-brokering due to the easy manipulation of its inner contentless core. Theologians who are listening to the voices of a new subject of theology located on the outer edges of such centralized schemata have sharply rejected any such division between history and faith. There is a readier recognition on the part of such authors of the inescapable circularity of the christological and larger theological process. There is not and never was any "pure" Jesus of history who was recognized by his followers as the Messiah of faith and whose life, words, and work are deemed significant and necessary for the faith and life of the ongoing church. Rather, for those who consider relation to Jesus as Christ to be crucial for Christian life and thought, it is necessary to accept the risk of historical accident and the unceasing historical process of communal and personal identity formulation. In such a process, christology is moved from a front-and-center position to a space between the Jesus traditions as they have been received, studied, reported upon, analyzed, and considered in their own milieu (which includes the context not only of first-century Palestine, but of the churches that reformulated their own received traditions in the light of pressing concerns) and in contemporary historically situated Christian communities. In the gap between these two, Christ and christology emerge not as a finally definable entity but as the subject of this peculiarly Christian praxis. What emerges is not so much a persona as it is what Peter Hodgson has called a Gestalt of Jesus'*^—one that is already in the process of being reformulated. The crucial point is that christology is recognized as irreducibly entwined in the web of history such that no image of Jesus is understandable without reference to the concrete context in which it was shaped.^^ This is the crux of a search for a historical Jesus. The christological question, then, is not, "Who is Jesus?" the question concerned with ahistorical essence and foundations; nor is it a matter of "How can we co-opt the Christ for liberation," which manipulates the authoritative power of the name of Jesus by absolutizing a contextually appropriate but historically limited perspective. Rather the appropriate question for our time is, "What does it mean to be a Christian community in a world of massive social and psychic suffering?" Here we see a convergence of christology and ecclesiology, for it is the peculiar praxis of relation to and dialogue with Jesus as manifested in past histories that is the identifying mark of Christian community. Wlien the interpreted history of Jesus abuts the identified concerns of a particular, situated community, a new space is opened up in which christology and ecclesiology mingle and shape one another. The fundamentally social and communal nature of such a process calls upon theology to reconsider Jesus of Nazareth in relation to his social/cultural milieu, that of the militarily dominated Galilean Jewish peasantry of first-century Palestine. For we find that what is necessary for our time is not a "historical Jesus" who turns out, in truth, to be a metahistorical Jesus but a Jesus who is immersed in and constituted in the midst of his particular sociopolitical era—^that is, a Jesus looked at and listened to in relation to the pressing issues of his own people in his own day: the conditions of hierarchical social and political dominations. This Jesus offers twentieth-century scholarly and ecclesial praxis a reintegration of the religious with the political and the social and a recognition of the crucial interplay of faith with history. In reference to such a Jesus the realm of God becomes historically manifest, though never totally realized. Because it is inherent in the finite nature of human being and language never to be able to comprehend or express the totality of even another finite being, we can never attempt to name Jesus in his human essence. Who he is for us, Jesus' "self," emerges as the product of a communal historical encounter as do all human identities. The image of Jesus as the Christ that emerges from any historically situated matrix space, as Karl Rahner reminds us, carries with it its own transcendence.'*^ Yet, the inability to grasp the entirety of Jesus' being does not preclude the ability of christology to function as a critique or norm. If peculiar to Christian identity is the praxis of christology, then it is the appropriate function of this praxis to say "y^s" and "no" to specific ways of being in the world. Risks of HistoryAVounds of Life The relation of Jesus to his history and to us in our histories, then, is not as an inaccessible "object" bounded by dead or unavailable facts but is instead better understood as a contextual historicity that offers the means for continually "doing a new thing." The limits we experience in this fundamental ecclesial practice of engaging the Jesus texts out of our own particularities may be regarded, following Rebecca Chopp, as "access points to broader horizons of understanding."'