Religion: New Debate over Jesus’ Divinity

Germany’s Hans Küng again challenges the Vatican

The belief that Jesus Christ was both “true God and true man” has been the bedrock of Catholic orthodoxy for more than 15 centuries. Yet over the past decade some Roman Catholic theologians have been at odds with the church hierarchy about this dogma. They argue that orthodox theology is too static and abstract and has overemphasized Jesus’ divinity to the point where he has been stripped of his full humanity. One of the most outspoken advocates of this school of thought is Priest-Theologian Hans Küng, 49, of the University of Tübingen, Germany. Küng, who has previously struggled with the Vatican on other issues, has been accused by his country’s bishops of disseminating dangerous views about Christ. Last week, after three years of futile negotiations, Küng issued his latest response to the bishops’ charges.

This is not merely the conflict of one celebrity priest against the hierarchy, for Küng is part of an international group of theologians who are demanding that the Catholic Church take a bold new look at Christology (the theological interpretation of Christ). Influenced by liberal Protestants, these theologians are saying things about Christ’s nature that only years ago would never have been uttered publicly by priests in good standing. Though these theologians still profess belief that Christ is divine, conservative opponents maintain that in the New Christology, Christ is not as divine as he used to be.

At first the case was pressed in abstruse books of theology and all but inaccessible journals. Angry arguments were muffled behind closed clerical doors in The Netherlands, Germany and Rome. But in 1974 the debate became more general with the publication of Küng’s Christ Sein (English edition: On Being a Christian; Doubleday; 1976), which quickly became Germany’s bestselling religious book in a quarter-century.

In the book, Küng reinterpreted the dogmas that were hammered out by the church’s early ecumenical councils to counter prevalent heresies that threatened to split the church. Those councils insisted that Jesus was really a man, not some sort of divine apparition. But they also asserted that he was the Son of God, part of the eternal Godhead. The first two councils crafted the Nicene Creed, which was formulated by A.D. 381 and has been recited at every Sunday Mass since the llth century: Jesus is “eternally begotten of the Father … true God from true God … one in Being with the Father.” The Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451) refined this further, decreeing that Jesus Christ had two natures, divine and human, which were merged without confusion or change in one Person of the Trinity.

Küng wrote that nothing should be “deducted” from these ancient dogmas so long as they fit modern scholars’ understanding of the New Testament. But he argued that the dogmas must be “transferred to the mental climate of our own time.” Küng’s own paraphrase of the dogmas: God “was present, at work, speaking, acting and definitively revealing himself in Jesus. The ancient statements that the Son “preexisted” with the Father from eternity were meant merely to substantiate God’s unique “call, offer and claim made known in and with Jesus.”

The German bishops, authorized by the Vatican to handle the case, feared the book’s wide influence and demanded amendments. They were not upset by what Küng said, but by what he did not say. Letters passed back and forth, and a summit meeting with Küng was held a year ago in Stuttgart. Three months later, Joseph Cardinal Hoffner, chairman of the bishops’ conference, wrote a letter accusing Küng of evading a binding creed, and demanding in exasperation: “Is Jesus Christ the preexisting, eternal Son of God, one in being with the Father?” Because Küng continued to provide no flat answer, the hierarchy last November issued a formal warning that the book created a “distressing insecurity of faith” and charged that Küng had failed to explain how his Christology could be reconciled with the historic creeds.

Küng’s reply is his 394-page Um Nichts Als Die Wahrheit (Nothing But the Truth), published last week by Piper Verlag. The book’s full documentation of the dispute attempts to prove that Küng is the victim of an unfair inquisition. In a concluding proclamation, Küng states that he accepts the Chalcedon formula but that interpretations of it must follow the view of many modern scholars that Jesus did not proclaim himself as the eternal Son of God, nor did the early Christians. What is more, Küng argues, the ancient dogmas were flawed because they relied upon Greek concepts of man and nature that are now outdated.

Küng thinks that the bishops simply misunderstand his method. Like Jesuit Karl Rahner and other contemporary theologians, he starts his Christology “from below,” with the man Jesus, and works upward toward his divinity. The council dogmas started “from above,” with ideas about God’s essence. Church officials, however, are convinced that content, not method, is at stake. Some censure from the German bishops or the Vatican could result.

Disputes over Christology are not limited to Catholics. Though many Protestant scholars have been questioning the dogmas for more than a century, elements of the Church of England were scandalized last year when seven university theologians put out a book contending that Jesus was not really God at all. In the U.S., Southern Baptist Theologian Robert S. Alley, religion chairman at the University of Richmond, was abruptly switched to another department after he told a meeting of atheists that “Jesus never really claimed to be God, nor to be related to him as son.” Next month the board will debate a faculty demand that Alley be reinstated.