*^ Such a perception is filled with risks: the risks of misconstruais and partial insight and the risks incumbent in seriously integrating the socialpolitical with the religious. These risks are the wounds modern theology has sought, unsuccessfully, to avoid in its search for an objectively verifiable Jesus. But being serious about history in theology means a never-ending breaking and reformulating of ourselves in relation to the Jesus given through our received histories, from the positionality of our own worlds of discourse. It involves a kerygmatic claim that the God of Jesus of Nazareth does act in the cracks and contingencies of human lives. Christian identity and unity, connected inextricably with the unity and well-being of the entire planet, its peoples, creatures, and eco-system, is rooted, then, in a relation to Jesus of Nazareth that manifests itself in the historically contingent nature of the theological process. There is not, in this view, the earthly Jesus, on the one hand, and the church's kerygma on the other. Rather there is the kerygmatic process of encounter between the Jesus-traditions of church histories and the present-day situations of Christian communities. The New Testament contains not "kerygma" but kerygmas, not a "pure" proclamation any more than a "purely historical" Jesus, but it does contain the actual formulations of the meaning of Jesus for the ongoing life of real communities of his followers. "History," then, is not what happened but something that we do; christology is the ongoing praxis of the ecclesia in relation to Jesus in his and our histories; and theologizing is the doing of history in the faith that God acted definitively in Jesus, thus making the relationship of Christian life to his life of uhimate significance for us. Notes 1. Cited in Donald F. Bouchard, ed. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 5. 2. Attributed to William James by William Dean Adolphus in a paper given at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, (Boston, 5 Dec. 1987). 3. As clearly as anyone, John P. Meier articulates the difference between the 'Veal Jesus," which he describes as the "total reality of that person [Jesus]" (p. 21), and the "historical Jesus," the figure who may emerge from scholarly investigation of the extant sources. See Meier, "Basic Concepts: The Real Jesus and the Historical Jesus," in A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Anchor Bible Reference Library vol. 1. (New York: Doubleday, Inc., 1991): 21-40. 4. Sec, for example, James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1970), and God of the Oppressed (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1975); Gustavo Gutierrez,/! Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, Sister Caridad Inda and John Eaglcson, trans., 1988 ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973), and The Power of the Poor in History, trans. Robert Barr, trans. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983); Elisabeth SchUssler Fiorenza, Jesus: Miriam's Child, Sophia's Prophet (NY: Continuum, 1994), and In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1986). 5. See, for example. The Atlantic Monthly (December 1986), Time (August 15, 1988), and Life (December 1994), in which cover stories about Jesus* historical identity appear. This "public status" of Jesus in the wider culture is noted by W. Barnes Tatum, In Quest of Jesus: A Guidebook (Louisville: John Knox, 1982), and Marcus J, Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994). 6. See, for example, Ira Rifkin, "Scholars Say Facts Don't Support Easter," The San Diego Union-Tribune (March 10. 1995), E-5; Bill Broadway, "What Really Happened to Jesus? Seminar's Quest for That Answer Angers Some Traditional Christians, Who Say Faitli Is All They Need," The Washington Post (April 6, 1996), B-7, the first sentence of which reads: "Somebody's messing around with the Easter Resurrection story...."; and John Rivera, "Controversial Jesus Seminar Issues New Book," Sacramento Bee (May 16,1998), SC-5, which opens with, "He didn't walk on water. He didn't multiply the loaves and fishes. And he didn't change water into wine." More neutral headlines include Bruce Nolan, "Jesus Seminar Ponders Historical Figure; Christ Is Cast in a New Light," The Times-Picayune (November 24,1996), B-I. 7. See Marilyn Mellowes, "From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians," Frontline (1998). 8. Tatum provides a brief introduction into the ways in which Christian authors from as early as the beginings of the second century grappled with the differences between the four Gospel accounts and provided theories on their origins and offered theological arguments for the necessity of four different Gospel accounts. See his notes on Papias of Hierapolis, Irenaeus of Lyons, Clement of Alexandria, and Augustine of Hippo, pp. 12-17. 9. I thank the students of Fred Craddock's senior seminar in preaching the canonical Gospels (Spring 1980, Candler School of Theology) for this turn of phrase. 10. Among biblical scholars, in addition to Meier, vol. 1, above, see, for example, E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985); John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991); Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996); Marcus J. Borg's Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship provides an overview of the contemporary discussion and an analysis of the work of the Jesus Seminar with which Funk, Crossan, and others are associated. Likewise, Luke T. Johnson offers an evaluation of the Jesus Seminar in his The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFracisco, 1996). Borg's Jesus: A New Vision (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1987), Crossan's J e ^ M j ; A Revolutionary Biography, and Horsley and John S. Hanson's Bandits, Prophets and Messiahs: Popular Jewish Resistance in Roman Palestine (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985) are both a resource for the lay reader as well as part of the scholarly discussion. Systematic theologians who draw upon historical Jesus research to construct contemporary christological statements include Latin American liberation theologians Jon Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads: A Latin American Approach, John Drury, trans. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1978); Jesus the Liberator: A Historical-Theological View (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993); Juan Luis Segundo, The Historical Jesus of the Synoptics (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1985); Elisabeth SchUssler Fiorenza provides a feminist reading of the ministry of the historical Jesus in relation to women in In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1986). Charlotte Allen's The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus (New York: The Free Press, 1998) provides a layperson's account of the scholarly debate and is a further indication of the general public's ongoing interest in the question. 11. Christian theologians who raise questions about the function of Christology as it has been classically construed to reinforce the oppression of the poor and other socially marginalized communities include Saul Trinidad, "Christology, Conquista, Colonization," in Josd MIguez Bonino, Faces of Jesus: Latin American Christologies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984); Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power (New York: Crossroad, 1988); Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker. "For God So Loved the World?" Christianity. Patriarchy and Abuse: A Feminist Critique, Joanne Carlson and Carole R. Bohn Brown, ed. (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1989) 1-30; Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge ofWomanist God-talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993); Rosemary Radford Ruether, To Change the World: Christology and Cultural Criticism (New York: Crossroad, 1981); Eugene B. Borowitz, Contemporary Christologies: A Jewish Response (New York: Paulist Press, 1980); Cone (1970) and (1975). 12. The concept of sovereignty itself has come under scrutiny by theologians of the marginalized who question the hierarchical despotism of any central figure, even Jesus. See, for example, above: Daly (1979), Ruether (1981), Trinidad (1984), Brock (1988). 13. For this reading of Mark, see Werner H. Kelber, Mark's Story of Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979). 14. See Robert Kysar, John: The Maverick Gospel (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1976). 15. See SchUssler Fiorenza (1983). 16. For a brief introduction to patristic and medieval methods of scriptural interpretation, see C. R. Evans, "Senses of Scripture," in Alan Richardson and John Bowden, eds., The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1983), 537-8, and John H. Hayes and Carl R. Holladay, Biblical Exegesis: A Beginner's Handbook (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), 18-21. 17. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Garrett Barden and John Gumming, trans. (New York: Crossroad, 1985). 18. In Richard J. Bemstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics. and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988). 19. Rudolf Butmann, Jesus and the Word, Louise Pettibone Smith and Erminie Huntress Lantero, trans. 1962 ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934). 20. Thus, while the examples I will discuss are part of what might be labeled a *third quest" of the historical Jesus, my argument is intended not to extend to all the projects that might be grouped under that rubric but rather to argue the possibility of speaking with honesty of '*the historical Jesus" when such discussion is viewed in a methodologically viable manner. 21. See, for example, Horsley, 165. 22. Ibid., 156j7: 23. Ibid.,20# 24. Ibid., 170. 25. Ibid., 168. 26. Ibid., 190. 27. Ibid., 2 0 9 / : 28. Ibid., 2 3 2 / 29. Ibid., \29ff. 30. See, for example, SchUssler Fiorenza's discussion of the New Testament household codes in In Memory of Her. Sheila Collins cites Simone Weil's comment to this effect in "Reflections on the Meaning of Herstory," in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, Carol R Christ and Judith Plaskow, eds. 1992 ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1979). 31. For a more current and nuanced christological argument, see Jon Sobrino. Jesus the Liberator: A Historical-Theological View (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), in which he describes as "a more systematic development... of what 1 have written in Christologia desde America Latina (Mexico City, 1 9 7 7 ) p . 275, n. 14.1 have chosen to limit my comments to the earlier text because it is here that Sobrino most fundamentally challenges the modem notion of what we understand "history" to mean. 32. While Sobrino's desire to ground dogmatic Christology in a "history of Jesus" might first appear as a peculiarly modem, rather than a postmodem project, it is important to locate Sobrino's project within the context of the historical practice of the Roman Catholic Church In Latin America. The power of the name of Jesus has primarily functioned there as an arm of the church in support of Latin American authoritarian regimes. Christology in this arena has been primarily an ahistorical philosophizing upon classical doctrinal formulations which at best has fostered theological stasis and at worst has functioned as a tool of active oppression for the encouragement of submission. 33. Sobrino, p, xix. 34. Ibid.,381i?: 35. Ibid., 13, 87, 89, for example. 36. Ibid., e.g., 4 7 / . 92, 369. 37. Ibid., e.g., 124.214. 38. Ibid., 360. 39. Ibid.. 102. 40. See, for example, Sobrino, 101. 41. Ibid.. 226. 42. Ibid., 230. 43. Ibid., 234-5. 44. Ibid., 47. 45. Eduard Schweizer. Jesus Christ: The Man from Nazareth and the Exalted Lord (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987), 12. 46. This idea was first brought to my attention by Peter Hodgson in a brief excursus on Hegel's christology, American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting (Boston: 7 December, 1987). 47. See, for example, Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 48. Karl Rahner, "On the Theology of the Incamation," in A Rahner Reader, Gerald A. McCool, ed. (New York: Scabury, 1975), 147. 49. Rebecca S. Chopp, Saving Work: Feminist Practices of Theological (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), 98. Education