Among Roman Catholic thinkers, the New Christology first appeared at the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, in 1966, when the late Ansfried Hulsbosch, an Augustinian, issued a manifesto against the Council of Chalcedon. The church, he wrote, should “no longer speak of a union of the divine and human nature in one pre-existent person.” One of the Dutch movement’s two leading figures has been his Nijmegen colleague, Jesuit Piet Schoonenberg. In his 1969 book, published in English as The Christ (Herder & Herder; 1971), Schoonenberg also discarded the “two natures” approach, speaking instead of “God’s complete presence in the human person Jesus Christ.” Canadian Theologian Bernard J.F. Lonergan later said that Schoo-nenberg’s book could lead to the logical (and heretical) conclusion that Jesus was “a man and only a man.” The other important Dutch liberal is Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx, whose first volume on Christology will be published in English by Seabury later this year. The elliptical book describes Jesus as a human being who gradually grew closer to God.

Some recent writings in France are even more adventuresome. Jacques Pohier, a Dominican at the Institut Catholique in Paris, says that “at the limit, it is an absurdity to say that God makes himself into man. God cannot be anything other than God.” Father Pierre-Marie Beaude of the Center for Theological Studies in Caen thinks that early church leaders had to “murder their founding father Jesus” to develop into maturity, while Father Michel Pinchon, editor of the magazine Jésus, writes of his liberation from “idolatry” of Jesus, who “does not present himself as an end or an absolute.”

In Spain, José-RamÓn Guerrero, director of catechetics at Madrid’s Pastoral Institute and author of the 1976 book El Otro Jésus (The Other Jesus), told TIME that Jesus is “a man elected and sent by God, and has been constituted by God as the Son of God.” At the Jesuit theological school in Barcelona, José Ignacio Gonzáles Faus insists that during his earthly life, Jesus was not aware of being God, and displayed such human traits as doubt and ignorance. Similar points are made by a German-trained Basque, Jon Sobrino, who has written the most thorough study of Christ’s nature based on Latin America’s “liberation theology.” The Maryknoll Fathers’ Orbis Books will publish it in English in June as Christology at the Crossroads. Sobrino, a Jesuit and professor at the Universidad José Simeón Cañas in El Salvador, says that Christians working for justice should realize that Jesus was mistaken in his social outlook because he expected the imminent appearance of the kingdom of God. In fact, he thinks that Jesus had to undergo a “conversion” in his views of God.

More broadly, Sobrino espouses an evolutionary view of Jesus’ sonship. Instead of saying that Jesus is the Son of God, Sobrino writes that he “gradually fashioned himself into the Son of God, became the Son of God.” As the Son, Jesus “reveals the way to the Father, not the Father himself,” through his example of obedience to God’s mission. Sobrino admits that Jesus’ “becoming” God sounds like the old heresy of Adoptionism, but he still insists that his Christology “is in accord with the dogmatic formulas.”

Traditionalists are divided on how to handle such new ideas. Father Jean Galot, a Christology expert at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, fears that the essence of the faith is being challenged. Says he: “The basic question is this: Does the Church have an authentic teaching on Christology? It does. Hence theologians who claim to be representative of this Church must teach the authentic teaching of the Church.”

Under Pope Paul, however, Vatican policy has not been to force innovators into line, in the belief that false ideas are only dignified by the publicity and will die out eventually. Besides, adds a top-ranking prelate in the Curia, “I don’t think the Catholic Church could stamp out these errors anyway.” In 1972 the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued its most recent declaration on Christology. It defined as an error the theory that God was only “present in the highest degree in the human person Jesus,” including the version in which Jesus is “God” in the sense that in “his human person God is supremely present.” Though no names were mentioned, this was aimed primarily at Schoonenberg.

The most effective recent Catholic exponent of ancient dogma is Küng’s colleague at Tübingen, the Rev. Walter Kasper. In his major 1974 work (English edition: Jesus the Christ; Paulist Press; 1976), Kasper rejected Küng’s idea that the early councils distorted the Gospel with Greek concepts. Rather, he says, the councils did the opposite. They “dehellenized” the church, using the language of Greek philosophy to express beliefs that “shattered all of its perspectives.”

A Christology developed solely “from below,” Kasper contends, is “condemned to failure.” The reason: the New Testament makes it clear that far from considering himself only a man, Jesus “understands himself ‘from above’ in his whole human existence.” Though Kasper accepts many findings of 20th century Bible critics, he insists that the council dogmas are implicit in Jesus’ teachings about himself. He also maintains that belief in Jesus’ pre-existence was not a late development, but rather part of the earliest material in the New Testament.

Kasper concludes that the Council of Chalcedon provided “a valid and permanently binding” version of what the New Testament teaches, “namely [that] in Jesus Christ, God Himself has entered into a human history.” All the dogmas and investigations of the mystery of God in Christ, he concedes, “come up against an insuperable limit of thought, speech and sympathetic insight.” To Kasper, however, this limitation is actually “something extremely positive, not darkness but excess of light, dazzling to our eyes.”